ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Current run, for saving Melinda, her father gave me burning star!

Number43 wrote:Current run, for saving Melinda, her father gave me burning star!

That is pretty impressive. On the other hand, you are not dead, so your experience is unrepresentative of Dark Crypt runs, especially on higher difficulties.

It's fine on normal, not really worth the risk after that.

I once did it on nightmare without dying.

Her father gave me Bill's Tree Trunk once.

I think it's quite manageable on nightmare with the stronger classes.

I've had a number of bad deaths in there, even a few characters ended their run. But most of the time I clear it even on Nightmare. The bigger problem is keeping Melinda alive after rescuing her! I try to lead her into a dead end and then do some phase door/movement infusion out of there and clear the rest of the level to grant her safe passage.

I would hesitate to try it on Insane even with a very powerful character. Situations get out of control very quickly. Maybe doable with summoner/pet classes. I love the challenge, and it feels wrong to not try. But, like those late game vaults in EoR, and the demon portals in the Orc Prides, sometimes it's better to just leave it alone and not tempt the fates.

Nice artifact pick up!

I've only cleared it like twice on insane, once on oozemancer and another time with temporal warden

Effigy wrote:Her father gave me Bill's Tree Trunk once.

Ehehe, yeah, I get the unerring scalpel or kor's fall or whatever often enough my expectations for that guy are hilariously low. Tends to feel kinda' bad, though, because my usual thought is fairly reflexively that I would have been better off killing the demon for XP :V

And yeah, keeping melinda alive after waking her up is usually silly easy if you care to expend a little extra effort. Wiki actually mentions it, but taking a few moments to dig a corridor (make it a spiral or a twisty zigzag or somethin') off to the side of the starting room and ditching her in it while you clear the place out makes it just about the easiest part of the entire crypt experience. Don't even need to teleport out most of the time, so long as you have corners in the corridor you can generally just walk out and let her get stuck on a wall.

Theoretically some rare or another could teleport in and kill her, but in the... probably over a hundred times I've done the crypt since noticing the digging trick, it's never happened, heh.

Well if all you care about is winning the game and your only consideration is a coldly rational risk / reward comparison, no, you should never go in there, no matter the difficulty. Maybe you survive in spite of the dangers and yes, there is a tiny chance you get lucky with the reward, but all things considered it is not worth it on any difficulty. Better to go somewhere else instead, where you get better stuff for less trouble.

But I actually love that. Because from a moral perspective, you are supposed to be a hero and someone is about to die a horrible death. Do you really want to let it happen? It becomes a roleplay decision.

grobblewobble wrote:It becomes a roleplay decision.

and that's exactly why it's bad

I've always found killing the four cultist before she transforms the hardest part, especially with melee characters that lack reach. And if you play as meticulously as the guys that play insane and madness do I think the crypt should be pretty sterile on nightmare. Though I myself play nightmare precisely because I can't play that meticulously.

ster wrote:

grobblewobble wrote:It becomes a roleplay decision.

and that's exactly why it's bad

You misspelled good.

Only my opinion of course, but I love having choices like that. Do I rush to help whoever is screaming in some weird crypt? Do I want to help a dragon or a naga when both could be manipulating me? Do I kill the last female orcs and condemn their race?
This, and the lore in general is one of my favorite points of the game, and something that sets it appart.

And the good thing is, If YOU don't care about the roleplay part you can just ignore it while we have fun with it.