Suggestions for the DarkGod Challenge (Codename Madness!)

[grmblfzzz]

A couple of quick things. First, as PureQuestion posted, due to DarkGod's general badass nature he threw up something along the lines originally discussed (plus SageAcrin's suggestion) onto the git. I've been play-testing it with Stition for the last few days, and seems to have done a remarkably good job at nailing down a do-able yet... maddening... difficulty! I think our going record at the moment is Daikura 2, where in that time he could have probably gotten 2 Insane wins and I gotten almost 1, heh.

@Coolthulhu: This next patch is going to be a pretty epic beast, so it's kind of hard to keep up with all the changes, but for the record there's already a change in there relating to pet aggro to prevent a lot of the current cheese. Things aggro on to you after they've died, which prevents a lot of shenanigans. Although I'd also like to note that I think something like this was amazingly timely, because overall Insane would have been easiest after this patch in general due to scaling changes/good power creep (much more balanced items/prodigies).

All that being said, I'm all for any sort of challenge modes, and some of the mentioned ones were interesting. On this note though, I'd personally like to see some AI tweaks to rares/uniques/bosses/The Master. I was thinking about making an addon for this, because certain things like The Master's silly helplessness with LOS make me sad, and have nothing to do with the difficulty level. There are just certain bugs/features-gone-awry that make him intrinsically abusable. Also, similar to what you mentioned with Priority Target... In many cases I suspect the AI is willfully bad (Mindslayers not using spiked aura's against you). I want to fear enemy mindslayers!

[Stition]

After testing madness for a month or so, I feel it's overall in a good place but there are some problems with shadowblades and corruptors.

Ambuscade is horribly overpowered and boring to use even without being able to teleport. Probability travel still works and so does shadowstep (which still doesn't count as a tele so can access vaults and everything without opening the door).

Wraithform with belts of unlife or lamps of corpeslight make corruptors invincible for most areas, and even without them they have some of the best damage and survivability of any class.

I could make some videos of this abuse if people want, but both ambuscade abuse and wraithform are incredibly boring and overpowered. I have a corruptor and a shadowblade in the east on madness, but they're too boring to play. I just don't want this patch to come out and beat it within a month with both classes.

Everything else I feel is appropriately maddening and I'm have great fun dying over and over with cursed. It's just these two problems in my opinion.

Edit: some solutions to wraithform would be taking crushing damage when it's not active inside walls, similar to the walls collapsing in the sandworm lair. I'm not sure how to balance ambuscade, maybe just make it uncontrollable and just a temporary pet.

[SageAcrin]

Probability travel still works and so does shadowstep (which still doesn't count as a tele so can access vaults and everything without opening the door).

I say, just ban Probability Travel.

Shadowstep still works, but it's fairly limited, and there's a point where you need to cut off the mobility talent limitations, or else you're just making it more tedious, not less powerful. You can, for example, just have the Ambuscade walk physically into the vault, Rush an enemy, and if the enemy survives, teleport your Shadowblade, Arcane Eye around the area, and come back with another Ambuscade.

It is, by basic concept, pretty much Vault Killer Supreme. Single enemies in controlled situations are basically dead against a decently leveled Shadowblade, period, if the player is good, and no amount of mobility limitations will change that. Ambuscade would have to be totally changed-I don't even think making it an uncontrollable pet particularly alters this.

(And it makes it spectacularly more powerful in uncontrolled situations. Forgery of Haze is an amazing spell and it can't use one of the best tricks of the class.)

I'm not sure how this is overpowered outside of these situations, though, particularly on Madness. Aren't enemies becoming aware of you in this time?

Wraithform with belts of unlife or lamps of corpeslight make corruptors invincible for most areas, and even without them they have some of the best damage and survivability of any class.

Corruptors are really good, but I don't really feel like they're intrinsically overpowered.

Having said that, I agree on Wraithform being an issue, though in a more broad way than you're saying; Even ignoring those items, Skeletons can just blow off the downside, since they don't need air.

That's one of those skills I've kinda been trying to think of a way to rebalance and failed-it's an overly good skill... with a downside that makes it near useless until negated.

Why not just have the talent lower your damage to half/30%, ala Invisibility, but also allow you to not need air? That leaves it usable for escapes, but much worse for constant hit and runs for airless characters.

The other idea I can think of is to have it deal damage for each tile you pass through, but that has its own workarounds.

[grmblfzzz]

I totally agree with Stition here, and made a post regarding similar issues here: http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=38558.

Basically, 1.05 removes the majority of highly ab-usable things (tentacle range, spider/crystal farming, mucus through walls, etc), but I figure that it'd be desirable to make a clean sweep of all of them. Here's a rundown of all the really game-breaking things that I can think of that are left. Most are obvious bugs, some are just tedious yet broken ala swift hands, all of them are horrifically abusable. These are the type of things that completely sidestep difficulty, and are in general just bad for the game.

General Exploits

1) Persistent effect stair cheesing. The old change where enemies heal up and whatnot fixed most of it, but there is still quite a bit of stair abuse possible. Mostly it's persistent effects such as Gravity well, Maelstrom, Earthquake, Traps, etc. These don't disappear when you go up stairs and rest, so you can just keep going down and throwing one, go up, repeat. You can just layer an absurd amount of stuff like that, which is pretty abusive.

Solution: Already fixed by Hachem_Muche with a patch found here http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=38467, all that needs to be done is integrating it into vanilla.

2) Horrible AI pathing that's ab-usable, described in the AI discussion thread.

Solution: Have I mentioned that Hachem_Muche is badass? Because he also already made a fix found here http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/npc-ta ... provements that I've been playtesting for the last several days and it solves the issue nicely. Again, just needs to be integrated into vanilla.

Class Specific Exploits

1) Paradox mage temporal clone has infinite range/goes through walls, similar to how tentacle was.

Recommendation: Same as with all similar things, just make it obey range/LOS.

2) Gravity trap damages/sucks people in through 1-thick walls (via being placed ON the wall). This is insanely broken, if anyone disputes that I can post vids/scrnshots to demonstrate.

Recommendation: Either make it so that all traps can't be placed inside walls, or just make gravity trap not do anything if it is in a wall.

3) Ambuscade is probably the single most abusive class specific talent remaining. Particularly with the horrible AI pathing as it stands (please implement Hackem's fix!), you are literally in no danger at any point 99% of the game. You just dig tunnels (which nothing can ever path to you from, as mentioned) and clear the entire level and all vaults without being in any risk. Teleport was disallowed from Ambuscade because it was so abusable, yet that wasn't the real issue. As it stands now Ambuscade is exactly as imbalanced as it was with teleport, just in a slightly more tedius/tactical fashion.

Recommendation: The vault issue is of much less importance than the general problem, because they're such a small part of the game. Still, I recommend making Shadowstep respect vault walls. More importantly, a simple and clean solution is to disallow Shadowstep (and probably probability travel) for Ambuscades. The ability would still be plenty usable, and that would remove almost all of the abuse potential.

4) Wraithform once you get a belt of unlife/corpslight/are-already-undead is on a similar tier of imbalance. It allows you to rest in perfect safety on the huge majority of levels, and allows you to pop out and snipe anything with pretty much 0 risk. Nor would just lowering the damage as SageAcrin recommended work as all that would do would be to make it take 1 or 2 spells more to snipe things and be perfectly safe (also, domination hexing one of a group of mobs doesn't even depend on your dmg).

Recommendation: There are a couple possible solutions that I could see working: Stitions solution, that being in a wall when it ends does damage (as you are presumably being crushed, and not needing to breath wouldn't really help you). That way, it can still be used for positioning/escape, without being ultra-abusive.

On the other hand, you could maintain it's defensive/cowardly properties while removing the imbalance by disallowing spell casting while you have wraithform up. That way you couldn't pop out/back during one cast of it (and do anything), although you could still try to abuse it but would have to use a turn to cast it and go hiding again. Overall, I think Stitions solution is the most elegant, and most likely to solve the issues once and for all.