Balance Tweaks Roundup

[Darvin]

Slightly related, what if Smuggler's Den replaced one of the 1st level monsters with a 2nd level one? I might actually use it the way it was intended if it did that.

I like this idea.

[TigerKnee]

(seriously people, he's a powerfull newbie crutch, if that crap worked in the endgame 100% what would be the point?).

That is the sort of the reasoning that gave us pre-buff Fighter who had no real identity and a lacking power level to take on the hardest challenge and thus might as well have been an empty slot on the class selection screen.

[Darvin]

Pre-buff Fighter wasn't so much a newbie crutch as he was just plain bad. The new leveling curve he got was a massive buff, easily counted amongst the most powerful class features in the game. Taurog in his current state is not comparable to pre-buff fighter...

[Lujo]

Pre-buff Fighter wasn't so much a newbie crutch as he was just plain bad. The new leveling curve he got was a massive buff, easily counted amongst the most powerful class features in the game. Taurog in his current state is not comparable to pre-buff fighter...

This, Taurog CAN win you the game on his own. TBH, Taurog can win you the game on his own quite a bit more often than not, and all you're really using while you're at it is... Taurog - most of anything else gets converted. He has a ridiculos piety gain / piety farm capabilities, he has a built in piety spike for when it works, you can squeeze +20% att without actually filling up your inventory, and for very dedicated BURNDAYRAZ guys he's ok as desecration fodder.

Fighter had a deliberatly unfocused bunch of mediocre abilities, and couldn't roflstomp anything, as he was so all over the place that nothing was particularly weak against him, while he wasn't particularly strong against anything. One of the abilities got buffed in a way that made him rather good against everything and a bit of a conceptional annoyance to anyone figuring fighter shouldn't be so good at spellcasting (although tbh, that comes from the priest actually having the flavour of a fighter and not being in any way priestly in my book).

[TigerKnee]

Ah, but the point is not pre-buff Fighter's power level but rather, the fact that the argument made against buffing the Fighter:

"If we buff the Fighter and we have a super simple class that can win all of the dungeons in the game, what motivates the player to use any other class in the game?"

And we replied with arguments like "Catering to different playstyles and using different characters for its own sake? There's generally a tier list in Fighting Games but most players don't just pick Akuma and then never play any other character in their lives, even though he's probably one of the strongest characters"

It seems to me that this Taurog argument is very similar.

[dislekcia]

The fighter changes were more in line with the dungeons becoming harder around the character and the need for leveling up early in the game's difficulty curve to be made more obviously useful for new players.

This isn't a fighting game, nor is it a competitive RTS. Half of the point in DD is throwing things that would otherwise frustrate you and end a run at the player so that they can overcome that hurdle

What if everyone used Dwarf Fortress balance logic and "losing is fun" to justify strange fighting game balance choices? Oh wait. Dan.

[Lujo]

Ah, but the point is not pre-buff Fighter's power level but rather, the fact that the argument made against buffing the Fighter:

"If we buff the Fighter and we have a super simple class that can win all of the dungeons in the game, what motivates the player to use any other class in the game?"

The bolded parts sort of indicate to me that the question asked revolves around fighter's power level and very little else.

It's very deffinitely not the same question as Taurog one. The real question about the fighter was:

"If fighter is the baseline class, how powerfull, strat specific or generic should he be?". It was never about buffing fighter to be able to solve everything, but tweaking him to be able to solve anything, since he was at the same time too general-purpose and not powerfull enough for any specific strat.

The Taurog question seems to be: "Does he need buffs to compensate for his weakness to %res monsters?" to which there are several answers with differing viewpoints, mine being - "Since Taurog is allready so good at what he does, and deffinitely useable in different scenarios across the dungeon difficulty curve, getting rid of his one weakness would needlessly push him above other gods that fiddling with other gods could turn from a viable strategic choice into self-imposed challenge territory".

So, no, I don't think it's nearly the same question. Fighter was never encroaching on any unlocks "reward" status, and was considered a "self-imposed challenge class" for most of the beta. The decision to be carefull about moving the power level of the baseline was a smart one because as long as stuff in the game needs to be unlocked (items, story progression) giving a player the ability to unlock everything from the get go for no effort at all would defeat the purpose of having "rewards" and a story progression in the first place.

This is different from the alpha which encouraged you to complete everything with everything in oder to unlock new stuff, but in the beta, if you can unlock vicious items with starting classes all the difficulty on the pre-vicious content is shot to pieces, and so is the balancing on classes which benefit from the dragonshield, whoopaz, namtars ward and so forth. Having a superpowered guy in the alpha didn't mean much - the monk there was stupidly powerfull, but completing everything with him didn't make your kingdom too powerfull. Here if you have a superpowered god or class it alone can net you preps.

The way to play Taurog right now is obscenely powerfull when it works, and what's worse it allows players to ignore a lot of content (items and glyphs are mostly conversion fodder). The downside is that you sacrifice flexibility, but if you didn't, picking up another god at almost any point would be a "self imposed challenge" moment. I don't think anyone can demand Taurog be made 100% applicable everywhere on "all playstyles should be viable everywhere" grounds, because worshiping Taurog isn't a "playstyle".

It's litteraly a newbie crutch designed to let people settle into the game focusing on very basic mechanics and still be able to complete a dungeon even if they ignore glyphs and items. Considering he's the most played god by far (or was) tells me that he's too good at it if anything, and this is also easily explained by the fact that Taurog is a viable god as an early unlock, he gets the wins while there is no shops, items, potions, preps and stuff, and all that stuff just adds to his power (even if it just adds CP sources). He's the patron saint of "screw the learning curve", and what he lacks in power he makes up in ease of use.

So the way the fighter was below the curve and the way Taurog is weak to specific stuff is not the same thing. Fighter was considered barely above "guard" power level, Taurog is in the "only held in place by circumstance" tier.

[TigerKnee]

I don't think anyone can demand Taurog be made 100% applicable everywhere on "all playstyles should be viable everywhere" grounds, because worshiping Taurog isn't a "playstyle".

Why would you say that? It seems to me that someone would choose to worship Taurog if he wanted to focus on the "physical" aspects of the game vs something like using glyphs or plant/wall managements.

The gods offer benefits in return for "warping" your gameplay style by imposing new "rules." The general power level for worshipping does tend to be greater than the power level of an atheist, but it's not like worship is strictly superior in every facet of the game.

Thus, a playstyle choice.

[TigerKnee]

dislekcia: I'm curious but do you consider "pick the suitable class for the dungeon" to be part of the "optimal decision making" process and not a playstyle choice? Just asking because DD's use of RPG tropes makes it hard to disconnect it from RPGs, and generally "class choice" is generally intended to be flavor/playstyle rather than power level.

[Lujo]

I don't think anyone can demand Taurog be made 100% applicable everywhere on "all playstyles should be viable everywhere" grounds, because worshiping Taurog isn't a "playstyle".

Why would you say that? It seems to me that someone would choose to worship Taurog if he wanted to focus on the "physical" aspects of the game vs something like using glyphs or plant/wall managements.

The gods offer benefits in return for "warping" your gameplay style by imposing new "rules." The general power level for worshipping does tend to be greater than the power level of an atheist, but it's not like worship is strictly superior in every facet of the game.

Thus, a playstyle choice.

Yes, but being the default newbie prepless, itemless, glyphless god, Taurog is so self contained in all the ways he helps you focus on the physical aspect, and so forgiving and straightforward in his do's and don'ts and piety gain that he lets you have your cake and eat it by default. A focused Taurog worshiper doesn't really give a damn about what he loses (edited), and an unfocused one can reap plenty of the numerous benefits without crippling himself - just ask anyone who's the best Pactmaker partner.

So while it is a playstyle choice in the broadest sense, compared to any other playstyle this one is so reductive and straightforward due to his introductory nature that that it can't really be called a playstyle choice. When it works.

"I wanna play as honey badger" is a legit decision, but it's a decision where your gameplay is predetermined completely before you go into a dungeon - everything is conversion fodder, more glyphs are taken, none are used (and you can even use them what with the ridiculous piety gain), inventory is sorted out as long as you know what to do with the one slot you got left after you compress something. He's good enough that you could go warmonger wizard back when everything the player had was weaker, and the dungeons were tougher, and he's also the reason that the warmonger badge is sort of laughable to me.

It's the same thing that balances both TT poison and the Monk - the chance of running into it's cancerous element (Poison - undead, Monk - magic damage, Taurog - phys res) is enough to discourage people from relying on the same fundamentaly broken feature and take a ride along the actual learning curve.