Fighter races / strategies

[Lujo]

[Darvin]

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

By the way I had no intention to sound know-it-all, I guess I just reacted to Darvin's post about how Yendor is supposed to be used. I don't really like it in an open game like DD when there is an assumption about how certain game elements are supposed to come together (even if it's the ultimate optimal play). Heck, the other day I prepared Titan Guitar for my Goatperson Cursed Oasis run, and fired it off right at the start. I know that Titan Guitar is "supposed" to be used on wall-heavy levels (oasis has almost none). I know that it is "supposed" to be used to slow opponends to give bonus XP, but as the Goarperson I could only one-shot a handful of monsters at high level, but I killed most of my monsters in multiple hits, so arguably the bonus was wasted. So was it the silliest thing possible to do? Maybe. But I really felt it was the right thing to do, because the effect highlighted to me the monsters on the level for a glimpse, and I could direct my early exploration towards the highest concentration of monsters to make sure I don't starve. You'd never mention this effect as to why Titan Guitar is strong, but in this context it was a side-effect that I felt was more valuable than the slowing/scaring main effect (or the normally used wall-breaking side-effect). This is what I love about DD, this whole side-effect-of-side-effect thing, and all the quirky interactions that can come up from this, which is why I think this game will keep on offering a reason to play it even after hundreds (thousands?) of runs.

[Lujo]

You had me at money laundering ^^

And anyway, you're alright and you have a point - Darvin can be a bit deterministic about the optimum usages, but that's often provided a fine counterpoint in many balancing discussions. And he's been incredibly gracious about having stuff he was fond of nerfed over the years and he actually made me discover JJ at one point and also taught me all about spiking stuff in general (I somehow managed to learn regen fighting first o.O)

And your playstyle, from what I gather from your posts in general is much more similar to his than, say, mine - all the gnome love is like reading old Darvin posts. But it goes deeper than that I just don't wanna textwall again* You did come in with a deterministic statement about goblin's and yendor, if it wasn't him commenting it it wouldn've been someone else (and as you can see I'm actually much more likely to jump up at one of those than he is). It's no biggie, you really CAN play the game any way imaginable, it just get's tricky justifying rigid logic when you're talking to people who HAVE been playing it every-which-way for years. And we don't know everything! It's just that between us we know a ton. A lot of it came from discussions, mind you.

Keep in mind that we often know (or can assume well enough) how stuff was supposed to be used, because we spent a great deal of time thinking about it and how it related to what we were doing with it. The devs never told us what something was for. If we got it right or wrong, we read it off changelogs. While there's a million combinations of things, a lot of stuff was put in the game and balanced around a certain logic and a lot of it has to do with the learning curve, so in order to be able to make somewhat sensible reports we HAD to figure a lot of this out. Because the devs were apparently trying to get us to test BOTH the learning curve and the power curve at the same time. In fact, the learning curve primarily, testing the power curve was more of a side effect of hitting powerful outliers which boosted your ability to overcome challenges without getting any better at the game (and thus arriving at later challenges without having a clue about the obvious solutions and getting potentially murderously frustrated).

So what often happened was that people did the crazy thing (and I'm not sure you can really find playtesters who do this just like that), of going back to stuff they don't understand the purpose of (like say someone who thought "Why are goblins even there if I'm using Yendor all the time?"), chat people up about them, go around trying to "break" them until they did and understood what thy were for and which insane late game challenge did this knowledge make easier to pull through - and then try to figure out why they missed it in the first place.

So you got stuff like acid caster EM corrosion spamming wizzards because "Why EM?" turned out to be an interesting question and "Only for warlords and paladins" turned out to be an unconvincingly narrow answer, or the story of how you could write a guide to never learning DD properly in pure tr0llspe4k which got the TT money laundering nerfed (and eventually poison), or how GG got reworked because he was dishing out the best rewards in the game for absolutely optimal play making him a no-brainer choice 100% of the time, the complete shop rework + introduction of the alchemy shop because it turned out not unlocking stuff was more rewarding than unlocking stuff. Also how lvl1 boss killing became an achievement ("Wth, there's gotta be some obvious way to deal with random Bleaties on 2 boss runs, what random bit of useless junk am I not aware of?").

"Am I supposed to be doing this?" was actually the most important question for us during the entire beta test - whether we knew it or not, tbh. Followed closely by "How silly, EXACTLY, is this thing I'm using?" and "How do I replicate this with every class?" It was all related to the big question of "If this causes someone to hit a brick wall down the road like I just did, will they double back and find the answers or will they just give up on the game? Or just plain go strangle the devs? Or even *ghasp* call us lousy beta testers in disparaging game reviews!" Well, those last two might've been just me, but being an emphatic guy I always kinda assumed other humans could get as frustrated with the game as much as I could! And sometimes it was a legit concern! XD

Eh, sorry for textwalls, can't help meself. We LOVE DD discusions!

Oh, and if you're an EM enthusiast (or were) I do assume you've discovered the fabled codex + EM strat, yes? The one you use to make priests and monks fun and deal with elf + regen figher PQI challenges? And I definitely approve of mystera spam on all but the most magic damage heavy dungeons, but I tell you, you haven't lived until you've done a tour of duty of VT goobo sorcerers. With crystall ball (because money's no object!) Oh, the flexibility, oh, the effortless refills!

Oh, and TT is more than just a late game god. He's just a really good late game god, but he's totally joinable as an early jump off god. It just used to be a lot more obvious back when it was more difficult to get piety with everyone else, and it actually got nerfed a few times in various ways because it was a really no-brainer thing to do if you happened to find his altar first (and people using him to grind kingdom gold might've been interfearing with general experimentation with gods).

*crap, another textwall.

[Tinker]

[Lujo]

[dislekcia]

bombastic - (of speech, writing, etc.) high-sounding; high-flown; inflated; pretentious.

... I have no idea why someone would want to call themselves bombastic on purpose. How about just being nicer?

[Lujo]

Uh, might have slightly different linguistic connotations over here, but, eh, good point anyway...

It's self-depreciation, but it's kinda also about how it's sorta fair game to blow merits of a particular approach a bit out of proportion on it's own, especially now that stuff isn't likely to get changed mechanically... "X or Y is teh sillyness and omgzor" might lead somoene to trying it for a laugh* (or not take it as a guaranteed recommendation that success it 100% guaranteed) or imply that under cetain circumstances something is well above the curve (a class/race in a dungeon etc...) It's kinda safe because there's so many ways to play and acheve unexpectedly screwy results... Heck, if comedic overpraising of stuff gets a counterefect it leads to someone kicking a vicious run with a Dwarf Assassin (possibly to spite the bombastic blowhard who's been praising something else), so it's kinda win-win... I guess...

On the other hand, I've done my fair share of "what's the point of X when there's Y" posts (often about elves and dwarves), and I know how it ends, usually it tuns out I've been missing something. Halflings for example turned out a be a complete gold mine, I had no clue about it for years - and I coulda went on about them needing buffs all the time. So I guess it seems sorta fair to me to give folks reason and an in to knock me down a peg quickly rather than going full serious on something like that. Dunno.

Also, it seems to be the only way I know of stopping myself from textwalling. Somewhat. I'm actually trying, it's laughably / pitifully failing most of the time.

*EDIT: And trying out stuff for a laugh and a weird experience is really the only reason to try stuff after a certain point, because you just can't beat certain things for number crunching, taking things you're über with out of the locker is a pain, and often these things need a wacky impetus rather than a powergamey one. It helps if they are actual powergaming, too, just off-beat.*

*EDIT2: And sometimes it really IS silly. Halfling Monk spellcasting prodigy? Prep codex + EM! Now someone tell me there's a conventional train of logic that leads there? The PQI sets you up with one, you don't go "ow, damn, why couldn't I get an orc or human or something... whine... flowcharts... moan... optimimus..." you go "HA-HAH! Lets get stooooopid!", and you still burn the place to the ground ^^

[Tinker]

Lujo, if you're so good with the Mystera Sorcerer that you can even shine with it playing a Goblin, imagine how bright you would shine if you could finally come to embrace the GNOME.

XD
*sorry couldn't resist*