Vault Warden Sealing and Vault:5

[cgilbert]

Hi there!

I had a recent game that produced a pretty nasty situation with this that I wanted to share.

Essentially, the first turn upon entering Vault:5 resulted in the stairs going up being sealed by a vault warden at the furthest possible corner in my LOS away from me.

Since I was completely surrounded by vault guardians, evoking a wand to deal with the warden (teleport, etc) was not an option as too many enemies were in my way.

I ended up pulling out all the stops to kill every vault guardian, however the noise from combat begun drawing in other enemies to deal with.

Eventually, (after killing tons of enemies, getting smited multiple times, etc etc) I managed to kill the warden while still standing on the stairs I needed to travel back up.

The stairs unlocked (hooray!) however during the turns required to travel back upstairs, another vault warden showed up (also at the edge of my LOS) and immediately sealed the stairs again.

Again, at this point I was surrounded by enemies and the vault warden was inaccessible to my melee character. (Hill Orc Bezerker)

Regrettably, I did not have any scrolls of blinking (which would have really saved my hide) but I was pretty shocked to encounter the whole situation to begin with. (The more you learn...)

In any case, I feel like Vault:5 was already an extremely dangerous area to take on at any level due to the mass of enemies and the speed at which they move - however the simple change of allowing stairs to be sealed has made this specific case (especially since the layout of the Vault:5 stairs is fixed and surrounded in such a way) exponentially more dangerous. (Particularly to melee characters who lack the ability to target a remote enemy without shooting through people)

Any thoughts?

[crate]

This is just one of many reasons that staying near the stairs in v:5 is not a good idea.

What I do for very nearly every time I enter v:5 is I get outside the vault guard ring (lots of ways to do this) while hasted, then run to a corner of the map (along the outer rim). If I want to have things stop chasing me I keep running around the rim for a while. Then clear the level from there.

This is almost always dramatically safer than staying near the stairs, unless you have something like tornado.

This was true before stair sealing and is still true after stair sealing.

[absolutego]

people keep saying that but i must've stair-danced v:5 a hundred times :p
stair sealing is something else though

[galehar]

stair sealing has made a bad tactic (stair dancing V:5) even worse. People will be forced to learn better tactics, good!

[Amnesiac]

I'm glad because stair dancing is not fun. People should spend more time having fun while playing! Dd-uuh

[Sandman25]

Add Vault Warden to Tomb

[Mankeli]

Regrettably, I did not have any scrolls of blinking (which would have really saved my hide) but I was pretty shocked to encounter the whole situation to begin with. (The more you learn...)

Well, if you are going to a place where you know you are going to get surrounded having a source of blink is a pretty good idea. Also next time if you already know that there are stair sealers in the level then don't continue with the stairdancing strategy!

Also, shouldn't this thread be on the advice section since this has very little to do with game design?

[njvack]

What I do for very nearly every time I enter v:5 is I get outside the vault guard ring (lots of ways to do this) while hasted, then run to a corner of the map (along the outer rim). If I want to have things stop chasing me I keep running around the rim for a while. Then clear the level from there.

For added fun, get marked while doing so. Lively times!

Friggin' sentinels

[cgilbert]

That kind of approach in the Vaults makes sense.

I wasn't really trying to get into a strategy vs strategy discussion, was just trying to illustrate a situation that the stair sealing change could create and have a discussion on it.

My point was that the stair sealing (and now that I think about it, the combination of Mark) seems to have made Vault:5 quite a lot more dangerous than it used to be.

(I'm not making any assertions as to if this increase in danger is a good or bad thing for the game...)

Thanks!