![]() ![]() This way you can actually strategically use your HP as currency in a drawn out fight and feel nice and skilled when you come out of it victorious. If someone were to respond that they like the long dungeon, then simply cut down the hit dice of enemy attacks, and remove easily accessible sources of healing. So, how can this be fixed? One of my suggestions has already been implemented I believe in the Sil variant, which is just chop the dungeon down to size. A ton of fights are just waiting for the monster to do a melee attack instead of a breath attack so that you can spend a turn attacking instead of healing. ![]() It's a stressful game play loop, because unless I want to burn right through all of my *healing* and life, I'm constantly gambling in healing not hitting the 5% fail chance and the monsters slicing through the rest of my hp. Morgoth was the same way, after I used the paladin capstone ability single combat to put him into a 3x3 cage fight from which only the victor may emerge. If(highest roll of their most powerful attack > Current HP) As a dwarf paladin, my endgame fights against uniques went like this. The heal spell is the broken solution to the broken enemies. As a paladin, or priest, you have access to an ability that negates almost all of that - the heal spell. In order to maintain a linear difficulty curve to D100, the dungeon generates more dangerous enemies, enemies with a ridiculous variety of deadly abilities and breaths. (I got pretty lucky with speed drops, so never fault like I had to do this.) Not having X speed by X depth feels awful, and usually will compel the player to grind for more speed. Speed is basically a flat multiplier to character strength, and too important in my opinion. The game itself tried to have a linear, increasing slope of difficulty as you dive down the floors to D:100, but your character has long ago left behind their linear power curve, hitting a pretty strong asymptote. The problem is, and this might be obvious by now, you've still got 60 - 70 floors to go! From here, the power increases are largely marginal, compared to how quickly a new PC bulks up in the early and mid game. The average character skyrockets in power from CL1 to CL40, and as they start to max out their stats at about D30 - D40. Moving on! The biggest flaw I think Angband has rn, and sadly this is not a flaw that is easily fixed, is its way way overextended endgame. Kudos to vanilla for only having 1 level of ID however, and the rune system IS pretty innovative! Strangely enough, the variants seem to have the "Suffer as I have" attitude more than vanilla, which I guess is what caused them to fork out in the first place? At this point, every character has enough gold to sell that item and buy it back from any shop in town, so why waste the player's time needlessly. The ID game in general CAN be fun and challenging early on, but once you hit CL 40, everything should be fully ID'd. I realize that spoil lore is an option, but the fact that it is not set as the default is pretty telling. I've seen this in other games such as Old School Runescape, where veteran players flag down any updates that might be perceived as making the game "easier" when in reality they make the game better. I think the Angband community (and I realize that coming from an outsider this might make me sound like a prick) has a severe case of "I had to endure this dreadful mechanic to win, so you have to as well!". I think that saved my hide a couple of times. I made heavy use of for my run, as I value my time. Dying to Morgoth because you didn't know he drains stats/casts 600 damage mana storms only to have the "silver lining" of having that knowledge for your next character just seems unusual and cruel. He's probably the most important enemy in the game to have full and complete info of. To me, having stacking lore only makes sense in a game that doesn't have permadeath. The ID/Lore thing is kind of interesting to me, as it's been a long standing issue from what I've seen. This does not mean I don't like Angband, in fact I really enjoyed it! It is a heavily flawed game however. Reader beware, I'm a fairly critical player and enjoy picking apart games for their flaws. I did miss the wide variety of races, classes, and pets, but vanilla is probably a bit more balanced as a result. a lot of the criticisms I had for the variant I tried (PosChengBand) still stand for Vanilla. If some of you saw my first post and are thinking, wow, that was fast, do recall that I've been playing DCSS for probably about 7-8 years now and have ~70 wins in it? (Average wins take about 3 hours for a relatively fast game.) ![]()
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