The Deities ; Thoughts on the Final Roster

[xspeedballx]

Off the top of my head would Taurog be more useful if you could get CP from the items? I can't get into game still from my laptop to verify if you can. So make it useful for early players as a staightforward deity, and then for advanced players balance picking up items for later CP advantage(or even immediate but that is harder).

Overall I think it is ok that some gods are very niche, some gods are useful for advanced and some for basic. Balance is a funny thing. If they were all "balanced" you are looking at one of three scenarios in my mind: Either choice and selection of god has no impact on your game other than knowing what they do, all gods make the game equally more complex and therefore only worth using once you are a vet, or all gods make the game easy and you just hope for the one that best fits your current class each time(but don't worry if you don't get it because they others will do).

I am probably over simplifying to a degree.

[gjaustin]

I don't think anybody wants Taurog to be both "insta-win early Kingdom" and "insta-win late Kingdom" but the important phrases "balanced"/"viable choice".

Maybe they should take more inspiration from the original DC's Trog, who is gamebreakingly powerful early in the DUNGEON but terrible end-game and a lot of Trog worshippers try to jump ship then.

I don't know how you would translate that though. Giving bonuses that are uber at level 1 but become super weak at 10? Shrug.

You mean like +5 base damage or 5 damage reduction? Or, thanks to glyph conversion, the piety gain being front-loaded?

[The Avatar]

The problem with DD's Taurog vs DCSS's Trog is that even selecting a boon from Taurog will haunt you later when you're one or two mana short.

I have an idea. What if you connected the +5% bonus at the -1 mana penalty the items so you could convert them to regain that mana? Also, you'd make it so Taurog couldn't punish you outside of his religion.

[Lujo]

I am probably over simplifying to a degree.

Not really, in fact. Well, from my perspective, anyway, and I "broke" the game rather verily a few times so I'll entitle myself to an opinon.

Now then, I've said this before, the problem with Taurog in particular is that for new players, and early game in general, Taurog doubles as a dispenser of a million things that you unlock later and get used to prepping, having in shops, having as racial or class choices and all that. He is immensly powerfull, but the game (and the playerbase) has always had a big problem with determining the baseline for anything (or settling for one). We're all bud's here, and it can be just me saying it and everyone denying it, we can all come clean or we can take a 3 month sabbatical and dig throught all the archives and then face it.

What happens is that a newbie walks into the game at a point where he has no shops, once he gets those, then he has a limited item pool, a limited building prep pool, a limited glyph pool, a limitad race selection, a limited altar selection, a limited... just about everything. Then he finds Taurog, and all of a sudden he has the following at his disposal:

A source of %20 based damage boost with every boon - so he doesn't have to be Human all the time, and when you look at it there aren't many sources of it in the game at all.

A +5 Dmg Sword - which is on it's own the best stright up damage item, with no gimmicks, at a point where there are no Orcs, no Trisword, no nothing. It's still worth picking up even later and I've done it regularly way past the "insane vet" stage of development as a player.

A -5 Dmg Shield - which is really the only obvious powerleveling tool before the potions, cydstep and all the other stuff we take into dungeons like we deserve it.

A +15% Phys Res or a +15% Mag Res item - both of which make for half a Dragonshield, which is an OPTIONAL "we-just-put-it-there-for-a-lark" item that we all somehow made a major factor by virtue of never really accepting the whole "VICIOUS is just an optional thing for crazy people" policy, except verbaly. This is coming form a guy who did about 20-30 VICIOUS Gaan'Telet runs even though he knew it would always crash before he got the reward for it and when it took 10 minutes just to trek up and down floors. And there are no mixed-damage-type bosses out there, so half a dragonshield can easily be all you really need, and in fact rather often is, especially later.

So, anyway, once the newbie has aquired all these goodies which he would in no other manner have acess to, and even if he did, buying them and prepping them would bankrupt him, he gets the piety spike on top of it. A rather good one as long as he can tackle one boss without it.

And he can even cast spells while he's at it as long as he doesn't go overboard. And he ges piety for killing stuff, which is like, what you're supposed to do anyway to get levels, you know?

And then along come us vets and complain that once you unlock all the rather excessive junk (I'm glaring at all the stuff I ever got sick of using at some point) and all the wonderfull options we can preselect or pick up on the fly while we roll in money, anyway, we come along and say:

Right, this Taurog chap, once he stops in effect replacing just about 3/4 of the entire games content, he just doesn't look up to snuff, does he? I mean, once I have quest/elite/vicious bling to fill my inventory up with, once I've unlocked classes which are silly by design, and once I'm loaded up to my ears with preps and I can preselect my god, and get not 3 but 4 altars in case I run into one I don't like, we'll he just doesn't wow me as much as say Drac.

Because Drac, you see, he's solid - he still makes you many times more powerfull even after you've grown into a habit of bringing/buying/counting on stuff like Dragonshields, Namtar's Wards, stacking 75% resists, juggling a cuple of gods. You can set you measures and standards by him, you can - I certanly did: If a strat for the old VICIOUS Gaan'Telet took more than one Bloodswell, I didn't really feel like I won. More like cheated.

And before anyone starts up about PQI runs, trickshots and purist runs - guys, we have shops. And classes. And glyphs. And races. And alchemists. And subdungeons. And altars. And, what, over a year of expirience?

Let's just let this go, we've influenced the way the game is quite a lot, and for a very long time our feedback has for various reasons kept the dev's in belief that stuff that shouldn't be doable if you want balance between early and super-late is perfectly fine. We've come a long way in helping them make it all work better, we've said goodbye to quite a few silly exploits (and come to see them as such no matter how fun they were for a while), but I honstly think that the way the game is layed out Taurog has to stay the way he is.

I'm not happy with it, namely that the only thing you can afford to tax Taurog worship with is inventory space and that turning into a big problem for optimal (excessively insanely munchkiny?) late game play, but if we want regular people to buy this after release and possibly finance an expansion or something, I think we ought to cut Taurog some slack.

That or badger the devs into a big round of balancing, but I'm not sure that's doable.

EDIT: And for anyone who remebers - back when I was trampling with the old conversion/TT/GG Monk stupidness, I didn't even want to unlock Taurog. Because I felt that with him in every run there would be no challenge at all. If all his crap which doubles for most of the content didn't take up your mana and inventory space it would stack with all the other crap (and still does to a fine degree), and noone would be able to balance it.

[Darvin]

And there are no mixed-damage-type bosses out there

Anoobis and Namtar are multi-stage bosses that swap damage types, Evolvia can randomly switch his damage types, Cursed Oasis effectively forces you to fight a physical damage mini-boss before a magic-damage main boss, and the Rock Garden is assured the Brothers of Earth and Stone Not to mention every single vicious dungeon forces you to cleave through both high physical and magic damage enemies, and pretty much every dungeon once you go more than one step along any directional has multiple bosses and may likely draw differing damage types.

So I find you're just as likely to need varied resistances as you are to be able to get away with just one type, and the higher you notch up the difficulty the more likely you'll need both.

I'm not happy with it, namely that the only thing you can afford to tax Taurog worship with is inventory space and that turning into a big problem for optimal (excessively insanely munchkiny?) late game play, but if we want regular people to buy this after release and possibly finance an expansion or something, I think we ought to lay Taurog some slack.

More or less my conclusion as well, even if I'm not in agreement with you on all your points. I'm not happy with how Taurog turned out, but at this stage I can live with him.

That or badger the devs into a big round of balancing, but I'm not sure that's doable.

I've been badgering them about Taurog for well over a year. If it were going to happen, it would have been long, long ago.


Oh, and as I said a few pages ago and will repeat again: Please keep in mind that these are the comments of a veteran. I realize a less experienced player who has to deal with the meta-game economy and struggles with lower-difficulty dungeons may have a different experience.

[Lujo]

Oh, and as I said a few pages ago and will repeat again: Please keep in mind that these are the comments of a veteran. I realize a less experienced player who has to deal with the meta-game economy and struggles with lower-difficulty dungeons may have a different experience.

I know, I just want all the reasons for why it is the way it is to be there. Good point on the multi bosses though.

EDIT: Allthough half a dragonshield is still half a dragonshield. Just because Drac gives a whole dragonshield with no strings attached doesn't make it a bad deal in and off itself. Especially since you can pick the other half up too.

[TigerKnee]

You mean like +5 base damage or 5 damage reduction? Or, thanks to glyph conversion, the piety gain being front-loaded?

Yeah, I realized after I typed that, that Taurog IS kind of front-loaded...

but then at the end of the dungeon run you get like 2-3 death protections which is pretty much a gurantee to kill the boss in non-vicious dungeons. I wish Trog made Zot a cakewalk in a similar way!

And Taurog makes the early dungeon exploration easy but it's kind of... already easy in the first place if you have preps and it doesn't quite carry over to other levels unless you're a Monk.

Imagine something like this:
Neo-Taurog gives you a powerful bloodlust effect. At level 1 as a Neo-Taurog worshipper, you can pick fights with enemies 3 or 4 levels higher than you and win!

But as you level up, your "bloodlust" catches up to you and makes you weaker. You'll probably reach the level cap fast but be a bit worse than an atheist or someone who is a level 10 worshipper of other deities, even on non-Vicious dungeons. You'll have a harder time killing the dungeon boss...

HOWEVER, If you constantly pick on higher level enemies, then you'll have a big pool of "popcorn" and the fact that you're so powerful at the start means that you probably won't have to make "sub-optimal" choices like blowing a potion because you got blocked off and you'll take less Weaken/Corrosion stacks by having to hit those guys a lot less.

Probably not the "optimal" Taurog solution, although I'm fully aware a Taurog solution won't exist, but I think it's more interesting than "He auto-wins in early kingdom dev and is a piety farm loser altar in late kingdom dev."

[The Avatar]

I'm with Darvin. I would have liked Taurog to be changed, but I can live with him.

I think the part that really gets to me about him is that he is the only one-sided god. He can only be applied to people who want to help their physical combat effectiveness, and physical combat is the most basic part of the game. He basically just dumbs down the normal and hard dungeon's to a level where it is just highlight and click (okay, that's a bit of an over-exaggeration, but you get the point). He is almost a cheat code for early game and fairly lame late game, because of how one-sided he is. It is what makes him so powerful and so weak. It is the key flaw in how he works.

[Lujo]

I'm with Darvin. I would have liked Taurog to be changed, but I can live with him.

I think the part that really gets to me about him is that he is the only one-sided god. He can only be applied to people who want to help their physical combat effectiveness, and physical combat is the most basic part of the game. He basically just dumbs down the normal and hard dungeon's to a level where it is just highlight and click (okay, that's a bit of an over-exaggeration, but you get the point). He is almost a cheat code for early game and fairly lame late game, because of how one-sided he is. It is what makes him so powerful and so weak. It is the key flaw in how he works.

I'm actually with you, this is presenting the whole argument concisely. He does dumb down the early development so much that I was incentivised to learn how a whole bunch of stuff simply by purpusefully avoiding him.

But I'd say this is more due to how the game is layed out progression wise than just Taurog. Which is why I'm not happy with it, but I can live with it, just like you guys.

[The Avatar]

I assume you mean because of the fact you get Taurog so early? I suppose there is a quick fix to that. Make it so his subdungeon only appears when you play as a berserker. That will at least force a few more normal runs, and it will pair Taurog with the class he is actually good with.