Buff Swamp

[Hellmonk]

Swamp is way too easy compared to shoals and clearly needs a buff. Here are some pro as heck suggestions, courtesy of yours truly.

• More thorn hunters.
• Put spark wasps in the shambling mangrove spawns.
• Give alligators af_cold and rename them (frosty gator? cool croc? blizzard lizard?)
• More common tentacled monstrosity spawns, think similar weight to ghost moths in spider.
• Remove insubstantial wisps. They are boring and annoying and not dangerous. Replace them with death drakes.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to post your own.

[BabyRage]

Tentacled monstrosity in swamp, are you serious?

[Sar]

They already spawn there occasionally.

[Shard1697]

I agree unironically with your last 2 points, especially wrt insubstantial wisps

they're the most annoying monster in the whole game and I would actually prefer miasma spawners over them

[tabstorm]

Tentacled Monstrosities are currently very weak for their spawn depth, they would be fine in Swamp occasionally.

[Sar]

Tmons are scary if you have bad AC.

[Shard1697]

lots of things are scary if you have bad AC

I am more scared of Thorn Hunter on basically any character than Tentacled Monstrosity

[Hellmonk]

To be perfectly clear, I sincerely think swamp could stand for some buffs and my suggestions are only slightly tongue in cheek.

[Sar]

Well tmons are only speed 10 and hunters to that weird thing to you that slows you down (?). I just remember losing like 50-70 HP to a tmons as an octopode once and dying because I wasn't used to them to do so much damage. Then again, octopodes are awful.

[duvessa]

tentacled monstrosity and naga warrior are basically the same monster

[Arrhythmia]

Well tmons are only speed 10 and hunters to that weird thing to you that slows you down (?). I just remember losing like 50-70 HP to a tmons as an octopode once and dying because I wasn't used to them to do so much damage. Then again, octopodes are awful.

mangroves do the weird slowing/EV malus thing. thorn hunters are the roses that make the brambles appear and then fuck you hard with thorns.

[Sar]

Oh right, thorn hunters are dangerous.

[goodcoolguy]

I jump for joy whenever I get swamp. Please keep it easy.

[Dungeoneer]

I jump for joy whenever I get swamp. Please keep it easy.

i agree. not all people are pros and what about new players? in the recent updates the game is getting less and less new player friendly

[dowan]

Moving spark wasps to swamp would make a good deal of sense to me. Makes swamp a little harder, makes spider a little easier. Or have them in spider and swamp if you don't want to make spider easier.

[archaeo]

I jump for joy whenever I get swamp. Please keep it easy.

i agree. not all people are pros and what about new players? in the recent updates the game is getting less and less new player friendly

See, I can get behind goodcoolguy, but I think you're off base, Dungeoneer.

I don't really have a huge problem with the S-branches having variable difficulty. What's the point of having randomized branches if it's basically a cosmetic change? I've had characters where Swamp presented lots of problems, and characters for whom Shoals was a breeze, but sure, most of the time, it's the other way around, and that's cool and fine with me. I don't think it's a great use of designer resources to balance them for balance's sake.

But I think the devs have really only made the game more "new player friendly" since I started playing, and the vast majority of that comes from interface and quality-of-life improvements. I'd say the bigger obstacle for new players remains the huge amount of stuff in the game and the huge spike in complexity from tutorial to hints mode to the full game. Difficulty itself isn't and shouldn't be a big consideration, imo; lots of games have reached way bigger audiences despite being more difficult and unforgiving than Crawl, after all.

[MainiacJoe]

They already spawn there occasionally.

One of my very first characters to make it to Swamp was memorably killed by one.