by Lujo on Sun Feb 23, 2014 11:21 am
It's quite a tough subject to tackle, and with differing playstyles and so much time and experience between a vet and a newbie it's been a problem trying to even figure out what the initial obstacles towards becoming a pro even are (from the vet perspective).
I think a few things ought to be put first - you use resources to either fill up your health and mana, or to get more use of them by being able to hit for more damage, tank more damage, cast more spells, etc...
Then you explain the resources in unlock order:
- You start every run with 10 HP and 10 Mana and 5 damage. Each time you level up you get 10 more health and 5 more base damage. You also get a full health and mana refill. You also start with 1 health and 1 mana potion.
- Every run has 6 randomly placed potions, and 9 randomly placed powerups.
- Every dungeon has 5 randomly chosen glyphs. These let you explore, level up or deal damage to monsters. The magic damage dealing FIREBALL (4 dmg per level) is a guaranteed spawn. The other damage dealing glyph, PISSORFF isn't.
- Almost every dungeon has at least one subdungeon - a mini level which often provides some additional resources or a small challenge
- Every run has the map covered in blackspce at the start - as you explore, it refills your health and mana but is consumed. It also "heals" any damaged monsters at the rate of 3Xmonster level, so most characters can't fight and heal using blackspace at the same time (at least not too much of it, and some classess can).
- Every run has (?) piles of gold randomly placed, and once you unlock shops you can buy items with the gold. The items give you additional stats, or more ways to refill your health and mana.
- Once you unlock gods, their altars start spawining in the dungeons at the rate of (???). Gods can give you special abilities and refills in exchange for piety, which you gain by playing the game in a way they like.
Once you manage to explain this, you're on to the tactics:
You can do damage to enemies in two ways - click on them to attack them, or use a glyph (Burndayraz or Pissorff) to do damage to them. If you attack a monster, it costs you health, if you use a glyph it costs you mana. Any character can (and probably should), combine the two as much as possible.
One health pool and one mana pool worth of damage (from attacks and glpyhs) is often enough to take down a monster of an equal level. This isn't the optimal way to play since the experience gain from fighting same level monsters isn't enough to get you strong enough to be able to fight the boss (and a few other reasons). Fighting a monster higher level than yourself, however, often requires refilling your health and mana during a fight, or otherwise having ways to get "free" hits in. You can do so in a number of ways:
Then you explain all the ways in which you can get a refill or free hits:
- Potions (pros/cons)
- First Strike
- Damage protection
- Level Cannon/popcorn bowl
- Regen fighting/small scale - large scale
Etc...
But the biggest problem is IMO the lack of awareness of how many resources there are. Once you've learned that you can be thaught about tools to manipulate them or find your own, and without that you can't even assess a situation corectly. I guess...
I almost got pwned by Shifty Brickwork!