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.
