This Spiral Vault is a Bad Vault

[archaeo]

There's a vault I see fairly often in Dungeon that just has deep water and shallow water in a spiral with a few centaurs in the middle. It doesn't have any loot, and it looks like this in the minimap:

It's not a good vault. It looks like something will be in the middle, but there's nothing except for enemies that can't move through deep water. The obvious solution is to back up and let the centaurs come to you, but I've also noticed that they don't do a great job of pathing through this vault; maybe that was an illusion.

[kuniqs]

There's no justice in this world

[sweetrabies]

Troll vault to help teach players the value of picking fights? I dunno, I'm fine with having some teases that don't lead anywhere.

[chequers]

I think it's an interesting vault and putting some loot in the middle would fix it.

There's a similar vault of centaurs over a river guarding an altar, the vault comments specifically state the shallow water path is designed to make the centaurs unable to path away from the altar.

[byrel]

Couldn't we just use patrol instead? Having a vault designed around exploiting a bug in our AI sounds like a problem, since improving our pathing AI could potentially break the vault.

Also vaults that are best dealt with using exclusions, with no loot to compensate for the risk they add, is probably bad design since it raises up a barrier of entry for new players unnecessarily.

[tasonir]

This vault is fairly easily solved by simply having a ranged attack, but if you are pure melee, it's fairly easy to just sit at max LOS and wait for them to run out of arrows. Centaurs don't have infinite ammo, and if you can't hit things at range at all, you're probably fairly well protected for the area. If they do manage to find a path out then you can keep backing out until they're out of the vault.

It is a bit tedious, but I wouldn't say it's terribly hard. I wouldn't mind loot, but I don't think that vaults really need to spawn loot in most cases.

[dynast]

The vault has no loot + enemies in the vault cannot leave the vault + the best course of action is to ignore the vault. Do the math. Also, as you can see from the screenshot, this vault does a awful job at being placed in the dungeon.

[stoneychips]

Then there's the long rectangle vault full of fire, with a single tengu at the far end and no significant loot... At least, one observer reported stumbling into the exact same thing.

Painless if you have rF+++, but still a great waste of time and dungeon space.

[ZipZipskins]

This vault is fairly easily solved by simply having a ranged attack, but if you are pure melee, it's fairly easy to just sit at max LOS and wait for them to run out of arrows. Centaurs don't have infinite ammo, and if you can't hit things at range at all, you're probably fairly well protected for the area. If they do manage to find a path out then you can keep backing out until they're out of the vault.

It is a bit tedious, but I wouldn't say it's terribly hard. I wouldn't mind loot, but I don't think that vaults really need to spawn loot in most cases.

I think your definition of "a bit" and my definition of "a bit" are two different definitions of "a bit"

[pubby]

[Rast]

The arrows are the loot.

If you aren't using bows, exclude and move on.

[Tranquil Suit]

But I want to kill every single thing.

[Reptisaurus]

I got teleported in the middle of this on, like, level 5 with a wyvern and an orc warrior wandering around and a bunch of hounds blocking me in.

I got saved by a centaur with arrows of dispersal.

That was pretty fun.