The Tavern

A Spriggan with good Stealth and reliable Controlled Blink (easy for a Spriggan) can survive in Abyss:1 with very little risk. Blink away as soon as you see something that can harm you at range, and the chaotic terrain makes walking away very easy. Starvation is no problem if you avoid spellcasting hunger because the Abyss spawns more than enough food to keep up with base hunger. It's especially bad once you have the Abyssal Rune because exits spawn so frequently, making escape even easier. You can accumulate huge quantities of consumables with only tedium preventing it. This goes against the "anti-grinding" philosophy.

To discourage this, every time you enter the Abyss the difficulty should permanently increase a little, e.g. increasing the effective depth by 0.25 levels each time. Additionally it should increase by a very small amount each turn. This is somewhat like Ziggurats permanently increasing in difficulty each time one is cleared.

If this is too big a change, at least remove all food spawns there so there's some theoretical reason not to grind, although only a small one because the food clock is so weak.

That's a pretty good argument for removing Sp.

Remove Spriggans and all you do is make Felids the ideal Abyss farmers. It's only slightly more difficult for them.

Remove felids as well. Vampire in bat form can usually quite easily run away as well. Or we can simply remove Abyss. :wink:

Anyway, it's quite likely that a Sp which can learn controlled blink wouldn't have much difficulty in winning the game. So it doesn't matter much if it can scum Abyss.

I disagree. Controlled Blink is impossible in Zot. It's definitely more difficult than Abyss:1 for a Spriggan.

mrob wrote:I disagree. Controlled Blink is impossible in Zot. It's definitely more difficult than Abyss:1 for a Spriggan.

While technically true, I think the point here was "By the time you've learned Controlled Blink, you should already be well prepared for winning the game" not "It's possible to learn controlled blink before you are prepared to win the game"

That is to say, Controlled blink isn't a tool that automatically wins you the game, it's a tool that you should have really only spent the XP to get online, once you're already at the point where you could win the game.

That's pretty much the argument I've always seen for it being okay that Pan and Abyss scumming are possible. They're not optimal tedium because it's pretty much never actually optimal.

Let's keep the species removal talk in threads dedicated to that, folks.

e: that said, I don't think the changes suggested in the OP would make the game better; Abyssal farming is its own punishment, imo, and the fact that you get banished to greater depths at higher banishment power makes the difficulty scale okay.

Like archaeo said, the deeper levels of Abyss exist to increase difficulty already.

I believe it's already set so you can never re-enter at a shallower level than where you've been?

Speleothing wrote:I believe it's already set so you can never re-enter at a shallower level than where you've been?

Unless it was added to trunk recently, no. And if it it did it wouldn't matter. The frequent exit spawns from carrying the rune are nice to have but if you're relying on them you're farming incorrectly. The key to successful farming is extreme caution. Apport items, flee from anything that can harm you, only engage enemies when you're at full HP/MP and can kite them safely. I entered the Abyss 60 times in my last game and the only time I felt any serious danger was when I went down the stairs to Abyss:2 and started in a vault surrounded by monsters and with no easy escape route. I used haste to get out of that one. There's no reason you have to get the rune if you don't want to. Seeing as going down stairs into dangerous vaults is a possibility it seems it would be safer to grind in Abyss:1 for Necromutation and get the Tomb rune instead.

Increasing the difficulty over time would prevent this kind of farming. Abyss:1 is only safe because the enemy density is low enough that you can easily recover before you see something that forces a cBlink. Farming Abyss:2 feels unwise, and Abyss:3 is definitely too dangerous for farming.

If people don't like the idea of increasing difficulty, how about a gradually increasing chance of Hell-effect style random mutations?

How about not generating items in Abyss and making all Abyss monsters durably summoned?

That seems a way of the game telling you: "this is a (mostly) meaningless minigame, get out of here to continue playing the actual game".

I think some people feel this way about the Abyss, but I don't think all of them do. Many people seem to dislike durably summoned monsters for psychological reasons.

mrob wrote:Unless it was added to trunk recently, no. And if it it did it wouldn't matter. The frequent exit spawns from carrying the rune are nice to have but if you're relying on them you're farming incorrectly. The key to successful farming is extreme caution. Apport items, flee from anything that can harm you, only engage enemies when you're at full HP/MP and can kite them safely. I entered the Abyss 60 times in my last game and the only time I felt any serious danger was when I went down the stairs to Abyss:2 and started in a vault surrounded by monsters and with no easy escape route. I used haste to get out of that one. There's no reason you have to get the rune if you don't want to. Seeing as going down stairs into dangerous vaults is a possibility it seems it would be safer to grind in Abyss:1 for Necromutation and get the Tomb rune instead.

What was your character like when you started scumming Abyss? Perhaps if you manage to do it at a significantly lower XL (Sp have pretty high translocation apt), your case would be strengthened.

Look at what it took for demonstrating that traps are bad. And he still hit a trap in the game. He should have started as a Su and used spammals for a foolproof way. We heroes must pave the way for generations to come.

bel wrote:What was your character like when you started scumming Abyss?

XL:24 IIRC. Maybe it's possible at lower levels. I might try it.

bel wrote:this is a (mostly) meaningless minigame, get out of here

Sounds about right. Abyss should only be about getting the rune, a punishment branch, a resting place for AKs and an exit of Pan, not a farmland. Pan is better designed for farming since the risk is way bigger with that amount of open space.

floors that you can farm w/ minimal risk are terrible. this includes dungeon floors, where I am pretty sure that optimal play for mu/anyone with surplus food involves clearing explored maps and reexploring them, but it is absolutely awful in pan/abyss. "it is its own punishment" is the worst justification for a feature I have ever seen.

I honestly think that if you enjoy scumming pan/abyss, there are way bigger problems with you than there are with the game design at that point. That isn't to say that Pan couldn't use some streamlining, but I've got better things to do with my time than spend it needlessly in the two most annoying parts of the game.

prozacelf wrote:I honestly think that if you enjoy scumming pan/abyss, there are way bigger problems with you than there are with the game design at that point. That isn't to say that Pan couldn't use some streamlining, but I've got better things to do with my time than spend it needlessly in the two most annoying parts of the game.

Thats the point, no one enjoys it, but they do it to raise their winrate. A character of certain XL and god choice, managed properly will never die in the abyss, and will reliably accumulate enough XP, scrolls of blink, heal potions, etc to trivialize the rest of the game.

Yeah, my point is if you're willing to go through that to improve your winrate, you're welcome to as far as I'm concerned.

Don't generate items in Abyss unless PC spends consumables or gets mutated. I mean if PC spends one potion of heal wounds, Abyss can generate one potion of heal wound. If player picks it up, no more potions of heal wounds are generated. If player gets permanent mutations (cacodemon or neqoxec), a potion of cure mutations can be generated. Not sure about food, maybe the same approach as with other consumables.

prozacelf wrote:Yeah, my point is if you're willing to go through that to improve your winrate, you're welcome to as far as I'm concerned.

You know, people said that for decades about pudding farming in NetHack. Yet when the devteam awoke from their slumber a couple years back, they did in fact remove it (or rather, rendered it almost entirely pointless).

Abyss and Pan scumming may be less ridiculously monotonous than pudding farming, but they do fall into the same category. "You'd have to be masochistic to want to do this" is not a good reason to keep anything in the game. If it's boring and tedious to do, but still gives a leg up, it should go.

Personally, I'm much more in favor of just making Abyss and Pan finite, rather than futzing around with durable summons and itemless levels. Those are both things that, as said above, many players have a psychological aversion to. This isn't some deep mysterious Freudian shit by the way - it's pretty simple. Lots of people don't find it fun to play a section of a game that has no chance of giving you an in-game reward. Durable summons on itemless levels are just that.

non-serious time wasting post removed.

Proposal: abyssal shafts.

After spending X turns in abyss 1-4, where X is a big enough number to ensure that banishees and runeseekers are unlikely to get shafted (literally and figuratively), you are sucked down an abyssal shaft and immediately go down a floor. You can still farm abyss 5 if you want to, but if you can do that you can just go win anyway.

These turns are cumulative between visits for each level, so no farming abyss for 5k turns, returning to dungeon and going back for another bout of farming.

The Tavern

FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit

Re: FR: Make Abyss difficulty increase each visit