Stairscumming?

[betamin]

Hello, I remember playing this game a while ago and it was great, the only thing that killed it for me was stairscumming since it meant that you can beat anything if you don't get one shotted. I wanted to ask, Is there any plan to remove this feature?

[Grey]

My approach is to simply avoid doing it. There have been many requests for it to be fixed, but alas none have been implemented. The main suggestions were:

- Heal up everything on a level when returning and cancel all statuses (inc area effects)
- Give enemies the first turn when entering a level previously visited (thus making stairs traversal take player time to act)

[Mithril]

Hello, I remember playing this game a while ago and it was great, the only thing that killed it for me was stairscumming since it meant that you can beat anything if you don't get one shotted. I wanted to ask, Is there any plan to remove this feature?

There are many status effects than prevents using stairs so it is not just one hit kills that stops you.

There are also some bosses that are currently very difficult compared to the other monsters without scumming. The undead dungeon boss and the house boss would be some examples.

But I agree that scumming is generally both unrealistic and reduces boss fight and thus game excitement.

[betamin]

My approach is to simply avoid doing it. There have been many requests for it to be fixed, but alas none have been implemented. The main suggestions were:

- Heal up everything on a level when returning and cancel all statuses (inc area effects)
- Give enemies the first turn when entering a level previously visited (thus making stairs traversal take player time to act)

Your first option sounds ideal to me since you can escape but it doesn't break the game (especially good when you're playing blindly with permadeath).

What are the dev's views on this?

[Mithril]

Let us not forget the possibility of monsters, including the boss, following you up the stairs.

[betamin]

That would be cool also, should it be the standard "only adjacent" monsters go with you or all that are chasing you? That would create some hard stuff lol.

[edge2054]

A thread like this comes up pretty often.

And while I'm sure this has been suggested before I think an easy solution would be to simply prevent leaving a level with hostile creatures with in 5 tiles or so. A message saying, "you can not travel while engaged in combat" would work.

Anyway, as to the Darkgod's point of view (the developer, the rest of us just lend a hand and some ideas), he's said that he'd like to change it but the ideas to fix it have either been hard or impossible to implement, or not felt right for Tome.

So if you have a good idea on how to prevent it feel free to post it, though you may want to search for the older threads first and look through them. Because the idea may have already been posted in the past and got nixed for whatever reason.

*Specifically, following monsters has been brought up before (many many times) and for whatever reason, it's not one Darkgod has seemed fond of.*

[Rectifier]

Stairscumming is good for tome. It lets new players experience more of the game.

Also stairscumming gets owned by status debuffs and skills that npcs use later.

[betamin]

So later in the game its harder to use as a strategy against bosses? I think I reached level 15 the first couple of times I played and beat most bosses abusing stairscumming, if later is much harder/impossible to use this strategy I'll give it a shot again.

[Rectifier]

I'd say from experience ~20-40 is far more dependent on build and player skill, stairscumming becomes less effective if not outright impossible (several times) later.

If you rely on stairscumming because of a lack of knowledge or a poor build, you *will* get destroyed later; and probably haven't learned anything in the process.
Personally I rely on it for early game. Some classes just have such a slow start where unless you get lucky, stairscumming is mandatory. Or maybe I'm trying a joke build and don't want to die before I get the core of it done.

[Frumple]

I'll abuse stairs when I'm up against truly ridiculous odds, such as farportal bosses with 3-5x more talent points used than a similarly leveled player could have -- if the game's going to cheat blatantly, I'm going to return the favor -- or starting a level off (literally) surrounded by a dungeon boss and multiple uniques, and occasionally to speed things along (Re: Weirdling Beast and low (early-game) damage classes). It's abuse, and I call it such, but it certainly makes some frustrating parts of the game easier to bypass.

To be honest, though, I haven't really seen a solution that seems particularly viable. Letting the enemy have a free turn is going to get players instakilled (*band players will well remember opening doors/entering levels and getting breathed on by a hound pack or something), just as preventing the player from leaving a level with stuff within a certain radius would (New player exploring zone, massively dangerous <whatever> ends up genned right beside them. Whoops!). Having the enemy chase you up the stairs would just extend the process to leading th'enemy toward the stairs out of the zone. Healing everything and canceling any timed effects would be almost as abusable as the current system -- it'd still give the player considerable ability to kill off everything but the boss before taking it 1v1, ferex. The list goes on.

It generally seems like such an avoidable thing (unlike vicious bugs and various not-player-controlled balance snafus) to abuse, though, that fixing is kinda' a low priority, especially when fixing it would probably negatively impact the games of non-abusers. The best way to prevent yourself from abusing stairs is to not abuse stairs

[betamin]

Ok guys I'mma try to play this without stairscumming, I got discouraged the first time because I thought that it would always be the same (early or late game), if you can't abuse it at least as much later on it gives me hope.

[Dwarf_Hammer]

Stair-scumming is abusable for almost the entire game. There was a bad player who made it to the final dungeon by scumming constantly. Make traveling between levels cost a turn.

[Rectifier]

Is stair-scumming really more abusable than say, using a teleport rune to escape a fight to heal up? Or any archmage using an aoe+probability travel?

Make all phase door/teleport/probability travel abilities cost a turn. /sarcasm

[Frumple]

Make traveling between levels cost a turn.

Guarantee that no enemy will be generated within LoS of the stairs up and we've got a deal. The biggest issue with adding a time cost to level transition is instagib on entrance. I personally got horrendously effing sick of that with T2.

And yeah, Rec, it is. It's more the full heal/CD thing, which isn't quite as possible with teleport runes, especially with actual happy-to-track-you-across-the-stage bosses. The fact that the enemy doesn't heal (and any status effects don't tick down) is particularly a problem in the current system.

Healing/resetting talent CD and removing timed effects from actors on a level when you leave would probably be the closest I could see to an ideal solution. No chance of instagib and the amount of advantage you get from it wouldn't be quite so excessive. It'd still be abusable (You could pick off an enemy in a crowd, go up, heal, repeat), but not quite as abusable.