Does vaults 5 really have to be so evil?

[AzuredreamsXT]

It's a challenging break in, and that's cool. Where I feel things get too masochistic is how there's often vault wardens around who will seal the damn stairs back up, pitting you against often insurmountable odds and virtually guaranteeing your death if you don't happen to have certain escape options available. Losing hours of progress to this kind of sucks

[duvessa]

Stairdancing was a tactic that was usually more dangerous than running or teleporting, but still sometimes useful. Now it's a tactic that is completely impossible. I think stair-sealing made Vaults:5 a lot less interesting.

[AzuredreamsXT]

Our more realistic options for a third rune to attempt the endgame and win are V5 and slime, both of which are brutal for those without certain items or abilities. What would really be cool IMO is a new branch with a rune, if the devs feel stair-stealing in V5 should remain in the game.

[Velikolepni]

What would really be cool IMO is a new branch with a rune, if the devs feel stair-stealing in V5 should remain in the game.

Simple proposal: Move the demonic rune to Elf 3 and make Elf harder.

Alternatively, make Elf 3 have a portal to a special Pan level that contains the demonic rune and an exit.

[TeshiAlair]

I definitely think that more rune choices are better than less, especially given that arguably a full third of them (hells and Pan) require the stars being aligned to go for in a reasonable manner for the average player.

[dpeg]

Not saying it's the best way to approach this, but it Vault:5 is considered hard enough that people starting for their third rune elsewhere (Slime and Abyss, I guess), then that's an interesting side effect.

[Kalma]

I used to always stair-dance it (successfully). It's a lot more fun now that you can't. More of the game could use the same medicine.

[Sprucery]

And you can still stair-dance it, as long as no wardens are visible (I did it with a GrSu). Whether it's a good strategy or not is another issue.

[Velikolepni]

I definitely think that more rune choices are better than less, especially given that arguably a full third of them (hells and Pan) require the stars being aligned to go for in a reasonable manner for the average player.

More than a third, infact more than half: 9 out of 15 runes are in Hells and Pan.

The demonic rune is currently the most boring in the sense that it is just found somewhere in Pan and it is not associated with any named unique (though it is sometimes on the "hellfire island", which is kind of cool).

Thus I think that moving it to the main dungeon would be appropriate and Elf 3, or some extension of Elf seems like the natural choice. Right now one often hears people say that doing Elf is not worth the danger. Well, if a rune is to be found there it might be worth it.

[TeshiAlair]

Particularly since Elf is so associated with summoning demons anyway. And, in the same vein as removing mountain dwarves, making elves even more explicitly dark, manipulative, and more "true to the mythos" might be a really good thing as well.

[damiac]

That'd be great if the demonic rune were in elf 3. It makes good thematic sense, and Pan's already got other, more interesting runes.

[nicolae]

Fun fact: an elven rune of Zot already exists, with a tile and everything. It's used in a couple of Sprint maps.

[Laraso]

I used to always stair-dance it (successfully). It's a lot more fun now that you can't.

Actually, depending on your character, you still can! I won a Centaur Fighter of Okawaru yesterday, and to get the vault rune, I stairdanced everything on Vault:5. Eventually, when a warden showed up, I used everything at my disposal to get to him as fast as I can and kill him, and then I continued stair dancing.

However, I was playing a super-tanky character with 230~ health, 51 AC and 53 SH (not to mention I was a Centaur so I was also speedy), so if you have anything less than that you're still probably screwed if you try to stairdance.

[duvessa]

Not saying it's the best way to approach this, but it Vault:5 is considered hard enough that people starting for their third rune elsewhere (Slime and Abyss, I guess), then that's an interesting side effect.

I'm pretty sure only very bad players consider it that hard. The only case in current Crawl where I would personally get the slimy rune before the silver rune is if I am worshipping Jiyva.

[Sandman25]

I must be a very bad player, I got slimy rune with rMut/stasis/corrosion when speedrunning with 3 runes MfFi.

[Leafsnail]

There's a difference between fastest and safest.

[dpeg]

duvessa: Sure. I think there are exceptions but for the large majority, silver should be rune three. (I recall a game where slimy was the second one, and not for showing off or as a challenge... was something about particular monsters, and gear/skills were just right for Sime).
I actually have some sympathy for an elven rune, but that's a strictly private opinion at this point.

The pressing point right now is the status of stair dancing: when I learned Crawl, everyone seemed to be stair dancing V:8, and was advocating to do so (including tips for good staircases). Now, and this is years later, some of you really good players tell me that stair dancing was a subpar strategy anyway (in most cases, I assume as unspoken qualifier). In my more recent games that made it to V:5, I have used mapping+ctele, whenever I could (and with good results), and I have also done the rim runs.
It's not clear at all to me how these three compare in success, and whether that actually depends on tools and build (would be nice if so). If stair dancing was marginalised already, then it indeed makes no sense to punish it. Then again, in limited form it is still possible. (There are very many 100% opinions flung across the board, which makes it harder for me to assess what's going on.) In any case, I'm also curious whether we were misinformed five years ago (when stair dancing was all the rage), whether groupthinking was going on back then, and/or is going on now, or whether the V:5 threat has changed sufficiently to make stair dancing less reliable than it used to be.

[Sandman25]

There's a difference between fastest and safest.

Right, but I believe slimy rune was the safest one too. Especially since Vaults require high MR while Slimes does not care about it. So it depends on gear IMHO, with my gear slimy was easier.

[duvessa]

I can recall a time when I was a worse player than I am now, and thought, very wrongly, that stair-dancing vaults:5 was usually the best way to do it. I've played every major stable version since 0.4, and knowing what I do now, I would say the same thing about stair-dancing vaults:5 for all of those versions: it's usually not very good.

[damiac]

duvessa: Sure. I think there are exceptions but for the large majority, silver should be rune three. (I recall a game where slimy was the second one, and not for showing off or as a challenge... was something about particular monsters, and gear/skills were just right for Sime).
I actually have some sympathy for an elven rune, but that's a strictly private opinion at this point.

The pressing point right now is the status of stair dancing: when I learned Crawl, everyone seemed to be stair dancing V:8, and was advocating to do so (including tips for good staircases). Now, and this is years later, some of you really good players tell me that stair dancing was a subpar strategy anyway (in most cases, I assume as unspoken qualifier). In my more recent games that made it to V:5, I have used mapping+ctele, whenever I could (and with good results), and I have also done the rim runs.
It's not clear at all to me how these three compare in success, and whether that actually depends on tools and build (would be nice if so). If stair dancing was marginalised already, then it indeed makes no sense to punish it. Then again, in limited form it is still possible. (There are very many 100% opinions flung across the board, which makes it harder for me to assess what's going on.) In any case, I'm also curious whether we were misinformed five years ago (when stair dancing was all the rage), whether groupthinking was going on back then, and/or is going on now, or whether the V:5 threat has changed sufficiently to make stair dancing less reliable than it used to be.

Stairdancing is still possible for V5, if you don't get wardens, but you're still going up stairs with 8 vault guards around you. So there's a lot of danger there, but it's not a terribly awful idea for a tanky character. The run for the edge strategy carries the risk of running into something even worse than the pack of guards, but then, it is vault5.

Groupthink is always going on, there's no getting around it, and in such a small community such as this one, it's going to be severe.
That's why it's great to have people like Sandman, he is clearly not influenced by groupthink, so even if much of what he says seems crazy, some of it pans out. Someone has to be willing to get shot down over and over to keep at it like he does, but once in a while he strikes a nugget of truth.

Anyway, it's good to remember that there's more than one way to play games. Typically any game has the "right" way to play, right up until someone comes up with something that blows away the old "right" way to do it. And then that's the new "right" way, and anyone who says different must be an idiot. It's usually one of those idiots who define the metagame by doing something new.

[dpeg]

Well, the first trick of stair dancers is to look for a stair which leads less than eight wardens to V:4. Not always possible, but often.

Yes to Sandman praise!

[moocowmoocow]

I don't understand why the vaults keep getting targeted for increasing difficulty. Sentinels, convokers and wardens already made a considerable spike in difficulty. Opening the corners of V:5 makes it even worse now.

[dpeg]

We like it hard?

Seriously, there is a huge disparity between developer intentions and player perceptions. Things are very often not done to punish players, but to prevent something, or support another. The punishment is mostly a side effect... Nobody sat down and said, "Hark, too many characters are fetching the silver rune lately. Let's do something about it!"

You have fun abusing the game, we have fun giving you a harder time at abusing the game.

[zardo]

In line with what several people have said, I used the stairs pretty heavily on my last win (in .14). It only ever worked with some characters anyway. Opening the corners, well, I wouldn't say it needed to be done and you have to take into account difficulty for newer players but on the other hand the run to the corridor routine I *do* think was too predictable. Any semi-fixed level will have that kind of problem, though, and sentinels and convokers already helped shake that up. I dunno, the current Vaults: 5 is pretty good, the previous version was pretty good, this is not a part of the game that needs to be messed with much in any direction.

[WalkerBoh]

Anyway, it's good to remember that there's more than one way to play games. Typically any game has the "right" way to play, right up until someone comes up with something that blows away the old "right" way to do it. And then that's the new "right" way, and anyone who says different must be an idiot. It's usually one of those idiots who define the metagame by doing something new.

I can't wait until this is true of my new patented Vaults:5 entry tech: hatches and shafts! Silver lining, even if it goes terribly wrong you can make great puns about how you got shafted.

In seriousness, I agree with duvessa. Any sufficiently skilled player will tell you (I think) that running to the outer ring was almost always the best strategy for Vaults:$ and still probably is. The difference now is mostly in the threat level, and I think the new layout creates much more interesting (and yes, dangerous) situations. Stair-sealing and marking are maybe okay separately on V:5, but together it's insane. That's my only real complaint - and even then it'd be okay if there were better ways of avoiding or dealing with being marked (increased ?vuln is one such recently-added possibility, or making MR not totally unreliable).

Also agree V:5 is still almost always safer than Slime or Abyss, though it's more of a legitimate discussion now.

[crate]

My main problem here (as I said in ##crawl-dev yesterday) is that mark status is overwhelmingly the most powerful hex an enemy uses in all of crawl. Paralysis? Psh, that's nothing. Petrification? Don't make me laugh. Mark is the real danger. In theory you could treat it like paralysis where the interesting part is avoiding it, but there are a few problems with this:
1) it's cast at a higher power (I think, I could be wrong, but I believe I have been told this is the case by some devs) so getting enough MR to reliably resist it is much harder.
2) getting hit by mark is dramatically more dangerous than actually getting paralysed (consider if paralysis lasted for 100 turns--it would then obviously be a terrible ability) and it has the same problem banishment has where your distance from the user has no effect on how powerful it is (getting paralysed next to an ogre mage is noticeably more dangerous than getting paralysed by one at the edge of LOS)
3) surviving mark while remaning on the level where you got marked and without teleporting is effectively impossible unless either you are so ludicrously powerful you can just lean on tab and clear the floor anyway, or if you have already cleared a large majority of the enemies, or if you have somehow managed to avoid waking enemies up (this third one is basically impossible in v:5 specifically)

You can do things after mark affects your character, but in practice this means you have two options: you can teleport (since you will not be able to just run away until mark ends)--most likely multiple times! and this is another case where ctele existing is problematic, I feel--or you can leave the floor. Because of v:5's layout, leaving the floor is often not really an option even if you ignore stair-sealing (there will be so much crap in the middle of the level that you are pretty unlikely to be able to get there anyway). You can also end the status early with ?vuln, except that ?vuln is still pretty rare and having to use it as a magic-bullet to counter mark isn't very interesting either.

So in practice if you get marked on v:5 you have to teleport, often multiple times, until the mark ends. There is no other reasonable option for dealing with mark there. Even on other floors it's not a terribly interesting effect, since in practice I usually just find the nearest < and use it as soon as possible in most cases.

I don't really have much of an opinion on stair-sealing. I find it pretty pointless on floors other than v:5 most of the time, so I assume it exists specifically to prevent v:5 stairdancing. I agree with minmay that this is a deterrent to a tactic that wasn't anywhere near "the only best plan" status to begin with so it probably doesn't need to exist. On the other hand, I have a reasonably strong dislike for < existing in crawl at all, though I realise that eliminating them is not really possible without changing crawl into a different game entirely.

(The v:5 layout is quite good in my opinion, but I had a whole topic on that already.)

[Laraso]

2) getting hit by mark is dramatically more dangerous than actually getting paralysed

That's highly debatable. Whether Mark is or is not more dangerous than other hexes is entirely dependent on what kind of situation you're in. There are more than a few situations I can think of where I would rather get marked than paralyzed. Just a few moments ago, I lost a promising character to an invisible vampire knight (who precariously spawned on D:9) that followed me to my stash unwittingly. He paralyzed me before I even knew he had followed me, and took me from 93 HP to 27~ HP during that time. I only had a chance to blink once before it happened again and I died. I can assure you that I would have greatly preferred being marked than being paralyzed in that situation. If I'm trying to sneak my way around to get the rune in Vault:5 and I happen to run into an enemy, then yes I'd rather that enemy be a giant eyeball than a vault sentinel, however that does not make that true for every situation.

I really wouldn't go so far as to say "mark status is overwhelmingly the most powerful hex an enemy uses in all of crawl". Yes, mark is powerful and dangerous, but getting marked outside of Vaults is often more of an inconvenience that can be solved by going back up a flight of stairs and waiting it out than it is a life-threatening status as it is in the Vaults. The difference between paralysis and mark is that you can react and take action while marked, but if you're paralyzed your fate is left in the hands of your enemy. Neither of them are statuses that you should particularly ignore, but I really don't think it's accurate to say that one is overwhelmingly more powerful than the other.

[dck]

I don't know if I'm off base here but I actually think V: $ was made significantly better by the open corners change. I feel it made it a lot less tedious throughout different games, although it was a very good level to begin with.
The current change places emphasis in having a way to deal with the ambush rather more bluntly than in stable, but unlike the first version with no outer rim it doesn't just turn it into "zig tactics or die: the level", since if you don't feel comfortable killing or ?fearing the ambush and attacking a quadrant you can indeed go into the outer rim at the price of ?blink or dragging more attention from the monsters in the quadrants and prolonging the fight there.
This gives the ambush a new threat level beyond that of sending you off the stairs, where you already don't want to be to begin with because there are four open corners to quadrants full of bad dudes in your LoS.

The second part which I really like are the convergent corners of each quadrant. In stable V: $ you walk into the rim, kill all the dudes and then carefully approach the central section of the level and get into whichever quadrant you like most trying to remain unnoticed by dudes in the other quadrants, if someone does notice you you back away from the center, kill him and then resume approaching the quadrant; in trunk V: $ you either deal with the dudes in a more dangerous fashion in the hallway or risk attracting the attention of things from quadrants as you go into the outer rim. The thing is, when you've dealt with the ambush you have to choose whether to enter the first quadrant from a convergent corner or to go through the outer rim to enter it from the non-convergent corner.
To me this is really genius. If you attack the quadrant from the first convergent corner you have the advantage of spending less time in the eyes of possible things wandering out of the other quadrant, but if you misjudge your killing capacity or otherwise fuck up and need to retreat you don't have a fully safe place to which to do so and you risk attracting the attention of bad things from the neighboring quadrant while already in a bad situation. On the other hand you can approach the quadrant from its non-convergent corner which would be significantly safer since you have more space to maneuver in case of a fuck up, but you need to either use a ?blink or expose yourself for longer to things that may notice you from both quadrants and then need to deal with whatever may be in the outer rim itself.

This, I think, concentrates the good parts of the whole "don't let the neighbors see you" thing of stable V: $ while reducing the number of times this puzzle has to be solved to exactly one (and god knows crawl likes to repeat puzzles, so this is amazing), all while giving you more options and more control over how you deal with your initial dive into the quadrants and raising the stakes noticeably should you screw up. But not only this, the change also makes it so that random placement of really bad things next to the corners of the quadrants is less relevant, since you only ever attack with two quadrants at once in sight, instead of four.

note: since cTele is in my opinion one of crawl's most lackluster mechanics I like to pretend it doesn't exist at all, so these comments are made from my happy place where cTele isn't a thing, of course if one were to read this from a parallel universe where cTele does exist then all the impact of the level's design, ambush and whatnot would be greatly undermined.

[dpeg]

A lengthy discussion in ##crawl-dev led to the following two changes:

  Code:

commit 63f152f1fce206446bb886867570b3eb93dd6af2
Author: Steve Melenchuk <smelenchuk@gmail.com>
Date:   Tue Mar 11 16:46:59 2014 -0600

    Allow players to continue traversing stairs if they get sealed halfway.
   
    This was never intentional, by all indications.

commit 83c5e769d0f02cc25f5a322a9f3a3e965837f661
Author: elliptic <hyperelliptical@gmail.com>
Date:   Tue Mar 11 18:50:51 2014 -0400

    Decrease Mark duration by 25%.
   
    (Numbers also tweaked slightly to make them rounder after the 25% reduction.)


[Sprucery]

About stair dancing in the past: It's really a moot point whether it was ever optimal or not, it was popular because it worked. Starting with Linley's Dungeon Crawl 3.20 I always did it. I'm sure I would have changed my tactics at some point, if I would have had problems with that approach. Vault Wardens obviously changed the situation, and in a good way.

[Psiweapon]

haste, downstairs, immolation, disc of storms.