Vestibule Violator
Posts: 1653
Joined: Tuesday, 30th July 2013, 11:29
Depths and boggarts.
For one thing I find it a good idea that "D" is overall shorter and think 22 levels is a good number for it, also the level of opposition I found in the depths was definitely strong and satisfying to beat, but there are some things I'd like to bring up for discussion:
While the sudden spike in difficulty is appropriate it may lead some weaker characters to having to do the other lair branch to scrounge up a bit of extra power to at least start making it through the depths. The same way I don't think it's a good idea to force people to do one of the lair branches via lock, I think maybe the first two levels could use a bit less lethal monster set so people do not have to slog through a second branch (that is normally not challenging after beating the first one) only to keep going down the depths without huge risk.
Also several really annoying monsters that I expected to be gone like giant skeletons and boggarts (both of which come in packs) spawn there which I find a pretty awful idea because giant skeles are horribly boring to fight and boggarts are the epitome of the summoner problem. Having packs of five really weak monsters that can snap their fingers and spawn stone giants and tmons and sphinxes doesn't sound like fun to me.
Other than that, well, I didn't see much crazy stuff just wandering around out of a reduced number of titans and tmons which aren't all that horrifying. Sphinxes I don't like but that's more of a disliking of paralysis as the terrible thing it is than anything else.
Now the most obvious problem I believe Depths generates is it makes V a joke. By the time you hit vaults you've already cut through basically 1-3 levels of V:$ monsters, so 1-4 are annoying and mindless and V: $ loses part of its charm, but is still okay. This is less aggravating now that spawn range doesn't reach U: 5 (which is where my LONe got V entrance) but it's still pretty silly that the subbranch is so much simpler.
Although I assume this last problem must be already being looked at, so the main point of this post is "fuck boggarts" I suppose.