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The seasonal greetings

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Re: The seasonal greetings

Postby Alweth on Tue Dec 25, 2012 7:22 am

Were you expecting a coherent message? Alweth does not deal with such trifles. Ignore him or watch the thread get locked!
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Re: The seasonal greetings

Postby gjaustin on Tue Dec 25, 2012 4:54 pm

Merry Christmas everyone!

May Glowing Guardian not punish you for drinking Egg Nog!
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Re: The seasonal greetings

Postby Darvin on Wed Jan 02, 2013 5:29 pm

Just to make clear: I'm converting APHEELSIK on sight right now. If I literally have no other useful glyphs I might keep it temporarily, but against any relevant foe it just times out way too quickly to be worth the MP. For low-level characters it's ludicrously weak; BURDAYRAZ and HALPMEH are way better for regen-fighting purposes, since APHEELSIK times out much too quickly. For high-level characters, exploration space is mostly depleted and at a premium and poison has highly limited applicability.

What annoys me most of all is that this change has effectively killed many of the glyph combos that formerly existed with APHEELSIK. Fireball/poison? Good luck fuelling that even with BLUDTUPOWA. Poison with LEMMISI or HALPMEH? Much too mana intensive. ENDISWAL/poison? That's a pipe dream. CYDSTEPP/poison? Just cut out the poison entirely, you're better off just specializing in damage spiking. You simply cannot regenerate your mana while maintaining poison against any reasonable foe, which renders pretty much every glyph combo with APHEELSIK non-operational.

One of the cool things about poison was that it opened up a wide variety of combos, and if you were willing to sink the exploration into fuelling them you could do some pretty amazing things. In a typical dungeon run, this could mean killing monsters up to 4 levels higher than yourself. In the most extreme, tweaked-out scenarios that meant a level 1 boss kill (which only works against low-HP bosses) on the easier dungeon in the game. I feel that to deal with a very niche scenario you've ripped up a huge amount of variety surrounding this glyph. In most cases, APHEELSIK did nothing more than what was possible with damage-spiking strategies.


With that said, I think this is the right direction for dealing with on-attack poison (it just needs to scale with level, like lifesteal does), but for the glyph this isn't working for me.
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Re: The seasonal greetings

Postby The Avatar on Wed Jan 02, 2013 11:48 pm

Agreed. I think APHEELSIK should be reverted to its original form. The new concept works for on-poison attack (though as of now it is awfully ineffective, like the rest of the current poison), but I still would prefer something like the level difference for poison on attack.
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Re: The seasonal greetings

Postby Darvin on Thu Jan 03, 2013 12:41 am

I'd say 3-4 stacks of poison per level for Tikki's boon (priced at 25+25, with 10 gold payout) and the venom dagger would be appropriate. The current numbers are definitely much too front-loaded, but I think the concept is solid. The gorgon will need rebalancing, but that might not necessarily be a bad thing; she was too dependent on attack-bonus boosting preps anyways.

The issue is how to reconcile the new system with the glyph, which was mostly working fine. The problem is that one of the counter-balancing factors - that poison no longer is lost on attack - is currently a moot point. Poison as it exists now just doesn't last long enough for that to come into play. However, if we were to properly buff the glyph up to the levels it needs to reclaim its spellcasting combos (somewhere between 50+10/level and 100+20/level) then this could become extremely problematic and make poison last too long in many cases.

From a playtesting perspective, all I can say is that the current numbers for APHEELSIK are so low as to be functionally useless and provides little insight into the nuances that may emerge.
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Re: The seasonal greetings

Postby q 3 on Thu Jan 03, 2013 3:59 am

Apropos of nothing, but not wanting to start a new thread, subdungeon balance is still way out of whack. I just found for the first time a "maze" subdungeon with an NPC troll who warns you away, three 99% lifesteal imps, and... literally the only reward is (roughly) the same amount of blackspace as the zombie gold subdungeon, which also rewards you with both gold and XP. I feel like I'm on a game show and a sad trombone just played for me.

I'd like to offer a more comprehensive review of the various subdungeons, but this is literally the only time I've seen this one in particular, and there are quite a few others that I only see once in a while. I'm starting to think that it might be best just to scrap most of the subdungeons and only have like half a dozen, so that there can be some semblance of consistency.
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Re: The seasonal greetings

Postby The Avatar on Thu Jan 03, 2013 4:38 am

A lot of them are exclusive purchases. Still, I don't think it's that being weak. It's zombie money being OP.
We made an expansion and it is awesome. Really, you should check it out, especially if you're looking for some extra challenge.

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Re: The seasonal greetings

Postby q 3 on Thu Jan 03, 2013 7:04 am

It's by far the most useless subdungeon I've ever encountered. The others I can at least imagine some weird situation in which they'd be helpful (e.g., the death gaze immunity charm would be great when fighting Medusa or certain other bosses, and if not you at least get some free CP/piety/transmutation and a fair amount of blackspace to explore, risk-free). This one is only good for the exploration space, and it's pretty terrible for even that purpose due to the 99% lifesteal risk.
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Re: The seasonal greetings

Postby The Avatar on Thu Jan 03, 2013 4:18 pm

What if they made it 150% as big as it is now without adding any hellbois? That would probably make it reasonable.
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Re: The seasonal greetings

Postby q 3 on Thu Jan 03, 2013 4:37 pm

That would certainly make it useful, albeit fairly boring. Maybe like 200-300% larger but keep the imps? High risk, high(er) reward. Or add a few somewhat useful trinkets to the mix. I kept exploring, expecting to find something to loot, and was rather puzzled when it turned out to be completely empty, save for the monsters.

(I wish I could find the Metal Spider Temple more consistently - I've only seen it twice. It seems like one of the more interesting ones to try out, but only if you're adequately prepared for it.)
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