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I'm just wondering whether anyone else finds running towards the top floor of the dungeon once you have the orb to be somewhat anticlimactic. It's almost always an easy win at that point. Maybe originally it was harder and more exciting but it got toned down?

No, it was always a pointless walk back to d:1

Someone do a query one orb-run deaths in the recent tournament please. It's often quite exciting.

Sometimes I walk up 20+ floors tabbing everything in the way, then a pan lord with chaos attack comes on D4, I do not pay attention and die.

You may be surprised to hear this issue has been addressed in hellcrawl. There, the solution is to repurpose hell as the terrain for the orbrun. There is a portal in the orb chamber that takes you to the vestibule, which houses a portal to one of the four hells, which is not known to you at the outset. You therefore have to fight or tele your way around the welcome party (remember, no stairs) and find the active portal, which again is unknown and not even revealed by magic mapping.

You then go to the bottom of whatever hell, again no upstairs, to the dungeon exits just outside the hell lord chamber. You can at your option collect a rune from that chamber. I can tell you that the hellcrawl orbrun is consistently challenging and makes for a very climactic endgame.

watertreatmentRL wrote:You may be surprised to hear this issue has been addressed in hellcrawl. There, the solution is to repurpose hell as the terrain for the orbrun. There is a portal in the orb chamber that takes you to the vestibule, which houses a portal to one of the four hells, which is not known to you at the outset. You therefore have to fight or tele your way around the welcome party (remember, no stairs) and find the active portal, which again is unknown and not even revealed by magic mapping.

You then go to the bottom of whatever hell, again no upstairs, to the dungeon exits just outside the hell lord chamber. You can at your option collect a rune from that chamber. I can tell you that the hellcrawl orbrun is consistently challenging and makes for a very climactic endgame.

Agreed, hellcrawl's orbrun is pretty fun. It's not perfect but I think it's already a better alternative to the current orb run.

duvessa wrote:No, it was always a pointless walk back to d:1

FWIW, it's not entirely pointless, just pointless enough to merit a thank. I like the idea of an ascension; you get a trip through memory lane, an opportunity to see the journey you made to the orb from the other side. In practice, it's a very easy stroll up to d:1 with occasional episodes of good gameplay.

I still tend to think that you could make the orb run better if the terrain on the way up got increasingly destroyed, or if the dungeon slowly got swallowed by the abyss, or other complicated-and-too-hard-to-program ideas. Good on Hellmonk & co. figuring out a simple solution, which loses the advantages of the backtrack but probably makes up for it in gameplay.

archaeo wrote:
duvessa wrote:No, it was always a pointless walk back to d:1

FWIW, it's not entirely pointless, just pointless enough to merit a thank. I like the idea of an ascension; you get a trip through memory lane, an opportunity to see the journey you made to the orb from the other side. In practice, it's a very easy stroll up to d:1 with occasional episodes of good gameplay.

I still tend to think that you could make the orb run better if the terrain on the way up got increasingly destroyed, or if the dungeon slowly got swallowed by the abyss, or other complicated-and-too-hard-to-program ideas. Good on Hellmonk & co. figuring out a simple solution, which loses the advantages of the backtrack but probably makes up for it in gameplay.

That would maybe be relevant and nice to have, but the reality at the moment is rather press GD1 repeatedly and adapt when disrupted. The hellcrawl idea of making you run randomly through one of the hell branches with a last optional rune seems certainly better in my opinion and could replace the orb run/extended in the long term (the exact manner in how to do and what to do with Pan/Tomb definitely needs to be clarified further).

If you cut one of the lair branches in addition, i.e. random 1 out of 4 (maybe extend it 6 levels instead of 4 to compensate), to make the XP gain tighter I think the end result could be very interesting and actually provide meaningful tactical and strategic challenges throughout the game. In the end the 2nd lair branch is anyway irrelevant as you can amass tons of XP before going into it. Alternatively one could extend the rune lock to two runes, but I prefer to force players getting two non-lair runes as this would be far less trivial.

MainiacJoe wrote:Someone do a query one orb-run deaths in the recent tournament please. It's often quite exciting.

<Doesnty> !lm * t0.20 orb
<Sequell> 1782. [2017-06-11 19:57:05] demenzo the Wrestler (L27 TrFi of Okawaru) found the Orb of Zot! (Zot:5)
<Doesnty> !lg * t0.20 won
<Sequell> 1710. demenzo the Wrestler (L27 TrFi of Okawaru), escaped with the Orb and 3 runes on 2017-06-11 19:59:25, with 1972687 points after 52111 turns and 1:58:11.

Looks like orbrun has a 4% lethality rate, although I imagine most of it comes from people failing to get off Zot:5 for partly non-orbrun-spawns reasons.

4% lethality rate is plenty high enough. What's the figure for Vaults:5, for comparison?

mkraemer wrote:press GD1 repeatedly

It's better to press GD0.

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Anticlimactic orb escape

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