Shoals Surfer
Posts: 312
Joined: Thursday, 9th June 2011, 19:12
Please keep in mind when balancing
I do not know if this was the trend in the past (started playing in 0.7), but it seems (to me) that most of the balance discussions lately have been referring to zigs/extended endgame. Judging by personal experience and a few months of lurking the forums, I would say that 95% of the people spend 95% of their time pre-rune. Therefore I suggest that the game be balanced around the 3-rune victory.
I agree that spell casters cap out in power higher than melee, and hybrids cap out higher than either, but I am not sure that is a problem. In a 3-rune victory, even melee classes generally will have not reached their cap. If you can win before any of the fighting styles peak out, how much does it matter the one peaks out higher than another? By way of example, I when I started playing I spent a long time trying to get naga casters off the ground because I read in the wiki, (yeah, silly me) that they can be the strongest endgame casters. It took me a lot of splats to realize that a little power early, (read: normal speed and a larger mana pool) is often better than a lot of power at a time I will never reach because I die too soon. Similarly, balancing it so endgame casters cannot easily throw out 5 firestorms and annihilate everything is not optimal if said balance keeps people from having the power to clear the vaults.
At the risk of damaging my credibility, I would like to make an analogy to MMOs. Many MMOs I have read about/played use high end raiders as a suggestion/balancing point. They have the most through knowledge of game mechanics, make the most lucid suggestions, and are willing to do the often hard work of actually testing (coding) ideas. While this is frequently the only feasible way to actually realize ideas, it has the side effect of tuning the game to be optimal for said high end raiders. Sadly this can have the side effect of leaving the casual players who make up the bulk of the player base out in the cold. A MMO casual who feels bored and disenfranchised will stop playing (and paying). This is less of an issue for crawl, but even crawl depends on casual players becoming involved in order to replace people who become burned out or leave due to other issues.
If one is to balance the early game, I would go back to the early spells. Perhaps I don't optimize my characters well, but I consider mephitic cloud to be more unbalanced than haste or controlled blink since I can get the cloud online before D5, and it trivializes most combats until around D17, including the early branches. Conversely, by the time I have the spell of haste or controlled blink and have made it reliably useful (i.e. have the mana/other spells and/or other combat skills to exploit the benefit), I am generally getting ready to start collecting runes and victory is pretty close. Judging by my own win percentage, I probably spend 70% of my time in the former situation and only about 15% of my time in the latter.
I guess my point is to make a request to keep at least a little focus on the casual player. I am not saying the devteam is not doing that (the training revamp and perma-buffs are ideal in this regard), but dismissive comments that the food mini-game is irrelevant bother me a bit. I agree that post-lair food generally is not an issue, but given the amount of time that most players spend pre-lair, I still consider it rather relevant. Likewise, in my experience, if I am able to spam high level spells and ignore the food/mana cost I am either about to win, or could have already and am working on the extended endgame.