Monster attack change, early Dungeon difficulty

[le_nerd]

A while ago monsters had their attack speed changed. Do you like it?

My Octopodes hate it. My intuition which fights I can take and which I can't is all shot. Early game is even more deadly than before(!). Snakes suddenly hit like motherfuckers. Halberd Gnolls swing more often. Siegmund is a worthy opponent again. Ogres are suddenly deadly again.

This really ramps up early dungeon difficulty (maybe thats just me and my stupid 'podes?). While in general weapon swing change to this much easier system is great, early dungeon really didn't need the boost in difficulty.

Discuss here how to adjust tactics to deal with perma hasty halberd gnolls.

[andrew]

I think it's good for clarity; but Sigmund should probably be nerfed somewhat; I recently lost a character to him without being confused, which almost never used to happen. Unless, I suppose, he's supposed to be a "run away at sight" monster; but those are rather boring.

[Nekoatl]

In my unpopular opinion, the early game used to be trivially easy for most characters most of the time, and now it's somewhat more in line with midgame difficulty. I think that's a good result overall, but I find myself needing to kite enemies to buy time for recovery, and as that's always been a tedious process, I wish base recovery rates weren't so slow.

To be fair, though, it's possible I only think the early game is so much easier than the rest of the game because of the thousands of times I've quit and restarted when I wasn't happy with the demonspawn mutations offered, or the draconian color, or the unrandarts generated, or simply because I grew tired of dealing with inventory clutter.

[andrew]

I think the early game is easier than the rest of the game largely in that it's simpler (which makes it easier to get good at it) and most of us have far more practice with it; I'm not sure it's intrinsically easier.

[Hellmonk]

Several early game monsters got their base damage nerfed to help compensate for this somewhat, though weapon-using monster damage is still buffed overall. Ogres swing slowly again (but you can see their swing speed in xv now, because it's intrinsic to the monster rather than a property of their weapon), so they're pretty close to where they were before the change. Adder attack speed didn't change at all, nor did the attack speed of any monsters that don't use weapons. There have been a couple other shakeups to early dungeon this version in the form of spawn table, dungeon feature, and item changes, so it might take a little bit for the dust to settle. Agree that the difficulty curve might need to shift a bit later, certainly.

[le_nerd]

Thanks Hellmonk, lots of great clarifications. I would have sworn that poison monsters wreck me worse than ever before - just another one of the many illusions ones develop while playing.

[Jeremiah]

Aside from halberd gnolls and Sigmund, it seems particularly noticeable in Orc and Baileys.
Have the same changes been made to ranged weapon using monsters? Orc knights and warlords with crossbows seem to be murder machines...

[Siegurt]

Aside from halberd gnolls and Sigmund, it seems particularly noticeable in Orc and Baileys.
Have the same changes been made to ranged weapon using monsters? Orc knights and warlords with crossbows seem to be murder machines...

Depending on what you're comparing to, you may not have noticed that monsters don't run out of ammo any more, which makes ranged-weapon critters nastier.

[Jeremiah]

Aside from halberd gnolls and Sigmund, it seems particularly noticeable in Orc and Baileys.
Have the same changes been made to ranged weapon using monsters? Orc knights and warlords with crossbows seem to be murder machines...

Depending on what you're comparing to, you may not have noticed that monsters don't run out of ammo any more, which makes ranged-weapon critters nastier.

Yes, I know about the changes to monster ammo, but crossbow orcs, yaktaurs etc had enough ammo that they would never generally run out anyway, it was only large rock throwers that you could realistically wait until they ran out.

[Khashishi]

No, it's a bad change. Orcs with halberds shouldn't attack at the same speed as orcs with daggers. A pack of meliais shouldn't be able to murder you before you can do anything.