First impressions

[Elhazzared]

Before everything I'm going to say the game is fun and provides a lot of variety. I've fiddled with it for several hours during the past few days, probably more time than i should but hey, who cares when you are having fun right?

That said there are a few problems that the game really needs to iron out before I could recomend it to anyone.

One of it's major problems is lack of information:

Some items have ambiguous descriptions. For example the wild infusion says it removes physical conditions. It doesn't say all, but it doesn't says one. Most people will come to it and think it's all, after all it's your CC breaker... But apparently no, it doesn't takes it all and neither does it lets you at least chose which one you want to remove, all of this is information that should be provided to the player.

Enemies lack information. You mouse over and you see a few things. Resistences, health and name of effects going on. It misses a clear and accurate description of what those effects do. It misses a description of what special attacks or magical attacks it has and it misses the information about their damage, duration and cooldown.

Level and quest information. Like what level are certain areas and whether or not there is a quest related to that area for the character you are playing, either now or further up ahead.

There are a lot of pertinent information related to items, one being the tirakai's maul, that is sonegated. In the specific case I should be able to know that sloting a gem of tier 1 will actually make the maul worse than it is without a gem. I should also have a way of knowing what bonus and every gem provides. Another example of sonegated information is that spellblaze gem. So it can be combined with a weapon... Ok which weapon? I tried with one but it didn't showed me the weapon on the selction so I gather it requires specific weapons. What they are and what happens is again information that should be given to the player.

Information aside there are other things that can really make the game go from fun to sour very quickly. One of them is cheap kills. I have rarely died and thought... Yeah, I screwed up there. Many times I die simply to things like permanent CC. The infusions don't help at all because they rarely remove the right effect. Other things consist of finding level 22 to 25 enemies inside the lowest of low level areas. i'm talking about a level 7 going up against enemies 3 times higher level than you are. Other deaths are simply due to too many strong enemies not only beating on you at the same time but giving you lots of random debuffs. Trying to flee doesn't helps much because the enemy almost always can move and attack.

Fixing this would be easy. A form of retreat to every class that is reliable and allows to back up behind cover and proper CC removal that would just remove everything out or maybe it would only remove a certain number (certainly more than one) and allowed you to pick which things to remove.

Another thing is most classes not really having a decent begining. They relly on either 3 stats right from the begining or they just have absolutly no abillity to shrug off damage and they don't have much health in the first place... People need to have survivabillity in each class, not being one or two hit very easily and similarly, people need to have only 2 stats to focus on until they have capped one of them or playing these classes is a nightmare.

Last but not least the game is all about RNG. And I understand that any roguelikes are going to have some RNG associated with it. However making the game so RNG dependent that tactics and knowledge of the game matter little is hardly fun. The game is all about having luck on finding godlike drops early on and having luck with the enemy composition thown at the player. Not how he choses to engage the situation. Less RNG dependency would only make the game more enjoyable for everyone.

So what do i think at the end of the day? Innitially it's a bit of fun but becomes very frustating very quickly due to some design decisions or poor implementation... I do hope some these things change in the future and i'll be keeping an eye on the game for further developments.

[ghostbuster]

Some items have ambiguous descriptions.

Probably some info can be improved. The best is whenever you encounter one imprecise info is to post a message in the bug section to improve the description.

Code: Select all

Enemies lack information. You mouse over and you see a few things. Resistences, health and name of effects going on. It misses a clear and accurate description of what those effects do. It misses a description of what special attacks or magical attacks it has and it misses the information about their damage, duration and cooldown.

Mouve over a char, right click -> Inspect Creature and you have ALL the information you can dream of.

Code: Select all

There are a lot of pertinent information related to items, one being the tirakai's maul, that is sonegated. In the specific case I should be able to know that sloting a gem of tier 1 will actually make the maul worse than it is without a gem. I should also have a way of knowing what bonus and every gem provides. Another example of sonegated information is that spellblaze gem. So it can be combined with a weapon... Ok which weapon? I tried with one but it didn't showed me the weapon on the selction so I gather it requires specific weapons. What they are and what happens is again information that should be given to the player.

Tirakai was recently introduced and seems to somehow buggy.Probably all will be fixed in a next release.
Spellblaze gem (and most similar items) can only be combined with a BLANK (no-egoed) weapon. Besides that any weapon can be used (any tier, any kind of melee weapon).

Information aside there are other things that can really make the game go from fun to sour very quickly. One of them is cheap kills. I have rarely died and thought... Yeah, I screwed up there. Many times I die simply to things like permanent CC. The infusions don't help at all because they rarely remove the right effect. Other things consist of finding level 22 to 25 enemies inside the lowest of low level areas. i'm talking about a level 7 going up against enemies 3 times higher level than you are. Other deaths are simply due to too many strong enemies not only beating on you at the same time but giving you lots of random debuffs. Trying to flee doesn't helps much because the enemy almost always can move and attack.

Fixing this would be easy. A form of retreat to every class that is reliable and allows to back up behind cover and proper CC removal that would just remove everything out or maybe it would only remove a certain number (certainly more than one) and allowed you to pick which things to remove.

Another thing is most classes not really having a decent begining. They relly on either 3 stats right from the begining or they just have absolutly no abillity to shrug off damage and they don't have much health in the first place... People need to have survivabillity in each class, not being one or two hit very easily and similarly, people need to have only 2 stats to focus on until they have capped one of them or playing these classes is a nightmare.

Last but not least the game is all about RNG. And I understand that any roguelikes are going to have some RNG associated with it. However making the game so RNG dependent that tactics and knowledge of the game matter little is hardly fun. The game is all about having luck on finding godlike drops early on and having luck with the enemy composition thown at the player. Not how he choses to engage the situation. Less RNG dependency would only make the game more enjoyable for everyone.

Welcome to roguelikes! But you are wrong saying all is about RNG. RNG has an impact, of course, but it is very limited compared to other roguelikes. Generally, you can find excellent items early in the game and you cannot have bad surprise with items. Attack and defence are mostly deterministic. With a careful tactic, it is quite feasible to cope with all the problems encountered in the game, overpowered bosses, been surrounded, etc. It is a matter of experience, knowing your strength and weaknesses, knowing the monsters tactic, etc. And the most useful advice is to always be extremely careful. Overprudence is the best way to stay alive. If you find a teleportation rune or a psychoport torque, use it and whenever in trouble teleport away. Always favour defence over attack. In the early game wear any life increasing item that you find. Use two regen infusions. Etc...
I think there are some beginner guide in the spoiler section.

[Elhazzared]

Let me say some roguelikes I've played recently.

FTL: Advanced edition (also played the vanila)
Bionic Dues
Dungeons of dredmore (and all it's DLC)
Hammerwatch
Sword of the stars: The pit (with all the DLC)

This is merely roguelikes, there are other games which feature permadeath and are very hard which I played but they don't fall into the category.

From all of those only Dungeons of dredmore is really RNG hostile and by comparison to this, it's a pretty fair game without any RNG elements.
Everything in this game is highly dictated by RNG, drops, enemy types, all the fun stuff... runes of teleporting? Enjoy teleporting one square away like the last time I died. Enjoy being permanently in an icecue which no matter how much damage it takes won't disapear. after 15 rounds you'll be dead no matter who you are... 2 regeneration runes? Using one puts the second on cooldown, sure it lets it off a little bit earlier, but hardly good enough.

Beginners guide in this game... Well it's not like they wouldn't be welcome, but you'd really need one for each class cause the differences are way too high.

Also if the enemies have every single thing I said in the inspect monster, then while that is nice, you should have to constantly inspect the monster. I admit I never tried to do that, however that information should be readly available when you mouse over.

[marshmallowpeep]

I'm pretty sure the only game in that list that's actually a roguelike is Dredmore, and I'm pretty sure Dredmore is an unusually easy roguelike, which is probably part of the problem here. "Roguelike" is a pretty specific genre, but the term has been appropriated to mean any game with permadeath and randomly generated levels.

I agree, to some extent, about lack of information. Wild Infusions really should say "removes one random (type) debuff." Your quest log tells you to go to the T2 dungeons after you finish two of the T1s, but it's probably smarter to go do all six of them.

Infusions and runes contain effects like healing and escape and CC breaking and mobility specifically because those are the effects all classes need to have, so every class does have an escape. One thing that is, perhaps, not clear to you yet is that a teleport rune (or torque of psychoportation) is your real escape effect; it has a minimum range of 15. It sounds like you tried to use a phase door rune as an escape, which is obviously less than ideal. That's more of a reposition skill than an escape. It's not that regeneration infusions put each other on cooldown, it's that you can only have one regeneration effect up at a time. It's probably smarter to invest in a regeneration and a healing infusion than two regenerations.

When you were frozen in a block of ice for 15 turns, what were you fighting? I bet it was something that was continuously reapplying the ice because you were standing in it's ice storm. When you found a bunch of level 25 monsters in a starter zone, were you they behind a door that had a check about if you're sure you want to open it or not? That's called a vault, and it's often a good idea to skip those unless you're very confident in your character.

Honestly, I think a lot of your perceived RNG problems are from inexperience and lack of information. This game isn't all that random. Yeah you get boned by a too-hard unique monster now and then, but it's not terribly common.

You might be surprised how helpful you find a beginner guide. The classes are all very different, but quite a lot of general strategy is universal.

[EatThisShoe]

Being frozen can be removed with physical wild infusions, or blocked with stun immunity. Ice blocks also absorb some of the incoming damage you would take, and generally should never actually take 15 turns to break. If you have multiple physical conditions you can sometimes wait out the shorter ones and cleanse the iceblock when they are gone.

In this game you pretty much have to expect to get stunned and frozen, confused, slowed, pinned, etc. and have a plan to deal with it. The same thing goes for rare enemies. The reason veteran players don't consider the game RNG dependent is because these threats are so common that you probably wont ever avoid them just by luck. Pretty soon getting hit for half your life becomes par for the course, but I assure you the game has all the tools necessary to deal with what it throws at you. It's hard for new players because of the sheer amount of information and options. While ToME is actually quite open about giving you information, there is so much to parse that it can be hard to know what's important and how to use it best. That's also where a lot of the game's depth comes from.

It's also worth noting that there are several towns, and some have better shops which are worth visiting as soon as you have 50ish gold to buy better infusions, or some wands/torques. Inscriptions are the defensive backbone of every class since they comprise your status removal, healing, and escape options, it's rarely a bad idea to use your first category point unlocking a 4th slot. Also worth noting is that teleport runes are not the same as phase door runes. Phase door are shorter range, no minimum but give you a boost to resist all, defense, and reduced condition duration for new conditions, they are more of a skirmishing option and not really an escape. Teleport runes on the other hand have a minimum range of 15 and tend to throw you across the map. Movement infusions are also very good, the most controllable escape option, but somewhat easier to disrupt.

[Elhazzared]

I'm pretty sure the only game in that list that's actually a roguelike is Dredmore, and I'm pretty sure Dredmore is an unusually easy roguelike, which is probably part of the problem here. "Roguelike" is a pretty specific genre, but the term has been appropriated to mean any game with permadeath and randomly generated levels.

I agree, to some extent, about lack of information. Wild Infusions really should say "removes one random (type) debuff." Your quest log tells you to go to the T2 dungeons after you finish two of the T1s, but it's probably smarter to go do all six of them.

Infusions and runes contain effects like healing and escape and CC breaking and mobility specifically because those are the effects all classes need to have, so every class does have an escape. One thing that is, perhaps, not clear to you yet is that a teleport rune (or torque of psychoportation) is your real escape effect; it has a minimum range of 15. It sounds like you tried to use a phase door rune as an escape, which is obviously less than ideal. That's more of a reposition skill than an escape. It's not that regeneration infusions put each other on cooldown, it's that you can only have one regeneration effect up at a time. It's probably smarter to invest in a regeneration and a healing infusion than two regenerations.

When you were frozen in a block of ice for 15 turns, what were you fighting? I bet it was something that was continuously reapplying the ice because you were standing in it's ice storm. When you found a bunch of level 25 monsters in a starter zone, were you they behind a door that had a check about if you're sure you want to open it or not? That's called a vault, and it's often a good idea to skip those unless you're very confident in your character.

Honestly, I think a lot of your perceived RNG problems are from inexperience and lack of information. This game isn't all that random. Yeah you get boned by a too-hard unique monster now and then, but it's not terribly common.

You might be surprised how helpful you find a beginner guide. The classes are all very different, but quite a lot of general strategy is universal.

Granted a few of them are more Roguelite than Roguelike. But sword of the starts: the pit do is roguelike in all it's glory.
DoD is pretty much damn hard, I've done good runs but I always end up dying to RNG there because more often than not I end up hitting a dry spell and don't get any items that will allow me to keep up with the difficulty. Kinda why I stopped playing it really.

As for which dungeons to do first and which to do last... Well it's not as if we guess which ones to do hit first or second, I just keep following the quest log and really it's up to good drops and up to enemy composition, trip on the wrong composition and you will die even in very good gear.

The problem with a teleportation rune is that it's random. It's not very helpful to teleport somewhere where you can just be surrounded by enemies again and not be able to do anything against them as well cause you were already in a bad situation. What is needed is a way to say, retreat here where I know it's safe so I can heal and rethink my approuch to the situation... Healing infusions are nice, but I never find usefulones. It's always like, 2o to 40 life when i have over 200... It just doesn't helps.

When I was frozen in a block of ice I was in daikara. I found a unique, not sure if the quest related boss or not. I charged it just by the mouth of the room, managed to get him to one hit before death, there was only a second enemy in the room as far as I could see but I didn't saw any other attacks coming aside from that guy. Then the boss froze me for 7 rounds. I couldn't attack the ice, I couldn't break the CC (too many debuffs on me), so I sat there eating shots to the face trying tank it with a regeneration rune. Mind you the ice block had 316 HP and I took way over that, the ice never broke which is strange considering it takes 60% of the damage. When the ice wore off I tried to run away cause I was low on life and needed to recover. So I moved one step back, and when I moved a second I was encased in ice again for 7 rounds. The only thing I could do was pop the heroic rune then but I went bellow 249 which was the limit of it in the turn before the ice went way. This is pure RNG. Although I belive there was some bug with that ice block it still pretty much sums up the vast majority of my deaths. They have no reason to happen, you're just thrown RNG the hard way... Similarly playing an archmage is for masochists. Now the elves are a better choice because of the shielding rune, but I can't accept starting with an elf which levels up way too slowly. I just go to the camp and most of the time I find 2 enemy mages, they each drop me one attack and I'm dead. Just RNG and of course some characters just start pretty bad.

Another beserker example today. I had a really good one going, not my best but good none the less. I made all the way to the fortress, not a problem. meeting the guardian before the fortress was just for some reason a complete overkill. The last time I was there, I killed it, it wasn't a piece of cake, but it wasn't a close call either. This time I even had 11 turns of invunerabillity that darkgod gave us today... Heck it actually lined perfectly as I got that just before going in against the boss... So I go in, charge it, start beating on it... No damage. Some shield absorving it (last time he also had the shield but he was taking the damage none the less). So by the time I break the shield I am at half life... That is right, my invunerabillity come and gone already. regeneration rune, keep on beating him, take about a third of his health off before my regen rune goes out and i'm still pretty hurt. Suddenly, he heals and casts the shield back again in the same turn... Oh joy! He had over 1000 health too I might add. Why I have no clue. I had the cape to put up a barrier arround me so i do it, but forgot to move away first so he's inside the barrier, mistake there but he didn't attacked that turn, I lucked out. So I used the phage door to try and teleport out of the barrier and buy me some time. I teleport 1 square away, the wall there breaks to let me get to that square. With the thing still attacking me and my life running low I use an invisibillity rune. Should have known better, The thing still sees you reguardless of being invisible though it was missing the attacks as i tried to run. Eventually and even before the invisibillity expired it seemed to get tired and threw me an AoE for a good measure and that was GG.

Pretty much 99% of my deaths are pure BS. I recognise when I do dumb shit and get punished by it, as it should, but most of the time I'm just a fly minding my own buisness until I'm introduced to my very own personalised windshield of a truck. And that is not very fun... Even if there is some general strategy to help, I just don't see how I could be doing more at this point.

[Marson]

I've said this many times. Just because you don't see how you could have escaped a death doesn't mean that there wasn't a perfectly reasonable way to avoid it that didn't involve the RNG. How do you explain people winning on higher difficulties? It's not some crazy string of luck where the RNG went on vacation. Some of it is learning the ins and outs of the game mechanics, but a lot of it is changing how you approach the game.

[grayswandir]

When the ice wore off I tried to run away cause I was low on life and needed to recover. So I moved one step back, and when I moved a second I was encased in ice again for 7 rounds. The only thing I could do was pop the heroic rune then but I went bellow 249 which was the limit of it in the turn before the ice went way. This is pure RNG.

This would've been the perfect spot for a movement infusion. It's instant use and (a) makes you run away really fast, and (b) temporarily immune to being frozen. Not sure what order you were doing the dungeons in (I always do daikara last in its tier), but I've generally by this point bought one from last hope, angolwen, or zigur, even if it's not a terribly strong one.

[Marson]

I tend to do Daikara after Golem Graveyard, Hidden Compound and Halfling Complex as well.

[Davion Fuxa]

One of it's major problems is lack of information:

A lot of talents, items, and such do indeed need a bit of explicit descriptions to describe what they do. However, this is really a problem with any game - from Torchlight II to World of Warcraft, and practically every other game that might be compared to this one. Ultimately the game is just the same as the rest, the descriptions can only help you so much, the rest you need to experience through gameplay.

Enemies lack information.

As stated, right click on the enemy and 'inspect creature'. The initial information you get from mousing over enemy just gives you some light details on enemies. More of the indepth information comes from inspecting them, where you can mouse over their talents or effects to see what they all do; along with seeing what their specific stats look like.

Level and quest information. Like what level are certain areas and whether or not there is a quest related to that area for the character you are playing, either now or further up ahead.

There has been some banter about trying to separate the game into stages, acts, sections, or whatever you want to call them. The purpose would be to prevent players from entering dungeons they are much too low level for. However, quests related to an instance are not really as much of an issue. You practically get a quest upon entering certain dungeons, or in the case of the 'plot quests' you get the next following quest in the plotline after completing the actions in the first.

Information aside there are other things that can really make the game go from fun to sour very quickly. One of them is cheap kills. I have rarely died and thought... Yeah, I screwed up there. Many times I die simply to things like permanent CC. The infusions don't help at all because they rarely remove the right effect. Other things consist of finding level 22 to 25 enemies inside the lowest of low level areas. i'm talking about a level 7 going up against enemies 3 times higher level than you are. Other deaths are simply due to too many strong enemies not only beating on you at the same time but giving you lots of random debuffs. Trying to flee doesn't helps much because the enemy almost always can move and attack.

It is unlikely that many deaths are 'cheap kills' in ToME. Almost every action you take dictates if you might die or not. Status effects like Stun and Confusion can be quite detrimental, but there are several means to reduce their impact. Knowing when to use your infusions, or what infusions to use are also important considerations. Much of all this will come from player experience in knowing what actions you need to take in order to mitigate problems from specific elements you come up against.

In regards to level 22-25 enemies appearing in low level areas, I can only assume you made the mistake of 'entering a vault' - specifically perhaps you might be referring to the Rhaloran Camp Vault if you entered one at level 7. Vaults are predefined events that randomly spawn within your 'randomly generated map'. Sometimes they might be something simple like a 3x3 room with gold on the ground an a few of the dungeons denizens on top of it, or it could be a nearly map wide vault where there is little more then the way you got into the level and the friggin giant vault leaving little more then a small strip of land between the edges of where the vault begins and the map ends.

To keep the story short - Vaults are generally very difficult instances or events, usually with some reward attached to them. Before entering some of the more dangerous ones you generally get a little popup as you try to open the door. Of course though, this doesn't apply to all vaults - I'm sure you are probably familiar with Dredmor's Monster Zoos; that sort of concept sort of exists in ToME as well, but there isn't any real indication denoting that you've entered one - it will just be the room where every tile in the room has an enemy on it.

Fixing this would be easy. A form of retreat to every class that is reliable and allows to back up behind cover and proper CC removal that would just remove everything out or maybe it would only remove a certain number (certainly more than one) and allowed you to pick which things to remove.

This would lead to scumming. Players could simply get out of every fight when things aren't going well for them to replenish resources or wait out detrimental effects. One of the things ToME prides itself on is 'Tactics'; a player needs to understand what actions they need to pursue in order to survive the various encounters they get into. There is no 'Easy' Button that you can press, and sometimes a player just needs some hindsight to anticipate problems before they occur - or leave room to surmount them.

Another thing is most classes not really having a decent begining. They relly on either 3 stats right from the begining or they just have absolutly no abillity to shrug off damage and they don't have much health in the first place... People need to have survivabillity in each class, not being one or two hit very easily and similarly, people need to have only 2 stats to focus on until they have capped one of them or playing these classes is a nightmare.

I think some elaboration is needed here. Some classes do indeed have difficult beginnings. I'm currently doing a Let's Learn on a Shadowblade for instance which is one of them. Shadowblades have three core stats: Dexterity, Magic, and Cunning, and generally the class rely on Dual Daggers to inflict their damage; notably a weapon type that doesn't deal good damage until later on in the game. However, while the class is difficult to start, that doesn't mean that it doesn't have the ability to survive its first initial dungeons. Being a Multi-Stat dependent class as well, it just boils down to prioritizing what stat to invest in first.

As a note again, part of the reason a character is potentially quite frail to enemy attacks is that it ties into the tactical nature of the game. You need to plan out your actions and understand how to tackle opponents in an engagement - you can't go rambo and expect to take on a hoard of enemies without some repercussions.

Last but not least the game is all about RNG. And I understand that any roguelikes are going to have some RNG associated with it. However making the game so RNG dependent that tactics and knowledge of the game matter little is hardly fun. The game is all about having luck on finding godlike drops early on and having luck with the enemy composition thown at the player. Not how he choses to engage the situation. Less RNG dependency would only make the game more enjoyable for everyone.

Practically no part of the game features any RNG element that makes tactics or knowledge of the game matter little; at least on Normal Difficulty on any race outside of Yeek (higher difficulties are meant to be less then fair, Yeeks are meant to be a challenging race in character selection). Personally I've seen worse RNG elements featured in the one of the games you listed - The Vanilla version of Faster Than Light. I can literally name one of the worse offenders, specifially regarding a certain 'Space Station' with a little 'infestation' problem. Of course however, much like that specific FTL instance or elements in the game, knowledge and what to do let the experience player know how to handle the event and select the best option in their run.

[Elhazzared]

I was just following the questline. Granted there was another I could do first but I also didn't knew where it was... Movement infusions are yet another of those thing that are very well explained (not). Why wouldn't it say, allow to move X squares in a turn? Cause i imagine that is what it does but it doesn't really gives me a number I should know how to work with for sure. Besides movement infusions are broken the moment you turn right? Kinda breaks their usage quite a bit... I'd probably have needed something that allowed me to move some 8 squares at least to get to the turn point anyway.

[marshmallowpeep]

Movement infusions don't make you move X squares per turn. They increase your movement speed by X%. If you have no other modifiers to it, then you move one square per turn, so you look at the movement infusion, and it says "increases movement speed by 300%" and you do some math and say "well normally I move one square per turn, and this increases that by 300%. 300% of 1 is 3. Since it says "increases by 300%" rather than "multiplies by 300%" you know that 3 per turn is in addition to the 1 per turn you normally have, so it gives you four moves in a turn.

The reason it says "300% increased movement speed" instead of "move 4 squares per turn" is because there's a very good chance you have some other modifiers to your movement speed or your global speed that will stack.

They are not broken when you turn (not that there's such thing as facing in this game, so you can't really "turn," you just move in a different direction), and I have no idea how you would get that impression. They're broken when you do something that isn't move.

[Davion Fuxa]

Maybe he thinks they work like Vault, which is a very special instance in regards to movement of a character - it breaks if you change direction from initial movement.

[Elhazzared]

One of it's major problems is lack of information:

A lot of talents, items, and such do indeed need a bit of explicit descriptions to describe what they do. However, this is really a problem with any game - from Torchlight II to World of Warcraft, and practically every other game that might be compared to this one. Ultimately the game is just the same as the rest, the descriptions can only help you so much, the rest you need to experience through gameplay.

Enemies lack information.

As stated, right click on the enemy and 'inspect creature'. The initial information you get from mousing over enemy just gives you some light details on enemies. More of the indepth information comes from inspecting them, where you can mouse over their talents or effects to see what they all do; along with seeing what their specific stats look like.

Level and quest information. Like what level are certain areas and whether or not there is a quest related to that area for the character you are playing, either now or further up ahead.

There has been some banter about trying to separate the game into stages, acts, sections, or whatever you want to call them. The purpose would be to prevent players from entering dungeons they are much too low level for. However, quests related to an instance are not really as much of an issue. You practically get a quest upon entering certain dungeons, or in the case of the 'plot quests' you get the next following quest in the plotline after completing the actions in the first.

Information aside there are other things that can really make the game go from fun to sour very quickly. One of them is cheap kills. I have rarely died and thought... Yeah, I screwed up there. Many times I die simply to things like permanent CC. The infusions don't help at all because they rarely remove the right effect. Other things consist of finding level 22 to 25 enemies inside the lowest of low level areas. i'm talking about a level 7 going up against enemies 3 times higher level than you are. Other deaths are simply due to too many strong enemies not only beating on you at the same time but giving you lots of random debuffs. Trying to flee doesn't helps much because the enemy almost always can move and attack.

It is unlikely that many deaths are 'cheap kills' in ToME. Almost every action you take dictates if you might die or not. Status effects like Stun and Confusion can be quite detrimental, but there are several means to reduce their impact. Knowing when to use your infusions, or what infusions to use are also important considerations. Much of all this will come from player experience in knowing what actions you need to take in order to mitigate problems from specific elements you come up against.

In regards to level 22-25 enemies appearing in low level areas, I can only assume you made the mistake of 'entering a vault' - specifically perhaps you might be referring to the Rhaloran Camp Vault if you entered one at level 7. Vaults are predefined events that randomly spawn within your 'randomly generated map'. Sometimes they might be something simple like a 3x3 room with gold on the ground an a few of the dungeons denizens on top of it, or it could be a nearly map wide vault where there is little more then the way you got into the level and the friggin giant vault leaving little more then a small strip of land between the edges of where the vault begins and the map ends.

To keep the story short - Vaults are generally very difficult instances or events, usually with some reward attached to them. Before entering some of the more dangerous ones you generally get a little popup as you try to open the door. Of course though, this doesn't apply to all vaults - I'm sure you are probably familiar with Dredmor's Monster Zoos; that sort of concept sort of exists in ToME as well, but there isn't any real indication denoting that you've entered one - it will just be the room where every tile in the room has an enemy on it.

Fixing this would be easy. A form of retreat to every class that is reliable and allows to back up behind cover and proper CC removal that would just remove everything out or maybe it would only remove a certain number (certainly more than one) and allowed you to pick which things to remove.

This would lead to scumming. Players could simply get out of every fight when things aren't going well for them to replenish resources or wait out detrimental effects. One of the things ToME prides itself on is 'Tactics'; a player needs to understand what actions they need to pursue in order to survive the various encounters they get into. There is no 'Easy' Button that you can press, and sometimes a player just needs some hindsight to anticipate problems before they occur - or leave room to surmount them.

Another thing is most classes not really having a decent begining. They relly on either 3 stats right from the begining or they just have absolutly no abillity to shrug off damage and they don't have much health in the first place... People need to have survivabillity in each class, not being one or two hit very easily and similarly, people need to have only 2 stats to focus on until they have capped one of them or playing these classes is a nightmare.

I think some elaboration is needed here. Some classes do indeed have difficult beginnings. I'm currently doing a Let's Learn on a Shadowblade for instance which is one of them. Shadowblades have three core stats: Dexterity, Magic, and Cunning, and generally the class rely on Dual Daggers to inflict their damage; notably a weapon type that doesn't deal good damage until later on in the game. However, while the class is difficult to start, that doesn't mean that it doesn't have the ability to survive its first initial dungeons. Being a Multi-Stat dependent class as well, it just boils down to prioritizing what stat to invest in first.

As a note again, part of the reason a character is potentially quite frail to enemy attacks is that it ties into the tactical nature of the game. You need to plan out your actions and understand how to tackle opponents in an engagement - you can't go rambo and expect to take on a hoard of enemies without some repercussions.

Last but not least the game is all about RNG. And I understand that any roguelikes are going to have some RNG associated with it. However making the game so RNG dependent that tactics and knowledge of the game matter little is hardly fun. The game is all about having luck on finding godlike drops early on and having luck with the enemy composition thown at the player. Not how he choses to engage the situation. Less RNG dependency would only make the game more enjoyable for everyone.

Practically no part of the game features any RNG element that makes tactics or knowledge of the game matter little; at least on Normal Difficulty on any race outside of Yeek (higher difficulties are meant to be less then fair, Yeeks are meant to be a challenging race in character selection). Personally I've seen worse RNG elements featured in the one of the games you listed - The Vanilla version of Faster Than Light. I can literally name one of the worse offenders, specifially regarding a certain 'Space Station' with a little 'infestation' problem. Of course however, much like that specific FTL instance or elements in the game, knowledge and what to do let the experience player know how to handle the event and select the best option in their run.

Level and quests are always an issue. I should know whether entering a dungeon or not is going to be too high level. Similarly I should know whether a dungeon has a quest attached to it. if it has then I only want to enter when I get the said quest, if not I can enter and blast at will.

I have given a few examples of cheap deaths. In any of them I had no way to survive. I had no way to kill what was in front of me, nor I had a way to flee from it. You may say there are ways that might, maybe with luck, have helped me there. Telport. It can just be out of the cooking pot and into the fire. Running doesn't tells yous exactly how much it helps, waiting for debuffs to go down so that I remove the one I want. They generally tend to last all about the same time anyway. Taking a look at the situation and evaluate it... Well many times the moment you take a look you are already set into a single option course of action whether you like it or not. All of this leads to cheap deaths and RNG reliance to artifically make up difficulty rathe than a good set of mechanics. and don't get me wrong, there is a good set of mechanics in place already, but there is a lot of fine tunning needed to make the game be reliant of skill rather than luck.

Oh and the high level enemies. Yes, they are vaults and some vaults give you enemies twice your level which you can handle with some difficulty, sometimes even the level 22 you can handle, but sometimes not. The vault rarely give anything worth fighting something 3x your level but then again you need all the loot you can get and you won't know what is in there until you actually open... As for you comparison to the monster's zoos. Bad comparison. I nthe game you have certain areas filled with enemies about your level, this usually is some 20 or more monsters all cramped up together. More to the point, monster zoos are pretty much dependent on whether the previous level gave you the necessary resources to fight it. However you are not fight overleveled enemies by horrible RNG, they are about your level and you can simply get them one at a time by leading them into a convinient corridor to fight. Not the same as triping on something 3 times your level.

It's not scumming, it's getting a way out of a no win situation that you were thrown into with no choice in the matter. If the game was fairer and gave you a way to actually chose where to engage and where to flee. That would remove the need for something to get you out. More often than not, you aren't given such thing.

Let me give you an example. Let's take the bulwark which is a simple first day access class. it's a tank, it can take a few hits. Cool, more survivabillity. Let's start developing the character. Well you need strenght for many talents required for tanking. You need dexterity for many other talents required for tanking. you need constitution for talents for tanking and you need it to actually have a health pool. At the end of the day you cannot say no to either of them but you can't just go putting one point in each. You need to max one of them out, then you keep maxing that and putting the rest into a secondary. The class doesn't gives you the luxery for that however... And yes, I'm fairly sure there are people who can make them work. It doesn't changes the fact that stat prioritisation for it is broken and it should never be. It should always be incredibly clear which stats to shot for first and the third should always be for when you hit cap. More of an afterthought than a necessity. Similarly no characters should see themselves as a complete glass cannon. I like glass cannons when they actually have a chance to work as they are supposed to. But every time I play an archmage I always trip into eitehr 2 mages that will one shot me, or some boss with ranged attacks that will one shot me. And no, I don't have the chance to do anything about it. I walk around a corner and fall dead. Not exactly fun.

There is a huge amount of RNG to this. I may be relatively new, but I've put many hours into this game already, probably over 40 in 3 days (I'd say 4 but I barely played today). If after so much gameplay time and a relatively vast experience with roguelikes and generally very hard games you ar still feeling that all your deaths or at least the vast majority of them were pretty damn cheap and that RNG is playing a huge role, then it probably is right.

Vanilla FTL was pretty easy and solid gameplay, some RNG to it as it is to be expected but nothing you can't handle easily. For the most part vanilla FTL had one problem and it was some pretty horrible ships, if you play any of the decent ones you are rarely going to lose a run... The advanced edition is worse because there are 2 major problems with it. one relates to RNG which is the seeding of the sectors that is pretty bad throwing you many C shaped sectors and what not. The other is teh ASB which is ridiculously overpowered... Still it's easier to play FLT with the worst ships available and winning, than actually having a decent chance at winning TOME. If I was to compare the RNG from one to another I'd have to say that FTL has absolutly no RGN elements at all... By comparison that is. such is the disporportion.

marshmallowpeep - By broken when you turn i mean they do have that thing that says, if you move in a different direction than the innitial one, the infusion stops working and your bonus is gone. either way for that to properly get out of a bad situation it needs to give you a huge movement allowance and allow you to change directions so you can get out of line of sight and can't be targeted anymore. Actually now that I think about it I've seen at best movement infusions that were like 178% extra movmeent speed... One extra square is not particularly helpful when running from not mellee opponents.

[HousePet]

I have no problem putting one point into three different stats on level up.
Movement infusions say exactly what they do, changing direction doesn't break them.
Putting all of what you call useful information on a creatures tooltip would require people to be playing with at least two monitors to fit it.
I'm pretty sure you can't teleport at all when fighting the fortress boss, also teleport will never drop you 1 tile away.
If being hit while frozen doesn't reduce the iceblock hp, why haven't you reported it as a bug?
Same with Wild infusions supposedly not working.
You always have options for running away, unless you are undead and fighting the fortress boss.
Saying you have loads of roguelike experience means absolutely nothing if you keep talking about things that aren't correct.