ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Trollmire 2. A loremaster escort spawns, steps on a poison vine, and dies of poison within four or five turns. The poison which my level 1 halfling alchemist shrugs off with no worries. This being a starting area, my character has had no chance to pick up any sort of NPC-healing wands or other skills and can only watch the escort slowly die.

If escorts are going to be suicidal anyway (which they are, often ignoring portals to charge at overwhelming masses of enemies), could they at least be a teeny bit more durable?

Or remove traps...

...or slowly regenerate life (though it sounds like it wouldn't have helped here)

At least it was just a loremaster.

Or, have better strategy. If you spawn in Trollmire, clear the 1st level, then go somewhere else where you won't get an escort. Go back to those places when you (and they) with be lvl 6+. This is a roguelike. Many deaths, few wins. Don't expect every attempt to be perfect. Learn from your mistakes. Try again.

rangerjeff wrote:Or, have better strategy. If you spawn in Trollmire, clear the 1st level, then go somewhere else where you won't get an escort.Go back to those places when you (and they) with be lvl 6+. This is a roguelike.

That's metagaming/scumming, bit sad that you'd have to do that isn't it?

Many deaths, few wins. Don't expect every attempt to be perfect. Learn from your mistakes. Try again.

It's not (at least for me)about escorts just being difficult, but about how some of their mechanics simply don't make much sense.
Making them behave crazily and not heal at all on their own(despite some being Anorithils and Sun Paladins!)is a VERY artificial way of making them challenging.
Other ways to make them challenging and fit with the game have been suggested in the past, of course - such as giving them life regen and a good AI in exchange for them not knowing about the portal location and having a time limit before the portal expires.

Yes, please make escort missions tougher, its too easy for these punks.

Grey wrote:Or remove traps...

The crux of the issue. There are very few trap-removing/avoiding solutions.

I don't mind the escorts, though I do find it frustrating that the classes with the fewest available trees tend to have the most trouble with the escort missions.

Toughness isn't even the issue most times, they are just plain suicidal. I posted a game log cap here a few weeks ago documenting a repentant thief detecting a trap well out of the way of the path the portal, running over to it to try to disarm it (why?), stepping on/off it FOUR TIMES IN A ROW, killing himself. If he had more toughness, or passive regen, he'd have just stepped on it again and again; it was a higher tier glow-y trap, he had no chance to succeed, but he was dead set (literally) on trying to.

I suspect that is exactly how escorts would behave in real life, from my freelancing consulting experience

I don't think that every escort quest is meant to be able to be done, so I'm not sure if escorts need to be made tougher.

However, the AI definitely could use some improvement. Either we should be able to give them more detailed orders (easier to implement) or they should make better decisions (harder to implement).

If they are to make better decisions, the AI probably should be specific to each one: the warrior being more likely to go off and suicide in a blaze of glory, or the loremaster more likely, when enemies are around, to find a nearby tile with the greatest amount of adjacent walls and defend only. And definitely all of them should beeline for their exit if there is a possible path which gets them there in the same amount of time or less than it will take a visible enemy to close.