bananaken wrote:Yeah, this makes special levels like forest-themed depths or those Lair endings more interesting and dynamic. It's not necessarily a bad thing to restrict these to the cool guys who can train the relevant spells but you're definitely missing out now.
It's a bad mechanic to restrict areas of the game to characters who make a highly specific and significant skill investment to get a particular spell which may or may not be available in a particular game. Doubly so if the situation is spoilery.
You choose a character build, initially as a general idea of solving Crawl using a given skill set, and eventually as a number of cummulative responses to the challenges of Crawl which works to evolve that skill set. Some characters with some skill will do better in some areas against some problems, and vice-versa. But everybody can conceivably succeed. Enter spoilery vaults of secret loot. Don't got lightning bolt? Oh that's too bad, get lost. "I better learn lightning bolt on every character or I might miss some of these fairly common loot drops" is not a behavior that is in line with creating good decisions and/or fun.
I thought those types of vaults got axed several iterations ago? For being spoilery. They definitely need to go if they are not possibly accessible to any character thru item drops.
A better example of a "locked-loot" vault is the square of glass walls surrounded nine items that often loads in early D. You cannot miss the vault if you explore the floor, you definitely know loot is locked inside, and you probably do not have the ability to open it when you find it. But there are multiple options. You can learn LRD, but you can also find a wand of digging or even a wand of random effects (do they still have digging?), and then you are presented with a decision. Do I backtrack and open that vault, or is it a waste of time? Whether or not that is an interesting decision is another discussion (food clock, piety decay, backtracking, stairs, etc..) but the vault, on its face, works within the game design mantra.