Tomb Titivator
Posts: 808
Joined: Sunday, 23rd June 2013, 15:20
Long term trend discussion: Stealth nerfs
Generate Gauntlet monsters awake
Let players explore around and see all the options without feeling
bad about waking monsters up. (You'll still make monsters notice
you, but there's less downside to that.)
TLDR: a long series of small incremental changes make being stealthy much less rewarding, and thats not fun.
Lets talk stealth. I thinks its an awesomely fun mechanic. No-spell support Stealth is great, very high risk, very high reward. Its defensive and offensive at the same time. Not being noticed by monsters is good defensively being able to oneshot sleeping monsters is awesomely offensive. At the same time, it rewards the things crawl is all about: proper positioning, item+spell use, taking chances. Its also an equalizer to characters that can't or won't use crawls best defense mechanic AC. If you can't use heavy armour, at least you get to be stealthy!
The above change takes away a real consideration for weak chars: it definitely was an option to just T1 pop invisibility and - without checking rewards - hopp into a teleporter.
There have been other long term stealth nerfs that made being stealthy less fun:
- evocable invis reduced to cloak wearing characters. Invis definitely could use the nerf, its stupidly strong, but why limit it to cloak wearing characters? Two of the weakest, most stealthiest species can't wear those. Octopodes+Felids.
- Generating Gauntlet Minotaur awake. Labyrinth Minotaur had a good chance to be asleep, making stealth kill possible. Now, with him guarantueed awake and having Javelins, it presents a very hard cap on the survivability and damage output of any character. And with !agility gone, there is only !invis left as literally only viable defensive potion against him. I think thats bad design, we want the gauntlet to make up a lot of the "can I do it" decision space, not the Minotaur. I think Minotaur also got MR buff - Lab Minotaur was at least mildly hexable, Gauntlet Minotaur is just not.
- Change of Slime vault to having glass interior. Previously you had the LOS blocking winded stone corridor, giving you a chance at not waking Royal Jelly up. Stabbing Royal Jelly was *hard* and on the stealthiest of chars maybe 50% successful, if you did it it was a great achievement. Now it just gets tripple the distance to spot you and wake up.
- Noise monkeys. Those are fine per se, but you can't avoid or silence them easily. Even if you paralyze/enslave/otherwise wand the monkeys, they still get to make Noise before being paralyzed! Thats just not at all what I'd expect from paralyzation, and player chars don't get a turn to read a scroll before paralyze kicking in. Monkeys also come in packs which is a decision that only hurts stealthy chars, since unstealthy chars will get Noise even from a single one. If they had windup time like orb spider at least.
- Bog ossuary for some unfathomable reason starts with awake monsters, which wake up *everything* on the level. It'd be a fine challenge otherwise, but that single fact makes it the hardest ossuary of them all.
- Dart stab removal. Sure, that was necessary to avoid darting+kiting 100% of monsters since it allowed silent monster wakeup. Still, there'd been other solutions to it, for example tying it to very high stealth skill.
- Mandatory alarm traps in timed portals.
- Alarm traps. I don't disagree with those and much has been written about them already. Its just that the Noise part of them disproportionally hurts stealthy chars. AC melee brutes have woken up enough monsters anyway.
I think I forgot some. None of these are backbreaking on their own, and their have been good changes for stealthy chars overall too. (small weapon fight noise+wake ups, non-stealth stabs, blowgun removal, unrandarts, stealth goddess) Its just the general direction of the slope. Many of these which could often be avoided without much down downside. I wish there was a "if it nerfs Stealth inadvertendly, find a solution that doesn't" step in the design process.
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