ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=44388

Being an opinionated jerk on it but just encouraging: Its a weird thing environment wise that Bill's vault allows things vastly stronger than him to come support him. This isn't a pure random vault, but a lead up event through the entire zone with several notes. Separate from it being vault craziness, it belittles the narrative build-up in facing the fearsome Bill, if he's just a tiny mook next to a random non-rare. If its intended for that encounter to be randomly vastly harder (Every story in that thread seems out of scope with my experiences with bill), then it should be Bill getting the buff, not his adds.

Also, does it really make it better than 1/500 times, someone will find that coming back to bill in the middle of tier 2 dungeons (level 15-18) is biting off way more than they can chew (with T1 rewards still being delivered?), but the other 499 times they're significantly overpowered to just swatting Bill and his mooks down?

bill has a potential to wreck you if you are unprepared... but after a few times it is indeed rather underwhelming.

I am more afraid of the patchwork troll that sometimes spawns inside the dungeon. RNG shouldn't be able to wreck your game up so easily.

For those who aren't aware (as it was not explained properly by the original poster), the issue is mainly a ~L38 Patchwork Troll that has a tendency to spawn around Bill. Fortunately I'm yet to meet this terror myself! Anyway, the issue is entirely about the RNG creating massively overlevelled enemies, not so much over-powerful ones. I could dig the Patchwork Troll if it would appear as a L11 or even L21 foe, but this is just silly (level 38 might be acceptable for Madness, so people replying haven't helped in not specifying the difficulty.)

Powerful enemies randomly spawning are a familiar feature of ToME - rares, tough elites, optional bosses... Overlevelling monsters is not the accustomed way for ToME to throw challenges at you - that's a higher-difficulty feature, not an intended RNG feature - hence this feels like a bug and an inconsistency.

Why does this happen (encountering a L38 creature at L11?) What is the behaviour of the NPC generator such that it spawns such high level creatures in this vault when it does not normally do so?

Why can't the Patchwork Troll spawn at a normal level?

My issue with this behaviour is not that it is too difficult but that it is un-ToME like.

Na, it's just that patchwork trolls have a min level of 38 and that Bill's level is not out of depth protected, so it can, rarely, generate a patchwork troll