Yes, There Will Be Blood! (or, why the game is hard)

[achoice]

The game got much easier - and faster - when I discovered auto-activation.
I always have a shield auto-activate upon sight of enemy.
As mele-dude I often have best attack on auto-activation when adjacent to enemy.
For mele - rush & stun are essential. Keep eye open after gear that lowers cool down of rush.
If possible - get healing light from escort. Good for any character.

[greycat]

If possible - get healing light from escort. Good for any character.

Well, any character that's not Antimagic.

[SageAcrin]

Nature's Touch would be the Antimagic equivalent, there.

I don't think either's "good for any character", but Nature's Touch is good for anyone boosting Mindpower(which is most AM players), and Healing Light for anyone boosting Magic(which is most but not all non-AM players), so it covers most classes anyways.

[Zizzo]

I do think you have a point on both of those alternates, however; This isn't the first time I've heard alternate Daikara referred to as unfair or a deathtrap, and it likely won't be the last-it's very unfriendly to melee-and that Shardskin is also.

*sigh* Y'know, I was planning on giving most of the alternate zone versions a fair chance before deciding whether to block them. At this rate, I'm just gonna have to block them all preemptively, aren't I?

Always have a physical wild infusion ready, if you need to use it than you should seriously consider retreating immediately. But! Don't just automatically use it when you are stunned and especially not for blind.

See, that argument has always bugged me: "Well, duh, you're not supposed to actually use your wild infusion to remove detrimental effects. I mean, honestly, how do you expect to have it available when you need it if you go around using it when you need it?"

That particular nastiness is due to the random "rares" that are pretty much everywhere, and can hit you with pretty much anything.

You want the No Rare Monsters addon. It hasn't been updated in a while, so you'll have to enable it manually in your addons list, but it still works like a charm.

It's still uncommon, since few things have either of those.

Uncommon? It seems to happen to me almost every time I play any of my sustain-using characters. No idea what's doing it, as generally the culprit is long gone before I even realize what's happened.

I'm abandoning a level 16 rogue, for example, because he hasn't found a single movement infusion - in any store, in any drop

(like diseases that do 40 damage per turn for 10 turns, when you haven't seen a magical wild infusion anywhere in the whole game yet)

Hmm, I think I'm going to use these as pretext to go ahead and release this. Doesn't currently cover the movement infusion case, but that would be straightforward to add.

[SageAcrin]

*sigh* Y'know, I was planning on giving most of the alternate zone versions a fair chance before deciding whether to block them. At this rate, I'm just gonna have to block them all preemptively, aren't I?

No, no, you need to get killed by them, so people know to nerf them.

...

Or I guess you can do that if you want.

(Shardskin doesn't need Gravity Well, having just fought him. I'm fairly sure that's the majority of the problem people are having. Alt Daikara is just weird and needs to not always drop the rocks on you. Both are easy fixes.)

See, that argument has always bugged me: "Well, duh, you're not supposed to actually use your wild infusion to remove detrimental effects. I mean, honestly, how do you expect to have it available when you need it if you go around using it when you need it?"

Risk assessment is a weird thing in any roguelike. In ToME, it's weirder, because so much of the game is based on constant time pressure, rather than resource pressure.

In most Roguelikes, resource pressure gets you into the habit of questioning using resources instantly. But if you don't use resources at all, you die; Many people never quite get over this and just die a lot.

ToME's setup is something I generally prefer, but it produces an opposite effect in people; The illusion that, since all that is limiting your skills is time, they'll always be there. It's not actually true, and sometimes waiting out a weaker status is much better than using your Wild instantly.

If someone Confuses you from 10 squares away, for five turns, does it matter? It does if they can close the distance, or if they have ranged attacks. If they lack either...it doesn't matter much unless someone else can. Just sit there and wait a bit. Wasted confusion! Didn't need to use your Wild. Many times, you can duck around a corner and wait off ranged status.

Other times, you'll generally want to heal a status off fairly fast-Stuns at close range, for instance. In some cases, not healing it off instantly can be more damaging-Skeleton Master Archers love to lead off with Pinning Shot, then Crippling Shot, and if you don't heal off the former fast, you may catch the slow instead of the pin with your Wild, which means you can't duck behind a corner.

In both the case of resource based, and of cooldown based, gameplay, you need to do a risk/reward assessment of lots of things you do. Status curing is not different.

[BoomFrog]

See, that argument has always bugged me: "Well, duh, you're not supposed to actually use your wild infusion to remove detrimental effects. I mean, honestly, how do you expect to have it available when you need it if you go around using it when you need it?"

I'm saying you need to reevaluate your definition of need. You should save a wild infusion for when you need it and you only need it when not using it will kill you which is hopefully a rare situations already. If you are playing well you will have a wild infusion that you almost never use. It's literally only for emergencies.

[Zizzo]

I'm saying you need to reevaluate your definition of need. You should save a wild infusion for when you need it and you only need it when not using it will kill you which is hopefully a rare situations already. If you are playing well you will have a wild infusion that you almost never use. It's literally only for emergencies.

I have an extremely high risk aversion. If I can't see what's attacking me (or what might be attacking me), that's an emergency. If I can't act reliably, that's an emergency.

[sehnsucht]

I think you've combined two alternate dungeons here. >_>

Meteors in Daikara are even more dangerous. There're many boulder throwers and thunderers.

The new T1-T2 dungeon are much more difficult than original ones. Especially maze and old forest. I lost a stone warden few days ago in the maze, Horned horror and 3 luminous horrors. Lighting rune and searing lightX3, killed my 600 hp instantly. As for the new old forest, Shardroot is more powerful than Snaproot, it is a fxxking corruptor.

I appreciate the "random event" idea, but it needs to be re-balanced. In tome 4, your choices are limited. You need to clear all the dungeons to level up and gear up. so at least you'll need 1-2 easier dungeons.

[Strongpoint]

I fail to see how skipping dungeon or two is fatal for any character
If the alternative version is too dangerous for your build - skip it

[Atarlost]

I fail to see how skipping dungeon or two is fatal for any character
If the alternative version is too dangerous for your build - skip it

A fragile build that doesn't get the summertide phial or start with cunning/survival unlocked to start may have to skip both of the unlit second starters, the maze, and the sandworm lair because of ranged enemies that don't carry lamps. Having to skip the old forest as well is pretty much game over and fewer chances to either get enough rogue escorts to get adequate infravision (you need 7 or 8 against skeleton archers and 10 against skeleton mages if you aren't in a situation where they can only be in one direction) or the one early source of radius 10 light. If infra stacked with the talent the wintertide phial would also work, but sadly it doesn't. Possibly the archmage talent can also be leveled high enough soon enough, but I haven't played one lately and the phials used to be a lot more common I think.

The sandworm lair just flat out needs a big light radius and having to skip so many dungeons means you probably don't have that.

[Hunter]

One issue that I think doesn't get as much discussion as it should is the relative merits of defensive skills/stats vs offensive ones. In my opinion, defensive abilities don't really scale very well in comparison to offensive ones. Defense, armor, and saving throws are all somewhat effective, to be sure, but it's a bit troubling when most of my best characters have learned to emphasize resists and shielding runes/auto-activated regen infusions over armor, defense, or saving throw modifiers. Even things that are only indirectly defensive are frequently more effective...for instance, given my druthers between a plus 100 physical save boots and +20% movement speed boots, I'll take the latter every time. I find it more effective to weave in and out of the fray than hope the combined sword blows don't cut me to shreds because of my armor and saves. I honestly think this is a factor in making the melee classes less capable than ranged attackers. They have potent offenses, of course, but they have limited means of closing the distance to use them, and scaling enemy offenses that overpower the carefully built-up defensive numbers often make it extremely dangerous to try to approach foes. Usually, the only reason I even bother maxing out my Armor training even when playing a character wearing heavy armor is because I have points to spare and nothing particularly better to do with them

Granted, as I said, there are ad hoc ways around this. Shielding runes, of course, and, depending on class/race, Evasion or the like. But once you've put your Rush or Shadowstep or controlled phase door on cooldown, you're going to be left extremely vulnerable if there are other enemies around. The ad hoc abilities work, of course, but it feels like the basic (non-activation) abilities should be a bit more effective in contrast to the offensive abilities available to give melee characters more substance. Playing a tank or a dodgin' fool just isn't particularly viable in the long run.

[supermini]

I don't really agree with your assessment. Armour, saves and defense can't be lumped together in the same statement, and overall they work fine - on normal difficulty.

Armour is the bread and butter of any melee character. Even on defense tanks like the brawler (if you play them that way, that is) you want to have a decent hardiness/armour rating so that blows that go through don't cut you to shreds. Armour training is superior to mobile defense (we'll get to defense and its issues in a minute) when it comes to pure damage mitigation, it gives you armour, hardiness, and crit reduction. It is a very worthwhile skill to max.

However, armour is not invulnerability. You can't stand in the melee range of 3 armoured skeleton warriors and expect to survive easily. You hit the nail on the head when you said that melee is harder than ranged, and one of the reasons is that positioning is much more important. With something like the alchemist you can just let golem tank, AOE everything that comes in range, and because your bombs don't hurt you it doesn't matter much where you stand. If you play something like a marauder how you position yourself in a fight is paramount to your survival.

Defense is a weird stat. To get anything out of it, you need a decent amount. When it works, it is strictly better than armour in the sense that besides mitigation it protects from status effects - a stunning blow fully mitigated by armour will still stun you, while if you dodge it, it won't. However, its main weakness is that it is binary - some amount of armour will always help mitigate damage, defense either works or it doesn't. If you become over-reliant on defense and neglect armour, you will get a nasty surprise the first time you meet a rare or a boss with high accuracy. 60 or so defense is the cutoff point for me after which it doesn't really pay off to increase defense further. It protects well enough vs most normal mobs and more won't help against ** accuracy randbosses. This binary nature (weakness), compounded by the fact that heavy armour egos are better, artifact heavy armours are (mostly) better and more easily found, and that armour training gives you tons of +armour means that a lot of players play light-armour toons (marauders, brawlers) in heavy armour. I have cleared both of those wearing light armour on roguelike and I can't say that I disagree with the conclusion that heavy armour is simply better for melee most of the time.

Now we come to saves. Unless you are playing a class that has built in immunities bonuses, stacking saves early is much easier than stacking immunities, because +immunity gear doesn't show up as much in the early game. Saves are extremely powerful if you stack enough of them - and if you play a race with save bonuses like dwarf or thalore, chances are that you will stack enough of it to make a difference.

This post is long enough as is (I could talk about this whole day!), but I want to focus on one sentence at the end of your post.

Playing a tank or a dodgin' fool just isn't particularly viable in the long run.

This always annoys me. This: http://goo.gl/z95G7 is the list of clears for the game. As you can see, there are plenty tanks and dodging fools in there.

If you want to get better at it you need to accept that you are not playing good enough, and if you don't find it viable, you are doing something wrong. This is not elitism - ToME is a tactical roguelike where simply reading a wiki won't help that much ("you must wear a red scarf or this monster will eat you"). It is easy to get into, difficult to master. Find where you are making mistakes in your play and correct them. Ask for advice on the chat, look through forums for strategies, watch lets plays - or just try over and over again and learn by trial and error. If you prefer talking to one person to a crowd of people, feel free to whisper me in game. I'm far from the best player there is, but I'm always available for a chat.

[Hunter]

You can disagree with my assessment all you want, supermini. You can also read closely and note that I'm speaking from personal opinion and experience.

Yes, these are bread-and-butter for the classes. At no point did I deny this. If you were paying attention, you'll note that my primary objection is that they're not quite as effective as offensive skills and the scaling of the same. I then went on to note alternatives I found more effective to develop/concentrate on. I did enjoy your thorough analysis of the abilities/stats that not only didn't really disagree with my points, it didn't even address them. I'm sure you had lots of fun writing it, but you should probably start a new thread if you want to discuss something different...or at least not reply to me for no obvious reason.

Now, as for me not "playing good enough" (you need to work on adverbs)...don't be a dick. I've been playing ToME since it was Pern, and I've had quite a few winners on the current form of the game. If you can't come up with a better retort than that, just be quiet until you can put more thought into your reply rather than immediately jumping on the "LOLNOOB!" sort of debate. So, no, based on your reply here, I wouldn't even consider hailing you to chat. Capisce? Thanks in advance for your willingness to behave intelligently.

[SageAcrin]

Lemme tell you a little story.

I had an Archer recently clear.

They did 1500 with Scattering Shot when they shot other people.

They did 250 with Scattering Shot when they hit themselves by accident. They reduced damage that much, to physicals.

My current character has never used status resists, in favor of using saves(I mean, outside of capping the Oozemancer class status resist, because why wouldn't I do that? It's good.). This is normal for me. I get stunned once in a while, I admit, but what else is Relentless Pursuit for?

My Nightmare character relied on sub-1000 damage usually and had something along the lines of ten barriers, Ghoul HP, high resists, etc., and that's only due to Nightmare statistics skewing flat rate subtractive defenses due to enemies having way higher stats; I would have probably invested in Blur Sight had I been on Normal(and I did, on my Normal run Archmage).

I think Supermini's right. You just don't grasp defensive play's intermesh. Resistances, armor, defense, regeneration and healing, barriers, even some more exotic skills...they all combine in ways that require playing a general defensive game, rather than just plunking down one skill here or there and expecting it to work. (Resistances are the most important part of the defensive game, but armor and defense are both competent on Normal-there are actual specific Defense breakpoints I go for at various points in the game in order to make it work out for me.)

There's no "I have Shield Wall! I'm totally invincible to all damage now!" type skills. If you have Shield Wall, that means you need to work on your elemental resists-you can somewhat lighten up on your armor and defense. If you are a Berserker, your gamebest HP means that resists are a little less important, but anyone at melee range needs to be disabled or killed fast, or you need to put some work into your armor(L5 Armor Training, keeping an eye out for high armor equipment, etc.).

Basically, you have to constantly play to the defensive game. You have to make notable offensive sacrifices for it, and you can't expect it to nullify everything-sometimes an enemy will need to be escaped from no matter what.

I've had quite a few winners on the current form of the game.

Looks like three, two Alchemists and an Oozemancer. Sounds like you're mostly good with pet classes based on this, to be honest.

People really need to make their accounts private, if they don't want people checking stuff like this, incidentally.

But I'm not sure why you're so vague about this anyways; If you were good at clearing tanks, you'd have cleared a tank.

I tossed the relative win rates up on the first page; It's not just you that has problems with tanks, obviously, or this conversation would have never happened and I would have never needed to toss up those figures. But the win rates relative to the class' popularity suggests that people clear 'em just fine and that there's at least something going for them, and I'd definitely say it's their raw defensive power.

Edit:

As a note, I don't see why you seem to have gotten upset over this assertion.

ToME does a really great job of differentiation of classes. The flipside of that is, they play really differently. There's nothing "scrubby" or "noob" about not understanding one playstyle-in many ways, it can be similar to learning the entire game over.

There's nothing shameful about not being good at a new class in ToME, even if you've cleared before, the moment you pick said class up.

[Hunter]

Lemme tell you a little story.

I've had quite a few winners on the current form of the game.

Looks like three, two Alchemists and an Oozemancer. Sounds like you're mostly good with pet classes based on this, to be honest.

People really need to make their accounts private, if they don't want people checking stuff like this, incidentally.

ToME really should make playing on-line mandatory if they want all winners to show up in a player's vault, especially for those of us who tend to play in places where we don't want to be hooked up, incidentally. I assume you understood that was very much a possible explanation rather than me lying. You did realize that, right? Hmmm? I prefer to play off-line and frequently go for weeks without logging in.

Your buddy decided to tell me I needed to learn how to play and acted as though I was being personally offensive to him by offering my opinion here. Sorry if you don't get that he was being a jackass about it, especially since neither you nor him have actually addressed what I was actually saying. I wasn't rude or excessively critical in my original comment. I was offering my thoughts on the game and the nature of how well these abilities stack against their offensive counterparts. His idea of replying was telling me I just didn't understand the nature of the game and being a prick. Had he simply explained why he disagreed, there would be no contention (though it would have been nice to address what I actually said more directly.) Instead, he decided to go Internet trollboy and add his thoughts on my ability to play despite knowing nothing about them. And now you're essentially telling me the same thing, though being (if only slightly) less prickish about it. Other than jumping to his defense, of course, and implying that I was lying despite there being an extremely obvious reason why checking my vault wouldn't give you all the information you need.