DCSS has a power creep problem


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Post Tuesday, 26th January 2016, 21:40

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Lasty wrote:Regarding negatively-enchanted artefacts, I don't think there's been meaningful power inflation -- hardly anyone ever used negatively-enchanted body armour or weapon artefacts, and people are only barely more likely to use +0 ones. The change was written so that body armour / weapon artefacts that would have been negatively enchanted ones are now +0, but there's no other change. Since the +0 artefacts are only very marginally more likely to get used, it's a pretty negligible power creep.


I strongly disagree. If I find a +0 randart body armour with non-harmful intrinsics on D:6 while I'm wearing equivalent unenchanted (or lightly enchanted) armour I will likely use it at least until I find a suitable upgrade. Any ?ea I find tipically goes to aux slots before body armour anyway. If that randart body armour had been generated with negative enchantment I would almost certainly not have even considered it. Same deal with weapons. Even a +0 long sword of flaming is useful for hydras, a -6 one less so.
Just because an item isn't endgame-quality it doesn't mean it's on par with trash.

edit: Not that I want to make this seem like a big deal. Of course it's hardly the worst offender in terms of power creep, but I've noticed that a lot of it (that people never complain about) comes in the form of things that used to be complete trash being buffed at least into usability.

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Post Tuesday, 26th January 2016, 23:35

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Siegurt wrote:
duvessa wrote:
Lasty wrote:For example, I'm responsible for the randart buff. I didn't intend to make it a buff, but it's possible that that is what it has been in net effect. What I saw was a chaotic system that was hard to tweak and hard to keep modern and hard to accurately anticipate the outcomes of. I cleaned it up so that it's much easier to work with and much easier to tweak any aspect that needs adjustment. Since I did that, there have been very few tweaks to the current balance; if overall the randart buff has been a buff, it would be good to identify what aspects have gotten stronger and twist those knobs a bit. It's definitely something I've been trying to keep an eye on, and I'd be interested to hear feedback on how it could be improved.
That is not the randart buff I'm talking about. It wasn't a significant buff. I am talking about the buff to randart enchantment values that happened prior to that. In older versions, randart weapons and armour had lower enchantment on average. I do think this buff was necessary (randarts were rarely useful because of garbage enchantment) but it was a power increase nonetheless.

Are you talking about this:
http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... 34d66467e0
  Code:
Don't allow body armour or weapon randarts to have negative enchantment

These were never wearable, since the value of these slots is so heavily
based on the enchantment.

?
No, I'm talking about these:
https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/05f4f2ed38ff
https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/44efbc97f7b1
I should have specified "body armour", non-body armour hasn't gotten any better.

As Lasty said, replacing negative enchantment with +0 really did nothing.

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Post Wednesday, 27th January 2016, 02:43

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

doesnt not having negative enchantment on randarts means that generated randarts are more likely to be good? Sometimes you would end up with a -4 cloak with rf++ so now you get a +0, rf++ instead.
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Post Wednesday, 27th January 2016, 04:30

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

You can still get -4 cloaks, it's just body armour that get set to +0 because no one's going to wear a negatively enchanted body armour.

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Post Wednesday, 27th January 2016, 05:38

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Lasty wrote:As far as I'm concerned, the main current balance-ish gameplay issues that need resolution are:
1) Spectral weapon is an unreasonably large boost to offense for relatively small investment.
2) Ozo's armour is an unreasonably large boost to defense for relatively small investment.
3) There are too many different evocables and most of them are very strong.
4) Throwing in particular and ranged combat in general is much too strong.
5) Lair gives too much XP relative to the danger of its monsters; after a couple levels of Lair, you almost always have enough XP to clear the remainder of Lair safely. I'd love to see it trimmed by 4 levels, and add scarier monsters on the OoD clock -- maybe dragons, which are more or less on-theme.
6) Energy randomization is a clunky solution to speed 10 chases.

There are probably a bunch of other things that also need some kind of attention, but those seem like some of the more glaring ones to me, at least off the cuff.


Spectral weapon is definitely problematic, although it is flavorful and fun. The ideal solution would probably involve tying either the damage done by the spectral weapon or its staying power or both to spellpower in a more pronounced way. As far as I can tell, even at minimum spellpower, a hit from your spectral weapon does the same amount of damage as it would at max spellpower.

Ozo's is also a huge boost, but it seems like a bit less of a problem to me just because it is already limited to the lightest armors in the game. That being said, there are probably legit ways to improve it.

There are also definitely too many evocables that are kind of all in the same conceptual space. I think part of the problem, evokable-wise, is that virtually every evokable is extremely powerful at a high skill level, with the exceptions of the wands that everyone leaves on the floor anyway and rod of the swarm. Having some evokables that hit their functional ceiling at varying levels of skill might be a way to approach this.

Throwing and ranged are fairly OP, and this seems to be currently "balanced" by being a huge pain in the ass in terms of inventory management and collecting ammo. Something can obviously be done here, but I'm glad you're tackling it and not me =p

4 levels of Lair sounds like a good idea, but it's probably something we'd need to see in action to really make a good judgement on it.

Energy randomization sucks, but this is another one where I have no idea what a good solution would look like.

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Post Wednesday, 27th January 2016, 06:29

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

prozacelf wrote:Ozo's is also a huge boost, but it seems like a bit less of a problem to me just because it is already limited to the lightest armors in the game. That being said, there are probably legit ways to improve it.

I think this relates back to Duvessa's original point; if you had actual numbers to aim for, you tune OA so that it's not giving you characters with overpowered defenses, or even rebalance the Ice school around the fact you're training offense and defense at the same time.

(and doing so might even make the idea of changing OA to a passive boost more palatable)

Energy randomization sucks, but this is another one where I have no idea what a good solution would look like.

IMO, just removing it, while not a solution, is better than the status quo, since I'm pretty sure "if you run around long enough, you can eventually break out of melee range so that you can escape upstairs" was not the intended effect.

Finding a solution, I think, would require that we stop thinking in terms of "speed 10 chases", but instead of what actual behavior we intend to stop (e.g. putting the fight 'on hold' so that you can regenerate HP/MP), and think about how to stop that.

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Post Wednesday, 27th January 2016, 08:12

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Make ozocubu and all other castable buffs drain your mp, so more buffs = shorter duration & less offense.
Also tie Regeneration's effect to spellpower, so it stops being a spell everybody and their troll learns and uses.
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Post Wednesday, 27th January 2016, 08:21

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Hurkyl wrote:
Energy randomization sucks, but this is another one where I have no idea what a good solution would look like.

IMO, just removing it, while not a solution, is better than the status quo, since I'm pretty sure "if you run around long enough, you can eventually break out of melee range so that you can escape upstairs" was not the intended effect.

Finding a solution, I think, would require that we stop thinking in terms of "speed 10 chases", but instead of what actual behavior we intend to stop (e.g. putting the fight 'on hold' so that you can regenerate HP/MP), and think about how to stop that.



Well, "run around long enough, you can eventually break out of melee range or get smashed by a giant fucking club or whatever." But at best I've got to think only one of those endings was the intended effect.

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Post Wednesday, 27th January 2016, 08:40

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

prozacelf wrote:Well, "run around long enough, you can eventually break out of melee range or get smashed by a giant fucking club or whatever." But at best I've got to think only one of those endings was the intended effect.

The odds are* even or nearly so that you get away rather than get hit, and even if you do get hit, if you survive (which you will in most of the situations you should be running away), that puts you right on the edge of being able to get away afterwards.

*: There may be some systematic biases I'm not accounting for, but I think they actually favor escaping first
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Post Wednesday, 27th January 2016, 10:18

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Hurkyl wrote:
Energy randomization sucks, but this is another one where I have no idea what a good solution would look like.

IMO, just removing it, while not a solution, is better than the status quo, since I'm pretty sure "if you run around long enough, you can eventually break out of melee range so that you can escape upstairs" was not the intended effect.

Finding a solution, I think, would require that we stop thinking in terms of "speed 10 chases", but instead of what actual behavior we intend to stop (e.g. putting the fight 'on hold' so that you can regenerate HP/MP), and think about how to stop that.

Finding a solution would require us to start thinking, period.

1) To recover, escape adjacent monster by taking stairs, and press 5.
2) To recover, regenerate by pillar-dancing.
For monsters incapable of using stairs, the two are nearly indistinguishable.

Letting monsters use stairs preserved the one that requires 100x more keystrokes* and eliminated the other one. So why was it done?
*-and the one, BTW, that allows a greater margin for error (think about it: you still prefer 2 over 1 if you're reduced to 1 HP)

Probably Linley himself put it in on a whim. He could see using stairs to get away from a fight and recover, and said to himself, "teehee, wouldn't it sting if monsters adjacent to the stairs showed up on the other side? So roguelikey, add add add"

We don't bother to remove this bad feature.
--Abusing monster stair-use to split packs (stairdancing) becomes ascended to tactics, and we balance the game around that. (Contributes to power-creep.) Yeah, fast monsters are harder to shake off, but that does not compensate sufficiently for the power of stair-dancing.
--We give the most problematic monsters e.g. zombies no-stair flags.
--We introduce energy randomization to make #2 slightly less boring than perfectly typing "llllnbhhhhyu" (depends on pillar) many times - "hey, at least something could happen on the screen, and maybe I'll get a chance to use stairs before my health bar fills up" - which doesn't actually impact pillar-dancing, but introduces Yet Another Simplistic Minigame that no-one likes anyway.

Crawl's "culture of removal" needs more love.
Last edited by HardboiledGargoyle on Thursday, 28th January 2016, 01:25, edited 1 time in total.

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Post Wednesday, 27th January 2016, 11:43

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Make it so it's 50% chance that a monster will follow you up/downstairs
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Post Wednesday, 27th January 2016, 19:13

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Let's take a step back a bit: should a typical PC even be 'allowed' to escape from an adjacent NPC without the use of consumables? Or flee from an NPC a few tiles away? Or just pull back a few squares? Does it matter if the PC was fighting before trying to move away?

---

Also, a new mechanic one might be able to toy with to achieve whatever the desired outcome is to modify movement speed; e.g. if you attack, your next movement (or next few movements) are slower. Or alternatively if you get attacked.

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Post Wednesday, 27th January 2016, 19:27

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

You have some really good points, but you manage to damage your position by being an obnoxious poster. Because of this, I expect this train of thought to go nowhere, but I made some notes for myself.

HardboiledGargoyle wrote:Finding a solution would require us to start thinking, period.
This suggests that nobody thought before.

1) To recover, escape adjacent monster by taking stairs, and press 5.
2) To recover, regenerate by pillar-dancing.
For monsters incapable of using stairs, the two are nearly indistinguishable.

Letting monsters use stairs preserved the one that requires 100x more keystrokes* and eliminated the other one. So why was it done?[/quit]
Monsters never using staircases has its own deficits. For example, you'd always try to fight on a staircase, and if things to bad, take it. If monsters all get another attack while you take, be more conservative in your estimate of when to take it.

Probably Linley himself put it in on a whim. He could see using stairs to get away from a fight and recover, and said to himself, "teehee, wouldn't it sting if monsters adjacent to the stairs showed up on the other side? So roguelikey, add add add"
Stop telling us what other people thought. We're busy enough understanding what you think.

Your good point is bringing up staircases. Your deficits are thinking that this is the solution to All Problems, and arguing like an ass:

We don't bother to remove this bad feature.
--Abusing monster stair-use to split packs (stairdancing) becomes ascended to tactics, and we balance the game around that. (Contributes to power-creep.) Yeah, fast monsters are harder to shake off, but that does not compensate sufficiently for the power of stair-dancing.
--We give the most problematic monsters e.g. zombies no-stair flags.
--We introduce energy randomization to make #2 slightly less boring than perfectly typing "llllnbhhhhyu" (depends on pillar) many times - "hey, at least something could happen on the screen, and maybe I'll get a chance to use stairs before my health bar fills up" - which doesn't actually impact pillar-dancing, but introduces Yet Another Simplistic Minigame that no-one likes anyway.

There are some problematic statements in this list (Why are zombies the most problematic monsters? That rule change was made for allied zombies, not hostile ones.) It also doesn't help to thrown stair dancing and pillar dancing in the same pot. These are different issues, which probably need different solutions.

So much for "culture of removal".
Obviously, this one takes the cake. Because it didn't occur to us to remove the one thing you just mentioned, we have no "culture of removal". The Mountain Dwarf diviners would like a word with you.

It would be a really good idea to take a step back, and think about the bigger picture: how to regain HP/MP, how can the player modify the random situation a new level presents etc. Your posting could have almost done it. Too bad.

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Post Wednesday, 27th January 2016, 20:11

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

My solutions (and i speak out of my ass when i propose that) would be:
Replace stairs with ladders: Takes long to step in, longer to climb, you cannot attack while standing in one and you can be pulled off it while climbing. Monsters dont follow you up. Ladders would give vision of the floor below before the player decides to go down.
Get rid of MP: spell fail rate and hunger are already enough to restrain a player for spamming spells, they can be adjusted to be more severe too. MP becomes SP(spirit points) or AP(ability points) and are still used for evocables, god abilities, etc.
Normal moving monsters get swiftness:

I am not sure if any of these changes would make the game better in any way.
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Post Thursday, 28th January 2016, 05:13

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

That's interesting and vague, Dynast, I'm not sure it's all been proposed in that combination before.

dpeg wrote:you manage to damage your position by being an obnoxious poster. Because of this, I expect this train of thought to go nowhere

Yeah - I recommend not doing that. Sorry, I really don't try to be obnoxious, honest. Thanks for not banning me, I suppose? Anyway, I throw pillar dancing and stairs into the same pot because monsters using stairs makes pillar dancing (our topic of conversation) displace the tactic of tanking ~1 hit while using stairs and pressing 5 a couple of times. For the most part. It also looks edgy the first time a newbie sees it, and makes fast monsters harder to escape. And it also has negative consequences I listed. So I don't think those are two different problems that require two different solutions. That's a bit like saying confusion and curing are two different problems and require two different solutions. And yeah, zombies are just one example, others being summons, illusions, player ghosts, silent specters, TRJ, dowan/duvessa.
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Post Thursday, 28th January 2016, 08:17

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

HardboiledGargoyle wrote:Thanks for not banning me, I suppose?

dpeg is not a mod.

Instead of splitting the thread again or locking it altogether, I'm going to ask that everyone in this thread stay focused on "power creep" as a holistic issue instead of shifting the focus to individual issues; if you want to talk about particular mechanics, please start a new thread. duvessa's OP has obviously struck a chord, and discussing whether or not power creep is a big problem in Crawl is totally reasonable GDD material, but it's not a useful discussion if we keep getting bogged down in minutiae.
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Post Friday, 29th January 2016, 07:14

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Are you sure archaeo? Thread seems to be getting interesting enough to get locked... ;) THIS JUST IN devs are promptly keeping power creep in check, courtesy of pleasingfung! See Remove various wands: "The primary reasoning here is that, as we've added new evocables and other items, we haven't made any compensating removals"... or are we not supposed to talk about it? :?

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Post Friday, 29th January 2016, 11:44

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Odds of getting wand of HW increases and you think thats a nerf, do you even soup?
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Post Friday, 29th January 2016, 12:11

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

It's like a philosophy convention - instead of analyzing the problem and posting reasoned solutions, people argue about definitions.
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Post Friday, 29th January 2016, 14:05

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

dynast wrote:Odds of getting wand of HW increases


They did? Looks like the weight of heal wounds stays the same for both acquirement (_acquirement_wand_subtype) and ordinary item gen (_random_wand_subtype), as do the total weights.

Edit: I guess the chances went up slightly for worshippers of good gods doing wand acquirement, since the weight of draining and random effects increased and those are god-hated.

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Post Friday, 29th January 2016, 14:40

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Hmm, eh? well, maybe not. I think wand drop will need some balancing now that most of the "useless" wands are gone.
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Post Monday, 26th December 2016, 02:33

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

What I'd like to avoid seeing is crawl being like making a munchin character from Ad&d. It's more fun when death lurks around every corner.

It's more fun for the game to punish you for making the wrong choice, rather than, just throwing Super Titans at you that can launch bolts of lightning from 3 floors away towards you which one hit you. But, Super Titans from three floors away throwing bolts of lightning out you seems very interesting.
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Post Monday, 26th December 2016, 05:58

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

TonberryJam wrote:What I'd like to avoid seeing is crawl being like making a munchin character from Ad&d. It's more fun when death lurks around every corner.


Which changes do you think have been made that decrease the likelihood of death being around every corner?

Merry Christmas, by the way :)

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Post Monday, 26th December 2016, 09:16

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

I wish the devs would remove extended already instead of torturously balancing the game around it.
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Post Monday, 26th December 2016, 09:58

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

On the topic of speed 10 chases, I've always thought Crawl has a bit of a monster locality issue.

To elaborate: monsters are often tied to vaults, in both a thematic and tactical sense, yet the player is allowed to disregard that design choice and lure the monsters to a favored (and generally boring) position. Most end vaults aren't experienced as a battlefield but as a glorified loot stash, because decent players will have done anything in their power to take the fight away from the monster spawns.

This ties with the chase mechanic, in particular with the fact that running away from a monster is in the overwhelming majority of cases almost risk free. This makes luring to a corridor/killhole/stair the optimal choice in almost every circumstance, which I think is the kind of tedious strategy that the crawl philosophy strives to fight. On top of all of this, it also makes the monster shouting mechanic obsolete, because it's trivial to lure a monster away from the point of alert, which is silly both thematically and mechanically.

So here's an idea: divide AI in four different types:

Chasers: Monsters with higher than average speed that will follow the player no matter where. Only faster than average players would benefit from running away from these, and it should still be a struggle. Ideal example: killer bees.
Shooters: Monsters tied to a point (vault, room, etc) that once lured far enough away, will use their ranged abilities exclusively and take a stand. This category should encompass all monsters that are comparably strong at a distance than at melee range.
Retreaters: Monsters tied to a vault or particular area that, once lured far enough away, will retreat back to their starting point at substantially increased speed.
Patrollers: Monsters that follow the old behaviour. Preferably with ranged abilities.

With combinations of these three AI groups, the player would be forced to take the fight to the monsters. More important than all of that though, is that the dungeon would be given a sense of locality and permanency, where a room is known to be dangerous and remains that way, and has to be played around.
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Post Monday, 26th December 2016, 10:14

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

For what it's worth, I think only live vs. trunk versions should be considered for future balance changes. Going several years worth of changelogs back and comparing a character from today to the days of yore without taking the completely different circumstances (selectively remembering only a few choice changes) both of these characters "lived" in is guaranteed to give you a very distorted image of "player power" across the ages.

It's funny that some of the "anti power creep" monsters like juggernauts and iron giants got nerfed almost the moment they wrere introduced. First they complain "too easy", then they complain "too hard", I'd have trouble catering to that too. Make up your mind, people.

I don't think crawl has a severe power creep problem, I've seen games with power creep problems (MTG)...

But even if it should be the case in crawl now or in the future, the effects are luckily not irreversible, as the complete evisceration of evocations has showed us.

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Post Monday, 26th December 2016, 12:00

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

removeelyvilon wrote:It's funny that some of the "anti power creep" monsters like juggernauts and iron giants got nerfed almost the moment they wrere introduced. First they complain "too easy", then they complain "too hard", I'd have trouble catering to that too. Make up your mind, people.

Perhaps you didn't read the thread before commenting on it? The issue being discussed is not monster strength, but player strength while holding monster constant. The example of Yak was taken because it hasn't changed in many versions.

Steel Neuron wrote:
Spoiler: show
On the topic of speed 10 chases, I've always thought Crawl has a bit of a monster locality issue.

To elaborate: monsters are often tied to vaults, in both a thematic and tactical sense, yet the player is allowed to disregard that design choice and lure the monsters to a favored (and generally boring) position. Most end vaults aren't experienced as a battlefield but as a glorified loot stash, because decent players will have done anything in their power to take the fight away from the monster spawns.

This ties with the chase mechanic, in particular with the fact that running away from a monster is in the overwhelming majority of cases almost risk free. This makes luring to a corridor/killhole/stair the optimal choice in almost every circumstance, which I think is the kind of tedious strategy that the crawl philosophy strives to fight. On top of all of this, it also makes the monster shouting mechanic obsolete, because it's trivial to lure a monster away from the point of alert, which is silly both thematically and mechanically.

So here's an idea: divide AI in four different types:

Chasers: Monsters with higher than average speed that will follow the player no matter where. Only faster than average players would benefit from running away from these, and it should still be a struggle. Ideal example: killer bees.
Shooters: Monsters tied to a point (vault, room, etc) that once lured far enough away, will use their ranged abilities exclusively and take a stand. This category should encompass all monsters that are comparably strong at a distance than at melee range.
Retreaters: Monsters tied to a vault or particular area that, once lured far enough away, will retreat back to their starting point at substantially increased speed.
Patrollers: Monsters that follow the old behaviour. Preferably with ranged abilities.

With combinations of these three AI groups, the player would be forced to take the fight to the monsters. More important than all of that though, is that the dungeon would be given a sense of locality and permanency, where a room is known to be dangerous and remains that way, and has to be played around.

This may or may not be fine, but I think this is the wrong thread. It would be better to necro this thread, or create a new one.

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Post Monday, 26th December 2016, 17:48

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Steel Neuron wrote:To elaborate: monsters are often tied to vaults, in both a thematic and tactical sense, yet the player is allowed to disregard that design choice and lure the monsters to a favored (and generally boring) position. Most end vaults aren't experienced as a battlefield but as a glorified loot stash, because decent players will have done anything in their power to take the fight away from the monster spawns.


Well maybe if pregen vaults weren't typically deathtraps players would be more likely to fight in them.

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Post Monday, 26th December 2016, 19:10

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

I really doubt DCSS has a powercreep problem, since it is insanely hard to win for most people

Some players had a skill creep, and I agree that some veterans got to a level where their safe approach reduces their likelihood of dying. So good for them. They don't need to spoil the fun for less skilled players, they should concentrate on speedruns instead.

By the way, it makes sense to differentiate player "might", aka how easily the player can zap or slam things, from player survivability which depends on
* chasing speeds
* general damage soaking ability
* maximum damage swing on a "lucky" monster hit
* get out of jail cards (teleport scrolls, former haste items, ...)
* pattern recognition skills from the player that allow him to identify trouble before it is too late

Very good players have pattern recognition skills that allow them to anticipate or completely avoid most dangerous situations. This snowballs into them using very little of their lifesaving coonsumables, and therefore always having escape cards on hand.

If you really want to please those annoying veterans without giving the middle finger to most players, maybe an option would be to limit hoarding survival options, for example preventing player from stacking more than 2 scrolls of BLINKING (and have any additional blink scroll discovered when you know more than 2 be autocast when encountered)

As for powercreep, I note that the developpers wisely stay out of stacking effects, or multiplicative effects. This definitely closes the most dangerous floodgate. Stacking buffs or stacking debuffs is a path to unchecked power, this is controleld by a lot of effects. The only time I felt there was a big powercreep in the game was when gargoyles were introduced with great weapon skills on top of their high armor, but gargoyles were nerfed since.
Last edited by Lameador2 on Wednesday, 28th December 2016, 00:59, edited 1 time in total.

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Post Monday, 26th December 2016, 20:06

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Lameador2 wrote:I really doubt DCSS has a powercreep problem, since it is insanely hard to win for most people
...thats not what power creep means

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Post Monday, 26th December 2016, 23:26

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

...and additionally, the premise (it is difficult for people to win at crawl) does not logically lead to the conclusion of the argument (power creep isn't happening)

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Post Tuesday, 27th December 2016, 14:30

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

imo:

Remove staff of energy
Make disc of storms xp gated
Make rods only charge while wielded and lose charge on unequip
Get rid of either box of beasts or sack of spiders

Should deal with some of the evocable related power creep
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Post Tuesday, 27th December 2016, 21:29

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

You may as well remove disc of storms and rods with those changes. Disc already requires a ton of evo and rElec to be useful (it's one of the few items that actually encourages getting to 20+ skill), and the only characters that can afford to just have a rod in hand all the time can already nuke monsters with spells. The rod change in particular would encourage anyone who primarily uses a weapon in combat to rest while wielding the rod, unload it at the first thing you run into, swap to a weapon, finish the fight, and repeat. Which is exactly the sort of tedious but optimal behavior that current design changes are trying to discourage. Granted, rods are supposed to be getting moved into wands from what I hear, so that makes the second point entirely moot. I just wanted to point out the problems there.

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Post Wednesday, 28th December 2016, 00:18

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

duvessa wrote:
Lameador2 wrote:I really doubt DCSS has a powercreep problem, since it is insanely hard to win for most people
...thats not what power creep means


Obviously doctor obvious, the fact that it is insanely hard to win means no undesirable power creep (aka power creep problem) happened. Thanks for this clever passive-agressive remark.
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Post Wednesday, 28th December 2016, 00:36

Lameador2 wrote:Thanks [to duvessa] for this clever passive-agressive remark.

Ironic and sarcastic comments of duvessa/minmay are not unusual. This behaviour has been discussed several times in the last years in this forum.

Don't worry! It has nothing to do with you.

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Post Wednesday, 28th December 2016, 08:35

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Lameador2 wrote:
duvessa wrote:
Lameador2 wrote:I really doubt DCSS has a powercreep problem, since it is insanely hard to win for most people
...thats not what power creep means


Obviously doctor obvious, the fact that it is insanely hard to win means no undesirable power creep (aka power creep problem) happened.
it doesn't mean that

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Post Wednesday, 28th December 2016, 09:17

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Lameador2 wrote:the fact that it is insanely hard to win means no undesirable power creep (aka power creep problem) happened.


Not commenting on duvessa's sarcasm, but this still doesn't follow. If power creeps up for monsters as well as players, then you can have power creep without necessarily making the game easier. There tends to be a lot more discussion of the player-side issues, but it's definitely a problem for both. Nasty new monsters and monster abilities are introduced pretty frequently, monster removals tend to impact 'boring' middle-powered monsters the most, and monster nerfs are fairly uncommon. The overall trend is towards more powerful players facing more powerful monsters, and this really isn't all that desirable.

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Post Wednesday, 28th December 2016, 10:17

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

The removed wands were situational, but in those situations (Ru, silence, mummy) they were a good or even the only choice. Does their removal combat the power creep problem?
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Post Wednesday, 28th December 2016, 11:15

Re:

Turukano wrote:
Lameador2 wrote:Thanks [to duvessa] for this clever passive-agressive remark.

Ironic and sarcastic comments of duvessa/minmay are not unusual. This behaviour has been discussed several times in the last years in this forum.

Don't worry! It has nothing to do with you.

Wow, i guess its up to me to side with duvessa and say "You dont get to come to a necro thread, ignore the OP, which was written by duvessa, and expect politeness, from duvessa."
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Post Wednesday, 28th December 2016, 13:42

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Also, unless "that's not what power creep means" means something very different in another language, there's nothing sarcastic or rude about it.

On topic: I'd say yes, yellow wand removal is a reduction of player options and thus player power. The significance of it, of course, is hotly debated. I tend to come down somewhere between "removing the wands changes nothing" and "wow devs ruining my game 0/10 would not play again". Maybe a little closer to the former than the latter?

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Post Thursday, 29th June 2017, 20:59

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Reminder that 0.20 globally buffed player melee and missile damage and wand power.

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Post Thursday, 29th June 2017, 22:26

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

duvessa wrote:Reminder that 0.20 globally buffed player melee and missile damage and wand power.

Don't forget Tomb hatches and more vaults with unsealed very-OOD monsters showing up earlier.

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Post Friday, 30th June 2017, 01:04

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

duvessa wrote:Reminder that 0.20 globally buffed player melee and missile damage and wand power.

This was the change where the strength formula now counts 10 strength (or was it 9 or 11?) so everyone effectively has +1 strength compared to before? Would you recommend essentially subtracting 1 strength from everyone to compensate? So you'd still have a smooth curve around the 9 to 11 range, but not add 1 strength to everyone?

I think it's also worth mentioning that when .16 doubled melee damage we saw a winrate which was almost exactly double the previous one; I was surprised how the effect was so closely 1:1. So while adding +1 strength is only about a 2.5% increase, you'd expect about a 2.5% increase in winrate (proportionally, not a flat 2.5% increase).

How much stronger did wands get?

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Post Friday, 30th June 2017, 19:49

Re: DCSS has a power creep problem

Floodkiller wrote:
duvessa wrote:Reminder that 0.20 globally buffed player melee and missile damage and wand power.

Don't forget Tomb hatches and more vaults with unsealed very-OOD monsters showing up earlier.
Yeah, there's been some big time power creep in monsters (and XP!) too.
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