Magipi wrote:It is quite common in Crawl that some parts have such a terrible risk/reward ratio that players simply avoid it. A recent example is the desolation of salt, some older stuff are the hall of blades, or hellion island. There are even some uniques, like Roxanne or Mara or Mennas.
Another way to look at it, is it depends a lot on your character. I've had a pretty easy time of Salt with a couple (stronger ranged characters), and passed it by with a purer/weaker melee one that I determined shouldn't touch it.
A similar if vaguer idea has to apply to unknown areas. If you're feeling uber-geared or uber-skilled (or you really love a challenge/even the horror-show aspect of Crawl generally), then you go in earlier. If you're not, treat it much like a runed door and go in later.
The OP vault was found on D:7 and it has a whole mess of carrots in sight from the outside, compared to most loot areas in Crawl. While I suppose a handful of very fresh players might make it their style to charge straight down that many floors fast and not get killed by other surprising things on the way, and not see many other odd vaults and doors that start to teach them not to think before hopping inside this...? I'm having a hard time seeing it as either something that is really going to catch a lot of people (and then rarely more than once or twice before they wise up), or as something that will do that more often than a range of other features presently in the game (which quite a few people also find amusing in principle).
I looked curiously at the first one I saw for a minute, I'll admit. It wasn't nearly so stocked with visible incentives and I could only see a couple squares of the inside from the direction I found the transporter from. But not knowing how the thing worked, and just knowing the game has vaults which tend to be trickier than the surrounding terrain, I put it off a bit and soon I had at least gotten a better picture what was inside. My first one wasn't all this dramatic, okay. But if this sort of thing is going to sock you and annoy you that often, then arguably so will crazy Yiuf and the like.