ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I don't claim to be the best most elite ToME player, but since 1.6, pretty much every insane run I have gotten out of the T1s has ended with me being one-shot (often through strong defenses) either directly out of auto-explore or immediately after attempting my first action.

I feel like I make a reasonable effort to build defense gear and use my active defenses, but it doesn't matter. I realize I could not auto-explore, constantly scout and inspect every rare+, but that's tedious and not fun. I suppose I could play on Nightmare, but I find that too easy.

At the same time, as has been discussed (http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=3 ... 9&start=75) the median rare+ enemy is much weaker and most pose little threat.

I'm not enjoying the game anymore, and I think I'm going to step away for a while. Maybe I'll find a future build enjoyable again.

FWIW I was able to beat insane on 1.5 without dying, so I don't completely suck.

In 1.6.4 endgame wep dam on monsters is higher now than in 1.5 already when it comes to super spiky damage. Just a couple of examples: I had two characters on HP today, other had 48 % phys res and 112 armour but still got for 2,7 K wep dam but had BoL and went on to win the game. Other char who was a corruptor got onerounded by a rampaging unique that somehow found to me from somewhere that must have been quite far away because of skynet activating. I was killed through full bone shield, full ethereal form and full HP of 1,8 K while resting still. Yeah.

I think insane players are better off just quit playing right now since after the initial release of 1.6 there has been very little interest of resolving any of these issues that keep coming up constantly. Freeze was "fixed" but it was buffed for 1.6 so that was a wash at best. ESP dam getting nerfed I guess was good but it's a one talent lol.

If you want to maximize your chances of winning currently you basically want to have multiple sources of track/AE and use other degenerate tactics because endame monster damage still very much seems spikier than in 1.5 AND because of skynet when it's on effect monsters can basically find you anywhere and just phase door through walls right next to you without los/lof and oneshot you. So it's not enough you knew the location of a monster that haven't ever even seen you 15 turns ago because it might activate blinding speed + rampage and run 15 squares to you in a a couple of turns before you ever knew it was even aggro.

And before some troll like housepet comes to comment on having to switch strategies or whatever, I've won 7 times on 1.6.X on insane RL now. It's not about the game being winnable or not it's about the amount of RNG you have to endure and if you had fun in general or not. And using random one-shots as a de facto balance mechanic and adding a cheating AI (that can still glitch itself too BTW) is not fun.

EDIT Unsure where the increased wep dam is coming from, it's prolly a mix of a lot of things like rampage working on skills, endgame monsters having very high TLs on total thuggery etc that basically let them negate armour and physical resistance almost completelety and the AI cheating to know your location/using instant prebuffs and other skills better now.

I feel that whitelion, and made the same choice in 1.6, 1.62, and 1.64. Nothing in the patch notes suggest things have gotten better for 1.65 so I'm skipping it (randbosses being delayed to level 10 is good, but lvl 25+ randbosses were given higher talent levels in debuff talents, so for most of the game on Insane+ the most recent patch made them stronger without doing anything to cap their damage excesses). I still hope for a change, but I'm not optimistic.

The other thing that kept me playing this game for so long was my engagement with these forums. I particularly liked finding new things and sharing them, or learning from others doing the same. However, in 1.6 a bunch of stuff from these discussions got edited out of the game (in my case - instant tinker swap's use for Elemental Surge Psyshot, Fungal Blood/Ancestral Life combos, accuracy stacking on Arcanewarden of Doom, using host's Summon ability while Projecting as a Possessor). I am not claiming, and do not think, that this was directed in a personally hostile fashion at me, or that it only applied to me (Awesome Toss got a significant nerf, which was a thing a lot of Adventurer players built around), but I do think it speaks to a mindset where the devs are using the forums to locate things that are particularly strong and removing them from the game. This is not an experience I recall having previously in TOME and is a particular pet peeve of mine - I get removing game-breaking stuff, but outside of the infinite-turns Drem Oozemancer none of it was gamebreaking, and it is a community norms choice that encourages players to horde the discoveries they enjoy playing with rather than sharing them lest devs decide to remove them. While the "either one-shotting or pointless enemies" dichotomy exists, while the Skynet AI sometimes pours all the enemies on a level at the player, I don't understand the philosophy that prioritizes spending dev time on e.g. nerfing accuracy stacking or Awesome Toss, decisions that primarily impact Adventurer builds about which dg had said:

Adventurers are not mean to be balanced in any way
It's just a fun sandbox to muck around with.

All the above changes are clearly within TOME's developer's rights to do. I played it and posted here because I enjoyed doing so, I stopped the former because I no longer do, I'll stop the latter if/when it becomes fully clear that this is the game we're stuck with. But it's a bummer, and it makes me wonder what experience TOME devs want or expect their players to have, because much of what I enjoyed about it has been removed.

Heya

Before I address some of those specific issues; I wanna note a few things
- There are cases where I cannot win;/ I'll explain: For some things like say Awesome Toss, I'm damned if I let it as it was because I get people complaining that this thing can be so broken that it's far superior to anything else and thus they feel *FORCED* to use it. If I fix it they other people complain about me removing one of their liked strategy. And I can understand and sympathize with both sides, so what can I do ? :/ This happens a lot. It usual comes down to people *feeling forced* to use/abuse some unfun but kinda broken synergy/system/whatever, but if I fix that hole, people that did enjoy it complain; if you have ideas how to resolve such cases and make everybody happy by all means, I'll gladly listen

- Intentions/mindset: It's never about "ruining fun", why would I want that, I mean a game is supposed to be fun (even if torturous ). Does that sometimes happen? Sure most likely, I mean tome is an incredibly huge game with tons of intersecting systems, it's bound to happen. But it's never a goal and if possible it should be fixed. Like say, 1.6.5 weapon changes trying to alleviate the fact that weapon tiers were nearly meaningless, which wasnt a fun thing

- I never balance, nor frankly care, about adventurers yes, that quote of me still stands It's likely very possible to break the game with them, or hell even to make it explode When I see stuff like that I just smile


Now, let's address a few specific points
- "initial release of 1.6 there has been very little interest of resolving any of these issues that keep coming up constantly" how so? Each patch has fixed things and even some hum .. hostile people .. managed to admit it was for the better. Why do you feel I don't want to make the game fun for *all* ? :/

- The oneshot thing: I'm certainly not dismissing your reports; but to the majority of reports they are rare; so it is even more important that I understand yours. But to do that I need specifically a description of exactly what killed you, this is vital to fixing the issue You raise the point of high talent levels, but they have always been so and the inherent scaling to them makes high TL not mean that much of a damage increase. It may one some talents, but it's considered a bug in this case and if you report too high scaling talents I'll gladly take a look (I've re-nerfed Freeze a bit a few minutes ago for example)

To sum it up, fun the is goal, if something is broken (and I'm not saying it's not) I'd be happy to work with you all to find what it is and kill it 'til it's dead
Thanks!

Thanks for your response darkgod. I do appreciate that you and all the devs put a lot of time into this game, and that the game is quite complex, so getting everything working in a good way is not easy. And there are a lot of things about ToME that I very much enjoy as well.

My experience is one-shots generally come from casters who have nuke spell + high resistance penetration + crit multiplier boosts. Sometimes they may also have +speed skills, allowing them to technically two-shot you, but before you really have any chance to react regardless. Weapon users are also capable one one-shotting/rounding you (see below,) but I have found that seems less common, probably just by virtue of melee enemies having to first get next to you to hit you (I mostly have been playing ranged classes.)

Freeze has been the most common offender for the actual source of damage itself, probably being involved in about 40% of cases in my experience. Even if you survive Freeze, it can still leave you stuck in 1000s of hp of ice block with no ability to do anything and blocking all healing, and if you aren't immediately able to remove the debuff you are toast (I didn't count this in my experience of being one-shot, since at least I do have some chance here, and I can strategize by holding back cleanses, even if there is some randomness to what gets cleansed.)

My most recent experience also involved the AI knowing where I was before I was in its LoS. A burning horror randboss killed me out of auto-explore by casting Fireflash right before I came around a corner into view and then using Abduction the moment I stepped into LoS, and so both hit me at once. The enemy of course did have Wildfire, so any fire resistance I had was more or less worthless.

I was also killed recently by a Rampaging enemy that used Wraithform to walk through the wall and enter a battle I was having with some pretty tame normal enemies from who knows where. The enemy then bursted me down from about 95% hp the moment it entered my LoS (next to me in the wall) before I had a chance to react to its appearance.

I actually agree that one-shots are rare in the usual sense of the word rare. They rely on enemies generating with the right combinations of talents, which has low probability for any particular enemy. But at the same time, you fight so many randomly generated rare+ in a run of ToME, that it's actually pretty likely you will encounter a few of these on a given run.

Each patch has fixed things and even some hum .. hostile people .. managed to admit it was for the better.

I wouldn't necessarily consider a post titled Death of Tome as an endorsement for the game in question.

Why do you feel I don't want to make the game fun for *all* ? :/

Because even with the changes that are good, and yes there are some, playing 1.6.X on insane still feels worse than playing on insane in 1.5. The problems are still largely the same than they were when 1.6 was initially released despite of substantial backlash from higher difficulty players.

The oneshot thing: I'm certainly not dismissing your reports; but to the majority of reports they are rare; so it is even more important that I understand yours

But they are not that rare. I've lost multiple lives already across many characters to getting one shot mid or late in the game and while all of those haven't been unreasonable, more than enough have. Some of these like the nonsensical 3,8 K Elandar freeze crit that should have never existed are fixed, others are not.

If you look at an average player X that dies in Old Forest then no, you won't see a report where they get oneshot despite of having 2,7 K health and decent defences. You know why? Because it's impossible for both the players to have such defences at that point and for the monsters to inflict that kind of damage. If you are a skilled and experienced player then the cause of death of your character being oneshot later in the game is drastically more common simply because you don't die many times in other ways. And this is what my post(s) are about, playing the game on insane to win and being tactically and strategically challenged by the game while doing so. If you want feedback about lore or how accessible the game is to new players you maybe want to consult lore guys/new players, if you want feedback about playing the game to win in a high difficult setting then listen to people who know how the game actually plays out.

But to do that I need specifically a description of exactly what killed you, this is vital to fixing the issue

I already explained how multiple changes in monster AI and skills can create a perfect storm that kills you more easily than before and literally gave examples of problematic talents. Let's take total thuggery for example, in HP it gave monsters over 80 in both phys res pen and armour penetration. I do not know if the base weapon damage of monsters is now higher or lower endgame nor I have any interest testing it since it seems that every patch there now needs to be an update or several to wep damage formulas anyway. Summoned minotaur had 430 base weapon damage, dualwielding uniques/bosses could have 200-250 x 2 base weapon damage in HP in 1.6.4.

If you don't see, for example, how it may be detrimental to the player characters well being that instead of the PC using track and prebuffing itself before engaging the monster, the monster does the same and phase doors next to you with all buffs up and hits you on the same turn before you even knew it was anywhere near you, then I can't help you. The latter is now noticeably more likely to happen than it was in 1.5. because of the AI and some other changes (monster density in some areas, more limited sources of digging etc). Also if the monster phase doored/used lightning speed to surprise you from many tiles away then no you don't necessarily even get a chance to inspect it at all because your char is now dead!

You raise the point of high talent levels, but they have always been so and the inherent scaling to them makes high TL not mean that much of a damage increase

You say talent levels have always been high but can you provide me with screenshots where Elandar hits for 3,8 K with one spell? I've played the game for 5 years or something like that and I've NEVER seen such a hit on insane with one spell on a stable version apart from some stack overflow bugs or something like that (madness is a different story ofc). Braid lifelines maybe could inflict that if you get braided with one million oozes or something and then they all get hit with some area dam but we are really grasping for straws now. The same goes for some of the other things that I mentioned. Getting hit for 2,7 K weapon damage surely was possible on insane in 1.5 and before but personally I never got hit that hard on any character with decent defences in High Peak. Honorable mention to the AI again: when you did see that champion of uhr'rok doombringer randboss in high peak in 1.5 you had at least a better chance of dodging it since the AI wasn't an omniscient cheater. Oh and also Aeryn had talent level 120 Bathe in Light on madness, the fixed bosses leveling up system may need some tweaks still!

And btw speaking of stack overflow bugs, my oozemancer got hit for countless of trillions of negative damage in the slime tunnels, I even pinged you and shibari in discord for the screenshot. I uploaded an ss about that 2,7 K hit too but didn't ping anyone.

The ultimate point of this is that it's not "certain talents" that are broken right now, it's the game that is broken on higher difficulty setting and sure some things are more broken than others but that's not the main point. The game takes longer to complete, it creates RNG no-win situations more frequently and the AI cheating just isn't fun and probably makes the game less tactical because it often effectively removes tactical options from the player.

I think whitelion and Mankeli have addressed most of the points I would have made re: the pervasive nature of spikiness in 1.6 v 1.5, although I will star and underline the implied "enemy Cursed hit like absolute trucks now and their movement options make this hard to avoid" in both their posts, and also explicitly call out Rogues who have been multiclassed with either Cursed or casters as a significant source of 1HKO death without option for counterplay. Given how much stronger Stealth is for monsters than for players (not clear whether this is an intentional asymmetry in the Stealth mechanics or a side effect of the sometimes omniscient AI) and how many crit-boosting passives Rogues pack, they're particularly good at taking the player from unaware of an enemy to instantly dead with no space in between.

darkgod wrote:Heya
Before I address some of those specific issues; I wanna note a few things
- There are cases where I cannot win;/ I'll explain: For some things like say Awesome Toss, I'm damned if I let it as it was because I get people complaining that this thing can be so broken that it's far superior to anything else and thus they feel *FORCED* to use it. If I fix it they other people complain about me removing one of their liked strategy. And I can understand and sympathize with both sides, so what can I do ? :/ This happens a lot. It usual comes down to people *feeling forced* to use/abuse some unfun but kinda broken synergy/system/whatever, but if I fix that hole, people that did enjoy it complain; if you have ideas how to resolve such cases and make everybody happy by all means, I'll gladly listen

As this was my addition to the thread, I'll cover this part.

I have so little sympathy for the forced side that it's hard for me to steelman their arguments. I am currently not playing at all, based on reasons mentioned here and in "overtuned," and so it's clear to me that no one is forced to do anything when it comes to a game. If you have a story about yourself that you *have* to play the strongest thing to find enjoyment, you're playing Adventurer, and have promptly disqualified yourself from balance concerns. If you *have* to play the strongest non-Adventurer class, anyone experienced in the game would have to concede that there's a huge power gulf between e.g. Paradox Mages and Rogues. If you were to satisfy these gamers in the manner expressed above it would entail nerfing Paradox Mages down to Rogue level. This has not happened, so we still have to look at why such things do happen in the cases where they do and how the fixes are implemented (is a feature excised, or is there a compromise position that removes the unfun without removing the enjoyment?). Furthermore, I would argue that, broadly construed, this is not a fix that TOME can survive and retain what I and others have explicitly posted (not in this thread, but elsewhere, over time) is something they greatly value about it, and so you may have to choose who to please on a systematic level as opposed to on a case-by-case basis.

When I try to point to games TOME is like, I often refer to the Dominions series. Dominions looks at balance between factions as a distant, twinkling star, and fixes its eyes on "provide extremely diverse experiences." This faction has the best knights and heavy cav, but is otherwise pretty vanilla. This faction is known for having incredibly powerful use of a single spell that allows spellcasters to coordinate, and changes their whole strategy. This faction can barely use gold, and autospawns undead everywhere it reaches. This faction forgot to wear armor, but has incredibly strong blessings and are top tier blood mages, a system that essentially dissolves a huge chunk of your economy in exchange for magical power. Balance, if it exists, is a thing that emerges organically, in a Diplomacy-style interaction in MP.

So I would say, let the TOME players who feel forced to play only the best things play other games entirely, where the differences between classes are a pale flicker of the class diversity in TOME. IME, IMO, those who play and support TOME over the long term love it for being weird, not for being a model of balanced class choices - I know I didn't feel compelled to write a 45 page guide on the differences between the Bulwark and the Berserker, I wrote it on the Possessor. I'm not saying throw out inter-class balance as a tertiary goal, but I think if it were a strong enough force in the game to consistently justify the choices in question then the game as a whole would look wildly different (and much less interesting, to me).

I don't pretend that I have answers to particular fixes that will please everyone, but given that I raised a bunch of things and you're asking for specific fixes, here we go.

- In the specific case of the accuracy nerf, what was it for? It killed dado's Arcanewarden and my +demonologist variant of the same. I could see it as a tool for avoiding spikey AI damage output if they ended up with arbitrarily high Accuracy boosts, but spikey AI damage output is way up in this edition and therefor if it were for this purpose then the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing.

- In the specific case of the "we will make Augmented Mobility an escort tree and pull TK wielding from it, unique among all Mindslayer talents" what was it for? It significantly weakened caster-type Adventurers who don't need FEM (including my Harold of Oblivion), and it made the rules of how TKwielding is gained for Adventurers even more obscure.

- In the specific case of Fungal Blood/Ancestral Life, no one was forced to play that way to be effective as an Oozemancer. Windtouched Speed + dual Beams was comparably effective, with better sustain but less burst and remarkably less tedium. For Drem, sure, infinite energy was too strong, but Frenzy going fixed CD (which I advocated for and eventually got) would have solved that without removing the broader Oozemancer option, and the Drem Madness-winning option was so tedious that even I didn't bother with it once establishing proof of concept. But what use is Fungal Blood now - it went from having no use on high difficulty levels, to a niche use, and back to none, which benefits... who? If tedium and infinite time were your concerns and you wanted to make Ancestral Life more broadly useful outside of combo-builds, you could have added a built-in energy gain option to Fungal Blood that added as much time as the old regen-cancel system when you removed that system (and with fewer button clicks to boot, without the need for cancels), instead of simply lopping off the part that one group liked to please another.

- In the specific case of tinkers going 1 turn to swap, I would have preferred that Fungal Web be removed from the game. The versatility of instant swap Tinkers, particularly when it comes to using groove types that many enemies have Affinities to, contributed significantly to a "Batman utility belt" feel to Tinker classes, that going deep into Tinker trees gave you the right tool for the job, and if the omniscient AI would allow players to benefit from stealth (which I hope will happen in a future patch) then being able to switch between White and Black Light Emitters would have been very useful. But that Batman feel was gone in a flash because some players felt compelled to conduct an 8 move sequence in order to regain 125 health at T5 (given what's been killing me in 1.6, I can't think of a single time when this would have made a difference in the outcome of a run, even with high healmod).

- In the specific case of pulling Summon off projected Possessors - from a balance perspective its removal is fine, it was tedious as hell and definitely strong (although I'm not sure the player gets experience for things killed by the Summon talent?). But it was also just a ridiculous thing that some others and myself discovered while messing around, and I would prefer a world where talking about such things on the forums doesn't lead to those kinds of things being removed. What forum flavor do you want for TOME? Horde discoveries or share them? You can have one or the other, but not both (although a community can appear to be the latter and turn out to be the former, which isn't a good feel).

- Intentions/mindset: It's never about "ruining fun", why would I want that, I mean a game is supposed to be fun (even if torturous ). Does that sometimes happen? Sure most likely, I mean tome is an incredibly huge game with tons of intersecting systems, it's bound to happen. But it's never a goal and if possible it should be fixed. Like say, 1.6.5 weapon changes trying to alleviate the fact that weapon tiers were nearly meaningless, which wasnt a fun thing

I don't think you do want that, but that's nonetheless the delivered outcome of 1.6 Insane - its 1HKOs respect neither the time spent on a particular run, nor the aggregate roguelike learning curve by letting the player learn consistent counterplay, and if a gameplay experience isn't delivering either a win or knowledge that might be used for a future win its going in the wrong direction as far as I am concerned. My guess is that there is something you *do* want that generated this outcome as an instrumental or accidental goal - the kind or amount of playtesting, how changes get added to a patch and by whom, how many changes should be released in order to justify a +0.1 patch increment, some large system that would require an overhaul in order to address what happened to talent scaling in 1.6... I certainly don't know. I've never been anywhere close to your shoes in being the lead (perhaps sole, officially?) programmer of a game that's consumed 1000+ person-years of time, so I don't know what workflow systems you've had to build to get this far. But among those things (or another thing I don't know enough to suggest) something went profoundly sideways in 1.6, and while I'm glad that you're willing to look at changes on a case-by-case basis in order to kill what's broken till dead, it would be helpful in the future if a sufficiently-finite number of changes happened at a time that we could understand which of them snuffed out a 15 hour run that would have won in the past.

I completely agree with snarvid’s thoughts on balance, finding weird and interesting combinations is *the* reason I play TOME.

As far as other things go, I mostly play adventurers, so it’s easier to build around the current state of the game, and I am perfectly happy to play on adventure difficulty to deal with the rest. But having to “build around the state of the game” means my options are more limited and less interesting overall, and I find myself playing regular classes a lot less than I used to because it just doesn’t seem worth the trouble.

My biggest problem with this release though is easily the omniscient AI. Every enemy knowing your location out of LOS from a huge area makes every level feel kind of the same and completely flattens a lot of interesting builds and tactics. This would be a fun gimmick in a side zone, but for the whole game (even without the other problems people have brought up) it’s enough to make me take a break for a long while.

Side note, but is it possible improved AI is the part of the reason for how many one shots are in 1.6? It definitely seems like enemies having a better idea how to combine talents and exploit players weaknesses could have this effect.

Pisastrish wrote: My biggest problem with this release though is easily the omniscient AI. Every enemy knowing your location out of LOS from a huge area makes every level feel kind of the same and completely flattens a lot of interesting builds and tactics. This would be a fun gimmick in a side zone, but for the whole game (even without the other problems people have brought up) it’s enough to make me take a break for a long while.

There was a bit of this in 1.5x too. But enemies should not be able to locate PCs outside of the parameters PCs are bound to.

Sorry with the end-of-year stuff I'm not much in front of the computer, so a long reply will need to wait.
But just to make a quick note: the AI target-passing and teleport-guessing is being nerfed for next patch, both to improve gameplay and lag

It would be great if these deaths out of nowhere could be drastically reduced or eliminated. Currently I'm only doing Normal, but I know that playing really well and then being killed out of nowhere with maximum defenses up is no good for anyone - neither the players or the devs, especially when this wasn't the case before. Look forward to improvements on this.

It would seem that the most bang for buck would be reducing or eliminating the AI code/abilities that allow the AI monsters to know automatically where the player is. I would not be against removing all player-sensing-outside-line-of-sight-AI completely, but maybe the changes DG is planning will make a big difference. Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating so we'll see what happens.

darkgod wrote:For some things like say Awesome Toss, I'm damned if I let it as it was because I get people complaining that this thing can be so broken that it's far superior to anything else and thus they feel *FORCED* to use it. If I fix it they other people complain about me removing one of their liked strategy. And I can understand and sympathize with both sides, so what can I do ? :/

Would there be interest in an addon to restore the old behavior? `Coz I too saw that and thought, "welp, that's my Gunslinger dead in the water…"

darkgod wrote: Why do you feel I don't want to make the game fun for *all* ? :/

It's the lack of proper testing. I've seen this exchange a few times and wanted to reply.

I have an hard time imagining anybody took, or even watched, a run through insane high peak during the beta and felt 1.6 was ready. And yet when I lost my umpteenth character in an explosion of nonsense and lua errors, I checked and found out that it was time for 1.6.0. Subsequent patches squashed the lua errors, but added in other odd changes. Did a dev run through t1s to see what kind of game experience was being inflicted by the lower spawn levels? Or new prides populated by uniques with shop tier/disable randart loot? Or even freeze changes trivializing most of the game?

Or on the topic of oneshots: weapon damage buffs. For reference, I won in 1.6.0 with 242 sheet damage on a berserker that pulverized everything but the occasional ebg, in 1.6.5 he's up 70 sheet damage. What testing determined that players needed an additional ~1k damage on death's dance instead of just fixing unkillable abominations or the armor stat? On the monster side the changes lowered the bar for oneshots, and it's not tied to any one ability, it's a mixture of a higher base scaling with crit/pen/dam/procs and high speed or gwf or a strong attack.

As an example I've got a 1.6.4 screenshot of a rare breaking stealth for 1.9k off a mixture of true striking, stealth, bleed, flurry, etc. There's no single broken element, just multiplication. Again, this was 1.6.4, the damage output would be even higher today, and the justification you've given is not related to top end damage needing to be higher.

I'm sure you care about the game, I do not doubt you want it to be fun. But you're achieving the opposite when you subject players to half baked changes. Whatever process you use to vet either proposed changes or their implementations should be reevaulated.

Mankeli wrote:

If you don't see, for example, how it may be detrimental to the player characters well being that instead of the PC using track and prebuffing itself before engaging the monster, the monster does the same and phase doors next to you with all buffs up and hits you on the same turn before you even knew it was anywhere near you, then I can't help you. The latter is now noticeably more likely to happen than it was in 1.5. because of the AI and some other changes (monster density in some areas, more limited sources of digging etc). Also if the monster phase doored/used lightning speed to surprise you from many tiles away then no you don't necessarily even get a chance to inspect it at all because your char is now dead!

I just got to witness this a moment ago myself, although didn't think to take a screenshot since I was frustrated and wiped the character. A shadowblade ported next to me and threw a multicrit flurry & dual strike in one turn for >1k, a fair bit over my max health. Was running a zerker wearing a lot of max health, high armor on most all of my equipment, pumped CON, 5/5 Thick Skin, the max hp bonus from fungus, and 5/5 hvy arm for reduced inc. crits. I can't think of how I could have been more prepared for that specific kind of damage source at Lv27.

The game's too long for spikiness like this to be common at all. If situations like this is a frequent occurrence, then I'll either see what Nightmare is like nowadays (is this problem present there too?) or maybe just grab/make a player HP inflation mod.

Dude, Nightmare has another problem - there is almost no good equipment, if class is relied on good equipment then Insane is easier for it then Nightmare. Just saying.