Things I wouldn't miss

[Grey]

This is a kind of negative thread, so I apologise for that in advance. It's about things I wouldn't miss from the game if they disappeared. There's nothing in the game I actively dislike, but there are some elements that don't add anything nice and can interfere with the good stuff. Things I wouldn't miss:

- The Maze dungeon. Top-down mazes are boring. Auto-explore turns it into a long corridor anyway. There enemies are dull too. Might be better with an entirely different layout and some spiced up baddies.
- Gloomy forest. The teleporting plants are kind cool, but the layout isn't fun to explore and the boss isn't very interesting. Might be nicer if the boss actually kept at range, and his powers were centred around shadows and boosting other enemies nearby. Oh, and it desperately needs a tile overhaul - the place is fugly!
- Cursed lumberjack. There's not much challenge and there's no real reward. The whole thing feels a bit pointless beyond the unlock.
- Alchemist quests. I know Sus put a lot of effort into these, but my god they're dull. I don't bother to read the long texts, I always go for the same potions, and I always end up bored/scared of farming adventurer parties and think "screw it" and ignore the quests entirely. I have no suggestions for how to improve it - the whole thing just suffers from bad design and poor integration with the gameplay.
- The ruined dungeon. Boring puzzle that I've done a hundred times. Had to spoil myself when I first did it too. It might actually be more fun if there were no clues and no elements, so it's just a matter of trial and error to find the right sequence. Okay, it would be frustrating as hell, but it would be more challenging than the current system.
- Vaults. Especially ones with traps in them, or diggable walls hidden amongst undiggable walls, or always the same monsters and items in the same places. In a procedural game pre-designed content sticks out like a sore thumb. It probably doesn't help that the same few vaults tend to show up a lot. Oh, and the teleport restrictions are just annoying, though I understand their purpose. Overall I find the rooms and random encounters more fun and varied than the vaults.
- Ardhungol. Even with the recent change the levels are too big and the monsters don't feel challenging beyond their ability to swarm you. Might help if the enemies were more mobile. Where are the leaping death spiders?! Or spiders that lay webs and run away whilst spitting at you (so the webs aren't just a nuisance you find after clearing the area). The place needs some real spice.

Post your own "boring" things here. Remember it ain't about actively hating things (though that's bad too), it's the stuff you just don't find fun. Good content shouldn't be diluted by mediocre content in my opinion. Oh, and feel free to disagree with me :P

[Dekar]

- The Maze dungeon: Improved in b38, still could be made better though. I like the big room in the middle idea to make it visually more unique. Enemies that make use of corridors better would be nice, like ghouls jumping behind you to cut your path off or ranged units that can fire past others.
- Gloomy forest: I like the layout, its a big brawl in the middle with a few clearly seperated rooms to explore, quick to go through.
- Cursed lumberjack: Maybe the level should be increased to level 20-25, as we have enough content for the first 15 levels. That way its more challenging and gives an nice exp boost.
- Alchemist quests: Grab them all after the first dungeon / immediately at character creation and then ignore them most of the time, because they are not worth doing more difficult dungeons first or dieing to adventurers.
- The ruined dungeon: Its probably not possible to create a riddle that challenges you over and over again. Unless its something like a sliding puzzle that can easily be created procedurally.
- Vaults: Optional encounters over the current difficulty that reward us with experience and items, they arent too bad. More vaults for variety wouldn't hurt. And some are just boring, like the forest-treant and the forest-slime vaults. No teleport zones suck and shouldn't exist without ingame reason.
- Ardhungol: Didn't see the recent change yet, but the levels were pretty large.
- Traps: Remove them all, replace them with scripted "vaults" as traps that roll a boulder into a corridor or open secret doors to rooms full of snakes.
- Starter Zones: Getting useful items from killing helpless bosses, making you clear 6-8 dungeons that you would never visit without the boss drops. Getting only a subset of all starter zones would remove the boring grind, but without a balancing of the greater picture it would also reduce character power in the first half of the game.

[bricks]

I agree with every Grey says. I started "forgetting" to do certain quests like Ben (weird location, falls at an odd level/difficulty), alchemist quests (frustrating, boring, rewards range from hard to use to extremely situational), Temporal Rift (first area can be a killzone, final bosses are often extremely difficult to kill due to the wretched lake layout), and the ruined dungeon (tedious, and 1-wide corridors make traps a constant annoyance when you have to run around the map).

I also extremely dislike the difficult unlocks (Marauder and Wildfire/Ice are the worst for me).

[donkatsu]

Agreed with the things Grey mentioned, minus the Heart of Gloom and vaults. I really like the flavor of the gloom forest, and you don't fight masses of cursed/doomed enemies anywhere else, although I agree that tileset looks like it was done by an overexcited child who just got a brand new box of Crayola crayons. Vaults are fun because I like blowing up huge swarms of monsters as a caster, or struggling against a gauntlet of difficult foes as a fighter, and being rewarded with a ton of loot at the end. Plus some of them are really interesting. More variety would be nice, but I think vaults are a good thing.

A couple of other things:
- Most active out-of-combat abilities. Things like Imbue Item are okay because you only do them once in a while, but stuff like Earth Eyes or Summertide Phial are cumbersome because why wouldn't you just map/light up the entire level every time? It's the optimal thing to do but god is it annoying.
- Traps that do tiny amounts of damage over time, for making me do like 3 extra keystrokes just so I can continue autoexplore, even though they're only doing like 5 damage per turn. Not a big deal, but beyond the poison vines in starter dungeons (where they do legit damage), why are they even there?

Notably, one of my formerly biggest peeves, perma-stealthed enemies, have been wonderfully addressed in the newest beta while simultaneously making two previously lackluster inscriptions useful. Go Darkgod!

[jotwebe]

-Maze: I could imagine teleporting enemies to make it more interesting. Ghouls probably won't have leap at the relevant levels, so maybe have a weaker variant that does have guaranteed leap. Considering the lore, some kind of cursed with blindside and maybe one or two more cursed talents would also be great. More temporal horrors. Weaver spiders. Spawn minotaurs with phase door runes
-Vaults: what bothers me most is that those are often lots of little rooms with one enemy in each, so you can fight each of them one-on-one with no distractions. The one with the diggable connected 2-by-2 rooms is the worst, what is even the point of that?
-Gloomy forest: I don't mind the layout either. It's a good representation of a dense forest with clearings and paths between them, and the animals' ranged attacks mean there's a downside to sitting behind a chokepoint and waiting for them to close. The boss could use a bit of spicing up though, that's true. Maybe if he got one point in all the feed talents plus creeping tendrils and would prefer to stay at range (against melee characters)?
-Ardhungol: yeah, less caves, more stuff.
-Ruined Dungeon: I enjoyed solving the riddle the first time. Now it still doesn't really bother me, but it's not much fun anymore, either. Maybe if you have the infinite dungeon achievement, the door to the final room should be openable right away, but will alert the rest of the dungeon to you if you haven't cleared it. But you wouldn't have to do the rigemarole with the orbs anymore.
-Traps: yeah, not fun. At least the damage-dealing ones. I don't mind loose stones and the like, and they're actually fun to use against the enemy.
-Lumberjack: Maybe murdered lumberjacks could rise as ghouls.

Now for some of my own:
-Slazish fens: the brown water tiles could actually do something, like slow (if you're not a naga, snake, or flying). A few animals for variety would be nice, it feels awfully empty with only nagas. Snakes, midges, the occasional ooze.
-Slime tunnels: it goes on and on with little challenge. Maybe there could be slime minibosses? A couple of random low-level talents, nothing over the top, and splitting...

[bricks]

Wait, ghosts are game-enders any more? Sweet.

[Grey]

Some nice ideas in here. I've added some (along with some new ones) to this Google Doc I set up a while back:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... pTmc#gid=0

Feel free to add more stuff to the spreadsheet.

[rjrrt]

- Some areas are still too big with too many levels. Some of this has been fixed, but reknor still has 3 huge levels with no variety and very little threat.

- Damage traps. Pose little threat and stop auto travel.

- Dreadmasters. Producing 1 or 2 dreads is fine, but good lord, I end up with about a dozen floating around when I go through with a bulwark. Frustrating as hell. All the dreads block a path to the dreadmaster, so the dread cycle never ends. End up just skipping the level.

- Escort quests in Dreadfell and recknor. Seemingly always an escort death sentence for melee characters.

- too many orc raiding parties in the east.

[Ignis]

- Old lore. Finding the same lore for every new character quickly gets uninteresting. I know that there is a lore archive in your home but you have to be fairly high level to get there. Maybe place it somewhere else so you can get there quickly?

- Finding the alchemist hidden somewhere in the wilderness. More generally, running around to the towns just to get all the alchemist quests. Maybe place them all in the magic-user town?

- Traps as mentioned above.

[PureQuestion]

Maybe place them all in the magic-user town?

Not everyone is capable of accessing that town.

[Tom]

- Alchemist quests. I know Sus put a lot of effort into these, but my god they're dull. I don't bother to read the long texts, I always go for the same potions, and I always end up bored/scared of farming adventurer parties and think "screw it" and ignore the quests entirely. I have no suggestions for how to improve it - the whole thing just suffers from bad design and poor integration with the gameplay.

A small change to this quest would be to make the monster bit totally random.
Like the first quest in Dwarfheim in ADOM.
You might get a rat, but also a doppelganger king.

Removing the parts from the adventurer parties would also make this task a bit harder.
Still, I like those party hunts.
If the alchemist bodyparts are to be removed, some other 'need' to go after them would be appreciated.
Really, they are sometimes deadly.
And after you did them a few times and 'know' how to deal with them, they still take a life or two from my game.
Perhaps some other solution to them would be possible. Perhaps another 'side quest'.

What strikes me perhaps most about the alchemist tasks is that I always 'wait' until I have the hermit parts.
Then I take him first, as I would hate to loose the +2 Class potion.
Then secondly I do Last Hope for the +2 Generic potion.

If the alchemists did give out random potions, maybe that would make more sense, but I'm not absolutely sure about that.
And would it make the task more fun? Doubtful.
Still, I do not see this as a boring task at all. It is one task I immidiately go for in every game and it is an important task.

[Parcae2]

For me, the three big things are:

1. Starter dungeons
2. Artifacts on the ground
3. Alchemists quests

1. We've been through this in some detail in the other thread. They add a big power boost but my god are they boring. That is not a good combination.

2. It's possible to miss some fixedarts entirely because of not full-clearing levels. In a game where full-clearing levels is often boring and where 80% of your endgame gear will wind up being fixedarts (and the same fixedarts every time, e.g. those +50% spell crit damage gauntlets for mages), this is a problem. The bottom floor of the Ancient Elven Dungeons is particularly bad because it's huge but the other half of that mummy set often drops there. Possible solutions: more artifacts, fewer fixed artifacts, giving fixed artifacts more tradeoffs so that you don't go for the same ones every time, or (my favorite) adding back the "special" level feeling from Angband when there's an artifact on the floor, possibly combining it with a random boss so that you need to decide if it's worth fighting her or ninja'ing the artifact.

3. Others have gone over this problem. They vary from slightly grindy to extremely grindy, depending on how confident you are about your ability to take out adventurer parties. Also, I pick the same rewards every time and 1 in 9 times I will not be able to get both of the good ones (class and generic points), a completely random and permanent hit to some characters' fighting power that often does not become apparent until midgame. Suggestion: alchemist ingredient monsters should be unique (as in the sense of the only monster of that kind, not boss monsters) and should appear randomly after obtaining the quest. Adventurer parties should not drop them, but there should be some way of encouraging players into one or two fights per game with adventurer parties because they're a lot of fun. Rewards should be rebalanced so that they're all more or less equally good (nerfing the class and generic points rewards would help).

[Postman]

Completely agree with Grey.
1. Traps are most annoying, because of autoexplore.
2. Alchemist quests is a chore and adventure party are annoying - they are easy to avoid and there is no point of fighting them other than alchemist quest. Adventure parties could be made interesting with factions system and/or guilds though. For example instead of friendly patrols and hostile adventurers we could have magic parties from Anglowen and antimagic from Zigur. Friendly side could give prizes/benefits for helping in fighting.
3. Starting dungeons should autolevel, but that create problem of too fast leveling, and we return to level cap problem again.
4. Ruined dungeon can benefit from random vaults.
Just my .2 golds

[eliotn]

For traps:
-The problem is that most of them are harmless if you are not in combat. Its that they don't mesh with "rest up to full stats before each fight" gameplay.
-I like the idea of putting them only in rooms. But in a maze or corridor is fine, there just always has to be a way to path around the trap.
-The traps should be designed to only go off if it would be meaningful. How about only enemies can activate traps, or you can if you know where they are. Summoning traps are also a good idea, or traps that debuff the player and summon.

For Alchemist's Quests:
-The components should not be obtainable from a run-of-the-mill monster, but an actual boss or more unique monster, that the alchemist gives hints on where to find. The spawn should be from the beginning of the game, so that the player can pick up the component if they kill the boss before getting the quest. The tooltip on the component can even give a hint of where to turn it in.
-I like the idea of a central location for all of the alchemists, at least for new players.
-Instead of choosing the potion before the quest, why not give the choice after teh quest has been completed?

For Adventurer Parties:
-Adventurer parties should drop more gold, and better equipment (less weapons and armor, with more equipment covering other slots please!), with the occasional chance of an artifact, to reward the player. Remove any Alchemist Quest drop.
-Give the player an achievement for killing X adventurer parties.
-Make the adventurer parties not as aggressive on the world map, and give a tooltip on the adventurers suggesting that they are really strong.
-Give a limit to the amount of adventurer parties, to prevent scumming. I would also suggest this for the other monsters on the world map. If they get killed by a friendly patrol, spawning more is fair game.

[edge2054]

For traps:
-The problem is that most of them are harmless if you are not in combat. Its that they don't mesh with "rest up to full stats before each fight" gameplay.
-I like the idea of putting them only in rooms. But in a maze or corridor is fine, there just always has to be a way to path around the trap.
-The traps should be designed to only go off if it would be meaningful. How about only enemies can activate traps, or you can if you know where they are. Summoning traps are also a good idea, or traps that debuff the player and summon.

I like this philosophy, especially the last part.