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Extreme Edition Spoilers

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Re: Extreme Edition Spoilers

Postby General_Milky on Tue Oct 17, 2017 9:23 pm

Oh hey, here's something actually worth posting about. Scrooge seems to consistently make issues on Hard Gaantelet. Upon killing random bosses, it throws up an exception, and the boss doesn't drop gold or indeed count as dead at all because the badge doesn't count itself complete even after clearing the room. 3 runs have all experience this.
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Re: Extreme Edition Spoilers

Postby General_Milky on Tue Oct 24, 2017 5:55 am

Not too big an accomplishment here all considered, but I've rainbow'd Ancient Scrapyard. No real reason, I was just curious if the map icon would change in any way on completion. It doesn't.

I like the dungeon. It's not mindblowingly awesome, but it's got a simple, but still engaging, flavor to it. Weaponizing Golem Arbiters to weaken the boss feels good and always makes me feel clever when I find ways to farm them out from lower level sculpters, even if the dungeon is honestly pretty damn easy at the end of the day. When I first started playing the mod, I felt as if the dungeon being listed as "normal" was a mockery as it was actually harder than hard dungeons, but now I don't believe so. If you know what you're doing, it's pretty easily doable even by the likes of goatperson and rat monarch.
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Re: Extreme Edition Spoilers

Postby The Avatar on Tue Oct 24, 2017 6:42 am

Congrats! And although there may not be an on-map reward for your efforts right now, who's to say there won't be in the future...

Also, just to briefly speak to difficulty, our intended difficulty hierarchy works something like this:
EASY < NORMAL < EE NORMAL <= HARD < EE HARD <= VICIOUS (not VGT) < BARD GOLD < EE VICIOUS 1 < EE VICIOUS 2 <= VGT < MAGICIAN GOLD

The reasoning being that a player who has beaten the game should be able to unlock all the dungeons after being stretched a bit by the quests on the new hard dungeons. That leaves them open to either turn back or plunge into the vicious/extra quests as they see fit. The way things turned out for this region, I feel we got it mostly right (I ignore Oasis Town as an exception, and thus I'd say Flooded Foundry being a bit too easy is my primary qualm), so I'm glad the Scrapyard was ultimately easy (or rather, normal).
We made an expansion and it is awesome. Really, you should check it out, especially if you're looking for some extra challenge.

Download over at ddmod.weebly.com!
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Re: Extreme Edition Spoilers

Postby General_Milky on Tue Oct 24, 2017 7:10 pm

I see. EE Vicious 1 and 2 are the two vicious dungeons counted as seperate tiers? The funny thing is, I don't really think Flood Foundry is easy, especially not compared to Lekon's Table which I have a much easier time with. Overall, I feel the mod's dungeons aren't actually that tough, it's the quests associated where all the real difficulty comes from. If I look at Lekon's and Vicious Steel side by side, I see them as relatively equal. Both dungeons have their hurdles, both hurdles are rendered somewhat trivial with the right preps and classes. Flooded Foundry feels harder to me than both, because it has way too many monsters you don't want to mess with either for bonus EXP or popcorn, with two subbosses that are NOT trivial followed by a somewhat easy boss that can dick you on RNG alone if it feels like it, so overpreparing is a practical must. This, however, doesn't mean it's the hardest thing in the world. It's about on par with Naga City imo, but when you force a Feeling Parched badge on top of it all... Yeah.

I kind of enjoy this, though. I know the vision for the mod is to make super tough, high end content for DD elites, but I enjoy the fact that casually speaking the new content is about equal to, at worst just a small step up, the vanilla difficulty. The quests are what change everything. Lekon's Table casually? Not too bad, easy to counter. Lekon's Table as Gorgon? Nightmare. Hidden Workshop casually? No big deal. Hidden Workshop with six badges? Now THAT's a challenge. What it all boils down to is I enjoy it when it's not too rough unless I WANT it rough. I like that EE vicious dungeons aren't that terribly daunting unless I'm going at it with a certain class or hunting a badge like Purist. That flexibility in vanilla is why I love it so much, and I'm happy to see that, at least so far, EE sticks reasonably close to it despite all the warnings of how hardcore it is. I don't think it'd be fun if the dungeons were still nail-bitingly hard even in ideal conditions, and so frustrating that one would need to scum for the exact right setup in less than ideal situations.
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Re: Extreme Edition Spoilers

Postby The Avatar on Tue Oct 24, 2017 11:49 pm

Ah, I probably should have specified that I was referring to the quest runs (with the exception of the class challenge, ofc). It's very interesting that you have an easier time with Lekon's Table, because I've always felt Flooded Foundry is quite a bit easier. Especially in monster choice, where the only not too tough Lekon monster is the Goat (arguably Warlock, depending on your build) while FF has Golems, Sapphire Golems, and Craftsmen who are frequently trivial targets. I suppose it comes down to play style, which is a good thing in and of itself, as it means there is a variety of challenge between the two of them.

Your observations on difficulty are surprisingly on point to how the mod developed over time as well. The original FF's goo had double health (which cascaded down through all of his splits), and the golem had curse bearer and higher damage. IIRC, the boss's golems didn't even give exp. On LT, Lekon's Chosen were quite a bit harder, you didn't get the blackspace refill on killing the first boss, and Lekon himself scaled a lot faster when consuming goats (making the final full consumption an guaranteed instant loss if you hadn't cleaned up most of goats). It was sort of miserable, so I just kept scaling them back until it could be beaten with near perfect consistency and then stopped there.
We made an expansion and it is awesome. Really, you should check it out, especially if you're looking for some extra challenge.

Download over at ddmod.weebly.com!
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Re: Extreme Edition Spoilers

Postby General_Milky on Wed Oct 25, 2017 5:19 pm

The reason I find Lekon's easier isn't necessarily how it is overall, but in how easy it is to work around. I can imagine Lekon's being much, much harder for a goatperson, or a rat, or anything that regen fights as its main draw because they need to fight TWO opponents for every one kill, but particular items and gods make the place way, way easier. Platemail, vampiric blade, dracul, binlor, pactmaker... anything that gives you resists or blood healing slashes the difficulty by half, because in those cases all you really need to do is worry about The Sacrifice and then you're gold. Blow all your potions on him if you must, but as soon as he's down, you're left with rather easy Lekon's Chosen to chain dings off of and basically just clean sweep the board. If you have any blackspace left, Goatboi doesn't even stand a chance.

There's tons of classes, items, and gods that can eventually build into a Lekon's steamroll, because it's a level that in essence says "build yourself for attrition." and there's many classes that excel at that and many tools to bolster them up. Gorgon ironically doesn't count here, because with her low damage, reliance on blackspace and poison, and general tendency to guzzle mana making up for her crippling negative bonus damage (unless you get lucky and find all your boosters extremely early) she runs out of blackspace before the level's even half done. Flooded Foundry, meanwhile, may be more generally accessable to a variety of different characters, but makes up for it in making the variety a pain in the ass. Flint Golems come from hell. Sculpters are the kind of enemy you gamble every time you strike because not only do they use up a TON of blackspace if they send you far away, but here in particular you BETTER have corestones on you. Sapphire Golems have an at-times crippling debuff AND Retailiate Fireball, the ultimate scumbag combo, especially when the only way to get rid of the frostburn is to take damage and unless you're running RBS, the only safe way to do that without significant max health bonuses is to set off low level flint golems. Arcane Golems blink and that's always a blackspace wasting joy, AND they berserk and hit rather hard too so screw you if you don't have a means of first strike. Stone Jellies are about the only monster here I don't hate and even they can be irritating as higher level targets, ESPECIALLY with RBS which you want for the golem boss and... yeah.

Someway or another you're going to hit problems. RBS solves being stuck with frostburn and one of the bosses, but makes stone jellies a pain, makes you take even MORE damage from flint golems and berserked arcane golems, makes sculpters annoy you with arbiters you can at best petrify and at worst spend even MORE health clearing them out, and makes the good boss a heck of a lot harder provided you've no means of first strike. Going for resists and durability is nice, except there's a load of curses to worry about and frostburn is a pain even for them. Spell casting's a good road to take, except half the monsters either A. teleport either themselves or YOU around the map using blackspace and therefore your mana, or B. hit you anyway with retaliate or Unstable which ranges from annoying to crippling depending on a number of factors, not to mention spells are TERRIBLE against the main boss himself because all it'll do is make an army of golems you can't deal with. Flooded Foundry is layers on layers of obstacles and counters to counters that give any one approach to the dungeon SOME sort of big problem. Lekon's Table, while more cruel to characters not good at it, is totally neutered with the right gear and boons. It's much more "one dimensional" in problem and solution.

...Wow, I did not mean to make an essay out of my reasoning there.
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Re: Extreme Edition Spoilers

Postby The Avatar on Wed Oct 25, 2017 11:01 pm

We made an expansion and it is awesome. Really, you should check it out, especially if you're looking for some extra challenge.

Download over at ddmod.weebly.com!
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Re: Extreme Edition Spoilers

Postby General_Milky on Thu Oct 26, 2017 12:22 am

Oh, make no mistake, I'm not calling Lekon's Table EASY. Just that the means of solving it is much more straightforward than Flooded Foundry's. Both dungeons are most certainly worthy of their Vicious labels.

Hopefully the edits don't shake it up too bad... I can already see Thrall!Lekon's Chosen being even worse than usual because not even transforming them and drinking potions will make them worthwhile targets for anyone but Crusader, but then again... there's always uses for them otherwise. Imawal, pisorf anchers... and when it comes down to it, why not let Lekon eat them? The proposed edits to Jealous Apprentice sounds alright, though, even if burning stacks popping out more golems will always make it seem less attactive to me unless I'm running Avatar's Codex or Magican. The thing with JA is that unless you have a large surplus of corestones to make a bunch of angles to attack him from, the summons are more or less an extension of himself. It's not JUST his 600 or whatever it was HP, it's also the HP of all the golems you need to knock out of the way. It's not just his damage against your health, it's also the damage and traits of the golems he happens to summon on you. Basically what I'm getting at is fireballs make a golem on hit, and if you need to knock a golem out to reach him again, he takes all of 1 damage from burning and you have yet ANOTHER golem to get through eventually. Because of this, I'd pretty much rather deal with the physical resistance just to minimize his summons and be in better control what spawns where, and use my MP for halpmeh or weytwut to put a bad golem spawn in the corner where it belongs.
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Re: Extreme Edition Spoilers

Postby The Avatar on Thu Oct 26, 2017 12:36 am

My concern with Lekon's Table is less one of difficulty and more one of interestingness (if that's a word?). Back in early beta, when Binlor gave out magic res even more than currently and basically all vicious dungeons were loaded with magic damage monsters, prepping Binlor+Dragon Shield+(other generic good preps) was basically a win anywhere with any class. The dungeons were still hard, and forced you to play an OP strategy like that, but winning them with every class just got sort of dull, since it was the same thing over and over again. So my goal is to have something that feels like it really requires different play from different classes.

Oh, and there's no question that the burning anti-synergy makes spellcasting the apprentice nigh impossible right now. But since his new health pool will likely end up somewhere around 450, an Avatar Codex build should have a pretty darn reasonable time dealing with him even if they don't have a ton of corestones.
We made an expansion and it is awesome. Really, you should check it out, especially if you're looking for some extra challenge.

Download over at ddmod.weebly.com!
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Re: Extreme Edition Spoilers

Postby General_Milky on Thu Oct 26, 2017 12:49 am

I'll talk about that more when the update's here. I'm interested to see how it changes, and to be honest, the mod's quality so far has given me good enough reason to believe you know what you're doing. If it gets overbuffed, I'm sure it can be patched more later.
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