Suggestions/Comments (alpha 2.1)

[Variaz]

Suggestions and comments.

[Gando]

Travel through mountains would be a lot less painful if you could press shift + direction arrow to move faster. As it is, trekking through huge expanses of empty mountain areas is torturous.

[random]

This could be far in the future, but I figure I should bring up something that's been at the back of my mind for a while: perhaps there could be something available to make money more important to essence monsters. As it is, the only items worthy the buying are scrolls and potions (books, too, I suppose, though those are readily available in the dungeons and, unlike scrolls and potions, you only need to find one, ever), and once a player starts earning even a bit of change, those make no impact on the player's cash reserves. I have no suggestions as of now (partly because I don't know what you would consider a good idea) but it's something I wanted to throw out there.

Also, a progressive overworld map would be nice. Keeping track of the coordinates for locations isn't intolerable, but being able to gradually create a consultable overworld map as you visit places would make life easier. And it would be even more useful if you plan to expand the locations and quests of the game in the future.

[Variaz]

Hmmm... I don't really know how we could make gold more useful for them either. The thing with Essence Monsters is that they use their own innate powers and their non-humanoid bodies. In many cases, it makes no sense that they would be able to use the weapons and armors humanoids uses. Instead, they gain more power by draining the essence of the foes they defeat. (this could also be interpreted as the monster eating the defeated foe, and gaining power by doing so, in the case of the less intelligent creatures that wouldn't know how to drain energy)

So this means that they do not need money to spend on equipment. They get their powers by other means, which makes sense since they are very different from humanoid species.

[Gando]

I really like the overworld progressive map suggestion.

[hairybolox]

How about creating "Ye Old Essence Shop".... Maybe roughly based around the "Rare Items" shop that already exists - maybe even adapt that shop & Black Market to sell the odd essence or two.... ??

[random]

Jun 16, 2011 8:43:26 GMT -5 hairybolox said:

How about creating "Ye Old Essence Shop".... Maybe roughly based around the "Rare Items" shop that already exists - maybe even adapt that shop & Black Market to sell the odd essence or two.... ??

I like that. Nothing too powerful, but, say, stuff normal adventurers might pick up in their travels, things a player could use relatively early on as a convenience for essences s/he would normally be able to find around the dungeon like kobolds or rats or worms or various humanoids.

Another -- wild? -- thought would be creating a really, really expensive scroll that's the equivalent of Instant Leveling scrolls (very expensive, never on sale, only available at one shop) that allows a player to merge two essences. To keep it from being overpowered, the resulting essence should be marked (perhaps as a "blue" essence?) in a way that prevents it from ever benefiting from the same scroll again. At the highest levels, this could be a effective way to power up a monster in a way equivalent to blue/red/green/Flow items by essentially doubling the amount of essences they can take advantage of. That way, they have the same number of slots but can take advantage of twice as many essences. Given that essence monsters have advantages and disadvantages roughly equivalent to the powers of player classes, I see this as little more than a way of giving them something comparable to the fairly significant advantages offered by levelable items available to regular classes. The main kink I see here would be those relatively rare monsters (nagas, for instance) who have both essence and equipment slots. But that doesn't strike me as an intolerably unbalancing issue.

[T10]

Another possibility - a scroll to make the essences leveling or modifying.

[sekira]

Monk:
- Power through Spirit will now apply it's bonus to your ability to dig through walls.
NOTE: The reason why I didn't go with Sekira's idea of simply raising strength is that the ability would then affect ALL types of melee damage, as well as throwing damage. I wanted this ability to be used exclusively with Martial Arts, and not with other melee skills.

a couple points...

1) Are you sure Power through spirit helps you do more damage with each blow from the "invisible str" it gives? or is the extra damage simply from the +10% to unarmed melee damage per AP? I personally think it should do both.

2) You can keep it from boosting str for other kinds of melee by simply adding a "and unarmed()" to the if() statement in the passive.lua file. Since the calc bonuses function runs every time eq is put on, then your str would drop when you wield a weapon. As far as the throwing goes... why not let that be? Throwing is kinda worthless right now, and it fits with the whole martial artist thing (throwing stars or knives seem to be rampant in martial arts movies, but not bows or crossbows, etc)

3) Everything would be simpler, more visible, and more satisfying as you look at your character stats if it was a simple boost to str instead of boosting "effective str" which really just seems like invisible str

[Variaz]

Jun 16, 2011 13:19:30 GMT -5 random said:

Jun 16, 2011 8:43:26 GMT -5 hairybolox said:

How about creating "Ye Old Essence Shop".... Maybe roughly based around the "Rare Items" shop that already exists - maybe even adapt that shop & Black Market to sell the odd essence or two.... ??

I like that. Nothing too powerful, but, say, stuff normal adventurers might pick up in their travels, things a player could use relatively early on as a convenience for essences s/he would normally be able to find around the dungeon like kobolds or rats or worms or various humanoids.

Another -- wild? -- thought would be creating a really, really expensive scroll that's the equivalent of Instant Leveling scrolls (very expensive, never on sale, only available at one shop) that allows a player to merge two essences. To keep it from being overpowered, the resulting essence should be marked (perhaps as a "blue" essence?) in a way that prevents it from ever benefiting from the same scroll again. At the highest levels, this could be a effective way to power up a monster in a way equivalent to blue/red/green/Flow items by essentially doubling the amount of essences they can take advantage of. That way, they have the same number of slots but can take advantage of twice as many essences. Given that essence monsters have advantages and disadvantages roughly equivalent to the powers of player classes, I see this as little more than a way of giving them something comparable to the fairly significant advantages offered by levelable items available to regular classes. The main kink I see here would be those relatively rare monsters (nagas, for instance) who have both essence and equipment slots. But that doesn't strike me as an intolerably unbalancing issue.

Essence combining seems like it could be fun, but we would have to make sure that it's actually needed. Monsters tends to have much higher base stats than normal players do, and they still have good skill points. So by allowing essences to become very powerful this way, we have to make sure that it won't end up becoming overpowered.

Keep in mind that defeating powerful enemies also results in more powerful essences. A powerful monster's essence will be much better than a normal monster's one, and a full set of Mature Dragon essences will be quite powerful already. And Essences can already get altered in the Flow like any other items in the game.

We'd have to see higher level players with leveled items versus a high level monsters with a whole high level CR3+ essences set, and compare which one gives more power. And then there's the matter of "Hybrid" monsters that can equip items and essences. Nagas aren't much of a concern, they only have one essence slot, but Imps are almost 50/50 hybrid.

[random]

It might not be needed, no. To be honest, I haven't yet leveled up to extraordinarily powerful levels with an essence monster in the latest version. I'm playing a level 28 Young Prismatic Dragon right now and he's doing okay, if not spectacular. In previous versions, I did find essence monsters underpowered at the higher levels compared to regular player races and non-essence monsters. Even with training one spell and Piercing, their magic, in my personal experience, had a rate of diminishing return to the point where they were fairly ineffectual against the bone lords and mature dragons and the like (I mostly tested with elementals, 'G' monsters and dragons.) I could do fairly well with, say, a vampire or humanoid build because I could get really powerful levelables, but I generally reached a wall around dungeon level 40 or so with essence monsters. But the new system may have changed things, so I'll keep playing with my dragon.

Incidentally, and maybe I'm missing something, but the toggle switch for turning off the essence's unarmed attack doesn't seem to work, so I pretty much have to go without an essence in the A spot if I want to do melee (at least for now my dragon's melee attack is much stronger than any I've gotten from wielding an essence.)

And, yeah, I forgot about imps. I haven't played them much since I discovered the Hunters are a lot scarier as enemies than as playable monsters.

[Variaz]

Jun 17, 2011 12:33:36 GMT -5 random said:

Incidentally, and maybe I'm missing something, but the toggle switch for turning off the essence's unarmed attack doesn't seem to work, so I pretty much have to go without an essence in the A spot if I want to do melee (at least for now my dragon's melee attack is much stronger than any I've gotten from wielding an essence.)

It should be working, though I'll have to double check.

But with the new system, your natural melee attacks scales with your level, just like enemy monsters, so they are better than they were in that aspect.

[random]

Which is why my dragon's melee attacks seem much better, I imagine.

As far as comments go, I must say I appreciate the new wrinkle of having dragons (and others? dragons are the only enemy I've encountered so far that do it) use scrolls of teleportation. That is to say, I hate it a lot, but only because I've been killed twice now while trying to cast spells at them from the maximum possible range and moving out of LOS as much as possible. The actual idea is good, just fiendish.

Also, I do want to comment that I appreciate the work you're putting in. I have fancier games, but this is the only one where I'm waiting impatiently for the next full version. There's just something about a turn-based ASCII game with an involved developer that makes it more fun.

Edit: Ah, I tested it again. You're right, the bonus does toggle off. I have no idea what I was doing before, but it clearly wasn't the smart thing.

[Variaz]

As far as comments go, I must say I appreciate the new wrinkle of having dragons (and others? dragons are the only enemy I've encountered so far that do it) use scrolls of teleportation. That is to say, I hate it a lot, but only because I've been killed twice now while trying to cast spells at them from the maximum possible range and moving out of LOS as much as possible. The actual idea is good, just fiendish.

;D *evil laugh*

I was aware that abusing LOS could be a way to defeat otherwise undefeatable foes, so I've added this nasty little "feature". It actually works with all enemies of CR2 and higher. When they are hit by an attack from a source that they can see, and they have 75% or less of their total health, they will teleport to you.

CR1 enemies will not do that. I don't really care if you use LOS abuses to defeat CR1 enemies. If anything, it means you may be a bit underpowered if you need such strategies to defeat kobolds and devlings. After all, their main purpose is to serve as target practice for your fireballs, and a source of experience and item leveling! But CR2 and higher are there to challenge you, to provide an actual worthy opponent. And they won't tolerate being killed by cheap tricks, so they teleport to you.

Also, I do want to comment that I appreciate the work you're putting in. I have fancier games, but this is the only one where I'm waiting impatiently for the next full version. There's just something about a turn-based ASCII game with an involved developer that makes it more fun.

Thanks you.

I think what's nice about 2D roguelikes in general is that since you're not focusing on visual effects, you can focus on everything else. Graphics and visual effects are great, but no matter how nice they are, you will get used to them eventually, and you will stop noticing them. Once you don't care about the visuals anymore, it becomes all about gameplay. And this is where many modern games fails, unfortunately.

By not having to make visual representations, this allows the player's character, and the monsters, to have a LOT of powers and abilities, and to be very diverse. It's a lot easier to implement all sort of abilities when you don't have to visually represent them, since this is what takes the most time. And with the epic levels that Portralis characters can get, we would have to have a HUGE budget to create 3D visual effects for this game!

And by keeping a certain level of abstraction, it allows us to have things that don't necessarely make sense, or would be very difficult to handle. The Monster race is perhaps the best example. Imagine having to figure out how to animate a Mature Prismatic Dragon entering buildings in the middle of a city! Good luck with that. But with Portralis, you can imagine whatever concept that you may have for the Monster race.

[Variaz]

Jun 16, 2011 23:22:12 GMT -5 sekira said:

a couple points...

1) Are you sure Power through spirit helps you do more damage with each blow from the "invisible str" it gives? or is the extra damage simply from the +10% to unarmed melee damage per AP? I personally think it should do both.

2) You can keep it from boosting str for other kinds of melee by simply adding a "and unarmed()" to the if() statement in the passive.lua file. Since the calc bonuses function runs every time eq is put on, then your str would drop when you wield a weapon. As far as the throwing goes... why not let that be? Throwing is kinda worthless right now, and it fits with the whole martial artist thing (throwing stars or knives seem to be rampant in martial arts movies, but not bows or crossbows, etc)

3) Everything would be simpler, more visible, and more satisfying as you look at your character stats if it was a simple boost to str instead of boosting "effective str" which really just seems like invisible str

1. Pretty sure it does. At least increasing Wisdom increases that you see in your character's sheet. If it wasn't, you'll notice it. You would be doing insignificant damage.

2. You do have a point about Throwing making sense for a martial artist, and it's true that adding a few ifs is all it would take to make it work.

3. I wonder just how simpler it's going to be, it's not as if it was very complicated at this time. (the higher the wisdom, the better) The only thing I can see is that you'd have two big numbers as opposed to one.

Conceptually, I guess it just would be a little odd to have huge, strong arms that suddently gets all soft and weak the minute you hold a knife in your hands. At least, with the way it is right now, it's pretty clear that the monk's strength is more a result of inner energy and body control than raw strength.