Is it just me, or...?

[greycat]

Do I suck at this game? I mean, more than everyone else?

Practically every thread on this forum is from someone discussing the bug they found in the endgame, or their adventures in the Far East, or in some zone I've never heard of before and wouldn't even know how to find, or how they sold some artifact multiple times....

Meanwhile I haven't even gotten a character to survive to face the Master in I-don't-know-how-long.

So, I'm just wondering what I'm doing wrong.

Here are the dead characters from September:

Arzgh, level 20 Skeleton Fighter, killed by The Master (435 damage in a single hit).
Silor, level 14 Dunadan Sun Paladin, killed by a slimy ooze (somewhere in the Sandworm lair)
Tromo, level 14 Hobbit Slinger, killed by ... um... it doesn't say. These dumps are incomplete.
Varesh, level 13 Nandor Archmage, killed by a sandworm, and a bunch of oozes....
Urist, level 18 Dwarf Fighter, killed by a cold drake
Yr-Kel, level 3 Hobbit Alchemist, killed by a stone troll
Gloria, level 4 Dunadan Sun Paladin, killed by Bill the Stone Troll (94 damage in one hit, then 64 in another)
Gloria2, level 18 Dunadan Sun Paladin, killed by an ice wyrm (ice claw for 132, breathed ice for 160, plus I took 14 cold damage each time I hit it)

[Patryn]

Humm... Middle-Earth is actually quite easy once you've seen it completely (and thus are prepared) and play a class you know. Propably you should fine tune your tactics a bit. If you start a thread in the spoiler section you can get some advise if you wish to polish your skills a bit.

What class do you usually play? And where do you usually die?

Edit: did you just edit your chars in or did I miss them? Am I really THAT blind?

Edit 2:
Humm... you seem to like the sunpalas. They're pretty nice aren't they? Make sure to get Ringil before you encounter the master (allthough the Mummy is tough for a Pala - prepare some see invis and free action potions! ). The freeze-effect rocks and combined with standing in a narrow passage, a sunlight spot in front of you and all your stuns things get pretty cheesy if you avoid fighting in the open. My beta8 endgame-pala made heavy use of the shield-stun, dirty tricks and assault. Don't worry to much about the AoE-spells - they don't do sufficient dmg later on, though the blind-effect is great (lvl1 is sufficient) and the beameffect of firebeam can be *very* useful in narrow tunnels.

Don't give up, thing work out with experience!

[yufra]

Hey greycat, I have often thought the same thing and I will suggest my self-diagnosis. I am fairly new to the realm of roguelikes, so this may be way off. My players survivability increased a ton when I slowed my gameplay down. I found myself unlearning bad habits picked up from games that did not have permadeath and had autosaves, like clicking before thinking through the situation. The other thing is power leveling. It looks like you are heading towards Carn Dum and Tol Falas at lvl 18-20. That may simply be too low. I'll leave details about why for a spoiler thread, and I'll keep an eye on this thread to learn too.

EDIT: What a hypocrite... I just loaded up my Anoritihil and saw that I was on lvl 1 of Carn Dum at lvl 15. Well I guess we shall see if I was right about power leveling.

[Zaive]

I've only gotten past The Master once, only then to die at the Mines of Moria right after it. Still haven't been to the far east...
I haven't been playing this game very much, lately. It's just too hard, and I don't feel like losing 5 characters to every boss just to figure out how to fight it.

[darkgod]

I guess I need to bring back the Easy difficulty mode ?
(I perfectly understand BTW I'm not good either too careless )

[darkgod]

Oh and I made the starting zones unable to have big OOD monsters it's a tad unfair

[Finguld]

I usually try to make sure my weapons, armor and jewelry are up to par. I grind out a few more levels than needed just to be sure. I also like to retreat to the stairs a lot if things look difficult so make sure your retreat route is secure. No use pushing into a hard level just to die. Sometimes retreat to town and stock up on healing pots and scrolls.

[Patryn]

@yufra: lvl15 in carn'dum isn't too early if you're knowing what you do. I usually beat the master with something like lvl 20-21. However, this is maybe not advisable if you don't have a good build and a plan how to get him.

@Zaive: My advise: play either a veeeery sturdy char or an archmage (fragile but tons of utility spells to avoid surprises => you can plan everything before). In every case, just play carefully, avoid line of sight (LoS) if you don't know the monsters (or know they have nasty abilities). Never get reckless, unless you want to end up neckless.

In addition (no matter which class) try to get many skills which freeze/stun or have some other crowdcontrol abilities (blind/confuse). Don't use them defensive as last resort, use them offensive! Most monsters wont hit you once if you have enough abilities to stunlock them to death.

Anyway, your general advise is absolutlely correct. If you go somewhere you've never been or you know its evil it's usually better to go somewhere grind a lvl or two before. If you beat it then, you know whats happening and you can skip the extra lvls the second time you go there.

BTW: roguelikes are kinda meant to be hard and as it is now, tome4 is one of the easier RLs (at least from the Moria/Angband line which I played mostly).

[darkgod]

BTW what about that for easy mode:
- Reduced incoming damage (like 30% ?)
- Player gets one "life" per 5 levels, so an easy mode character can die 10 times but only every 5 levels. This means you cant go on playing messily forever but you have more occasions to learn
- No achievements/unlocks

How'd that work ?

[Gwai]

I doubt very many of us have beat the game, particularly fairly and particularly since it's gotten harder. It's just that the ones who have talk about it and the rest of us don't always talk about how we don't.

For myself, I haven't "won" since beta 6 when the game was not even half done and I even abused the store-money bug to get there. It's not just you for sure.

[Patryn]

@DG & easymode:
I won't reduce the incoming dmg (since the (che)easy mode is meant for learning. But giving out a couple free Blood of Lifes might do the job. If you die in easymode you stillhave the "oh shit, i messed up - gotta think it over"-effect but it allows you to continue without starting over.

However, even free BoLs might bias the game experience. How about making it a "return to last save"-option once every 5 charlvls? This way you are forced to beat the encounter without actually dying but don't get so far thrown back.

No achievements is a good point and maybe unlocking a class in easymode only unlocks it for easymode (so ppl can peek into new classes and get an overview of the availible abilities).

[Zaive]

Veeeery sturdy class. Okay, fighter?
The annoying thing about the sturdy classes is that the shops never seem to have the equipment I want, and they *need* good equipment.

[yufra]

@DG & easymode:
However, even free BoLs might bias the game experience. How about making it a "return to last save"-option once every 5 charlvls? This way you are forced to beat the encounter without actually dying but don't get so far thrown back.

How about an auto-save at the start of each level, and once every 5 charlvls you can go back to it? One additional thing is if the once every 5 charlvls will be cumulative (at lvl 10 do you get 2 if you haven't used the other one)?

[greycat]

Yes, I edited the first post to add the dead characters. You weren't blind.

OK, "grind more" and "play more slowly". Those are probably both applicable.

Is there any reasonable way to "store scum" in ToME 4? In older versions and in any other Angband variant, I could repeatedly hit "R1000" (or "R2000" if I had speed), to rest for 1000 (or 2000) turns to force a store to restock. In ToME 4, there's apparently no way to sit still for N turns even when you're already fully healed. Put a rock on the keyboard, maybe? It's very annoying to get to the mage-town jewelry store and not see the ring/amulet you need.

Another issue that I haven't seen mentioned here -- it's often very difficult to see what's happening. The top line of the screen is utterly useless, as it often displays a message from like 30 seconds ago rather than what just happened. The lower left corner has the last 10 or so messages, but if 20 things happened since you last looked, there's no way to go back through them. I suppose I could use an external program to show the [LOG] lines from the file that I'm logging stdout to, but there's a buffering issue there -- the lines aren't always written to the file immediately. (That's why I gave up that idea months ago.) And finally, the little numbers that float up from creatures when they take damage are often blurred together into a big wall of pixels -- you can't tell whether you just took any damage, or whether it's just a wall of red "-0"s floating up. I don't know how other people deal with that, or if they just try to force themselves to look at their HP every 3 seconds or something.

What might really help is if the -0s were not red (or maybe not even shown), and if any single attack that does over 1/4 of my max HP were shown in some other color, so I could see immediately: "Oh! That thing is actually hurting
me! I'd better stop for a moment."

(The "low hit point warning" thing that pops up is good, but that's not usually the time when I die. I seem to do OK against large groups that try to whittle me down with a hundred attacks. What kills me are the monsters that can take me from healthy to dead in one go -- so I generally never SEE the hit point warning when I'm about to die, because I start out from 60% health or whatever and then suddenly I'm at -23. And I don't even know what killed me until I read the character dump.)

Make sure to get Ringil before you encounter the master (allthough the Mummy is tough for a Pala - prepare some see invis and free action potions! ).

Well, this brings up a couple issues. First, how do you know when to use those potions? Paladins have no monster detection abilities, do they? Especially invisible boss monsters that take half your HP before you even know they're there, and then take the other half before you've realized that you're actually injured....

Second, I've generally been favoring axes for my melee characters, because the two or three times I've made it to Moria and beyond, there've been more axes dropped than anything else. So I sort of figured that putting points into axes would give me the best chance of finding some useful weapon. (Also, I've been avoiding the elven ruins because the boss there is so very nasty.)

[greycat]

OK, here's another example. Level 13 Skeleton Archer, in the maze. (Is that just hopeless? Which other death trap am I supposed to fight at level 13? Am I supposed to grind on level 1 of the Elven Ruins instead of making real progress?)

Ran into the Purple Minotaur. Can I read phase door scrolls while I'm confused? OK, it looks like I can. Good. Now I'm in an unexplored part of the maze, and the Minotaur is "somewhere over there".

Resting starts...
Rested for 29 turns (stop reason: hostile spotted (Minotaur of the Labyrinth)).

Now he's right next to me. Well, let's see... I can't knock him backward (not a Slinger). I can't move MYSELF away from him except by reading another phase door, which just puts me somewhere way the hell out of the combat, and then I'll end up right next to him again by the time I find him again. My only chance is to Pinning Shot him, and then step back, and then start firing.

Xerk uses Pinning Shot.
Xerk hits Minotaur of the Labyrinth for 118.14 physical damage .
Minotaur of the Labyrinth resists!

Well, -. (Oh, cute, the forum censors me.) Now he's still next to me, and I have no stuns, no knockbacks, nothing. Maybe I can outrun him? Let's try moving a few squares... no, he followed right on my heels.

Maybe I can hit him with Crippling Shot, and then outrun him?

Xerk uses Crippling Shot.
Xerk hits Minotaur of the Labyrinth for 99.74 physical damage .
Minotaur of the Labyrinth slows down.
Xerk hits Minotaur of the Labyrinth for 3.67 fire damage .
Minotaur of the Labyrinth uses Stunning Blow.
Minotaur of the Labyrinth hits Xerk for 123.58 physical damage .
Xerk is stunned!
Minotaur of the Labyrinth uses Sunder Armour.
Minotaur of the Labyrinth hits Xerk for 134.60 physical damage .
Minotaur of the Labyrinth killed Xerk!

(Just as a point of interest, the Fighter gets a couple skills that push monsters away, but they don't want that! Except for the early game, there's just no way you ever want to push a monster away as a Fighter. And the classes that do want to push monsters away can't get those skills.)