Thick Skin hits low-HP race/classes too hard

[edge2054]

Doesn't item and monster decay speed up the game though and make save files smaller?

[Silvermoon]

Item decay hurts the low level characters the most -- the characters who actually CAN find important items without them being artifacts. I'm lost as to the actual *purpose* of the item decay is, as it is extremely senseless and has no benefit that I can think of -- and then the question is, with the purpose determined, is it actually fulfilling that purpose, or is it just annoying players?

[eronarn]

ToME 4 is actually quite unique among roguelikes in that it is close to being a finite resource game. In most roguelikes, if you aren't ready to dive to dungeon level N, you just keep doing dungeon level N-1 until you are. But in ToME 4, the dungeons run out of monsters. The only things you can farm are adventurer parties, and those scale to your level and outnumber you 2 or 3 to 1, so, um, good luck.

Crawl is way stricter about this than TOME. You can't even scum infinitely until you're already strong enough to just go beat the game already.

[Aquillion]

ToME 4 is actually quite unique among roguelikes in that it is close to being a finite resource game. In most roguelikes, if you aren't ready to dive to dungeon level N, you just keep doing dungeon level N-1 until you are. But in ToME 4, the dungeons run out of monsters. The only things you can farm are adventurer parties, and those scale to your level and outnumber you 2 or 3 to 1, so, um, good luck.

Crawl is way stricter about this than TOME. You can't even scum infinitely until you're already strong enough to just go beat the game already.

Unless they've changed something (I haven't played Stone Soup at all), the Abyss is actually way less dangerous than it seems at first. There's always risks there, yes, but it's less dangerous than ToME adventurer parties if you know what you're doing.

[Laerte]

It's the hybrid classes that get spread really thin; they pretty much all have some class-based means of getting their stats up, though, so careful building will mitigate this. In my experience, the truest glass cannon is Rogue. Sure, you can build Con and neglect another stat, but then your damage starts to scale horrifically and you die simply because you can't kill anything fast enough. I think my next rogue will be a race with a significant life rating.

I agree. If you try antimagic with a class that doesn't focus on WIL, lets say archers, you get exactly this: low damage and low HP. The only antimagic archer I've leveled up to the 20's was one hit shooted by a random boss. I had some + life gear on, but the total HP was way lower than used to be and shields aren't an option.

[greycat]

Thick Skin is not available to squishy classes in the Arena and the Infinite Dungeon, either.