[1.6.0] The game feels entirely overtuned/general feedback

[richardhawk]

Related to the large spell damage, is it considered an interesting/desirable part of the game that 100% crit shrug appears mandatory for Insane? I find the survivability gap of a character that cannot reach it and one that can massive, to the point it is the absolute #1 consideration on gear above everything else. Much more so than even with stun resistance. This also makes classes that have a built in talent for it a lot stronger in comparison, as well as tinkers since they get Ablative Armour.

[anonymous000]

Mana Thrust 1-shot by Pale Drake at level 39 as AM summoner (on the theory that hiding from enemies behind minions might help), 1263 damage (just 12 over my max hp). Resolve appears not to be helping against 1HKOs.

Unable to do enough damage to kill Massok despite snuffing all his Unstoppables with Healing Nexus, keeping him fairly steadily under Confusion effects and Insidious Poison, debuffing his physical and fire resist, and packing (among other things) talent level 9.8 Fire Drake with 308 Strength.

I do not recall having such trouble with Backup Guardians in 1.5.

Yes they are buffed in 1.6, they now have much higher level and stats all round. Massok was simply unkillable, and even Aluin took me 200+ turns to kill. I did the Backup Guardians at roughly the same level as you do with a Solipsist in Nightmare difficulty. I did not have Inner Demon.

Same for Warmaster Gnarg. High HP pool + ridiculous armour + high defense + pain suppression + heal means a pure tedium of a fight. I really hope these would be reined in with the 1.6.1 patch, as things currently stand melee classes are not viable

[Snarvid]

Fast board today! I posted this as an edit to my earlier post but it got left behind.

Someone asked if I were going to update one of my guides. I honestly have no reliable advice to give on winning 1.6... I guess “never get in a rare’s LOS if they have beams or AoEs” would help, but it’s a non-starter for most classes. For me, Insane difficulty was always the best test of a build’s strength because easier difficulties were too forgiving to let you know whether you were making good choices or not (didn’t Mex or someone win as an Antimagic Archmage on Normal back in the day?). Now Insane feels like Madness without Hunted! - just Track and corner-snipe everything, but many opponent’s defenses are too high to overcome by such means.

I’ll stop banging this drum now, it has either already been enough or it hasn’t (and won’t be).

E: As a follow-up, 1.61 does not solve this. Massok still unkillable (and with some temporary talents active is packing 100% resist all despite having been hit with both lower physical resistance and lower fire resistance off Grand Arrival). Casters still much too murder-y, at least in my one test-case.

@richardhawk I have to concede you the talent mastery on the Backup Guardians anyway - Pale Drake has 22.4 effective talent in wildfire, letting him hit me through capped fire resist for 1000+ damage on a level 5 fireflash with only 62 Spellpower even before his Elemental Surge kicked in.

[richardhawk]

What is the purpose of randboss minimum level reduction from 10 to 8 and their damage penalty softening in 1.6.1? A level 8 character may very well not even be reasonably equipped to deal with one randboss, let alone a clown car of them as can be the case. The category point gained at 10 is a big deal in making the player have more options.

Also according to Cathbald there was a special rule forbidding randbosses in Kor'Pul which no longer appears to be the case.

[Mankeli]

So yeah, mostly I just wanna thank you for your posts here since it's helped me get my own thoughts on the matter into some semblance of order.

Thank you!

High freeze damage is because freeze has a ridiculous formula that doesn't obey the standard diminishing returns for talent damage. And, on Elandar in particular, he now basically always gets Uttercold for extremely high cold respen alongside the bonus from the Awakened Staff. Freeze is getting mercilessly pummelled into reasonable numbers next patch, thankfully.

Don't see anything related to freeze in the patch notes. Would be a welcome change but it's still just a part of the puzzle, although an obnoxious one. On other news, emergency steam purge was nerfed which is great!

I do not recall having such trouble with Backup Guardians in 1.5.

Yeah some of the backup guardians were buffed considerably. Didn't see any changes to how fixed bosses level in 1.6.1 notes so I guess kor's fury can still one shot or close with freeze crit or alternatively do less than 140 dot damage with lvl 1 non crit flame

Yes they are buffed in 1.6, they now have much higher level and stats all round. Massok was simply unkillable

I was slowly grindring massok to death on my oozemancer on 1.6.0 until it killed my oozes/slimes while unstoppable and healed to full at which point I left.

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Pale Drake has 22.4 effective talent in wildfire, letting him hit me through capped fire resist for 1000+ damage on a level 5 fireflash with only 62 Spellpower even before his Elemental Surge kicked in.

Yeah the pen/dam elemental sustains break things (even further)

Also according to Cathbald there was a special rule forbidding randbosses in Kor'Pul which no longer appears to be the case.

Kor Pul and Trollmire didn't spawn randbosses, apparently this wasn't intentional for 1.6.

[khaotom]

This game is unplayable at best. It is annoying enough that play as a psyshot i was able to keep Thoughts of Iron and Mechanical Arm sustain with a fixed drain on my steam/psi. Now it just drain to zero as you move and leave you nothing to play with. Not to mention the randboss ganking at stairs in tier 1 dungeon is just plain annoying. Cannot kill a rare venus flytrap no matter what at tier 1 is also annoying

[Snarvid]

On Psyshot, is that a new bug or did you just not run dual Steam generators (as often is needed early/mid game for Tinkers until you find a good one)?

Lack of cave for Tinkers in 1.61 is a bummer but hopefully a bug.

[whitelion]

While I wouldn't consider myself an elite player, I have been playing for a few years now, and can and have completed insane in 1.5 when I had the patience to play with discipline. I wanted to throw in my two cents.

First, my experience echos some of the complaints here, most notable enemies being tedious/impossible to kill because of absurd defenses or constantly teleporting away.

But I also think there is something of a crossroads in the larger vision of what ToME wants to be.

For me, ToME is something of my eccentric uncle of strategy games. It is wildly creative and gives me some of the most novel and interesting experiences I have in gaming, but at the same time it can be incoherent and unintuitive. Stepping back to 1.5, which many of us myself included greatly enjoyed, playing ToME well required a canon of knowledge that has been informally passed down via the forums and chats. (Deducing these skills from carefully examining the source code and testing is also possible, but my guess is that it is mostly a small number of dedicated players have done this.) At the same time, though I have not played since ToME's inception, it seems to me that the game and this canon have co-evolved, with many apparent "design flaws" being papered over by players figuring out how to use the toolkit they are given in novel and unexpected ways, and the developers responding by balancing and designing around the players' discoveries, effectively bringing them into the mainstream of the way the game is played. The result, while it worked well in many respects, was also something akin to an unstable Jenga tower of design and strategy.

1.6 seems to me to be a departure from this model. The developers' vision appears to be that they want to give ToME a more unified and coherent structure, and part of this is excising many of the stranger parts of the canon. This is a huge step from a design perspective, and it appears the Jenga tower may have toppled. At the same time, such a goal certainly has potential benefits to the health of the game. For example, I think it will make the game more accessible to new players. 1.5 ToME had a very steep learning curve.

Personally, I feel DG's best design skills have always been his imagination and his ability to bring that imagination to life mechanically. More so than any other game I have played, ToME offers classes that (mostly) feel thematically satisfying and meaningfully different from each other to play, where so many other games fall back lazily on the tank/striker/support archetypes or only offer you choice insofar as what color sparks you want to shoot out of your hands. For me, if ToME is a little bit weird as a consequence, I don't mind. In fact, it's endearing.

Even if things are a bit rough right now, I would like to be optimistic about the future of ToME, and if 1.6 will end up being a different vision for the game, I realize that's a big step and I'm willing to be patient and see where things go while the kinks are ironed out. But I do, perhaps a bit selfishly, hope ToME stays at least a little weird.

[Snarvid]

I agree on the weirdness. Some of my favorite weird stuff got edited out (Fungal Blood/Ancestral Life), that's a bummer, and something I did not expect from TOME. I hold a grudge against DCSS for nerfing stuff I talked up, and while some I requested and obviously am not upset about (Frenzy on fixed cooldown), others were a surprise.

After playing more 1.61, compared to previous versions on Insane it continues to have:
- way too much spike damage from enemies. 1HKOs from crits is essentially the main way to die (even with significant crit shrug and reduction), and it seems to be happening a lot more than it used to. I do think that in part this is due to rogue/something hybrids Stealth, Lethality, and Shadowstrike, plus 1.3 mastery and no cap to skills, are just too good when thrown in with other classes that have crit-based abilities, other crit boosts or simply big hits. It also feels unfair that opponents can see players even when they have 200 Stealth power and max-Cunning players struggle to see enemies with less than 100.
- way too much respen on enemies, against likely due to mastery and cap issues. Resistance is pointless to build towards if the enemies who count just blow through it without slowing down at all.
- way too many enemies that have defenses and self-healing stacked so high as to be unkillable.
- many, many bugs or broken talents, to where it feels like I'm playtesting as much as gaming.
- most enemies that do not meet the first three problems above are walkovers and might as well not exist except as XP food.

Tome's ad copy claims it is "brutal, rewarding, tactical, and immersive." The above changes contribute to brutal (save for the last), are not rewarding or immersive ("my character concept was to build towards super high resists and it's functionally the same as not having any when it counts" or "I'm building towards something and then when I get there the talent does not work as advised"), and do not make TOME more tactical - many player decisions, in build and in play, matter less on account, which is just about the opposite of tactical. It feels like playing early edition D&D against a DM who is having trouble calibrating the adventure to challenge players and so alternates between streams of kobolds and sticking Spheres of Annihilation in statue's mouths.

I like the community here, both to learn from and to share my experiences with. I quite like playing TOME while listening to podcasts and audiobooks - got through basically all of Critical Hit and several other RPG podcasts while simultaneously playing TOME (as well as several amazing audiobooks). I really, really dislike 1.6+ thus far.

[Mankeli]

Snarvid, while it's still early too early for me say anything conclusive and it may very well be clustering illusion or whatever on my part it seems crits indeed are even more murderous now in my games too (combined with insane lvls in res pen talents too when spellcasters are the ones doing the oneshotting). I was amazed to get oneshot by a non-fighter basetype rogue rare through reality smearing, good armour (80+) and full ethereal form charges (if ethereal form charge lowering is checked before damage is resolved then the dam red from that was ofc lower) in 1.6.0 were the majority of weapon users are fairly harmless. And it wasn't even in High Peak or anything but in elven ruins. Getting one-shot by a weapon user wasn't really that uncommon in 1.5 ofc but in 1.6.0 weapon damage is quite neutered on average.

What is not clustering illusion however is that my oozemancer winner lost BoL just before High Peak because he got hit by literally hundreds of trillions of points of negative damage because of some stack overflow bug. Maybe it's a new bug, maybe it's not but yeah I agree with you on the "feels like playtesting" thing. It's pretty funny that the most serious threats by a large margin on slime tunnels + high peak were a stack overflow instakill bug and then later in HP:4 or something a recurring lua error every 3rd turn or so.

Right now because of the disruption shield change in 1.6.1 you can get hit for 8,4 K in nightmare in the final fight so playing on insane isn't even worth it before 1.6.2 comes out if you are planning on trying to win.

[GlassGo]

Related to the large spell damage, is it considered an interesting/desirable part of the game that 100% crit shrug appears mandatory for Insane? I find the survivability gap of a character that cannot reach it and one that can massive, to the point it is the absolute #1 consideration on gear above everything else. Much more so than even with stun resistance. This also makes classes that have a built in talent for it a lot stronger in comparison, as well as tinkers since they get Ablative Armour.

Maybe not mandatory, but yeah - highly welcomed.
Resistance doesnt matter much - I mean they do, but once in a while you wll run into someone with high respen, so you only have one, last and ultimate defence - damage affinity. So things like Fiery Chocker, Unbraphage, salves, Primal Infusion and such aremuch more valuable now. Same for defence that cannot be penetrated like Trained Reaction and Reality Smearing (are there any more?).
And of course al of that on top of 100% crit shrug-off.
Well, that's definitely narrow possible builds...

Also, I'm playing now EoR's Psyshot, and recently ran into Anorithil patrol. First one was tough - I realized mid-fight I forgot to put mindstar in off-hand yeah, after that it was easy. And later ran into second patrol on lvl 50 - first two anos was difficult but nothing special.
And third rolled Ano+Cultist skills.. I certainly remember things liek Rift Cutter (22) in his charsheet - though Im not sure it was charshit or description, in other words raw or effective, but I think it was charsheet - Rift Cutter hit for 400+, Entropy Gift tick for 500 damage, Netherblast for 250+250 - and that's without crits.
Since it's Psyshot I locked him in SA and ran for a life.
Can't comment on this if it excessive and broken or not - don't feel myself familiarazed enough with underlying mechanics and formulas despite havin ovet 2K hours in game, so it's up to you guys.
In defence of the game I could say that you actually can counter that bullshit with simple antimagic steamgun with silence on crit and disruption magic mindstar.

While I wouldn't consider myself an elite player, I have been playing for a few years now, and can and have completed insane in 1.5 when I had the patience to play with discipline. I wanted to throw in my two cents.

First, my experience echos some of the complaints here, most notable enemies being tedious/impossible to kill because of absurd defenses or constantly teleporting away.

But I also think there is something of a crossroads in the larger vision of what ToME wants to be.

For me, ToME is something of my eccentric uncle of strategy games. It is wildly creative and gives me some of the most novel and interesting experiences I have in gaming, but at the same time it can be incoherent and unintuitive. Stepping back to 1.5, which many of us myself included greatly enjoyed, playing ToME well required a canon of knowledge that has been informally passed down via the forums and chats. (Deducing these skills from carefully examining the source code and testing is also possible, but my guess is that it is mostly a small number of dedicated players have done this.) At the same time, though I have not played since ToME's inception, it seems to me that the game and this canon have co-evolved, with many apparent "design flaws" being papered over by players figuring out how to use the toolkit they are given in novel and unexpected ways, and the developers responding by balancing and designing around the players' discoveries, effectively bringing them into the mainstream of the way the game is played. The result, while it worked well in many respects, was also something akin to an unstable Jenga tower of design and strategy.

1.6 seems to me to be a departure from this model. The developers' vision appears to be that they want to give ToME a more unified and coherent structure, and part of this is excising many of the stranger parts of the canon. This is a huge step from a design perspective, and it appears the Jenga tower may have toppled. At the same time, such a goal certainly has potential benefits to the health of the game. For example, I think it will make the game more accessible to new players. 1.5 ToME had a very steep learning curve.

Personally, I feel DG's best design skills have always been his imagination and his ability to bring that imagination to life mechanically. More so than any other game I have played, ToME offers classes that (mostly) feel thematically satisfying and meaningfully different from each other to play, where so many other games fall back lazily on the tank/striker/support archetypes or only offer you choice insofar as what color sparks you want to shoot out of your hands. For me, if ToME is a little bit weird as a consequence, I don't mind. In fact, it's endearing.

Even if things are a bit rough right now, I would like to be optimistic about the future of ToME, and if 1.6 will end up being a different vision for the game, I realize that's a big step and I'm willing to be patient and see where things go while the kinks are ironed out. But I do, perhaps a bit selfishly, hope ToME stays at least a little weird.

Absolutely agree.

[Snarvid]

Mankeli thanks for the Disruption Shield warning, will stop for time being. And sorry about the -trillion damage bug, I’m still a bit peeved about the Possessor memory leak save breakdown I had just before Dreadfell, but High Peak is cruelly late for a playthrough to break under its own weight.

On the melee crit front - the bulk of the 1HKO rogues I’ve seen have been Anorithil or Defilers, but one of the worst was a Cursed/Rogue unique. The Rogue Lethality/Shadowstrike out of stealth and the 9 or 10 ranks each in the Savage Hunter/Shrouded Hunter combo (which essentially reads "crit = reenter Stealth against players"), along with Slash, Rush, Dominate, and Blindside, wiped out a Psyshot run in Reknor without blinking.

[khaotom]

It feels like a bug. Even with one Steam Generator, it shouldn't drain to zero by the time i come face to face with first mob without using any talents prior

[Snarvid]

It feels like a bug. Even with one Steam Generator, it shouldn't drain to zero by the time i come face to face with first mob without using any talents prior

Assuming you mean Molten Iron Blood + Mechanical Arms, that's 9 steam cost every round. Most early game generators can't match that by themselves. No bug needed unless your steam pool has +9 or higher showing when you have no sustains running.

[Peep]

Kor'pul and Trollmire having uniques/bosses again is very brutal. It's so difficult to get a class that isn't good early game going because of it. On Kor'pul alone I encountered 4 uniques and 2 bosses before killing the Lich. A lot of classes simply cannot handle that on what should generally be the second dungeon you do.

Without the level bump/gold, Madness just becomes a very thin range of classes that even make it to 15.