A question to darkgod/devs about your vision for insane mode

[grmblfzzz]

First off, I believe roguelikes are the best game genre ever created, and this is by far the best roguelike ever made. Thank you for that! Personally, the aspect that makes roguelikes so appealing is the mind-bending difficulty of them, and insane mode on this game is significantly more difficult than the average roguelike.

I realize that the primary balance concern is centered around normal mode, as that is what the vast majority of your player-base will be exploring. Still, I have a question regarding your vision for insane mode. There are basically two balancing schemes, and I wonder which method is what you are going for:

1) Crawl-esque balancing, where you accept (and perhaps design for) the fact that some classes/races are just radically superior to others. This leads to "easy" characters and "challenge" characters, which has the advantage of further spreading the difficulty possibilities. In relation to this game, this style also has the advantage of making far easier since you can focus on balance in normal mode and just accept that there will be large balance shifts on insane.

2) Standard balancing, where you strive to make each class/race equally viable. This leads to more variety for players playing on different difficulty modes, but is of course vastly harder to accomplish (and perhaps impossible to ever achieve perfect balance).

If #1, excellent work! On insane, there is a definite spread of quality tiers among the races/classes, and personally I find it enjoyable trying to figure out which are good or not. However, if you are going for #2, I have a variety of balance suggestions to address (including ego/talent balances) as I suspect that the game might be nearly impossible for several classes, and almost certainly is for certain race/class combinations. I just want to know whether discussion of these things would be welcome before I go about rambling on about them all. Either way, thanks for the great game (and please don't nerf insane mode)!

[Canderel]

As far as i know the design is #1, however #2 is always great to strive for. So i doubt your words will be wasted as many of the suggestions will be useful for attaining #2 on normal difficulty, where the focus will be.

[Grey]

Suggestions are never wasted :) And whilst the game is definitely in the #1 category, the spread between classes shouldn't be too great. And certainly the game shouldn't be impossible.

Of course Insane Mode is pretty crazy at the moment, and is a low priority for development whilst the main game is still undergoing radical overhauls.