Can we get rid of this portal entry vault?

[TwilightPhoenix]

Seriously. I knew where the door was at here, but the "portal" collapsed before my character found the door. Even being spoiled wasn't good enough to get in.

[nicolae]

Seriously. I knew where the door was at here, but the "portal" collapsed before my character found the door. Even being spoiled wasn't good enough to get in.

Secret doors are gone forever in 0.12, so the door in that vault won't be hidden anymore.

[mad]

Doesn't 0.12 keep secret doors in vaults, though?

[crate]

No. Secret doors are eliminated entirely in 0.12.

[Moose]

I'm so glad that secret doors are gone, but along the same lines, I just ran across an undead vault with a bunch of guardian mummies, and at the ends of the tunnels in the vault were 2 dead-ends. I just for the heck of it tried my wand of digging on them, and sure enough, they were "secret walls", and behind them were a bunch of artifacts and goodies with a few more monsters.

Wouldn't it be better to replace those diggable walls with doors?

[Roderic]

It's strange not to find anything secret in a dungeon... why not generating some secret extra-loot vaults where the door has a magic number and can only be detected having a larger skill in traps (like the auto-id for weapons) ?

Every time will be a hit or a miss when passing besides them and we solve the tedious pressing 's' as well as we get rid of the tedious plant-whacking for weapons.

[nicolae]

It's strange not to find anything secret in a dungeon... why not generating some secret extra-loot vaults where the door has a magic number and can only be detected having a larger skill in traps (like the auto-id for weapons) ?

Troves already work on a "you need X amount of this thing to enter" setup though.

There are ways to hide secrets with lua scripting, like doors that open when the player walks on a certain tile or kills a certain monster.

[Davion Fuxa]

I actually don't like the idea of getting rid of Secret Doors, except for when you know they are there and blocking your way into a timed vault, they add a fun flavor to the game that I think would be sorely missed; at least for me I've had a couple games where half the level wasn't explored on the simple reasoning that one secret door hadn't been found and that half of the level had to be reached via UP Staircases on the next level down.

Also, with traps being a near none-issue, this sort of feature removal sort of hurts the 'weakest' skill in game even more.

[njvack]

Actually: I'd say that level sections connected only by secret doors and a staircase on another level are better without the door.

[crate]

Also, with traps being a near none-issue, this sort of feature removal sort of hurts the 'weakest' skill in game even more.

Well there's an easy solution to this, just don't train traps skill!

I don't bother with it any more now that I don't need it to find doors that I know exist but my character doesn't.

[njvack]

...and yes, you will get hit with traps more. But the XP you've invested in something other than T&D means you're better able to deal with the results.

[Baldu]

For what it's worth, while many of skill mastery titles are rather uninspriring - like evocation i was hoping would be something like fetishist for all the toy action but got talismancer ( - traps mastery has the best title with fighting ( dungeon master and conqueror).

Ascending a dungeon master in a 15 runer felt pretty good, but ascending a 3 rune dungeon master made me wanna hug me. Might even have been from pride.

[njvack]

Talismancer sounds pretty awesome to me.

[XuaXua]

Feedback: without the secret doors, finding things has become a little less "thrilling" for me. I used to save those scrolls of magic mapping till I was sure something was wrong somewhere, then blap.

Now I only use them when Orc or Lair disconnects bubbles.

I had a lot of fun on that one crypt end with all the secret doors hiding all the various sections. Now that it's gone, I just tab the whole thing.

[Moose]

But, once you know where everything is, it's not going to be fun the 2nd time you find that layout.

And on the other side of things, I hate the thought of needing to read a magic mapping scroll each time I find a new layout to make sure I don't miss the treasure I've worked so hard to get to. It's an unnecessary pain in the ass for me.

The fun of a new layout is the contents itself: the monsters, the geography, and such. Having to search 20 turns on every square (you know that magic mapping didn't always reveal everything, yah?) or fire off a dig at some wall that MIGHT have a treasure chamber behind it was just drudgery.

I'm so glad secret doors are gone, and I'd like to see secret walls go too. I vote that if we want to keep things interesting, we should keep designing interesting map layouts and vaults, which seems to already be the case.

[crate]

Well the big thing is that really the "correct" response to getting a vault with secret doors is to go read the .des files and find out from them where the secret doors are. This uses no in-game resources but is time-consuming and ... annoying, to put it mildly.

(As an aside I got Jory's main vault about three or four times before I realised that in fact it had more to it than just the front area ... I never found Jory himself because the secret doors to get to Jory were in a place that I didn't think to look, because the first couple closets didnt have secret doors so why should I check every single one? Then I saw someone else get the vault.)

Anyway removing secret doors still keeps magic mapping quite useful ... I never used mapping to find doors before anyway. Now you use them to (gasp) map the level!

[tasonir]

I generally use magic mapping to find bazaars and labyrinths. If I happen to have 4 extras laying around I'll probably map a branch ending, but it doesn't really bother me to do endings unmapped. I haven't really used them for vaults, personally.

I'm still playing .11 for the tournament, so there's still doors, but I will probably keep training T&D even in 12. Getting to 10 is pretty easy, and Zot Traps can roll some pretty nasty side effects. If it wasn't for zot traps, it wouldn't be needed, but I hate miscasts.

[jwb]

I generally use magic mapping to find bazaars and labyrinths. If I happen to have 4 extras laying around I'll probably map a branch ending, but it doesn't really bother me to do endings unmapped.

That's about the way I do it, to. And while I've had fun when I guessed at a secret door correctly, vault secrets especially go against the "spoiler-free" point in the design philosophy.