Good Versus Evil

[Abraxas]

A few loose thoughts on today's update.

The new BLODTUPOWA: No words, they should have sent a poet. It's still early to say if it's overpowered (it sure as hell isn't underpowered), but the concept itself is just lovely, and based on my experiences so far, it synergizes much better with the Bloodmage. I absolutely love the class once again.
The one issue I have with it is that it kinds of steps on LEMISSI's toes. I'd suggest making BLUDTUPOWA's tile revealing "dumber" than LEMISSI's so that the later can retain its main selling point.

Also played around a little with yet another new profile to test the gold rewards from the Bronze challenges, and I have to say they speed things up quite nicely. It's still underwhelming to see quests that offer zero rewards, but I trust this is something for later updates.

GG's puzzle pack is awesome, as per usual. Still, when compared to Taurog's and Mystera's, I feel like GG's third puzzle isn't nearly as elegant. Taurog's and Mystera's both felt like they had a "trick" to them, an elegant solution that seems simple once you find out. GG's, at least for me, was a matter of trial and error and brute-forcing until I got a solution.

[Darvin]

New B2P looks quite interesting, but I totally agree with the others that it's too similar to LEMMISI. Very interesting for damage-spiking purposes, and definitely a must-have for BURNDAYRAZ specialists.

[Nandrew]

[Darvin]

[Lujo]

[Darvin]

As for poison vs fast regen, my only concern there is that undead already have total poison immunity. While half-poison is still better than no poison for people with an on-attack effect, for those sinking 7 mana to do it this is effectively no different than poison immunity. There might be some fringe-cases with regards to very high-resist characters, but for everyone else you're not going to win a battle with a medium-high damage monster several levels higher than you, and everything else you should just damage-spike to kill without resorting to poison.

[gjaustin]

I don't really view it that way. It's just making poison not work double against fast regen monsters.

Though, that does make it inconsistent with poisoned Monks.

[Lujo]

I sort of said "in general" since poison was sort of like the only real counter to fast regen except damage spiking, and the poison on-strike was deffinitely the only way reliable to deal with "fast regen + cowardly" monsters. I wouldn't know since I never had any trouble with them except the bugged sand trolls, but then again, I was running around with Poison: The boon more often than not.

It's even more obvious with the monk, really, if monks Fast Regen warranted a buff for some reason, and you gave him the ability to only lose the fast regen from the poison, you'd sort of take away one of the few things that can actually hold him down.

Not that I don't like it thematicaly.

[Nandrew]

[Abraxas]

http://i.imgur.com/bEo5X.jpg

I'm not gonna say it was trivial since I had to do a bit of resource squeezing and it would have been a very close call without whupaz, but still I'd say with this strategy I'd probably be able to get a DI victory (still haven't looked at other vicious dungeons) nearly 100% of the time.
In short, Gnome Bloodmages of Mystera with a Mage Plate are awesome. Once I started fireballing the Firstborn, I didn't stop until the Matron was dead.