Lair Larrikin
Posts: 22
Joined: Friday, 17th December 2010, 02:54
Location: Utah, United States of America
Recovering from Very Heavy Draining
(This is from when I died, so the skills would have been a bit lower than this, initially)
Well, I figured, that's pretty bad, but I'll just have to be careful, kill off weaker monsters for awhile while my skills recover, and go from there. But then I noticed it was extremely hard to fight even weaker monsters, since with all skills at 0, plate armor was messing up my attacks, the attacks were very slow. This is as intended, of course. But after switching to +3 leather armor and a dagger, so as to fight better at my current skill levels (Staying with my war axe and plate armor almost got me killed) and killing off a fair number of monsters, I checked and was still at all 0's. More shallow dungeon levels had hardly any monsters to fight, and the ones that hadn't been cleared were very dangerous.
So, with the choice of fighting previously-easy-but-now-often-lethal monsters, or hunting around for really weak things (Like goblins or orcs), I was in a bad situation. I kept killing what I could, running from what I couldn't, even got the notification that my shields skill had gone up to 12 (Checked the skills, but they were still all at 0, due to the draining), but it was like trying to use a level 1 character with more HP. Finally, I got surrounded and killed around 2500 turns later (I probably could have escaped but my heart wasn't in it anymore), and just before I died, I checked my skills, and they were *still* at all 0's. Not even a single 0.1 to give me hope of progress.
So, my question is this:
If you get heavily drained, how are you supposed to come back from it? Yes, you try and kill monsters to get experience to get rid of it, but I was, and it wasn't doing anything (Or it was, and I was so far in the hole that it wasn't making any difference). There's not really any consumables you can use to help with it (That I know of. I'm not saying there necessarily should be an easy potion fix, but it would be nice to have some consumables you could burn to help). You're basically just stuck being super weak, trying not to die, and in my case, for what seemed a very long time.
Is there a cap to how drained you can be? Better feedback as to how drained you are, or how much experience it will take to recover (Or even start to recover) would have helped. As it was, I just felt like I was killing monsters, but still stuck at all 0's, with no idea how much progress, if any, I was making. If your skills are at 0's, some indication of how far "in the hole" you are would be nice, so you know if you're just about to get 0.1, or you've got a long way to go to break past 0. Perhaps shows skills as negative, so you know how far gone they are (Although that might confuse people into thinking the skills had penalties or something).
Does experience recover draining at a 1 to 1 ratio? Meaning, to recover 1 level of a drained skill (It's at 11, and should be 12, for example), does it take as much experience as it normally would to go from 11 to 12?
I guess I'm just not sure what I should have done differently at that point (Obviously, not getting heavily drained beforehand would have helped). If you're drained enough to get to all 0's, are you supposed to essentially be dead, or find it nearly impossible to recover? I'm not asking for draining to be made easier necessarily. Draining should be nasty and something hard to deal with, but if you're going to be so badly drained that recovering will be nearly impossible without trying to grind levels 1 through 5 for hobgoblins, newts, etc, where are you supposed to go from there?
Just looking for insight on how draining is supposed to be balanced, gameplay-wise, and what the intentions and purposes of it are, and if it's achieving those in it's current state, given a case of heavy draining like I experienced. It seems like heavy draining is hard to come back from, and so perhaps there needs to be a cap, or experience should cancel out draining more quickly than it currently does. Thanks!
This is the last few notes from my character, so you get a sense of the timeline, and how long after the draining it was before I died:
- Code:
14251 | Lair:3 | Reached skill level 12 in Shields
14495 | Lair:3 | Found a staircase to the Shoals.
14532 | Lair:3 | Noticed Sonja
14598 | Lair:3 | Killed Sonja
15752 | D:12 | Found a staircase to the Orcish Mines.
16144 | D:10 | Noticed Erica
16642 | D:13 | Gained mutation: Scrolls take you a little longer to read. [potion of mutation]
16642 | D:13 | Gained mutation: You passively map a large area around you. [potion of mutation]
16646 | D:13 | Lost mutation: You are partially covered in icy blue scales (AC +1). [potion of cure mutation]
16646 | D:13 | Lost mutation: You passively map a large area around you. [potion of cure mutation]
16646 | D:13 | Lost mutation: Scrolls take you a little longer to read. [potion of cure mutation]
17026 | D:13 | Reached skill level 10 in Armour
17050 | D:13 | HP: 8/168 [hell hound/blast of flame (7)]
17052 | D:13 | HP: 1/168 [poisoned by an orc wizard]
17053 | D:13 | Succumbed to an orc wizard's poison