galehar wrote:galehar wrote:So, no berserk potions and no high-tier wands before D:3?
This is in.
KoboldLord wrote:I personally consider the practice of picking up rubbish clubs and stones to throw at everything to be an unfortunate artifact of the system, and not a desirable play style. I do not think it is newbie-friendly to call a background a 'fighter' and have it almost entirely incapable of fighting, such that throwing useless debris is the only way you can reliably deal with a large percentage of enemies.
People always complain about the lack of early game options for fighters. If you don't start with it, then you have to pick it up from the ground. And the first floors are littered with missiles. Why dismiss them as useless junk and ask for consumables? This is a resource, and you are supposed to use the resources you find.
If fighters need to be boosted, I'd rather upgrade their starting equipment rather than give them consumables.
I don't really agree with any of this. I'm not sure if making the whole early game flat-out less varied and interesting is desirable, and I don't think it solves the main problem anyway.
The issue is less that the early game is brutally unfair to everyone, and more that different backgrounds are
wildly inconsistent in terms of what they can handle. If a strong background like a Berserker or practically any caster goes down really early on, odds are good that either the player screwed up really badly or something incredibly unlikely happened (which isn't really that big of a deal if it only happens once in a while). It doesn't become serious until you work your way down to the weaker starting backgrounds, especially the likes of Fighters and Monks.
Playing Fighters in the early game isn't awful because sometimes Sigmund happens, or sometimes an enemy grabs a Wand of Disintegration (in fact, finding a good wand early on yourself is one of the few things that can really help to reliably get you
through the early game). It's awful because there exists literally no enemy which does not have a non-trivial chance of killing you outright for reasons which are entirely out of your control. A lot of the time you'll find something as utterly mundane as a snake on D2 and your game just ends right there. If it's noticed you, you probably can't run from it, because it's faster than you. Even if it hasn't you can't avoid them forever, because D2 and 3 are filled to the brim with them. You can't always kill it from range, because even if you have darts they tend to miss or not deal much damage. You can't use your special spells or abilities to give you an edge because you don't have any. And then the snake only has to fail to miss you a couple of times in inevitable melee combat and you find yourself losing the entire last third of your health to poison when none of the four single-stacked unidentified potions in your inventory are healing, nor are they anything that would have helped you kill or avoid the snake even if you'd known what they were.
Backgrounds like Fighters are 100% dependent on consumables to survive any situation that their stats and damage rolls don't let them plow through (which, due to the nature of the RNG, could be absolutely anything), and the game is more than happy to slaughter them before any of said consumables have been physically generated, let alone identified. Giving the weakest starts a couple of good consumable items would go a long way to solving this problem, because it means you have actual tactical options that can potentially keep you alive when your only other capabilities (namely "throw darts", "push towards monster", and "push away from monster") fail due to the nature of the situation or random chance. Delaying the generation of Sigmund and nasty wands or whatever doesn't do much of anything, because "out-of-depth things are hard" is not the root of the issue. Better equipment doesn't really help because lousy rolls can and will happen no matter how many pluses you have on your gear.
EDIT: Okay, some of this might be a bit of an overstatement. After forcing myself to play a few fighters, they don't seem to have serious trouble with snakes and common orcs very often, at least in the current patch. It's still hell trying to so much as reach the temple, though.