No more Ghoul Fighters for me....

[Gwai]

Well, as long as you report it ...

But where's the fun in that bug anyway. I want to escape just for the having done it!

[Elliott]

RAWR! Finally got an undead character out of the starting area legitimately. Skeleton archer who found an ash bow of might right away and got a couple lucky creations of ego ash arrows. Didn't do anything tricky, though I've definitely gotten better at entering rooms carefully.

Was just shy of level 6 when he left the starting dungeon.

[Repton]

Just made it out on my second attempt with a skeleton fighter.

Starting the game with a flaming iron long sword of massacre may have helped, though

The start text should probably be changed, though. It still says "You have arrived at Rhudaur ...", which is not really true. Maybe a message box when you leave the paths? "Now that you have escaped, you must seek your fortune. Perhaps trolls still linger in the trollshaws to the north [1], or you could dare the tunnels beneath Amon Sul?"

[1] Maybe you should start near the paths of the dead, in the south?

[darkgod]

Well then maybe it's not such a horrible place to start in, it's a challenge for a powerful race
I'll still tweak it a bit as there are some unintended side effects of reversing the level scale

[Fela]

Ok, now let's not encourage bug exploiting

Playing an Archmage is an exploit per se, so piling on top of that won't matter much

[darkgod]

Pfft !

[Zonk]

Pretty hard area, but...I love the idea.

Sorta related: I think that Undead races should have some blight/disease resistance - it's weird to see your skeleton take full damage from blight and get 'rotting disease'from a ghoul(I guess it's the bones that rot but still..)

[PowerWyrm]

Path of the dead is fun... there is still room for improvement though:
- change the starting text (meaningless)
- give starting area quest when out of the dungeon (otherwise you don't have clues about what to do in Trollshaws/Amon Sul)
- make the zone a one-level dungeon (pointless to fight level 20 armored sketelon fighters on the first level and level 1 giant white mice on the last level)

[Gwai]

Having now walked a mage out of the path of the dead, I can confirm that I definitely found the starting monsters (on lvl much harder than the admittedly larger ones on lvl 1. No matter how big it is, a mouse is a mouse, but a skeleton mage has a ranged attack even when it's level 1.

[paboperfecto]

Just got a skeleton summoner out of the paths, it was quite fun. I got worried when my first kill (that wasn't the necromancer) dropped a glowing phial but the RNG let me get out okay still. Almost lost it to a group of worms that were replicating faster than my fire imp could knock them off.

First step out of the paths and I got the lost merchant quest (would have been nice to ID some scrolls first). I tried accepting the thieves offer but he kept talking to me after I accepted every step so I finally attacked him to end his annoyingness. This put two stairs on the level.

First level of the old forest has been good to me, a canine nest and a nasty vault with four honey trees (well, would have been nasty if I couldn't attack with my imps from around the corner).

[mirrizin]

Alone in a cold room, I woke up. There was this weird cloaked guy in front of me, babbling something about how I was supposed to stay here for the rest of eternity...something about atoning for my crimes...I thought "screw this" and told him so. He blasted me with acid. I stabbed him with two daggers, and missed. I kicked him in the groin. He doubled over. I stabbed him. I stabbed him again. And again. And again. The screeching violins in my head didn't stop, so I stabbed him again until he was...well, I'm not sure, but he wasn't there anymore, just this cloak. I took the cloak as memento.

"OK," I thought. "Now what..." I saw some double doors and passed through hell.

Sneaking stealthily through the tunnels, I'd come across these other skeletons. Some had bows. Some had swords. A few slung spells. By a lifetime of training, I knew to hide and only hit when the odds were enormously stacked in my favor. Then I struck. And again! And again! And again! Rinse and repeat. Especially be wary of the crimson ones with their dread purple spells. Eventually I found the stairs, and went up. And there were some other stairs...somewhere else...

Once i encountered this weird half-dead thing with a lean and hungry look. He smelled funny. I stabbed him, again and again and...well, you get the idea. Cue the violence.

At one point, there was this great massive pile of bones, but I was just about worn out from repeatedly stabbing this smaller bone pile. So I teleported away, using a trick an old master had taught me. But he followed! And I was still tired, so exerting my final effort I simply flailed my blades at the thing as fast and hard as I could. And then...

He kept coming! AUUUUGHGHGHGHGH! RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!

Yep, I ran down the double hallway into a big room, and...RATS! RATS! TOO MANY RATS! RUN AWAY! Oh wait, STAIRS!!! I scrambled up those things as fast as I could, mere inches ahead of the moving bone-mountain, and found myself, in an existential sense...

Here. The first skeleton shadow blade to walk the earth. Alive.

Well, sort of...

[mirrizin]

Well, some observations.

And Gwai says I can put this info in because the balance of the game is being changed, as darkgod as said .

First, that's freakishly hard. I was convinced from the start that it was technically doable, but that a certain extent depended on luck. An aggravating number of my initial shadowblades were killed by the wizard dude before even getting into the dungeon. With luck, you have to play perfectly for the first three or four levels. Any mistake will kill you because all of the skeletons have the potential to kill you in one shot, especially the mages. Getting caught between a mage and an archer is guaranteed death. And avoiding that situation is largely a matter of luck, though with skill you can minimize the odds.

Honestly, I kind of enjoyed the ridiculously insane challenge of it (aside from a few infuriating moments...the one that got caught between a mage and an archer happened to find a special artifact ring with a name that sounds vaguely like a sesame street character on the first skellie he dropped.)

If I were to fix the thing in a big way, give some cure disease and also make it more of a running game. Part of me actually likes the fact that the early parts are such that you almost can't fight your way out. If there were a way to make the sneakiness aspect of it more apparent (which it is,) and not quite as impossible to do, it'd be fun. It's been a while since i played a game where the PC is actually weaker than the monsters. There is something fun about that. It makes you concentrate in a way that nothing else has (possibly excluding a certain location on another continent where I lost my most successful archmage.) The paranoia is exciting.

So, yeah, Boo yah. Getting there was a royal pain, but I must admit that it was fun.

Of course, it's easy to say that when you get your first skelly char loose. I'd definitely say something different before, and likely will if I lose this one (christened sneakybones) someplace less interesting like the Old Forest.

[paboperfecto]

Dang you.....

Got up to level four of the undead paths with a skeleton fighter, cleared the level because I was getting strong enough to except that there was a vault sitting right in the middle of the floor. I couldn't just leave and head on up. Some overpowered skeleton warrior in the vault resisted my stun, stunned me and then...goodnight!

[Shoob]

hehehe, yeah, vaults are still way OOD, monsters are generally lvl 18+ (normally 20-25)

but still it is possible to clear all the vaults

[Elliott]

Vaults have become my bete noir. They just sit there innocently, all full of xp and loot, gazing at me seductively. Even when I KNOW the character is going to die (That vault has 9 leveled rattlesnakes in it and my Arcane Blade is level 1 with no movement abilities and is on Trollshaws(1). If he opens the door, he not only can't kill them, he doesn't even have any hope of getting away) its really hard to resist the call. "Maybe he'll get lucky and kill them all! That's got to be like 2 levels of xp for a level 1 character!" Hope triumphs over experience, leading my character, lemming-like, to his his death. Again.