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The rune lock idea has been tested in the tournament through the Vow of Courage banner. The feedback is that it makes for an interesting challenge, but the post D:14 becomes even more boring and unchallenging than now. There's also the problem that the game is just too long. Therefore, I suggest we focus the overall balance along the following axis:

• Length reduction
• Provide some incentive for early runes
• Increase the mid-game difficulty

Those statistics have been made with version 0.11-a0-770-g290bfab. Note that the spider nest is still being balanced so those results will quickly be obsolete. All numbers are in kXP units and rounded to the nearest.

The XP bump in C:3 is probably due to Tomb entry vaults.
The Vaults difficulty and XP value varies a lot depending on the the entrance depth. We should really fix it. What should be the reference depth?

It should be based on the deepest it can spawn. So an 8-level Vaults starts at depth 20. That way entering it will never be an *easier* choice than the surrounding levels, and V:8 will get to keep extreme OOD monsters. — evilmike 2012-03-28 01:23

This is fixed in kilobyte's portal_branches branch.

The little weirdness (value of n > value of n+1) are probably due to branch entry vaults.

I suggest the following reductions. In parenthesis, the XP value of the cut.

• Elf: -1 (6.3)
• Crypt: -1 (18.6)
• Vault: -3 (56.2)

Total: 81k
This would give us some symetry: Rune branches are 5 levels, non-runes are 4. Only exceptions will be Lair, Slime, Hall of Blades and Tomb, but I think those are fine as they are.
elliptic pointed out that it's better if each branch entry has at least 2 levels it can spawn on. So crypt can't be shorter than 4 levels if we want that.
One of the main problem with the short branches (all Lair ones, Elf and Crypt) is that all the levels but the last one are too similar. It would be great if they had a steeper progression. The proposed cut would leave room (XP wise) for increasing the difficulty of deeper levels.

kilobyte has suggested cutting two floors from Elf and adding Dwarf as a single floor sub-branch. That sounds fine to me, and I wouldn't be against reducing Elf to 3 floors even before enabling Dwarf. I'd quite like to cut two floors from Crypt as well in that case, and let the Tomb entrance generate on Crypt:1-2. And -3 from Vaults and steepening the difficulty curve of many branches (especially the Lair rune ones) definitely sounds good. — MarvinPA 2012-03-27 20:12

Cutting crypt to 3 floors sounds good, but I'd rather see the tomb entry on floor 3 than 1. So either adapt the encompass vaults to fit a tomb entry in it or block them if there's no tomb entry in C:2.
I think Elf has potential. I'd say bump the rarity of blademasters and master archers to 3 so we can have a few in Elf:3 (if it's 4 level deep). Maybe ask contributors to make vaults for Elf. Not sure yet how to steepen difficulty of the Lair branches. The rarity/level of monsters need to be looked at. — galehar 2012-04-07 22:34

How to get the players to try to get the lair runes before they have cleared the rest of the dungeon?

• 10k XP for each rune.
• Loot in the branch end vault.
• A small locked room in wizlabs with 1-3 excellent items. Doesn't have to be at the end of it, so if you have snatched an early rune but can't clear the wizlab, you can still try to get the loot from the wizard's closet.

The last one is less significant, but I think it's nice and have theme.

I have 2 ideas for it, but I will develop them in other pages

• Improve monster bands with complementary abilities and improved AI (until you kill the leader).
• Some ruination of lower dungeon for less corridors.
• Increasing OOD frequency all over the midgame would probably help, the further down the more OODs. — st 2012-03-29 16:45
  • That might just detract from the late-game threats, since you will have been meeting a much higher quantity of late-game enemies throughout mid! — mumra 2012-03-29 17:19