xspeedballx wrote:It is pretty pricky to say "Well I don't want to give you this info because it makes the game easy but without the game is hard, suffer." Say what you will say. More information is better than less ALWAYS. Not everyone will abuse strategies. Not everyone will understand on the first try. Even a step by step video. When I used to use the Alpha wiki I would often read part of a strat to get me thinking and a place to start and ignore the rest. Does everyone play like that? No. But I can't be the only one.
No, no, no, you're right! It sounds dickish to me, too, one of the first things I suggested when I started posting was the god puzzles (dev's had plans for those on their own), or god tutorials. But the gods being purposefully obscure is something they, for reasons I can only speculate on, decided is unquestionable. So much so that the whole "priest can't be an actual prest because no starting gods" is something I actually understand (was bumming for scout: undead for other reasons).
Whatever the reasons (can be several), the game goes out of it's way to keep them obscure (mybe it doesn't look like that from the dev perspective, but it obviously does from the user interface). And the entirety of the "vet" perspective sort of comes down to knowing you way about the gods. Once you do - game is (mostly) too easy. If you can remember what it looked like - places that you find hard make you want to complain because you know how much power you've been given. If you don't have/know gods - you hit a brick wall.
But there isn't real middle ground tbh. A vet decides to show the newbies how to do a vicious dungeon run purist - he scums for GG, and all his pro play (excellent though it was) sort of doesn't mean much compared to him simply knowing that a certain god will give him an overwhelming advantage. Taurog, the god every newbie probably loves, the first guy you unlock who makes your game worlds easier? The vets want him buffed because that guy doesn't compare to what the other ones do. Now, once you unlock all of them, and get to really know your way around them, the game becomes really, really easy. It's not skill, it's just having them around and understanding what they do.
If all this info was available from the get go I think the game, the way it is and is gonna be most likely, would lose quite a bit of it's draw. God's are practicaly the only thing to explore, and are quite worthwhile in that regard, and you're also probably expected to explore them. However - because they can get you into trouble for random stuff, and big trouble - they have inherent balancing, which makes the alternatives "better". You can't screw yourself over with the Trisword, or rather, you can, but then it's you who screwed yourself over not some god. You don't start out with them, most people probably don't even want to try them out after several bad occurences.
And so Trisword and the potions and momentarily overbuffed glyphs seem necessary, when in fact they're not. And all this is surely intentional, so I feel like explaining it and describin it exactly as it is would be against the, arguably dickish, but not unwise, nature of the game.
And the features like the trisword or the potions can be handled differently - they need more variety in the "can be picked up in the dungeon" department, there could be more "warmonger support" or "faithless support" stuff so that a cap or reduction in availability doesn't mess up the game for whoever doesn't know his way around gods. You can't really make the game challenging for someone who's unlocked the gods and knows their way around them, and have the same game be doable for someoone who doesn't - you can, but if you combine gods and badge hunting noob-tubes you get lvl1bosskilrogues.
TLDR - way gods are handled makes game frustrating for newbies, and creates a large gap that's currently being filled by a few above the curve features. Anyone combining gods and said features can beat anything. In most cases gods are enough. Most of this is intentional. Some guys wonder if also necessary. I think making guides for this would be against the strictly enforced rules of the game itself, and also impossible to do in a way that both honest and flattering. Pretty much it.