Rambling

[paplaukes]

I think of Hard stuff as the endgame (~60% completion so far) and Vicious as something to be done when I can do Hard dungeons sleepwalking. That would be alright except for monster classes are hidden in Vicious. So far I have 1 out of 3 and while I'd love to unlock the other two I'm not even trying. The game clearly showed me it's beyond purist Hard Gan-Teleet win level.

Avatar was curious what makes Vicious too much. My experience is very subjective - I have dragon isles done, and 2 attempts on naga city. Didn't even explore other places when I unlocked them.

Dragon Isles are at least open (subdungeons/map accessible once you get to the boss) and have altars available. That makes me think they're doable with most classes, though I'm postponing that.

Naga city - I just plain don't understand it yet. No altars for leveling, locked out of main map, minimal blackspace to regen and lvl10 mobs with nasty afflictions. I don't even see why use gods at that point. They're all crippled by then. Could use shop resources better I suppose. Still - I don't think all races/classes can beat it.

Dunno. Overall Vicious stuff feels like it needs extreme minmax and I don't enjoy that much, so I'm steering clear.

Gold challenges are very different. They're an ultimate test for each class. Some may be TOO hard, but overall I think of them as the second "win" objective in the game (although the game certainly doesn't present them as that ).

[Lujo]

[paplaukes]

Thanks, though I don't watch game vids. Many reasons. Let's just say text is much quicker. Gods may be key but they seem to be crippled there. Some get no bloodpools, some cripple you (GG-potion restrictions, Taurog - glyph/inv space issues). I can't imagine much piety gain past joining. So if you do chaos avatar or englightenment, zero piety with not much else to do. Anyway, that's theory and I'm not in a rush for more practice

[Lujo]

And I don't make tutorial vids for other reasons - there's no gameplay in there, just a tour around some vicious and some explaining. Noone's forcing you to do anything, but it might clear a few things up, or get you thinking.

But in short - knowing which gods you can gain piety with in there, knowing which gods provide boons that push you over the top, knowing which gods you can safely convert into to gain piety for another one, knowing which you can desecrate and at what time, knowing what you need to take in there with the sole purpose of apeasing a god / making use of a boon, knowing which gods are just plain unfair-on purpose - every individual thing doesn't matter so much as knowing all of them, and the old naga city was always pretty much the only place to learn. Too bad it was also a place which you were supposed to already know all this before you try.

I'd say somethign concrete - but that would just equate to making a tutorial for a particular god...

And it goes so far as to judge your boss waves difficulty/luck based on correctly assessing which god you need to be in or must not be in for particular bosses. The whole "this or that is over the top" thing actually develops naturaly because it comes from all the time spent judging whether something you'd get from a god is worth the risk involved, whether you're ready for it, whether you need something at a certain point in, say, Naga City, and all that.

[paplaukes]

Will use the info on next runs, thank you

[Lujo]

Oh, and for concrete things - killing the first boss or two in naga city gets you 50 gold, which you can use to unlock altars. If you have burn salve with you you can unlock EM for a free desecration, and if you're not big on resists you can unlock Binlor for either desecration or to pick up PISSORF and use consensus to get out of and THEN convert. You can even use a stoneskin or two.

Killing the first boss or two is what the level prepares you for, after that you're supposed to either have supreme cheeze or do what you're supposed to do and apply gods. Technicaly, stuff that could do Naga City faithless is probably really over the top, and that badge is serving no decent purpose even being there...

The items in the shops serve different purposes depending on what your strat is - but converting the health pots for Drac or GG can get you piety in a pinch (if drinking them wouldn't get you anywhere). I'd still save them for the boss on instinct, but it might not even be the best move.

Killing a wave of bosses refreshes a bunch of blackspace so B2P can actually be awesome in there.

If you need TT the gold from boss drops also comes in handy, and the gold cost was probably introduced because TT made the place too easy on his own, once you figured him out, due to tribute. The bosses used to drop throphies which were worth 150 or 250 gold before and people used to transmute them with tinkers and transmutation scrolls to go nuts with TT.

Also, if you prefer text, the textwall on the previous page is actually informative about the vicious mode.

[Dreamdancer]

I think one of the important things about the vicious dungeons is, that they are post-game. But since we all / most of us beat hard GT, we are in this post-game, which gives us some bias.
For the difficulty of the vicious dungeons: I find them really hard. For DL i needed old GETINDARE. Dragon Isle i cheated somewhat in 2 of 3 wins (used LEMMISI to find last dragon before the mother, and then spamed WEYTWUT till we swapped places). NC with a TT then Drac rogue was a more satisfing win. But i would say, for me the difficulty is ok, if i try hard, i think i can reach it with some builds (hope so).
@Avatar: I don't really know, why vicious is much harder for me than for you. But i think it has to do with expierence and intuition. Small example: Exploration and one searches for a good higher level monster to kill, but one doesn't find one -> searching further and wasting blackspace or killing a not so optimal monster? Think it's this and many more 'small' stuff, which gives the vets an edge compared to other people who have beaten HGT and probably a couple of vicious dungeons with specific builds.

Think one problem of DD is, that the learning curve in the beginning is pretty brutal. I really needed the wiki, to look all the time what are the goes and no-goes for the gods. But also some concepts are counter-intuitive: regen-fighting, mid-boss-fight-dinging (i mean, you come from traditional RPGs (computer and pen&paper) and never played something rogue-like, the first idea is: the higher my level, the stronger i am -> consequence: kill everything for exp than kill the boss). Even with the wiki the learning curve is somewhat steep, but it was ok for me (i don't think every game must be an easy win).
Learning curve has two aspects i think: learning the concepts, but on the other had, on gets better tools (items, race/class, glyphs, gods).

I bought the game as present for a friend. Think he played a bit, but somehow lost interest. I will ask him why and where he had problems, etc. Think would be awesome, if we had more opinions from new players. Doing the game with a new profile might let one spot some flaws, but one the other had, there is the i've-beaten-the-game-already-bias.

[Lujo]

[xspeedballx]

Wow this thread got away from me. Few responses.

1) Ruby weapon: He could be cheese with W-Summon Hades long before end game. Easy golden chocobo. Required patience and no skill.

2) Avatar skill: Intuition is the biggest thing you got, and many of the others. You can see the situation and solution faster than most. That is a big advantage. I do lots of logic puzzles(griddlers mostly) I can notice patterns and make accurate logical leaps that would take 20 times longer to explain mostly from experience. You guys have that this with this game.

3) Gods: Whether intentional or not, Gods are the third piece of the character pie. This is true in a lot of rogue likes that feature a deity system. Race-Class-Deity. That is your character. So with that truth it is obvious that there is vast power in choosing and utilizing gods. It also explains the strength and weakness. It also explains why some gods are just better for some combinations. (You mean it is good to choose options that shore up your largest weakness or multiply your largest strength? SHOCKING).

4) Vicious rewards: I advocated a long time ago(though not strongly it was a one off comment), that vicious dungeons should provide ridiculous game breaking rewards. Really rip the game open for creative play even if not completely balanced. I would be comfortable with gating vicious dungeons behind both Hard Gaan-talet, and a certain amount of key missions. Then allowing for some really cool power creep at that point. Then again I am fairly certain I have advocated for talent trees, and interesting character/kingdom progression beyond preps. DD2 for sure.

5) I think to a degree we need to stop thinking of the game as too hard. What we all are saying and the devs are agreeing is that aspects of the game are still impenetrable to the average person. If they were not, the game has plenty of resources available to win if you knew about them.

[Lujo]

Well put.

Character pie here is more like race-class-inventory-gods, but in terms of power and flexibility gods pretty much trump the rest hard, except in a few cases. On the other hand they give enormous power, but shape your play - and if you're not well familiar with them it's hard to develop the intuition and skill you've mentioned. And since they (and a few other things) are so impenetrable, as we can all pretty much agree from all sides, as you've said - we are where we are.

Shouldn't be too hard to fix, plenty of ways to go about it, as long as it's finally acknowledged...

EDIT: And if I read dislekcia correctly then they actually have paid attention to one of my suggestions that was aimed toward making "what exactly is it that vets do" more understandable to everyone. And save me and everyone typing time when we want to explain a run. Been saying we need a better post run info screen for a while

Anyway - the vid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUeWlLL0 ... e=youtu.be

srry about my english, and clicking.