I'm tired of being one-shot

[Steven Aus]

Why do you feel I don't want to make the game fun for *all* ? :/

It's the lack of proper testing. I've seen this exchange a few times and wanted to reply.

I have an hard time imagining anybody took, or even watched, a run through insane high peak during the beta and felt 1.6 was ready. And yet when I lost my umpteenth character in an explosion of nonsense and lua errors, I checked and found out that it was time for 1.6.0. Subsequent patches squashed the lua errors, but added in other odd changes. Did a dev run through t1s to see what kind of game experience was being inflicted by the lower spawn levels? Or new prides populated by uniques with shop tier/disable randart loot? Or even freeze changes trivializing most of the game?

Or on the topic of oneshots: weapon damage buffs. For reference, I won in 1.6.0 with 242 sheet damage on a berserker that pulverized everything but the occasional ebg, in 1.6.5 he's up 70 sheet damage. What testing determined that players needed an additional ~1k damage on death's dance instead of just fixing unkillable abominations or the armor stat? On the monster side the changes lowered the bar for oneshots, and it's not tied to any one ability, it's a mixture of a higher base scaling with crit/pen/dam/procs and high speed or gwf or a strong attack.

As an example I've got a 1.6.4 screenshot of a rare breaking stealth for 1.9k off a mixture of true striking, stealth, bleed, flurry, etc. There's no single broken element, just multiplication. Again, this was 1.6.4, the damage output would be even higher today, and the justification you've given is not related to top end damage needing to be higher.

I'm sure you care about the game, I do not doubt you want it to be fun. But you're achieving the opposite when you subject players to half baked changes. Whatever process you use to vet either proposed changes or their implementations should be reevaulated.

Sadly, I kind of resonate to this "lack of proper testing" explanation which resulted in the issues with 1.6, but it may well have been that the lack of proper testing was happening before - but the combined effect of changes that were made in previous versions just happened to not be particularly negative. You know darkgod, it is a be-LIE-f that you constantly need to be releasing new stuff to be considered "worthy" (by yourself, let alone anyone else) and even "worthy" is a hack to begin with. Do animals worry if they are "worthy"? With a game with so many moving parts, saying that proper testing is crucial is a vast understatement (and even "vast understatement" is a vast understatement). Apart from essential bug fixes, it is basically no reason to release ANY new version unless it has been properly tested and evaluated whether it IS actually an improvement over the previous one, and the bar is raised to "EXTENSIVE" if lots of changes have been made. I'm sure that a lot of players and addon makers have been turned away with the results of the 1.6 changes. I'm afraid I too will put ToME, including addon-making, on hiatus for the near future at least.

[Arcvasti]

I'm afraid I too will put ToME, including addon-making, on hiatus for the near future at least.

ok

I feel like it's important to point out here that the feedback in this thread is important and does not just get tossed in a pile somewhere.

Looking through the most recent tome commits reveals a fair amount of changes directly related to stuff that's been brought up here, like total thuggery having crazy scaling and ai being too good at detecting the player and alerting the whole level.

That said I think people could stand to be a bit more detailed in what exactly is causing them to be one-shot in 1.6. Something like "freeze scaling with cooldown gives it the most broken damage formula in the game leading to this hit for 3.6k" or "crit power talents scale way harder then they should, leading to this hit for 1.4k". If you're not sure what thing exactly is causing an abnormal spike of damage, then just report anything that seems like it could potentially be a problem. Low detail reports like "I got flurried for a bunch of damage and died" give basically no information at all.

To be fair, this is actually at least partly a problem with tome itself not letting you properly inspect the thing that killed you. I propose the following changes based on what's already been reported and hasn't yet been implemented yet:
-Move crit power scaling to 0.5, standardizing the total thuggery change
-Remove the weird double dipping crit mult from shadowstrike
-Nerf rampage numbers in compensation for it working with talents now

and most importantly:
-give the player omniscience after death, so they can properly inspect the things that killed them and provide an actual report of what's going wrong

[Snarvid]

and most importantly:
-give the player omniscience after death, so they can properly inspect the things that killed them and provide an actual report of what's going wrong

The game currently provides a list of the names of all the things that killed you. Would it be too difficult/space intensive for those names to link to a list of talents of the thing that killed you? Seems like a. this would remove some of the burden from the player side and also remove reporting effects (we might be focusing on the talent that killed us as opposed to noticing a passive, or we might ascribe the problem to Skynet and it's actually from some other source) and b. might provide an option for dataset analysis ("hmmm, this talent was present on the rare for 22% of all insane deaths, seems worth a look").

[Zeyphor]

is it me or does fan of knives seem to deal a ton of damage when NPCs use it and 6 knives hit you, including 1 from GWF?
because i feel like fan of knives can hit really hard

[Tryble]

That said I think people could stand to be a bit more detailed in what exactly is causing them to be one-shot in 1.6.

This is reasonable, but also unreasonable. Not many players actually use the forums here, for one. And the moment you get instantly killed is...probably the time when a player is feeling most frustrated and least willing to be helpful. Similarly, not a whole ton of players are really adept at threat evaluation or are intimately familiar with how the highly involved talents and math of tome come together to make something deadly (Mankeli already mentioned this - a massive damage spike could be the perfect storm of any number of highly synergistic talents). It's possible we'll see a lot of misreports about what the root cause was - I suspect most of your typical players don't even know what people mean by skynet. I don't.

Additionally, I'm not sure how interested I am in dropping a ton more hours into characters in order to get wrecked to find this information.
Personally, I just slapped together a simple +Life -Healmod addon and am happy running that, so from here on, I'll just pay attention for extremely high damage hits and inspect + report them here when I notice them. Talent sheet screenshots of enemies that hit a gorrillion damage is probably more useful in any case.

[Snarvid]

Skynet is shorthand for “the Ai knows where you are and sends monsters, perhaps the whole level worth, possibly by Phase Door, at you without their having any legitimate way to know where you are.”

Or that’s how I use it.

[Tryble]

is it me or does fan of knives seem to deal a ton of damage when NPCs use it and 6 knives hit you, including 1 from GWF?
because i feel like fan of knives can hit really hard

Holy cow, you weren't kidding.
GWF is pretty scary in general. Here's another guy that basically wrecked me the moment I stepped into view. The confuse ended up claiming that life - I forgot confuse doesn't effect instant use stuff. That's still a thing, right?
Side note: I'm running an addon that trades some healmod away for extra 20 life/level, both of those screenshots are fatal.

[whitelion]

I'm afraid I too will put ToME, including addon-making, on hiatus for the near future at least.

ok

I feel like it's important to point out here that the feedback in this thread is important and does not just get tossed in a pile somewhere.

Looking through the most recent tome commits reveals a fair amount of changes directly related to stuff that's been brought up here, like total thuggery having crazy scaling and ai being too good at detecting the player and alerting the whole level.

That said I think people could stand to be a bit more detailed in what exactly is causing them to be one-shot in 1.6. Something like "freeze scaling with cooldown gives it the most broken damage formula in the game leading to this hit for 3.6k" or "crit power talents scale way harder then they should, leading to this hit for 1.4k". If you're not sure what thing exactly is causing an abnormal spike of damage, then just report anything that seems like it could potentially be a problem. Low detail reports like "I got flurried for a bunch of damage and died" give basically no information at all.

To be fair, this is actually at least partly a problem with tome itself not letting you properly inspect the thing that killed you. I propose the following changes based on what's already been reported and hasn't yet been implemented yet:
-Move crit power scaling to 0.5, standardizing the total thuggery change
-Remove the weird double dipping crit mult from shadowstrike
-Nerf rampage numbers in compensation for it working with talents now

and most importantly:
-give the player omniscience after death, so they can properly inspect the things that killed them and provide an actual report of what's going wrong

darkgod mentioned that there are some changes in the works related to things that were mentioned, as you said, and also that he might weigh in again here with a more detailed response, which I will be interested to read. I do appreciate that the devs have acknowledged the experiences reported here by myself and others, and I trust that everyone want ToME to be a compelling and rewarding experience.

On the other hand, I also agree with Mankeli that it seems like it's not as a simple as just a few talents being broken. It was the case in the early 1.6.x that Freeze was broken, but that was fixed and the overall problem of one-shots and pillow-fists remains. So many things were changed in 1.6 that it may not be easy to characterize why exactly the game plays this way now. ToME has so many complicated interactions. I will continue to make a note of things that I encounter that seem problematic, but I'm not optimistic that ad hoc changes to individual talents based on reports here will fix the big picture issues.

I also agree with Snarvid's views as well that 1.6 has taken some fun tinkering options out of the game for little benefit, and that ToME's incredible diversity and depth are more valuable than minor balancing improvements. But, as has been said, ToME is darkgod's game, and if that's his vision for the game, then that's the way it goes. People have different ideas about/tastes in game, so I don't think either side is right or wrong, rather my choice becomes whether I find the resulting product of that vision something I enjoy enough to spend my time on.

[Snarvid]

Is there a reason besides sunk costs to not roll back to 1.59 and just add in new content (inscriptions, prodigy changes, classes, bug fixes for memory leaks and stack overflows) while reverting the AI, randboss talent system, and crit/damage formulas to the last version that didn't have these problems? New Coke is a cautionary tale for a reason, and I'd love for dev time to be spent on fixing some of the original classes who've been in need of love for a while (necromancer, summoner) rather than attempting a thousand tiny tweaks to return workability to a system that worked fine -0.1 ago.

[Frumple]

New coke is probably a horrible example to use, there. By most actual metrics (taste, etc.) it was generally seen as an improvement, especially when doing blind tasting and whatnot, and iirc coke has since implemented a fair amount of what it did in other products, just more quietly. The major problem was cultural driven opposition (that additionally had roots in some pretty nasty shit) and iffy PR mixed with dedicated attacks on what was largely an improvement. Its cautionary tale is to watch out for hateful chuckleheads looking to ruin a good thing for crappy reasons

Also doesn't really apply to something like T4. If you want to play the older version, just... go play it. New coke in this case isn't effecting old coke's existence or production in the least. If you'd rather see development branch from it, the code's right there and far as I'm aware folks are welcome to branch it.

E: Though to clarify, I'm not trying to insinuate concern with some of the new patches changes is driven by stuff similar to what opposition to new coke was -- I'd like to think the folks here aren't coming from a place part way up US reactionaries asses, ha. Is why it's a poor comparison, especially given how poorly it paints folks against the changes. New coke (sorta') failed, but large chunks of its opposition didn't exactly come away from the issue smelling like roses.

[Snarvid]

Ermmm... well, I did not mean to align myself with the ideological or epistemological motivations of those who opposed New Coke. (I also don't think that the problem with 1.6x is the changes to the ratio of sugar, caffeine, and artificial kola-nut extract, lest I be tarred with that sticky brush.)

The reason I brought it up is that it's a well-known case where a large leap was made away from the original product, a significant chunk of core constituency of a product objected, the original was reverted to, and then some of the goals of the change to New version were pursued by the developer in a process of iterative changes from the Classic, with customer feedback along the way. This would be distinct from the proposed 1.6x solution model, where there is a proposal that those who dislike the myriad changes entailed in New should propose iterative changes to New to recapture the experience they enjoyed from Classic.

Other flaws in my analogy include the option to take issue with what constitutes TOME's core constituency. Certainly this forum is not populated by the majority of players of Tome, and I don't think most Tome players play higher than Normal, although that's all hear-say. A non-trivial fraction of the prolific posters and guide-writers here are displeased by the changes, I think that's a non-controversial claim. What, if anything, do these people represent to the TOME experience? Do we think a new crop of "how to win Insane in 1.6x" guides will spring up from a new, more mentally flexible or less loss averse generation of writers? I don't know, and I don't know how much that matters to TOME's developers.

I agree that one can play Tome 1.59 now. I disagree that 1.6x isn't changing existence or production of 1.59 in the least. Continued forum participation, unless we want to branch off a "frozen in 1.59 forum", is based around the current version, and those who are here presumably are here because part of their experience of TOME is based around discovery and sharing with other TOME players. Also, new content that 1.59-preferring-players *would* find desirable will be based around the new version (which is why I no longer play Stellaris - nothing new to discover).

[Frumple]

Eh, so far as common difficulty goes, you can eyeball the statistics on the main site. They're not 100% perfectly indicative of things, but when the amount of normal difficulty characters is somewhere over three times everything else combined, it's a pretty strong sign that, yes, the majority of T4 game time is spent in normal, with nightmare being the next most played to a degree a fair bit over everything not nightmare or normal also combined. Insane (or madness) difficulty play is a pretty small fraction of T4's use.

Think DG or something actually has more detailed stats on that front... hours played by difficulty or somethin' like that. It misses out on folks that don't play online for whatever reason, of course, but I somehow doubt that makes up for the gigantic difference in play, ha. I'unno if it's changed, but I pretty distinctly remember the higher difficulties being at a very low spot in the list of priorities for T4's design -- insane and madness and whatnot just kinda' weren't intended to be beatable or even enjoyable to play (and never have been the latter, personally, at any point in T4's development), and when it was initially implemented at player request that was pretty heavily emphasized. Which is more than a little understandable when most T4 users just don't play them.

So far as the general concerns go, well. I play normal, personally, pretty much always. Its felt about the same as always with the new patches, and what folks have been talking about in regards to insane play sounds to me like it's been every single time I've looked at it since the higher difficulties have been a thing -- lots of chaff and occasionally something just one-shots you and there's not much you can do about it besides stay well away from stuff that'll casually squish you (and playing to do that will probably be pretty unpleasant). Which is how insane's basically always came across, to the point that seeing recent discussion's made me wonder if it got toned (way) down at some point and I just missed it. I'll probably never play insane to begin with, since that's just kinda' misery inducing to me, so I don't really have much skin in the high difficulty nonsense, so long as tweaking for it doesn't turn adventurer parties and farportals back into deathtraps again or whatever.

Any case, mostly just noting the comparison issue. If I had to posit a different one, I'd probably say go with the Windows dev cycle or somethin' like it. It's had similar back and forth without having been caught so hard in the grinder of american culture wars.

[Slough]

I could definitely tell the difference between New Coke and real Coke, and real just tasted better, more complex. BTW, I boggle at the folks who taste-test Pepsi vs Coke and can't tell the difference. And I may have come in to TOME at a good time, v1.5.10, but I'm so new that I have not even scratched the surface. So that's where I'm playing until the dust settles. It's an awesome game.

[HousePet]

Is there a reason besides sunk costs to not roll back to 1.59 and just add in new content (inscriptions, prodigy changes, classes, bug fixes for memory leaks and stack overflows) while reverting the AI, randboss talent system, and crit/damage formulas to the last version that didn't have these problems?

1.5.10 did have similar problems, but they were the "devils you know" so you just put up with them as though they were normal.
1.6 has "devils you don't know", so they seem far scarier because you don't know what they are yet or how to deal with them.
Reverting the changes just freezes the development on all those areas that still do need improvements. As they can't sensibly test them while its sitting as a side branch. We all just saw that.

The Devs are still working hard, and I've seen AI discussion and changes going on for 1.6.6. There also appears to be improved tooltip code and something for making it easier to identify the cause of an insane death. There is also a lot of little bug fixes and tweaks going on. And this has been going on over a traditional Holiday period.

As of this post, the Vault contains 252 Insane 1.6.5 Winners. So the stupid one-shots aren't stopping people from winning. Perhaps the people that write guides are waiting for the dust to settle, or are busy doing something else at the moment?

[Zizzo]

lots of chaff and occasionally something just one-shots you and there's not much you can do about it besides stay well away from stuff that'll casually squish you

In my normal-mode experience so far, one of the main problems is that some bosses that used to be doable with some care have unceremoniously leapt into the "stuff that'll casually squish you" category.

Personally, I just slapped together a simple +Life -Healmod addon and am happy running that,

Willing to share? I'd be interested in comparing approaches. What I'm trying so far is a surgical (if somewhat ham-handed) massive damage malus to certain troublesome bosses, alongside attempts to revive the old AI definitions that still live in the .team data and short-circuit some of the new boss talent handling.