A bit frustrated

[Stormlock]

Everyone always says wild infusions solve everything, but they're really quite useless most of the time. If you're stunned, you're probably also poisoned, off balanced, off guarded, slowed and bleeding. The wild infusion will do sweet - all for you in that situation. Unless you get lucky, but if you're relying on luck, you may as well just hope they roll critical misses all game long.

Relying on immunity also doesn't seem to work. You can get immunity to stun... but what about confusion, and disarming and poisons and diseases? And getting immunity requires you to focus your gear so much you'll be wearing even crappier gear than normal. I already have a hard time even finding greens worth wearing for every slot by the time I reach tier 2 dungeons, and I clear EVERYTHING before doing them.

Sustained abilities aren't reliable either because lots of enemies will just turn them off for you, and they have incredibly long cooldowns. Funnily enough, I haven't managed to remove a sustained ability from an enemy once, ever. No idea how they do that shit.

The only thing that seems to matter is saving throws. It's pretty obvious because you can generally steamroll any enemy in the game using status effects on it.... until you find something with high saves. Then you're useless.

Armor is totally worthless. The enemies that do decent amounts of physical damage do it in such massive amounts (100+) that even stacking nothing but the heaviest armor items and skills will get you like 50% resistance at best, and that's for the 5% of enemies that actually do physical damage and not some elemental stuff anyways.

Saving throws and hp are the only things that are ALWAYS useful, and since you're going to lose to your weakest link, not to some average difficulty, it's far better to improve the things that are always useful than anything that is only useful most of the time.

[bricks]

I think there is a newish weapon ego that removes (magical) sustained skills, which changes most casters from 'try to avoid melee' to 'never ever get in melee range.' Plus there's really no good indication that a sustained skill has been removed - the icons aren't visually distinct enough to notice any change in my peripheral vision, and I don't think to check the message log every single turn. If sustained skills are so easily broken, they need to have drastically reduced cooldowns.

But yeah, stun and confusion are still really powerful. Frankly I'm not a big fan of how saves or immunities work.

Edit: Yes, the 'of purging' ego can show up at any level, with a fairly low rarity, and has a 25% chance to remove a magical effect on strike. I added a suggestion to the Ideas forum to make it weaker, and I also made a suggestion that could help make deactivated sustained abilities more obvious.

[lukep]

Everyone always says wild infusions solve everything, but they're really quite useless most of the time. If you're stunned, you're probably also poisoned, off balanced, off guarded, slowed and bleeding. The wild infusion will do sweet - all for you in that situation. Unless you get lucky, but if you're relying on luck, you may as well just hope they roll critical misses all game long.

Multiple status effects is the reason that it is very important to retreat before you absolutely need to. If you are slowed, bleeding, and poisoned, it is a good idea to escape, before you get stunned as well.

Sustained abilities aren't reliable either because lots of enemies will just turn them off for you, and they have incredibly long cooldowns. Funnily enough, I haven't managed to remove a sustained ability from an enemy once, ever. No idea how they do that shit.

There are only a few enemies that can disable sustains, most of them appearing mid-game, and most only affecting spells. Sheild wall/berserk should be safe.

Armor is totally worthless. The enemies that do decent amounts of physical damage do it in such massive amounts (100+) that even stacking nothing but the heaviest armor items and skills will get you like 50% resistance at best, and that's for the 5% of enemies that actually do physical damage and not some elemental stuff anyways.

Armour is more effective against melee/archer enemies than many people think. 100 armour (with 100% hardiness) is enough to make melee orcs completely impotent in the end-game, as armour is applied before many multiplications are applied to damage (eg. up to 1.6x as much randomly, 1.5x as much from crits, double from talents, and more from +damage%).

For example, an armoured skeleton warrior that deals 300 damage on a (non-critical) stunning blow to an unarmoured target would only hit for half as much against a target with 50 armour (50% hardiness). Also, it doesn't matter they type of the damage (fire, physical etc.), it's the source (arrow, projected ball, melee) that matters. Armour still works against (for example) a blazebringer's weapon's damage that is converted into fire, of a Sun Paladin's (light damage) Crusade attack.

[SageAcrin]

Armor is pretty badly flawed without Armor Hardiness backing it up, though, and that's an easy thing to miss if you don't really pay attention.

You can have 150 Armor, but if your Hardiness is only 30%, you'll block a whole 30% of physical attack damage pretty much every time. You can only block as much of the attack as you have Armor Hardiness up to, with Armor, so you want at least 50% to see an impact, and 70%+ if you want to genuinely wall physicals.

[Frumple]

Everyone always says wild infusions solve everything, but they're really quite useless most of the time. [...]

Relying on immunity also doesn't seem to work. You can get immunity to stun... but what about confusion, and disarming and poisons and diseases?

The big thing with immunities isn't to use them to become immune to everything (though some races/classes, ghouls in particular, can give it a good try), but rather to become immune, specifically, to the debuffs that will cause you to die quickly, generally by preventing escape or heavily nerfing offensive or defensive ability. So you aim for stun and confusion immunity, mostly (at least one of which is fairly viable to get by the mid game, possibly both depending on the race/class combo), and then use wild infusions to pick up the slack. Poisons or diseases aren't going to kill you in a turn, so having to use th'infusion multiple times (possibly after the fight's over, to keep the DoT from killing you) isn't a big issue. Combined arms ideology is generally best for avoiding dangerous status effects -- get immunity to key ones, as high of saves as you can manage, and keep an appropriate wild infusion around for effects you know are particularly dangerous for your build.

The other major thing is getting a feel for what is and isn't dangerous. Disarm's a good example -- most of the melee classes can just beat the crap out of most things while disarmed. Gloves/gauntlets are pretty painful and can proc some pretty damaging/impressive stuff, and most of the melee classes either have or can have some sufficiently powerful talents that aren't effected by disarm. Yes, you do tend to lose a lot of damage throughput, but disarm doesn't stop you from hurting things, and you can use that to your advantage. I can't count the number of times my melee characters have just punched armored skeleton warriors to death.

Poisons and diseases are another good example -- in most cases, they're just not going to kill you before you can kill every enemy in sight, so wasting time mid-fight trying to deal with them is just silly. Worrying about them at all is mostly unnecessary, because if they're tilting the battle out of your favor the problem is probably somewhere else; their damage and status effects are simply very, very rarely sufficient to actually turn things against you. There's exceptions, of course, but knowing those and how to cope is part of the game, heh.

If you're still having trouble, you keep an eye out for talents and items that get you out of that trouble. Psychoport, teleport amulets, various shield effects (actual shields have several useful activations!), stuff like that.

Sustained abilities aren't reliable either because lots of enemies will just turn them off for you, and they have incredibly long cooldowns.

There's an obvious answer to this, actually. If they're not reliable, make sure you're not relying on them. If you know they can go down easily, make sure you know how to react when that happens. It doesn't actually happen often (there's only a few enemies that can reliably do so), but sustain heavy classes do have to know how to deal with losing their sustains. Know it's coming and be ready -- escape methods, making sure you're not encumbered if you suddenly lose strength, not relying on sustains for important resists... stuff like that.

Anyway. The big thing to remember is that most problems in T4 really do have solutions. When you're having trouble with particular problems... identify the actual cause of the problem, and then find the solution. It is incredibly easy to walk most classes through everything up to about daikara without really trying, it's just figuring out what let's you do that -- and once you have reached that point, you've got the tools to do everything else... if you're careful, and attentive.

[Stormlock]

Normal poisons aren't so bad, but an insidious poison is basically a death sentence for any character relying on healing. Especially since the enemies that apply it generally do so every single turn and have incredibly high mobility. And I HAVE had my Berserk sustain disabled before. Less common than magical sustains, but it still happens. Good luck having 100% stun immunity (especially midgame) without that.

Also, nobody cares about whether disarming doesn't stop you from killing a vanilla skeleton warrior. That was never going to kill you to begin with. It's should even be on your radar. It's the rare/boss skeleton warrior with gloom or whatever that is going to kill you, and you're not going to be punching him to death, not even close. And if you can't kill him, you're in a shitty position, since wherever you are was obviously your first choice to get stronger. If you can't handle this guy, moving to another dungeon where even stronger enemies are is probably a bad plan.

Another thing: you can be stunned from physical, mental OR magical sources. Even a wild infusion covering 2 out of 3 isn't enough. And those aren't even that common, let alone ones covering everything. I suppose you can try stack one resist and get an infusion for the other two, but that still leaves two problems: it not clearing the right one, and you not finding the right infusion.

[Frumple]

Insidious... even with healing dudes, I have't had much trouble with it. It's a good target for wild infusions, yeah, but you can supplement things with shield runes (/damage shield effects, from a shield activation or talent) or throw on a lil'bit of healmod and just ignore it. Bouncing away until it runs out is always a good option, too. I'm generally more worried about crippling or numbing poisons, but even those tend to be pretty trivial.

As for classed disarmers... yeah, that happens. Incredibly rarely And yeah, I've face-punched those to death with disarmed dudes, too, especially when I've got a nice chunk of extra damage coming from somewhere (the less mundane melee classes are particularly capable in that regard). Unarmed is actually somewhat painful, heh. But yeah, if you can't kill it that way, you back off, heal back up, and re-engage. The AI'll eventually either slip up and not use disarm, or you'll make the save and be fine. Switch tracks a bit can help, too -- frontload some ranged damage (bow/sling, wands/etc., ranged talents -- shouts, whatever -- there's a long list), toss out some summons via choker or eggsac, stuff like that. There's a lot you can do.

As for dungeon swap... if the only sources you've got to swap to are more dangerous than you can handle, something else has gone wrong. If you're on the last dungeon of a particular level/difficulty bracket, you're either overpowered for that dungeon or fully capable of hopping up to the next tier. It... might be different on insane difficulty, but for anything lower than that, it's a rule I haven't seen broken, yet.

Stun's one of those things you immunity your way to, usually, or stack up those saves. Barring that, you keep a movement infusion around, or an unblockable form of escape; usually by the time you're in a position stuns are actually dangerous (90, 95% of the time before around level fifteen, twenty, you can just bull through or kite back for a turn or two, let the effect wear off; other five-ten percent you have to get creative, heh.), you've got some source thereof.

What I'm saying is that, well, there's solutions for the problems you're bringing up. It's mostly just a matter of knowing what to expect and preparing for it, knowing what problems you build has and making sure you can compensate for it. Roguelikes are all about that mitigation, yeah.

That said, if you think there's a problem, keep an eye on it, keep bringing it up, double-check your arguments and make sure you really can't figure out a way around the problem. There's definitely still balance issues in T4 and stuff that can still use some attention. Not so sure this stuff is, but hey, maybe I'm just too used to working around it.

[Keemossi]

I have to agree, stuns and confusions are still somewhat stupid. Early game they're incredibly dangerous (though getting past Daikara and beyond without dying isn't that hard anyway), and somewhere past midgame they cease to exist because 100% immunities from items aren't that hard to get.

I think saving throws could be a bit more useful. I don't want to rely on them, because unless playing a dwarf and specifically stacking saving throws, they're not going to stop status effects when it matters (ie saving throws are less reliable against enemies that probably deal more damage etc anyway). Immunities just plain work, especially when they're at 100%.

[darkgod]

Insidious poison a killer ? it's about 30% or so less healing. It's annoying, it's certainly not a killer .. Now if it was 100% I'd agree.
And which npc can apply it every turn except rogue npcs which are made this way (just like a player rogue can)

[bricks]

Does stun still reduce healing? Tooltip says it does but I don't see it in the code.

[lukep]

Insidious poison a killer ? it's about 30% or so less healing. It's annoying, it's certainly not a killer .. Now if it was 100% I'd agree.
And which npc can apply it every turn except rogue npcs which are made this way (just like a player rogue can)

Enemies with insidious ego'd weapons can apply it every turn, but it is even weaker than normal then (in moist cases), having about 10-20% healing reduction early game.

[SageAcrin]

Insidious almost never bothered me.

I think there's been a couple runs where I noticed it, even one or two I had to take action on, but never, ever a time it cost me a life. Most of the time I just shrug. Same with Deep Wounds. They're Curse of Death's little, annoying brother, and Curse of Death has maybe once ended a life for me on its own, too. (Now, Impending Doom, that's a nasty status.)

There are multiple sources of Stun but Flameshock is still a physical status. I think Stunned by the Gloom is Mental, but it's also three turns long, flat rate odds, and cannot be consistently reapplied by anything.

Disarm's silly. It should be a nasty status(At least, for some classes), but in practice it's so rare that it's not. Goes both ways, the PC doesn't get a really good source of it either. Just as well, resist for it is rare too.

[ohioastro]

The biggest issue for me has always been the uneven difficulty. With most character classes I can simply steamroller normal encounters - until I hit something with a twist. If you're not experienced in the game you can then hit a wall. Right now, for example, I've been running some corruptor characters; this is an extremely powerful offensive class. I've still been thwacked by casters in random adventurer parties and been put in an auto-death Fearscape below level 20 (65 damage per turn, no enemy in sight). I know it's difficult to balance, but I'd be looking for ways to make characters less able to simply become invulnerable to a lot of problems, while at the same time making it at least possible to work around "I'm missing immunity to X, and this opponent casts it without fail every 4th turn". Put another way, there should be some way to be somewhere between "can't be challenged" and "can't win" for most of the game.

[donkatsu]

Another thing: you can be stunned from physical, mental OR magical sources.

It doesn't matter what type the source is, only what type the effect is. Gloom stun is the only non-physical stun that I know of, and that only lasts 3 turns. Similarly, Bane of Confusion is the only non-mental confusion, and that has a confuse rate of only 50%.

[ohioastro]

If it helps the newcomers: the current version of TOME seems uncommonly high on the "frustrating early death" quotient relative to prior versions. In particular, casters seem to be quite deadly, and nasty status effects a lot more common than they were as of a couple of builds ago. There are some positives as well, but I'm finding the game veering more and more into the traditional roguelike "macho tough mode" dead end, with a lot of random and arbitrary deaths. (For the record, I have some game winners under my belt - I'm familiar with how to do well here.)

It used to be a lot less focused on trying to kill off player characters early. The vets here should really start listening to feedback from newer players - the fact that a lot of complaints are coming across the board is a clue that the game is over-tuned at the start. (Granted, some earlier versions let you get to the second part and then hit a wall - but that's a devil of a lot more new-player friendly than what is there now.)