I tested toorum + hard mode before publishing version 2.5, it was very funsargris wrote:Nice
Been testing normal and toorum mode (hardcore indeed)
One very little remark about monster leveling. To me, it feels like, at a certain point, leveling up your team is more a disavantage than an advantage. Of course this has already been said for other games that use monster leveling (Oblivion and co..). At some point, monsters have really high HP and hit so hard that protection / evasion / diminished resistance does not cut it really. You have to dance to avoid being hit and hit monsters for a longer time.
Of course, my goal was to build up to test the roof fight and see if there was a limit to the number of monster waves Lid can send you... For a normal play, this mod makes the game and his particular story as good as it can be I think.
I'm struggling with the very same problem in my own game (tactile table multi player dungeon crawling).
(if you don't mind some reloading... Single use Ironman would be a nightmare!)Monster leveling in this mod is balanced against characters leveling. Monsters gain 5% of their base damage, health and protection each level, and also +1 accuracy and +0.5 evasion, but all champions classes gain +1 to one attribute each level at least, and +2.5% armor (evasion scales with dexterity).
So I don't think any stat is missing in this scaling system. In vanilla, those characters stats did not scale at all, and monsters leveling would be unfair in that case. I don't agree diminished elemental resistance is a problem either, because it would be wrong to think that it becomes less and less useful the more you stack it. It is the original resistance that has a very wrong scaling. If I did not change it, it would just have destroyed all the scaling system itself; it does not matter how hard an ice elemental hits you when you are simply immune to damage. The diminished resistance can seem a little confusing because it is expressed as a damage reduction percentage, but if you think about it, it gives resistance bonuses the same value whatever your current stat is. When you gain +50% damage reduction from 0%, or +25% reduction from 50%, you just halved incoming damage in both cases.
Of course the "power" of your team when leveling is not linear, as some skill points are a lot better than others. +20% base damage skill points are a bigger bonus than anything else. So you can say that the easiest fights are at some level where you learned all the most important skills you will be using. For a caster it would be about learning all magic skills, critical and a few defensive points. Then you will only benefit from the stat boosts from leveling.
But that leads in my opinion to the real subject; the apparent paradox of games with leveling becoming "harder" the more you level. Leveling systems tend to make things easier for the player, as he does not get better at the game, but his avatar is! However, in classical game design, a game starts really easy, teaching the player the basics (In Isle of Nex, you start by learning how to use a weapon and move), and introduces progressively more game play elements and complexity (In that a leveling system can help smoothing the learning curve by unlocking features at a predictable rate). And when a player gets better at the game, he generally tends to look for harder content to compensate, or becomes bored. At that point, the "paradox" is that the player is ok with doing with for example 30 complex abilities what he could do at the start of the game with 1 or 2 simple ones, and still feel he "progressed"
.In Magic of Grimrock, that means at the time monsters scaling starts to be important, you should have learned a lot of spells and built some throwing barbarians or dual wielding killing machines. From that point, you have to use those abilities to do the things you did without them at the beginning. You should use damage reduction abilities to tank instead of square dancing, and crowd control instead of dying when cornered, osmosis, berserk, feast to manage your resources, vengeance for your knight so he can deal lots of damage, alchemy for bonus stats with crystal flowers, and potion of might at very high level. If you end up square dancing for a long time to kill something, then you learned nothing from the game as a player
(I have seen this in twitch let's play of the mod, people tend to stick to square dancing as the traditional solution to every fight and ignore most of their abilities to the point of dying when cornered!).For your own game, the question you have to answer is; what is the game play you want your players to experience at cap or "infinite" level, what is the wrong game play you want to punish (or else your game will simply be too easy), and is there a viable solution to every fight at that point?
