VeryAngryFelid wrote:If ghosts are fixed to be balanced, they are no longer ghosts, just random monsters inspired by ghosts and then they can be generated no matter if some player died on the level or not. Really similar to pan lords.
I don't really understand this. Are you recommending that it should be adjusted such that they should be potentially generated in various other ways...
Or are you saying that's technically the only way to do it? I don't see why the latter should have to be true, actually. Is it "just so" in coder land? I don't know the code that runs the game.
Once again, why current ghosts are different from uniques and cannot be fixed:
1) They can be unkillable. For instance, no monster has AC 30 and 120 HP on Lair 6 and this is typical for a HO in heavy armour. Should I prove that unkillable monsters are bad or do you agree that retreating 50+ tiles to upstairs is not fun?
So what, there is some hard wiring thing that can never be changed so they can not possibly be related to the level? Ghost code is god? (And does this apply to anything else in the game, if so? How much or often?)
2) They cannot use stairs so you can try killing them multiple times with zero chance to die (just retreat upstairs) until you are lucky with damage rolls. I remember games where I killed a ghost from 4th attempt. Why can't they use stairs? Because of previous point: they can be unkillable so not using stairs is a band aid.
I'm curious about this... What of the times when the ghost is patrolling a narrow space you want to move through... If only you could drag the damn thing upstairs and kite it away from your path on a level with more space, so you could go back on down and get moving again?
We don't have to kill
everything in the game in order of appearance every time. (If one believed we did, then for consistency they should probably want most to all uniques just gone too, and probably next every sub-boss after that, and I'm not so sure about going there.) I would modify hellmonk's statement about just not being able to kill stuff... How about just, not being able to "get on" with stuff sometime, as a more important question?
Okay, and I ignored your objection to stair-dancing, because that's become so common in the whole game I don't really know where to begin. (Except that I think "zero chance" can be dubious with the randomness of some movement computations, but it depends on what exactly each character/ghost has sure.)
3) They can have crazy resistances. All ghosts are immune to draining, venom. I remember ghosts with rF++, rC++ and rElec. It's ok for late game monsters but even then crystal guardians have just 42-86 HP.
And this can never ever be tweaked or capped by coders why, again? I'm still missing that info.
I also still say, it isn't all that often that I meet a ghost I have felt there has been nearly
no chance to kill or escape. I do get the hair standing up thing. There are
some that are damn nigh inescapable (just had to disintegrate some spriggan ghost heh), and there are quite a few where it's a darn close fight. But there are almost always some completely regular mobs in these boats, too. Is one or two more in the form of a ghost, occasionally, all that big a deal? Generally though... There is a whole lot to be said for having a balanced character -- carrying missile weapons, not relying on only one elemental school for offense, building some defense any way you can, saving consumables for only the very worst fights like ghosts and ogres/centaurs etc. depending on your particular weaknesses, learning not to use teleport on less extreme cases. Stuff goes a long way. There have been threads about this too, I'm sure.
(I'm not 100% sure if they are
all still immune to venom, could have sworn I poisoned one or two ghosts somewhere somehow -- I'm confused about this honestly as I don't
think it was normally possible, but that's a very minor question compared to the rest.)