Some thoughts on balance. (also long)

[Kingdom of One]

[Lujo]

Well, plenty of things I'd agree with, bunch of things you'll learn with experience. The beserker/monk/rogue/warlord and assassin is interesting because from a perspective of a long time player, if you take the berserker out of that list, the 4 that are left are generally considered the strongest classes by a wide margin.

The "game doesn't have to be balanced" is a tricky proposition really. "To a degree". Past that point you get the old trisword and the game can become rather unfun if players are allowed to bring a rocket launcher to a knife fight. Thakfully the game is pretty well balanced right now, or at least seemed so to me in the aftermath of my last playthrough.

Patches - the problem with patches is that one of his boons (bonus resists) is way stronger than the others. Noone ever really wants any other boon when they prep him. Well, you could prep him for mana but his mana burn punishment makes it not worth the risk most of the time. The health, gold and damage boosts he provides need much more stacking to become relevant and pay off the potential string of misfortunes he can visit upon you. But the main thing is - the ammount of "worth" you get from Patches is measured in +resists and they seem to have a low percentage chance of appearing (I've had a 4 in ten streak maybe once in my long career, while I've had every health and gold streaks every time).


As for gods - well, ATM, for experienced users - Binlor and Mystera are pretty overpowered. Mystera because she takes no effort at all and provides bonuses you can depend upon for said no effort. Binlor because he provides both damage and resistances while greatly helping exploration and letting you farm piety for almost no effort as well. Oh, and he provides more overall magic resistance than any other source in the game, and the stoneskin can provide a character with no physical resits a full cap when he needs it for a relatively low investment.


As for monsters - I wouldn't mind it if zombies provided you small extra piety when you killed them.

[Kingdom of One]

Your comments all make sense.
I guess the main point I was trying to make is that balance only matters if it gets you to that unfun point (too easy - or more accurately not enough strategy required).
In my experience so far nothing massively breaks that point. I assume as you get further into the endgame and you have to exploit the game more and more the balance issues become more important - but I'm not there yet.

I'm sure plenty of things I wrote are wrong/bad ideas but it seemed better to just throw my opinions out there than preface everything.

The strongest classes/gods thing makes sense to me. The class abilities are clearly strong and with physical damage being more prevalent I'm not surprised the berserker isn't as powerful. Those two gods have strong benefits without gameplay changing drawbacks. The binlor drawback was interesting the first time but after that you just account for it during the run.

I'd like to add that I realised why I find preparing a god 'unfun'. It's because you get a disadvantage for ensuring something that could have happened anyway. (The fireball prep disadvantage of not being able to choose another preparation for that slot is less direct so doesn't feel as bad).

[The Avatar]

@Lujo: I'm kind of surprised you didn't mention Dracul in your little gods write up. His boons are off the charts for late game users, and he provides resistance and lifesteal as an alternative (or complement) to resistance. I'd say he's just as good as the other two.

@Kingdom of One: The interesting thing about god preps is they place the altar within 4 or so tiles of you. I'm not sure if they mention this but they should, and personally, I think it is a lot better than scumming.

[Darvin]

[The Avatar]

An interesting idea for Taurog vs physical resistance is making the sword have a clickable ability that costs all your mana and makes you do magic damage (the sword is on fire). It makes it an interesting choice between spells and magic attack.

[Checkem]

[FDru]

[Lujo]

Whoa.

Mystera and Taurog don't benefit their niches?

I think, well I don't really think it - I sort of feel like I "know" it, that what you're struggling with is not a problem with Taurog or Mystera, but rather 3 separate cases of unintuitive weirdness with the fighter, the priest and the wizard.

1) Wizard doesn't need any help. That's the thing - Mystera boosts Sorcerors, Bloodmages, Fighters, Warlords, heck, even Berserkers, more than she boosts the Wizard. But that's the case of the Wizard being too good at what he does and overlap between his price reduction and mystic balance, rather than her not being as good in her niche - she's the best in her niche. I prep her for a string of weakenings even with wizards and I don't think I'd pick anyone else if the boss I was going to fight had magic resistance. But wizards benefit from EM and Binlor more, because they're so good at spellcasting that they don't need her.

2) Fighters are way better when played as spellcasters than if played in almost any other way. Warlords ARE spellcasters. And within the niche they belong in mechanicaly (spellcasters) they have plenty of benefits from Mystera. Fighters in particular benefit from her more than any pretty much any other god except Tikki Tooki. And neither Fighters or Warlords have sinergy with Taurog, not because Taurog's bad at boosting "warriors" but because they aren't in fact warriors. You couldn't make a "warrior god" that would benefit or synergize with them them more than Mystera, EM or JJ would.

3) Taurog isn't bad at boosting warrior types, in fact that's all he is good for. But the really niche warrior types in this game are in fact The Priest, The Monk and The Berserker. And while the Berserker can benefit from Taurog by going full retard niche, he's good enough at being a warrior that he tends to be looking elsewhere o shore up his weaknesses much like the wizard tends to not need any more spellcasting help from mystera.



As for the god preps - they're ment to be scumming-reduction mechanisms, and they are the strongest preps in the game if you know which strat you're going for. Having the altar you want right at the start lets you start gaining piety right away and guarantees you'll have the boons that have the most sinergy with your class-race combo. As for perp punishments:

Drac - you generally wouldn't want to pick him up early anyway, and his penalty is less of a problem than that.

Tikki Tooki - would be various kinds of broken if you could casually prep him anywhere you go. He's the only one with a really ridiculous prep penalty, but that's kind of justified, and you can still make him work.

Mystera - what prep penalty? She hands out piety for casting spells, and provides benefits to guys casting spells, and offers really strong boons to those guys. This is tied with the EM and Binlor preps as the strongest overall prep in the game.

Taurog - what prep penalty? I prep him for warmongers regularly.

GG - what prep penalty? I tend to prep him for any warmonger, or even when I just want a piety farm that doesn't require me to do anything but level up and convert stuff...

Binlor - what prep penalty? Prepping him = prepping a pissorff glyph (only way to do it), guarantees that you'll dismantle most cramped maps, provides +40% knocback and +30% on wall destruction eventually, and as much magic resists as you put an effort in acqiring. Also a string of stonesking which you can kill a boss with easily. It's probably the most broken prep in the game in any category, but it has to be there otherwise people would simply scumm for him.

EM - what prep penalty? Guaranteed slow on any monster, guaranteed IMAWAL for XP catapulting, piety comming out of your ears if you want to convert, and provides more plants per boon for clearance abuse. If you only grab the free glyph, entagle everythign and use a clearance, you can get to 50 piety just off IMAWAL, convert to whoever, desecrate her altar and drink a burn salve for 30 piety + 3 indulgences with the next guy. And once you locker avatar's codex, entanglement + clearance spam with it is one of the strongest prep-heavy strats on the game.

JJ - what prep penalty? Really, you only really want to prep him with warlords, and they don't mind. And if you wanted him in any other circumstance, having him available from the start would balance out any penalty he might give.


So in essence, the only guy with a serious penalty is TT, Drac isn't too good if you pick him up early (except with halflings) and JJ simply isn't too good. GG and Taurog can and should be prepped on most warmongers, and GG can be prepped every game if you just want an effortless 50 piety + humility. Mystera can be prepped any game if you want to win the game by using her boons OR if you just want a few points of mana and free piety, EM is better prepped than found and can be prepped anywhere for free piety AND benefits AND can win you games on her own, and Binlor is flat out broken.

Hope all this didn't come out wrong.

[Kingdom of One]

It's nice to see that this generating some discussion even if it's moved on somewhat from my original post.

I just wanted to clarify a few things:

God preps: I hadn't realised the altar would spawn at the start. It doesn't seem to mention this on the tooltips as far as I can tell. It just says the altar is guaranteed to appear in the dungeon. (I guess this should be made clearer).

Patches: I just don't tend to like mechanics with an unknown element to them. I think if the full list of effects was available somewhere (another useful codex entry) then this problem would partially disappear.