ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Here's a dump of my latest character to make it to Dreadfell.

Let me preface the following by stating: I went antimagic and if I hadn't I might have potentially had a way out of the situation, possibly, by using a teleport rune or wand. Having said that, given where I was when the Dreadmaster attacked it's pretty unlikely I would have been able to get away with any substantial degree of success, and would have been trapped on the floor regardless due to close proximity between the two staircases.

This character was more than sufficiently leveled to do Dreadfell (29 when I entered the floor) and more than well equipped. Unfortunately, I had had the poor luck of never getting a withering orbs, despite doing every dungeon prior to Dreadfell, including every available starter area. I even had a big vault spawn in Old Forest. (where I managed to get two behemoth's hides and a second nature's blessing?) Despite all my opportunities to recieve this item I never did, and as such when I got to Dreadfell and encountered a Dreadmaster I had no way to do damage to it.

My accuracy was more than high enough to hit any enemy I had encountered prior to this point, including Banshees and the unique Banshee boss on the first floor, but I was unable to land a single hit on the dreadmaster and was soon completely overwhelmed by dreads. They continued to rapidly spawn until I was stuck in a small area next to the stairs. Between burning hex and my low accuracy I had no way to retaliate and could only watch my health plummet as more dreads spawned every round that I simply had no ability to damage.

Dreadmasters have been one of the most challenging enemies in the game for a long time and have never been fun to deal with for melee characters. While I accept that roguelike games are supposed to be hard and aren't always supposed to be fair, Dreadmasters are NOT a fun challenge to overcome for anyone playing a melee class and their difficulty is so lopsided that a Dreadmaster often ends up being the hardest enemy you encounter in Dreadfell, trumping the master by an order of magnitude on any but the most well prepared melee character. If I'd had the shadow-strung orbs I may have been able to win the fight, but they are not a gauranteed item. When such an item is essential to clearing Dreadfell (if you have bad luck with dreads, anyway) it forces melee characters to clear ALL starter area content. This is boring and extremely tedious.

The situation I found my character in was more or less unescapable - so many dreads had spawned that there was no free spaces to move, no way to the upstairs or the downstairs. If I'd used eidolon to exit Dreadfell, I'd have only created an unwinnable game as there was no way back to the floor that wouldn't have put me in the center of a 9x9 grid of Dreads. The burning hex effect kept me from even attempting to attack the Dreads. An absolutely unavoidable death that could have only been prevented by getting lucky with a single item drop or playing a different class/build.

So I am suggesting some potential fixes to this problem, which I am sad to say has happened to me a few times before:

1. Limit dread spawns per Dreadmaster to a reasonable number. A single Dreadmaster can currently surround you with so many minions that he can no longer be targeted by the player. As Dreads are intimidating, hard to hit minions with a retaliation effect, boxing the player in can put them in an impossible situation, esp. if their main method of escape is direct movement. While being boxed in a danger for any character and something one should avoid, it can often be unavoidable due to Dread invisibility. 3-4 would be a more reasonable number. As far as I can tell the number now is limitless or at least high enough that you can be boxed in two squares deep.

2. Remove Invisibility from the Dreadmaster. This would allow a player to be aware that a Dreadmaster is present in an area before the Dreadmaster begins chase/summoning huge amounts of adds and would allow a player to remain aware of where the Dreadmaster is so they can shut off the flow of Dreads. This is more in line with what I expect from roguelikes as it rewards good prioritization and tactical skill. As it stands, detecting them before minions are spawned falls down to luck and gear, and see invisibility is still a pretty awful stat.

3. Remove Burning Hex from these enemies. Burning Hex combined with a minion spawner and hard to hit enemies can put players in a situation where their tactical choices are escape or die, and not every character has a means of long-range teleport. If anti-magic is going to be presented as a serious play option for characters there should be more concious decisionmaking involved in finding yourself in unescapable scenarios. Invisible dreadmasters can summon too many dreads to escape from often before you notice they are there, and with burning hex disincentvizing attacking those enemies, you are completely out of options if you become surrounded and can't consistently outdamage and outheal what is coming in from burning hex.

4. Keep all of the above, but simply given Dreads much less defense so they are at least as easy to hit as a banshee. Given how dangerous Dreads are offensively, they don't really need to be nearly unhittable.

5. Make shadow-strung orbs a 100% droprate item from a starter area boss. As it stands they are too important an item for many builds to not have for Dreadfell.


edit: edge brought it to my attention that a Sun infusion would probably have helped. D'oh! I stand by my suggestions regardless, I just feel like these are a boring and awful encounter.

An important note: ghosts are not invisible. They are stealthed. So if you're gearing for see invis, that won't help.

I note that they have a pretty significant phys resist on top of everything else, making them that much more annoying for melee types.

Although they are rarely used, one of the best effects of Infusion:Sun is helping you against this type of enemies.

Also there's no teleport wand. There's only a psychoportation torque which is, well, a torque and not a wand. Meaning you could have used one, if you had the good fortune to find one (which it sounds like you didn't).

But yes, I've always been of the opinion that the balance on dreadmasters is completely out of line with everything else. Even if you completely took away their stealth, they have like 45 defense so Gehennas would have had (correct me if I'm wrong) about a 30% chance to hit them. Granted you really should have gotten more Combat Accuracy, but dreadmasters still have like 20 more defense than anything else you encounter by that point except Subject Z, a boss that also gives melee characters a hard time unless they outlevel him.

picking up gear that deals damage to the enemy when you are hit can help in these sorts of situations... but by Dreadfall, I think it's getting pretty hard to stack enough to be really meaningful.

Sirrocco wrote:picking up gear that deals damage to the enemy when you are hit can help in these sorts of situations... but by Dreadfall, I think it's getting pretty hard to stack enough to be really meaningful.

And when you're surrounded by eight dreads all thrashing you at once, you're life tends to drop too quickly for this to really be viable.

donkatsu wrote:There's only a psychoportation torque which is, well, a torque and not a wand. Meaning you could have used one, if you had the good fortune to find one (which it sounds like you didn't)

Yeah, those are pretty rare before Dreadfell. But even if you do find one, they tend to have really long cooldowns (the only one I found on an antimagic character before Dreadfell had a 45 turn cooldown). Given that the pack of dreads will chase you all over the level, through walls no less, it's still not a great option.

To reiterate a suggestion I've put out before, remove their ability to track you all over the level (like pretty much all other non-boss enemies). Then you can maybe actually escape and choose to deal with them, or not. A character can scum farportals (or whatever) until they get a teleport torque. Then if they find themselves up against the dreadmaster wall, they can just teleport out and move on with the game, rather than now where you end up with a dozen dreads surrounding the stairs and no way for you to progress.

I think that there are basically two problems with dreadmasters:

1. Lore, or lack thereof. The Dreadfell lore is incredibly well done - the best in the game by a considerable margin. (I only wish High Peak was half as good, or that we had a better explanation for the Sorcerers' motives than "they grew corrupt.") So it feels seriously out of place that the most dangerous enemy in the tower by a wide margin is an enemy with basically no documentation.

2. Lopsided difficulty. Difficulty is good, as long as it's fair, but difficulty that is exponentially greater for some otherwise sound builds is bad. Maybe nerf their defense a bit, and find some way to make them even nastier for casters?

Dreadmasters feel too rock-paper-scissors, in my opinion. Unlike the majority of ToME you have to find very specific solutions for them, yet once you have these solutions Dreadmsters aren't really an issue. Also, they seemed designed to specifically counter Temporal Wardens, a class I would otherwise enjoy playing :/.

I have a different, and possibly useful way to look at things. Dreads and Dreadmasters are flawed. This seems clear - they force a decent percentage of melee types to tie themselves into knots in preparation (and still punishes them) in a way that absolutely nothing does for casters by this point in the game. There are any number of ways that one could nerf them. Nerfing is easy. Let's pause for a moment first, though. What is the cool stuff about Dreads? What do they bring to the game? While we're considering what to take away from them, what should we be sure to keep?

...and if "starkly terrifying" really *is* what we get out of them, then how can we adjust things so that they're starkly terrifying for the casters and the dex-based fighters too?

What if they could silence you and disrupt your magic-based sustains? Oh wait...

Granted I'm just being facetious here; they have really good offensive tools to use against casters but the problem is that during Dreadfell (and for the majority of the game) casters just do so much darned damage that the dreadmaster just doesn't get a chance to use its devastating shutdowns. A caster will typically kill a dreadmaster in a couple of hits, whereas they can take hundreds of turns to kill for a melee character. There's nothing you can do to make dreadmasters more resilient to spells but not melee because all of the selective defense mechanisms (invisibility, defense, armor, evasion) are anti-melee while none are purely anti-spell. Bone Shield is probably the most anti-spell-like defense mechanism out there, and honestly Bone Shield has never frustrated me or screwed me over like dreadmasters have.

Honestly, I just think dreadmasters are an outlier of a problem with the core game mechanics, which is that it seems to hate melee while spells get a free pass.

Give them higher arcane, fire, temporal and darkness resistance. And the big problem (as I see it) is too many summons - reduce this and they retain the "oh -"ery without being impossible to deal with.

But yeah, there is maybe a problem with the game having no generic "magic resistance" or similar. Still, I don't see a problem with imbalance between classes myself.