This sort of thing makes the game unbalanced...

[SageAcrin]

[raises hand] Yeah, point of order: I need all my current inscriptions, and I need all the category points I've gotten so far to actually, y'know, unlock talent categories. Where again am I supposed to fit a shielding rune? [And yes, my Alchemist character does fire his shielding rune before opening a vault. That's obvious.]

Heck if I know.

What's your character?

What are your inscriptions? What do you find hard in the game, so that you're certain you need every one of them? Do you have any useful charms that could fill a niche(like Psychoportation), so that you may want to use that over a similar Infusion? Any skills that do the same?

(I sure as heck am never certain exactly what Runes/Infusions I need so that they're a certain lock, and I have over a dozen clears now...or is it around. meh, counting.)

What's your rough build plan? Not necessarily a point by point allocation, but it helps to have at least a little idea of what you want to try out, even if it's as simple as "Let's see how this category works".

Of course, if you were actually interested in help, you...probably would have mentioned some of that, especially seeing as how I detailed that Shielding is not the only answer, already...

Regardless, my best answer with the data given is "No, you probably don't need your category points as much as you think, and a rune/infusion slot is absolutely amazing early, so you should think twice about it anyways.", though there's some exceptions.

In fact, as I also said, there's some class builds that really are not going to have the HP or shields to deal with vaults well at some points in the game. But without any info, I can't help you out at all, regardless.

Don't get me wrong, of course. I complain about Roguelikes all the time when I'm first starting them, but I try to stay self-aware enough to know I'm usually screwing up at least somewhat (at all times, actually, not just when starting...it just gets less later.).

Roguelikes're hard.

[bricks]

One more thought; ToME's out-of-depth monsters might not be as extreme or as common as they could be, but on the flip-side there is very little out-of-depth content that actually benefits the player. I understand why we don't find voratun weapons in Trollmire, but it's a shame that the RNG rarely swings in the player's favor. Picking up an awesome out-of-depth inscription or charm would be really cool, and help make individual runs more memorable. Sometimes it just feels like grind grind grind huge damage burst grind grind grind...

[phantomglider]

There are actually places to get sudden out-of-depth items. I've gotten voratun weapons in the Assassin Tunnels and the Sher'tul Fortress, for example, and snow giant villages in Daikara often drop a stralite randart.

[Zizzo]

Zizzo man, with all due respect especially because I'm familiar with killerrabbits...

KillerBunnies, but we won't sweat the difference.

I remember in bands that once I knew the exact depth I didn't go down below because you had decent chances of ood'ing poison breathing green dragons that would one shot you. You didn't go past that level without *resistance*, and I'm happy that little bit of knowledge has slipped my brain now. To illustrate check out section five here http://www.phial.com/angband/angfaq2.html#5b

And they expect non spoilered players to learn that by experience...

ToME2 is actually a little better about that, at least the way I play it. The cutoff for free action, for instance, is level 10, right where the Barrow Downs end --- and the next closest dungeon after the Downs, both geographically and in difficulty, is Orc Cave, which contains two guaranteed sources of free action (and admittedly requires going below level 10, but the monster mix is such that there's very low risk of needing free action before you get it). I don't remember where the base-resist/poison-resist cutoff is either, but with stuff like Amulets of the Serpents and Elven armors, you'll generally find the resists you need before you get to the point where you need them.

You go on for a bit that you approach vaults with non trivial amounts of detection, +speed equipment, reliable means of escape, reliable detection, and reliable trap removal. That's a non trivial amount of scumming levels to get those things to be prepared for a vault.

? That's not preparation for a vault; that's general preparation. Seriously, how do you survive doing less? (I didn't say "+speed equipment" either; just Potions of Speed, which can generally be had from the Black Market fairly early, or from fountains in the Downs in a pinch.)

And it's not scumming, it's just the way I play: slow and careful, so that by the time you get somewhere tougher, you're strong enough for it. If you know my stuff, you know I routinely walk every step of every level of every dungeon, unless I'm power-diving through it to get somewhere else (or I'm chased off by something really dangerous, but even then, I'll cover all the parts that aren't too close). And yes, that can drive some of my characters spare around mid-Moria or so-

"I hear that!"
"Gee, you don't say..."
"I tend to agree, Chronicler."

(yeah, yeah, keep it down, guys, they're gonna think I'm crazy over here...) But by the time they get to the bottom of Moria, they're ready to deal with pretty much anything they're likely to encounter for a long while, so I consider it time well spent.

How many times with artifacts not preserved did you hit a vault a little less prepared than you wanted when you got that *special* feeling?

Never; I don't play non-preserve, for exactly that reason.

How about with preservation, did you skip a vault?

If I don't think I can take it, sure. (I need to get my T2 DitLs back online, so I could show you some examples...) The key, though, is being able to tell how tough the vault is, so you can judge whether you can take it.

You can't tell me that you hit every vault, every time, with absolute preparation in *bands, unless you were preserving artifacts, and maintaining dungeon layout in levels, and then returning to a given vault when prepared.

Huh? No, I don't use preserve-levels. I didn't even remember you could do that until you mentioned it. If there's some cool artifact in a vault I don't think I can take, I just assume it'll turn up again later (or if I have Flare's ring or the Recall spell or DeathMold powers, I might try a hit-n-run).

On the vaults I do take, though, why wouldn't I take them with every scrap of preparation I can muster? Why would I do a vault if I wasn't at least reasonably sure I was strong enough to survive it?

Now I DO miss detection working in vaults.

Wait, what?! You're saying even if I do manage to get some form of monster detection, I can't use it to see what's in a vault?

I'm still pretty firmly on the side that this was an unusual but acceptable case; you don't approach vaults without preparation unless you accept the risk of death.

And how do you prepare for a vault if you don't know what's in it?

Well, the obvious solution here then is to make vaults a lot harder, so you don't have this expectation in the first place.

(shrug) Go for it. Just let me know when you do it, so I'll know to change my strategy to "Never do vaults".

Obvious but silly. Alchie should be opening vault doors via golem, preferably while the alchie itself is either around a corner (in the direction of the stairs) or a whole room away. But I digress...

Meh, I don't trust the AI with my body for that long, and no way in @#$% am I gonna leave it where I can't see it. I just make sure my golem's right behind me so I can swap him in.

What's your character?

The first eight of these are my current roster. (The rest are dead, which, alas, isn't easy to tell from the character list.)

What are your inscriptions?

Generally some variation of what I start with: regeneration/healing (obviously necessary), wild (for poison/stun/blindness [and confusion/magic if I'm lucky]; obviously necessary), and phase-door/teleportation (escape; obviously necessary). Arcane Blades, of course, have manasurge instead of phase door (necessary until they can get some kind of mana regeneration, and they can cover escape with spells). And my Alchemist really misses that wild infusion, but he's clearly too weak to go without a shielding rune, and he's mana-heavy enough that I don't think he could really safely punt the manasurge rune either. My theory is, if there's some better combination of inscriptions for a character then what they start with, then why do they start with that combination?

Do you have any useful charms that could fill a niche(like Psychoportation), so that you may want to use that over a similar Infusion?

Rarely. Almost never by the time I start needing them (which is very early). And you can only wield one of those at a time, so if I have to swap in a wand of detection or a digger, that leaves me vulnerable for at least the recharge time of the charm even after I swap it back in.

Any skills that do the same?

Depends on the character; but with cooldowns the way they are, I generally need the double coverage anyway.

Now, in fairness, that was kind of an outdated complaint, and I probably should have edited it out before I posted... Tanya has been playing around with a motion infusion recently, and yes, it's very nice. She had spares as a Cornac, though, and her build turned out not to need much unlocked anyway; for everyone else, there's invariably at least one category that I need unlocked as soon as humanly possible. And Wild-Gift/Harmony for double poison coverage is a recent addition to the extremely-high-priority list after getting curb-stomped by the Assassin Lord twice in a row... Which, in most cases, is all my category points used up until at least level 30 --- which, incidentally, none of my characters have reached. Hence my problem.

[Frumple]

Yeah... re: vault golem bombing, you never ever ever open a vault until you've cleared out the rest of the level. With alchies in particular, one of the things I like to do is send the golem in from way out of line of sight of vault, open the door, let the golem aggro, and then swap back into the alchie and use refit/supercharge to make the thing last longer. You can tweak the AI a bit to keep the alchie out of the way, as well -- if the enemy can't get line of sight on you (i.e. you're around a few corners or a room away), they can't target you; if they can't target you, you're pretty much 100% safe.

And if the golem dies, well. The enemy hasn't targeted me. Pop supercharge and send it back in. Rinse, repeat. Thus "golem bomb" -- it's like a nasty little physical damage artillery shot you can lob from half way across the map

Anyway. Yeah, detection won't work from outside vaults... I think it goes the other way, too (or is supposed to, anyway. There may still be exceptions, even beyond the obvious shadow one), so stuff in there can't see you and come out to play. I'm very much unsure but I vaguely remember detection working either once you open the vault or while you're inside of it... not sure, but if not, it probably needs to be suggested at some point.

As for vault preparation in a low information environment... it's mostly just having a failure-proof escape option of some sort, just in case, or a way to poke the vault and see what's in it without getting into danger (Opening the door while under the effective of a movement infusion, facechecking at hyperspeed, moving back out before your limbs get bit off, as an example).

You get a feel for what can come out of particular vaults after a while, as well (Like those circle vaults happily dumping OoD doom-monsters on you), and have a general idea from that what you can expect to see inside one. The massive preparatory setup I vaguely remember from high-risk areas in *bands isn't quite as necessary in T4, since there's few real consumables and kit swap isn't quite as attractive for many classes. Generally just making sure you have the tools you need to deal with anything -- if only to get away -- is sufficient for vaults in the maj'eyal campaign. Occasionally something bites your face off, but eh, that's what adventurer mode is for

Now, Infinite Dungeon? ID, you just don't do vaults. Period. Maybe once you're like level twenty or thirty, but not before then. Not if you want stay alive.

[wobbly]

ToME is lax when it comes to dishing out vicious OoD enemies.

My Summoner who ran into a pack of Luminous frickin' horrors on level 1 of Old Forest would be delighted to hear that. As would my Wyrmic who ran into a Skeleton warrior on level 1 of Trollmire. If they were still alive, that is.

Do you mind me asking how the skeleton warrior killed you? You have a regeneration infusion, a wild infusion, it's no faster then you, it lacks a ranged attack, can't 1 hit you at full life. Short of being unlucky enough to be cornered by 1 playing a frail class, low level skeleton warriors are not dangerous. Was it behind a vault door or just walking around?

[ggian83]

If it only happens once in 1000 vaults, that is normal for a bell curve.
Why are you saying this is wrong?

QFT

[SageAcrin]

My theory is, if there's some better combination of inscriptions for a character then what they start with, then why do they start with that combination?

Because starting infusions and runes are racial, actually. It's a couple of average lowest-common-denominator sets, not optimized ones.

Well and Manasurges for Mana users.

In the same way that your character starts with a few iron basic weapons instead of a perfectly picked to match their class ego weapon set.

Incidentally, Alchemists can get by without, they're pretty low Mana consumption, especially if you're using robes and not armor. I don't say you should, but it's worth a try, especially if you get good Mana regen gear.

And Wild-Gift/Harmony for double poison coverage is a recent addition to the extremely-high-priority list after getting curb-stomped by the Assassin Lord twice in a row...

Easy mistake here. Don't let an outlier dictate your build choices unless there's no other way around it. Assassin Lord is in fact more notable for the large amounts of Darkness damage he does with Shadowstep than his poison, on average, and his poisons have debilitating effects that Waters of Life will not remove(IIRC, at least, I don't think it does anything besides reverse damage.). Your best bet with him is to either approach him early(L10, if you've got a good class for the fight) or later(15 at least) and try to stay out of the wild areas in that middle area between.

Waters of Life isn't bad, but don't rush it just for that reason. There's a few required bosses where specific concerns are worth thinking about(Master and the final fight), though.

For specifics on those characters...

Wyrmic...I don't see what your Wyrmic invested in? Unless you unlocked Harmony, at which point doing Sandworm's Lair and eating the heart gets you an automatic unlock, so that's an easy mistake if you're new enough to the game. Don't unlock Harmony for Wyrmic or Summoner, just get the freebie. (It's not bad in the long run; Harmony is actually sorta worth catpointing, and the bonus is the same either way. But short term, the rune/infusion is better.)

Arcane Blade's one of those exceptions I mentioned, they need category points for skills for a while. Of course, they have a class heal, so ditch your Regeneration for a Shielding and just use Arcane Reconstruction instead. It doesn't matter a huge amount, though, a +2 HP class should usually not get into instant death situations(status deaths that look instant, perhaps, but not true oneshots).

Your Berserker may or may not have gone for an infusion slot before Bloodthirst, and IMO either way is good-Bloodthirst, then two slots, is what I'd suggest for most Berserkers, in any order you feel comfortable with. Simple beast.

Alchemists don't require Fire Alchemy. I would say getting it at L10-while producing a lot of impressive damage-dilutes your less shown-on-paper but overall better bomb huge damage. Bombs have a huge multiplier with capped Explosion Expert and do fairly good damage on base, as long as you keep your gems to the highest tier available. Sure, it's boring, and Alchemists have a lot of Class to spread around, so getting Fire Alchemy eventually is good, but I'd say wait until 20(Or 30, and get Advanced at 20, which is what I'd do.). Having said that, as someone said, Golem should be opening vault doors, so it's not really as big of a worry for them.

Shadowblades are notoriously hard to get off the ground due to a combination of stat spread, skill spread and category point emphasis spread, and make for a hard newbie class in general. Stealth Shadowblades have to put two into Stealth and one into Ambush to be optimal, and need to do it fairly early or else they're trying to get through on half a game. They're one of the "Some classes just have to skip vaults until later" options. Sucks that way, but the payoff lategame is worth it.

Bulwarks don't need Step Up so much that they want it capped instantly. You won't be able to cap it until L18 or so, and the effect on your survival in Sandworm or Nur isn't that high-it's much more of a Daikara/Dreadfell/etc. thing for me. Get a rune/infusion and save your class points until 20 if you really want it capped as soon as possible, then unlock it there-the difference isn't that big. (In fact, your personal Bulwark 1/1/0/0'd the tree by L19. How much of a deal really was it to you?)

Your Archer already spent their first point on a slot, not much to say there.

Your Summoner has unlocked both Advanced and Augmentation, but if you look, the overall impact isn't that great. You have three in Resilience, one in Grand Arrival(the impact from those blasts goes up as well as the radius, with levels), and while you've capped Master Summoner so Advanced was pretty worth it to you, you could have just leveled your summons instead of leveling Resilience, short term. My personal Summoner skipped out on Augmentation until quite late, so I could get an L10 slot-worked out really well.

Now, mind you, these are just suggestions. If you want to keep going with your skill builds, go for it.

But a slot is, and always is, an instant benefit. A category is only as good as what you put into it, and you have to ask yourself "Will this be as good as a shield? A heal? A teleport?" for not only the entire category, but for the foreseeable future with that category. If you're just putting one point into a category for the next ten levels, it needs to be a very useful skill at L1, or it's just a waste.

[Mewtarthio]

Harmony is a nice tree, but for the category point you spend to unlock it, you could have purchased a shielding rune to block the poison/disease damage, a healing/regen infusion to restore your health, or a wild infusion (phys for poison, mag for disease) to cure yourself. Granted, Waters of Life is the best way to deal with situations where you have lots of stacking poisons and diseases effecting you at once (such as the Crypt of Kryl-Feijan), but an infusion slot is generally more useful. If you're just getting Harmony for the Waters of Life, then an infusion slot is a better option. If you're getting Harmony for the Waters of Life and Elemental Harmony and Healing Nexus, then go ahead.

I will note that I never really have a problem overwriting my Alchemists' manasurge runes. A decent investment in Willpower means you never have to worry about running out of juice. Bombs are cheap, mana-wise, and you can always keep some spare mana regen gems on hand if you ever do get low.

[omni]

There are two things from the other side of the argument that I think are worth more consideration.

1. Detection not working until vault doors are opened, and then only working once inside the vault.

I think that could bear some scrutiny over whether this is ideal or not. I'm inclined to think making detection work once the vault is open *period* may be best practice.

2. OoD monster's in vaults don't provide OoD loot. If you have the outside of the bell curve experience, perhaps we should reward the player for it? Although I suppose the opposite situation happens just as often: OoD loot without the OoD monster. Perhaps we should look at tying these things together hand in hand?

As for category points and unlockable talent trees, I'll speak more vague rather than directed at anyone. It's been my experience that by far, by far, the most powerful thing you can do is trade any tree for a category point. Survival always comes first. I can't think of a situation with any character I've gone east with where I wouldn't happily trade in everything but my last tree of offense for one my inscription slot. Inscriptions are survival, plain and simple. That holds true for the late game, and I understand it's more of a balancing act in the beginning while your offense is developing, but it's far far easier to survive the entirety of the game by building survive and outlast rather than kill it quick, before it kills you. With enough inscriptions of appropiate power to your level, you can ignore the overwhelming amount of monsters you encounter as trivial, including vaults. Fire breath wyrm capable of bringing you to 10% life with a breath? Keep it out of melee, hit that heal infusion, hit a movement infusion, kill it with a conjuration wand, and if it's wing buffet starts getting to you hit a regen infusion. That's a fairly valid tactic for an OoD monster that doesn't involve class abilities at all.

I actually dislike that too- I'd much rather throw cat points at cool buttons that make me do cool things rather than one more heal, one more regen. I've ended so many of my games with a double wild cure, regen, heal, shield, shield, and a teleport amulet. I recognize the strength of that, but you know what's cooler than more buttons that do interesting stuff? The satisfaction of trouncing everything you come across.

Anyways, I've easily diverged from the subject. It was about an early game OoD which was really pretty damn uncharacteristic. Step 1, be prepared to run.

[greycat]

2. OoD monster's in vaults don't provide OoD loot. If you have the outside of the bell curve experience, perhaps we should reward the player for it? Although I suppose the opposite situation happens just as often: OoD loot without the OoD monster. Perhaps we should look at tying these things together hand in hand?

That's done on a vault-by-vault basis. If you feel a particular vault is written in a way that is not enjoyable, then maybe you should post a new version of it in the development forum and see if DG will accept it. Ultimately it's his game, so be diplomatic.

[jenx]

Ok, I've run about characters since that last one, all on roguelike, and I still think b42 is unbalanced much more so than previous betas. I've won half a dozen times (not all recorded in vault) in previous betas and got to the East dozens of times. I"ve got all unlocks without cheating except solips.

I mostly play Cursed, and I've run dozens of b42 cursed now, with all sorts of different builds, and I haven't got ONE to the East. And every death is too some crazily overpowered npc that just blasts me off the map. (Lots of my characters don't save properly to the vault, in fact, most of them don't).

For example, my most recent build, a nice lvl 18 Cornac Cursed, enters ruined dungeon, and a rare casts Impending Doom on me. I don't have a magic wild infusion (rarely do at this stage, they are rare) and despite rampage, wild infusion, shield, regen, and healing, I just can't stop the death occuring.

http://te4.org/characters/2460/tome/679 ... fc2abcf270


I've been mind blasted by @#$@# solipstists, pelted to death by superfast archery rares, etc.

It is almost always combinations of 2 or more rares, or rares + nasty traps, etc.

I've tried defensive builds, offensive builds, CON builds, detection and mobility builds, etc. All these combos I could play and win at least get to the East, and often Last Peak with in previous betas.

But now, I am endlessly frustrated by putting lots of effort into characters only to have them summarily smashed.

And they are smashed by npcs that are very hard to counter at the level you meet them.

One person also commented on something else that goes to the heart of the problem of how the game is currently, and that is, that super-powered npcs don't drop superpowered gear. My last character didn't find one teleportation rune, and he was lvl 18, and I didn't visit Shatur or mage town til lvl 18, to improve my chance of finding one. There is I think "drop pollution" as one chatter put it, with so much stuff with so many combos, and lots more artifacts, many of which I still can't use.

So I hope b43 addresses these sorts of issues. There seem to be more posts now about player frustration, more than there used to be:
http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=34407
http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=34761
http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=34658

The only positive I can see is that I'm a much better play now, even though I've won before, because I have had to develop my characters more carefully and pay huge attention to builds etc. But my patience is just about exhausted. I don't find the game nearly as enjoyable as I used to.

[SageAcrin]

I'd place Cursed at the absolute bottom of class tiers, right now.

(I'm kinda okay with this-I'm okay with some classes being worse than others, and thematically it is very fitting for Cursed to be on the low end. But it's still true.)

You sure that's not partially their fault? They have an extremely weak earlygame which was less visible in earlier versions since...well, earlygame was pitifully easy once you got everything down(could take quite a bit, but). Not really, anymore, so the classes with bad earlygames are suffering a lot right now.

[ohioastro]

Yes, I'd take the feedback on the difficulty curve seriously. The forums simply didn't used to have so much frustration, and that is speaking to a real change in the user experience. I think the random rares cause a lot of it, and that it might well be useful to consider making their existence dependent on difficulty level and not have them around on normal difficulty. I know that the vets want the challenge and the spice, but I'd like to see DG able to do something with this game commercially. And you really have to guard against things perceived as unfair at normal difficulty level.

[Roguelike Enthusiast]

Yes, I'd take the feedback on the difficulty curve seriously. The forums simply didn't used to have so much frustration, and that is speaking to a real change in the user experience. I think the random rares cause a lot of it, and that it might well be useful to consider making their existence dependent on difficulty level and not have them around on normal difficulty. I know that the vets want the challenge and the spice, but I'd like to see DG able to do something with this game commercially. And you really have to guard against things perceived as unfair at normal difficulty level.

Welcome to every roguelike ever.