ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

The Trollmire is really a bad representation of the game. It's not set up like most other zones and it's layout can be hard on new players.

Now I'm not saying I don't like how the Trollmire is set up, because I'm actually a fan of it. But it's the first zone new players will find themselves in and it's layout and set up may be a real turn off (especially to traditionalist roguelike players).

Anyway, my suggestion is to make the Trollmire more like the Old Forest and reuse the Trollmire layout someplace else (because it is a cool layout).

I agree. Trollmire is the most alien looking dungeon in ToME. I've already stated my preference for a random-layout starting dungeon, but if I can't have that, then starting someplace that looks like it belongs in a roguelike would be nice. To really make newcomers feel at home, go back to a Kor'pul-like layout, only without all the instadeath.

I definatly agree with this, and I would go as far as to say I ABSOLUTELY hate it and I find it "unfun" part of the game I have to brute force through, as navigating through it is such a pain.

Well, why not swap the two? The Trollmire with its regular pools of water seems rather more like the sort of place one might find a sunken fortress anyway.

Make it the Trollwoods and the Ancient Mire (or come up with something a tch more original) and keep the monsters encountered the same. Sure, it'd make pits and vaults easier to find in the redecorated Old Forest, but I suspect that the lack of easy chokepoints would rather overwhelm that advantage. It would also mean that a new player's first experiences with *escort quests* would be not so horrible. The trollmire, with it's wide variety of optional paths and frequent poor visibility is an *awful* place to try to keep track of an escort.

...and given the number of people who think "Ack! Kor'Pul is hard! I want to stay safe in the Old Forest!" it seems like the Old Forest could use a bit of a difficulty boost.

Kor'Pul is fatal to someone who would see it first; you might not be able to keep an escort alive easily in Trollmire but at least *you* usually make it. Skeleton mages are unsurvivable by almost any character before level 5 or so, and the money pits are sources of two or three (without the safety door there is on most vaults).

Or make Kor'Pul much easier and change it to the starting dungeon. Make most enemies rats and such, with skeletons only properly appearing later on. Would make more sense for the Shade to have the Rod of Recall than Bill.

Grey wrote:Or make Kor'Pul much easier and change it to the starting dungeon. Make most enemies rats and such, with skeletons only properly appearing later on. Would make more sense for the Shade to have the Rod of Recall than Bill.

*thumbs up*

Grey wrote:Or make Kor'Pul much easier and change it to the starting dungeon. Make most enemies rats and such, with skeletons only properly appearing later on. Would make more sense for the Shade to have the Rod of Recall than Bill.

Making it lit would help a lot. As would nerfing skeleton mages manathrust to 1 or 2. Could replace skeleton mages with a lich later on that's uber