ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Paths of the Dead is simply too hard. I just killed off... um... a whole LOT of ghoul fighters trying to get one started. Just one! One of them actually managed to find a stairway up. At that point, I noticed that I had to find 7 MORE stairs!? There was no strategy I could find to make a character survive there. Either a ghoul would give me a rotting disease (no way to cure it), or I'd be beaten to death by monsters 5 or 10 levels higher than me (or skeletons with weapons capable of doing three times what mine did), or I'd run out of healing potions and eventually get piled on until I eventually fell over and died.

I even tried NOT wearing the cloak, thinking, "Hey, maybe if I don't disguise myself as a human, I'll blend in and the undead won't attack, and I can sneak out." Nope.

Guess this means I should try the new Noldor race, eh?

Hum good idea about the cloak actually

I'll see if I can make the place less deadly, it's not intended as a death trap

It's the number of skeletons I would say. Skeletons are some of the hardest parts of amon sul, so a dungeon full of them is pretty deadly for a low level character.

Sadly, I'd have to agree that its a bit too tough, but I LOVE the concept and its the perfect way for the characters to start off.

Skeleton mages and skeleton warriors are pretty formidable when you're level 1. One bad door open and you're at a serious risk of dying (again, I mean) before you get another move. Since you have to hunt for the stairs you'll be running into those situations a few times each level, and there are multiple levels, so its a pretty tough gauntlet. I'd say its comparable to having to run Amon Sul (w/o killing the boss) all the way down and back up, before getting to do anything else. If it was Trollshaws, it would be fine, but Amon Sul's a little less forgiving, imo.

A thought: perhaps a skeleton/undead created in a place where diseases are more common should receive cure disease not cure poison.

However, this is nicely reminiscent of Tome2's lost soul. Guess it's time to kill off some chars

Elliot, I think you are totally right. My mage is having no trouble though the shadowblades were having a hell of a time and I was too annoyed to keep that up. After all, previously my skelly shadowblades had the advantage of a town before they had to do amon sul.

For fairness in there I think you need at least a few scrolls of ID and some potions of cure disease. And either light up the level or give a dwarven lantern.

I completely agree that the paths of death are by far too difficult.
I lost tens of shadowblades and archmages in the paths of death... And most did not reach level 2.
Skeleton archers and mages are the worst imho.

And the only solution that I found for the archmages is ... Angolwen!!! But I am not too proud of it. lol

Thinking about it a bit further, I think a good solution would be to replace the starting potions of cure poison with cure disease and then to make the starting point either level 3 or 4 (I'm torn), depending on how hard you want it to be. That should reduce the difficulty of the mobs encountered a bit and also cut substantially the number of levels you need to survive.

So perhaps if the paths of the dead were instead of a tower with the exit at level one, were instead a subterranean place that one comes up from and exits at the end of the dungeon. For instance, if one started at level one of the dungeon and had to get to say 4 or so to get out, that would already make the monster levels more logical. Instead it sounds like we're going from harder to easier.

what I think is happening is this:
monster levels are going from low (at lvl 8 ) to high (at lvl 1), but the difficulty of the monster is still being determined by the depth, making the harder monsters appear earlier, but still at low levels, but close to the "boss" of the zone there is lower quality monsters but at higher levels

ghostbuster wrote: And the only solution that I found for the archmages is ... Angolwen!!! But I am not too proud of it. lol

Haha yeah I have been using the Teleport to Angolwen as well! The only problem - it does not complete the quest to escape the dungeon, and you cannot receive the first quest for the Trollshaws and Amon Sul.

You'll get the trollshaws/amon sul quest when you kill either of the relevant bosses.

Ok, now let's not encourage bug exploiting