ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

There's been several posts about the way that 1.6 has a non-trivial tendency to spawn rare+ enemies with absurdly high talent levels (highest I've seen is 50+) that are either a. 1HKO specialists b. are virtually unkillable or c. both. In this post I discuss a possible fix to this system, capping enemy talent levels at some reasonably low level (not necessarily the player's cap of 6.5, but within a small distance of it, perhaps +1 or +2 more per difficulty level) while giving them substantial, difficulty-scaling buffs to power (physical/mind/spell/steam) in a manner analogous to the way enemies receive large bonuses to HP/tier/difficulty level. I think this would help limit the way certain problematic enemy qualities scale with talent level increases, notably their resistances, global speed, respen, and the duration and cooldown of their talents, while not making them essentially immune to all power-based status effects the player would wield (as would be the case if their stats, and thus saves, were buffed instead of their power). It might also allow for the tuning of rank-and-file enemies, who do not currently possess such over-leveled talents, to be somewhat less helpless. Finally, it would give a clear set of expectations for players when choosing a difficulty level - you could easily know ahead of time that on Insane rares got +X to their power, uniques +2X, and bosses +3X, as opposed to playing enemy lottery on every level and hoping not to pull the black dot.

I can understand where you're coming from here, but..

Nah.

Its worth keeping in mind that ToME comes from a gaming tradition that starts w/ games deliberately designed to be impossible.
If a player 'won', the devs considered that a bug (this was a long time ago). While that might not have been the best situation, what's carried over is the nature of the possible threats.
This is a survival game. That's the draw. It doesn't compromise. Its not fair.
Yet, its not as actively antagonistic as it could possibly be (at difficulty levels less than madness).
This is a feature not a bug. If you play long enough, I suspect you will feel the same way.

YMMV.

The variation is a feature, and the game would not benefit from homogenization. I like the broad range of difficulty, including the low-probability spikes that can end a run.