Dealing With Shining Eyes


Ask fellow adventurers how to stay alive in the deep, dark, dangerous dungeon below, or share your own accumulated wisdom.

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Post Thursday, 24th November 2016, 23:51

Dealing With Shining Eyes

I have just killed TRJ. I got mutated a lot in the process. However, I had MR +++++. Is there no intrinsic defence at all against mutations, aside from undeath or being a halfling?
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Post Thursday, 24th November 2016, 23:56

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

No.

There's having a lot of mutations already, warlock's mirror, summons, ranged damage, Zin...

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Post Thursday, 24th November 2016, 23:56

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

Don't give LOS. Use summon butterflies or sticks to snakes (latter is better).
After blocking their LOS, use smiting-type attacks. Airstrike, Beogh's smiting, PProj+silver javelins, ...

warlock's mirror is *NOT* reliable, as their ability only triggers when they 'block' beams with SH,
and the SH is pretty low as the mirror is based on buckler.
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Post Friday, 25th November 2016, 06:12

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

After spectating Yermak on Zot 5 I believe Lightning Spire + Portal Projectile is the best.
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Post Friday, 25th November 2016, 12:05

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

If you have access neither to Lightning Spire nor any other summoning, you can always use a slime creature as a shield.
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Post Monday, 28th November 2016, 04:41

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

Good stealth helps with not getting mutated when you enter LOS.

After that lightning is very good because it is immobile. It won't move on its own.
Any other monster works, too.
It can be your summons or charmed/enslaved ones.
If that is not possible: use ranged weapons (good skill) or close the distance in one go CBlink/Lesser Beckoning/Hepl.transfer/.. to minimize the time spent in their LOS

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Post Monday, 28th November 2016, 09:12

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

well that monsters is brainless, it won't follow to easily.
Since it flies airstrikes works well.
silver weapons work well.
it has 1 EV, bolt of innacuracy works.

The skill is line of sight so the best option is butterflies or stationary summons.
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Barkeep

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Post Monday, 28th November 2016, 18:18

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

There's also "don't stress too much about mutations, drink cmut when you get bad ones" which is pretty viable for most games nowadays.
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Post Monday, 28th November 2016, 18:40

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

njvack wrote:There's also "don't stress too much about mutations, drink cmut when you get bad ones" which is pretty viable for most games nowadays.


It works indeed, though in a very sad way IMHO. Previously you might choose to make your characters tactically weaker by wearing rMut, now the new mutation system just costs you some specific potions which don't even have any other use.

I kind of expected Sar to thank your message since he would like to get item destruction back as far as I know ;)
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Post Monday, 28th November 2016, 21:41

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

Mutations are in a weird space, design-wise. They're meant to be a threat (malmutators) but also good (benemut) and generally don't have a large effect on a character, except when they have a huge effect. And demonspawn automatically get some, which ostensibly use the same system except they work in a completely different way. And there are temporary mutations, which have the same effects as random mutations but different acquisition and removal mechanics. And there are multiple levels of many of them, but you're very unlikely to see the top levels unless they're demonspawn mutations. I'm not sure if mutations are something you're supposed to be able to cultivate, or if they're intended to be really random and kind of unavoidable, or what.

And I guess there's kind of a "press your luck" system on characters who have good and bad mutations which is kind of interesting.

But yeah, right now cMut (and rMut before it) is mostly kind of a license to be tactically lazy around malmutators, which is not particularly compelling. I don't think that "rMut was very good; it's not like most amulets were tactically awesome. For me, the most interesting question would generally boil down to "am I annoyed enough avoiding LOS with mutators for me to throw away Faith?" I guess maybe I'd swap rMut and rCorr in Slime, or very rarely Spirit or something.
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Post Tuesday, 29th November 2016, 06:31

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

Have !cmut or 1 shot them with chain lightning / iron rod

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Post Tuesday, 29th November 2016, 16:19

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

There used to be an amulet of resist mutaton which was removed.

There are currently for purely passive resistance/mitigation:

1) Being Zin, piety based up to 100%
2) Having rMut mutation, Halflings have rank 1 (66% resistance)
3) a couple of artifacts you are rather unlikely to find
4) being undead makes you get temp stat loss instead. Sadly removing the rMut amulet made Necromutation even more of a one stop solution for extended.

From an active/tactical standpoints:

1) Use summons as a blocker. I have found Hepl buddy fairly useful against Nequoxec and shining eyes, but getting true line of sight blocking with one summon is unreliable. Summon butterflies is a hail marry that has some effect but they move fast and randomly and easily can get around with an open LOS.
2) be stealthy and/or massively lethal from range. This is of course flawed as you simply cannot rely on everything not noticing you yet but it can help a lot.
3) controlled blink can help a lot in conjunction with 1&2

All in all with enough time, notice, and summons and smite targeted spells you can probably reliably not get mutated. But in reality you don't get all of those so you can maybe cut your mutation rate by 50% or 66% with good tatctics. But I have literally been mutated by a shining eye off of autoexplore. I hit 'o' and it stopped because a monster came into view and i was instantly mutated. I thought that wasn't really possible but it is. Unfortunately malmutate is not that tactical in its current form it has some tactics but is always a form of russian roulette.

Now if they made malmutate charge up like they changed that paralyzing eye things might be different. You can certainly easily get caught in a situation where you will unavoiably get mutated because it was directly around a corner or you don't have enough time to summon anything or your summon just moves stupidly. I just did Slime Pit on a 15 rune win with an Op of Hepl and I stopped trying to block with summons and be tactical the most reliable way to get mutated the least was to transference the eye directly to me and kill it as fast as possible. Trying the blocking stragetgy with my buddy + summon butterflies in an open level while better than nothing was not working great even though a battlemage can kill a shining eye quite fast. It was better to simply play roulette and minimize the turns it existed than try to be tactical.
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Post Tuesday, 29th November 2016, 20:06

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

njvack wrote:But yeah, right now cMut (and rMut before it) is mostly kind of a license to be tactically lazy around malmutators, which is not particularly compelling. I don't think that "rMut was very good; it's not like most amulets were tactically awesome. For me, the most interesting question would generally boil down to "am I annoyed enough avoiding LOS with mutators for me to throw away Faith?" I guess maybe I'd swap rMut and rCorr in Slime, or very rarely Spirit or something.


I strongly disagree. cMut pots are way, way too rare to be wasted in such a manner. I've had games finding none at all. And the other problem is that NONE of the described "tactics" (I despise that empty word shell. Ever noticed that nobody ever explains what they mean by this?) EXCEPT worshipping Zin (which is not a tactic) aren't guaranteed to work by any stretch of imagination, nor are you anywhere near guaranteed to have access to the tools needed to execute these "tactics" *cringes* in the first place.

In other words, the current malmutation system is terrible.
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Post Tuesday, 29th November 2016, 20:09

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

I wish the damn rMut amulet would just be brought back, maybe as (rMut *Contam) so that muh switching is not an issue. I am seriously too lazy to play around neqos/shining eyes, monsters that basically cannot harm you except through mutation, to the extent that I'll sacrifice a better amulet just to be lazy. Especially since even if you use LoS-blocking, when you get into melee range, you can just miss 5 times because of Crawl Accuracy and pick up mutations anyway, or your butterflies cannot spawn in the right place, or whatever. It's kind of an indictment of extended that people can and will sacrifice better gear for the privilege of laziness.
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Post Tuesday, 29th November 2016, 21:07

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

removeelyvilon wrote:In other words, the current malmutation system is terrible.


I have impression it is up to design philosophy. Do you remember Traps&Doors skill? It used to give player an option to make a decision about their willingness to get random deaths events via traps. But traps are considered "fun" and thus player should not have control over them. Then the same happened to rMut, bad mutations are "fun" and players should not have control over them. I wonder what will be next.
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Post Tuesday, 29th November 2016, 22:32

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
removeelyvilon wrote:In other words, the current malmutation system is terrible.


I have impression it is up to design philosophy. Do you remember Traps&Doors skill? It used to give player an option to make a decision about their willingness to get random deaths events via traps. But traps are considered "fun" and thus player should not have control over them. Then the same happened to rMut, bad mutations are "fun" and players should not have control over them. I wonder what will be next.


I was watching an orb run where the guy playing had a permanent teleport trap in each lung chokepoint on Zot5 and he had no -tele. It took him like 20 tries to get out of the lungs with the orb. It was ridiculous. He also got bansished to the abyss later on by a distortion branded thing, in the depths I think. He eventually won but it was a complete sh*tshow. In some ways its interesting and kind of funny, but at the same time its also just kind of dumb. The abyss banish is ok, but now that the amulet of stasis is gone having tp traps in both chokepoints is kind of BS.

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Post Wednesday, 30th November 2016, 14:51

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

removeelyvilon wrote:And the other problem is that NONE of the described "tactics" (I despise that empty word shell. Ever noticed that nobody ever explains what they mean by this?)

Ah! By "tactics" I mean (and I think other players do as well) managing your and other creatures' positioning to control lines of sight and fire, deciding when and who and how to attack, when and where to move, whether (and what) to summon. It also includes things like managing noise so you don't need to fight too many monsters at once, and when to just leave an area or level. And consumable use. And so on. It's in contrast to "strategic" decisions, which are long-term and relatively hard to change — things like species, skilling, and god choices.

I kind of think of it as "tactics are the actions I take 1–50 turns from now, strategy is what I'm working towards in the long term to make my tactics work better."

Every character has access to some of the same good tactics (don't walk towards monsters, fight 1v1, block lines of fire with other creatures, etc) while strategic choices make some tactics stronger or weaker for some characters (sac love means summons aren't so good, qaz means you don't need to try to be quiet so much, cleaving weapons make fighting multiple monsters less bad, reaching and smiting make summons even better).

Of course no tactical choice can (or ever could) guarantee you wouldn't get mutations; that much is clearly by design. If you really, really want to avoid muts, you need to make the strategic choices of worshipping Zin or being undead.
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Post Wednesday, 30th November 2016, 16:46

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

njvack wrote:I kind of think of it as "tactics are the actions I take 1–50 turns from now, strategy is what I'm working towards in the long term to make my tactics work better."


That's right, but the term is misunderstood and misused constantly, to mean something completely different like "positioning-based tactics only". Just look up-thread:

...I stopped trying to block with summons and be tactical the most reliable way to get mutated the least was to transference the eye directly to me and kill it as fast as possible. Trying the blocking stragetgy with my buddy + summon butterflies in an open level while better than nothing was not working great even though a battlemage can kill a shining eye quite fast. It was better to simply play roulette and minimize the turns it existed than try to be tactical.


This player is describing the tactic that worked as "not tactical" and the tactics that failed as "tactical." This is not an uncommon confusion on Tavern, and it's a clue that many players are understanding "tactics" and "tactical" VERY differently from their dictionary definition.
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Post Wednesday, 30th November 2016, 17:03

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

I agree that the poster was using the word "tactical" in a different way than I would. In this case, the most effective tactic was to kill the monster as quickly as possible. This is often very tactically strong!
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Post Wednesday, 30th November 2016, 19:03

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

JFunk wrote:
njvack wrote:I kind of think of it as "tactics are the actions I take 1–50 turns from now, strategy is what I'm working towards in the long term to make my tactics work better."


That's right, but the term is misunderstood and misused constantly, to mean something completely different like "positioning-based tactics only". Just look up-thread:

...I stopped trying to block with summons and be tactical the most reliable way to get mutated the least was to transference the eye directly to me and kill it as fast as possible. Trying the blocking stragetgy with my buddy + summon butterflies in an open level while better than nothing was not working great even though a battlemage can kill a shining eye quite fast. It was better to simply play roulette and minimize the turns it existed than try to be tactical.


This player is describing the tactic that worked as "not tactical" and the tactics that failed as "tactical." This is not an uncommon confusion on Tavern, and it's a clue that many players are understanding "tactics" and "tactical" VERY differently from their dictionary definition.


Fine. I'll correct it to "overly elaborate and complicated tactics" vs "simple kill-em the face real hard tactics". Is that better? I mean this is a distinction without much of a difference. Every short term series of actions is "tactical" because it in that realm rather than logistical/strategic realm.

But when something is extremely simple people tend not to characterize it as "tactical" thinking because its not worth the distinction. You can call tabstorming a tactic and it is but most people wouldn't bother calling it tactical thinking because its a tactic. One definition of tactical is "(of a person or their actions) showing adroit planning; aiming at an end beyond the immediate action". Tabstorming is not exactly adroit planning, even though its a tactic. using my "Grab it and kill it fucking dead with extreme fucking predjudice in 2 turns" tactic is also not what I would call adroit planning. Therefore it is in fact perfect in line with the dictionary to use tactical in this sense even though they are in fact "tactics".

Tactical has nothing to do with success it is merely characterization of its nature. You would instead say something like "tactically sound" or "it was a good tactic".

Second off the more elaborate approach is not a "failed tactic" people use that general approach successfully(with some other refinements and elaborations) which is why I was purposely avoiding calling it a "good tactic" or "bad tactic". The way I was doing it was unreliable and getting it reliable seemed overly complicated and would have need either a bunch of moving around or extra spells.

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Post Wednesday, 30th November 2016, 21:47

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

Semantic debates on the meaning of tactics is definitely the best way to deal with shining eyes

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Post Thursday, 1st December 2016, 15:18

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

tabstorm wrote:I wish the damn rMut amulet would just be brought back, maybe as (rMut *Contam) so that muh switching is not an issue. I am seriously too lazy to play around neqos/shining eyes, monsters that basically cannot harm you except through mutation, to the extent that I'll sacrifice a better amulet just to be lazy. Especially since even if you use LoS-blocking, when you get into melee range, you can just miss 5 times because of Crawl Accuracy and pick up mutations anyway, or your butterflies cannot spawn in the right place, or whatever. It's kind of an indictment of extended that people can and will sacrifice better gear for the privilege of laziness.

If playing around malmutators isnt fun then the answer isn't to have an item that you have to swap in so you can mostly pretend they don't exist. The answer is to change or remove them. I removed amulet of rmut because it created it's own problems while masking other problems.

Let's instead address the original problem.

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Post Friday, 2nd December 2016, 03:01

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

This gets into GDD, but I think temporary mutations work well; removing !cmut and making malmutate grant temporary mutations (maybe requiring more XP to clear than corrupting pulse, or more of them, or something) would make dealing with eyes and neqs a lot less annoying. If you get mutated by contamination or chunks of something, adapt or find a god to help with it.

But I really do kind of feel like the mutation system is being asked to do a whole lot of things, probably more than it can comfortably handle.
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Post Friday, 2nd December 2016, 05:23

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

njvack wrote:This gets into GDD, but I think temporary mutations work well; removing !cmut and making malmutate grant temporary mutations (maybe requiring more XP to clear than corrupting pulse, or more of them, or something) would make dealing with eyes and neqs a lot less annoying. If you get mutated by contamination or chunks of something, adapt or find a god to help with it.

But I really do kind of feel like the mutation system is being asked to do a whole lot of things, probably more than it can comfortably handle.


I agree, temporary mutations are the best. They are the scariest thing in the whole game since you can do nothing about getting Frail 3 and Berserkitis in Abyss but they are not punishing in the long run. If you managed to survive and cure them with XP, you feel great. Now let's compare to permanent mutations where you either don't care about mutations at all (in case when you have many potions of cure mutation or when your mutations are not that bad) or you are screwed because it is almost impossible to win (and is really unenjoyable to play) with some mutations.
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Post Friday, 2nd December 2016, 08:23

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

+1 for temp malmutations only. Balance can be adjusted by giving neqoxec malmutations a shorter xp timer and OoF malmutations a much longer one, for example.
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Post Friday, 2nd December 2016, 13:51

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

I have never commented about the mutation removal but maybe I go now.

Been playing since 2012 and mutations have ruined my game just once. Stepped on a Zot trap on the last level of the Swamp and got red Glow (for those who weren't around back then, Glow was equal to Contam). Resulted in something like 12-14 bad mutations.

When rMut amulet was removed, I had my doubts but afterwards I noticed I barely wore the damn thing. I don't miss it.

About OP:s question: Stealth is usually my way to avoid them. Summons are another. Special cases are already mentioned above. I could argue with people who say that those things can be one-shot anyway. They have reasonably high HP to withstand a turn against most 3-rune ranged attacks, so you can be left vulnerable for a turn or two. That's usually enough for them to snipe some muts at you. If you cannot take a mut or two, better postpone the Slime Pit then.

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Post Friday, 2nd December 2016, 23:51

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

Sphara wrote:I have never commented about the mutation removal but maybe I go now.

Been playing since 2012 and mutations have ruined my game just once. Stepped on a Zot trap on the last level of the Swamp and got red Glow (for those who weren't around back then, Glow was equal to Contam). Resulted in something like 12-14 bad mutations.

When rMut amulet was removed, I had my doubts but afterwards I noticed I barely wore the damn thing. I don't miss it.

About OP:s question: Stealth is usually my way to avoid them. Summons are another. Special cases are already mentioned above. I could argue with people who say that those things can be one-shot anyway. They have reasonably high HP to withstand a turn against most 3-rune ranged attacks, so you can be left vulnerable for a turn or two. That's usually enough for them to snipe some muts at you. If you cannot take a mut or two, better postpone the Slime Pit then.


Honestly, barring a few special cases like teleportitis in certain branches, I dislike mutations more out of a sense of anal retentiveness than anything else. If I drink a potion of Bene Mut and get +2 int then cool, score. But then I get banished to abyss and a nequoxec comes out of nowhere and casts malmutate before I can even summon something and give me teleportitis. Well I gotta get rid of that one, so I a) need to have a potion of cure mutation which are rare and b) I am extremely likely to undo the bene mut potion which is also extremely rare (and which I took a chance on drink because I might have gotten a bad good mutation like horns and lost my helmet slot).

I mean its just really frigging annoying. And it not like I am doing something like deciding to risk a mutation by playing aggressively or something you can just have it get popped at you and avoiding that when you want to control what happens to your character with careful gameplay is often kludgy or just requires things you may not even be able to get on that particular character. I mean you would want stealth which some species/armor combos suck at or multiple summoning spells (butterflies is not even close to enough they move way to much) and the time to use them.

Its not that its hard, its just that I would prefer less kludgy choices that more setups can actually perform. I think my main problem is that permanent malmutate is an all or nothing instant thing. The only chance involved is whether it casts at you and your only way to prevent this is to never ever give it a chance by using stealth (it won't do anything) or massive summons(no beam LOS). I am ok with the temporary mutations being an instant sort of random attack because they can be worked off fairly quickly and are essentially novel debuffs. But the permanent ones should never just insta mutate you, IMO. Have it charge up, if you choose to tab forward 3 times then and risk a genuinely bad mutation vs a somewhat inconvient mutation then fine. Basically the current permanent mutation setup involves an element of uncontrollable risk of permanent issues, yes you can mitigate how often this happens possly mitigate it alot.

But just having Malmutate be a two-three phase effect would help a lot towards making it feel less like roulette. The tactic for a number of setups is to simply power through mutations and I think this kind of shows that permanent mutations needs something a little more interesting. Making them unresistable has changed very little. By and large most people would like to avoid bad mutations. I would suggest the reason many playthroughs don't even bother is because powering through is a better tactic because the current setup narrows the viable tactics down into a few specialist branches that many playthroughs simply won't execute well. Making the mutations more severe won't change anything anyway because people go in with the idea of curing them because they have little belief that preventing them is worthwhile.

So the question is; what should a monster like a shining eye accomplish? Its a high priority target because it permanently messes you up. But even killing it fast is not a good solution because even if you one shot it from range you can still get unlucky and get mutated. Is it supposed to force to be a stealthy summoner? Because that seems odd. The paralyzing eye now taking a certain amount of time to paralyze this is essentially a timed event where you need to kill that thing before the time limit or be a formicid. You could simply make shining eye a slightly different effect with the same idea. Personally I want to kill everything as fast as possible so while chaning the Giant Eyeball is a good thing it doesn't change anything for me tactically but it at least gives me a chance to kill it and run if I fail.

I would say shining eyes should be the same give you a chance to run if you fail at whatever your are doing and you can always opt to be risky then. Insta-mutate is problematic otherwise. Paralyzing gaze almsot had to be changed because you can't even block it. But I would say since mutation are permanent the same should apply. Certainly paralyze is more dangerous than pretty much all mutations. But that is not actually the most important point which is to allow people a chance to execute some decisions when directly faced with a Malmutate. Sometimes a monster just pops up, like from a summon of a nequoxec, if it insta-malmutates you stealth and summons ain't gonna cut it.

Currently I can certainly heavily reduce my mutation load by being careful and having one or two decent tactics available, but I would like to be able to have smart options in even the unlucky situations and since its instant this is just not the case an unlucky roll can easily get you unavoidably mutated, for example Elf3 you can easily get a neqoxec in the face and its a roll of the dice. It fairly rare and its worth the risk, but it still bugs me and is just not fun.

I just want to be able to play in a way where I feel like if I make the right decisions I can reliably avoid mutations. That when I do get mutated I say "Yep that was a mistake I made" or "Well that was fair I got mutated but I really wanted to kill that other fucker". I don't feel its fair or even controllable, just mitigatable to some degree. Its certainly manageable but not fair really. For the most part I feel crawl is tough but fair. Sure you die a lot and you can get some really shitty bad luck situations like going down the stairs to D3 and seeing grinder, sigismund and duvessa/dowan all in the same room together (this has happened to me), but even there I feel its mostly fair or at least I have something that can help me. I mean in that situation you could get confused and that could lead to death but there is MR and potions of curing and teleport.

It could be justified that since mutations are not really going to be fatal in any immediate sense that its fine for them to not be fair sometimes. But I would argue the other way around. Since its not going to kill you and they are permanent you are basically just fucking with people for no real payoff. Grinder at least adds some tension. Shining eyes for a lot of playthrough is more like "Fuck it I am gonna get mutated anyway lets yolo this and get it over with".

The current set of tactics people use are actually fairly good and Ithink in the right vein. Having avoiding mutations be a bit of a puzzle is actually the interesting way to do it. But its only half way there. It needs to give people some time to do the puzzle. There are probably easily 5 or so other tactical variations people don't mention here as reliable simply because its instant.

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Post Saturday, 3rd December 2016, 05:35

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

I just want to be able to play in a way where I feel like if I make the right decisions I can reliably avoid mutations. That when I do get mutated I say "Yep that was a mistake I made" or "Well that was fair I got mutated but I really wanted to kill that other fucker".


Once I went downstairs in the Slime Pit and I had 3 Shining Eyes almost symmetrically in 3 different directions. All of them woke up ofc.
I actually had to ask gammafunk if that was a genuine entrance vault. Turns out it did not but, yes, these kind of situations make you deal with mutations, no matter how much you try to avoid them.

All in all, if I have to hate one mutating monster in the game, that would be a Wretched Star. It can provide endless examples, how to fuck up your game. It really make your guts turn when you suddenly get that "easier to cast but weaker spells" thing. Nothing like wandering in the Abyss:5 with a Regeneration spell that lasts just few turns and 1% Fire Storm that has only few power bars costing 9 MP and does less damage than well-powered Fireball.

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Post Saturday, 3rd December 2016, 06:25

Re: Dealing With Shining Eyes

Sphara wrote:All in all, if I have to hate one mutating monster in the game, that would be a Wretched Star. It can provide endless examples, how to fuck up your game. It really make your guts turn when you suddenly get that "easier to cast but weaker spells" thing. Nothing like wandering in the Abyss:5 with a Regeneration spell that lasts just few turns and 1% Fire Storm that has only few power bars costing 9 MP and does less damage than well-powered Fireball.


This is a pretty decent argument for removing subdued magic from the pool of potential temporary malmuts.

It's a mut with a heavily strategic effect, that reduces character differentiation towards the degenerate case of "Just get some melee then" when people try to play around it.

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