Halls Hopper
Posts: 55
Joined: Monday, 9th July 2012, 22:24
Why are wizlabs so incredibly rare?
And I loved it! It was great! I haven't been so excited in a new area since the first time I tackled the Tomb. It was thematically really cool, it was challenging, it had all sorts of neat unique monsters that I had to learn how to deal with, and it was just a really fun, intense area in general. It's really a wonderful exhibition of the Crawl Dev Team's skills and dedication. So why are they so rare?
Compare wizlabs (or at least the moon base) to something like the Labyrinth. I'd estimate that the Labyrinth pops up for me in 50% of the games where I complete the Lair and the Dungeon floors, it's an absolute no-brainer in terms of loot (very low risk, quite good reward), and it's not even particularly interesting (though I do like the vaults that have been recently added, gotta say). Meanwhile, Wizlab has popped up for me, what, 1% of the games where I've cleared both Vaults and Elf? It seems to have a decent risk-reward ratio: it was harder than the Vaults around it, being quite challenging - the Moon Troll would've turned me into a pile of toilet paper if I didn't have a wall of summons to retreat behind - and the loot, while offering an excellent unrandart, gave me 50 gold and a wand beyond that. So it doesn't seem rare to me because it would be "too good" for players to get it more often.
As someone who's seen literally everything else the game has to offer (hell, I ran into the Desolation about a week after it was added), I'd really, really love to see more of these. Or am I just insanely unlucky?