SpiderFighter wrote:
I had a thought though: I was just looking over your "Endless Dungeon" post (see below) and I was wondering if there was a way to add the dungeon's difficulty index to the program? Miught make it easier to start putting the dungeontogether once those maps start flying in.
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=3300&start=10#p33471
The Difficulty Index (DI) idea I outlined in that post evolved into the Suggested Level (SL) metric which I implemented in this Analyzer and my spreadsheet on items and monsters. I renamed "Difficulty Index" into "Suggested Level" because SL makes more sense for talking about where to place items, as well as monsters. Also, I suppose you could say SL is tied directly to the item or monster. When I described DI, I was describing the difficulty of a monster encounter. So fighting 2 monsters at once would have a higher DI. If you're really concerned about balance, you should be thinking about this! But with an automated tool as my analyzer it's impossible to know how many monsters the player will be faced to fight in each encounter. It's ultimately up to your best judgement. SL is "suggested" after all.
Besides number of monsters fought at once, there are issues to consider such as:
- Elemental damage and resistances
- Potential for ranged combat to avoid close encounters
- What types of combat are available to the player based on equipment discovered so far.
- Whether the monster hits the whole party or just one character, and if your back characters will be damage dealers or fall apart as paper tigers.
- The attack cooldown of the monsters.
- The relative effectiveness of accuracy/evasion/protection at different levels (still mostly unknown to me).
- Any scripting or custom stuff involved in the mod.
- etc
For example, in the main game there is a room right at the beginning of
dungeon level 4 where two big herders are fought. This can be a very tough fight! (It was for me.) In my spreadsheet herder_big has an
SL of 5. The discrepancy has to do with the big herder's very slow movement speed, which allows you to dart around it in an open room and trivialize the fight (maybe appropriate at
level 3 even for a single herder_big). If you're forced to fight one while pinned in a deadend, you'll find they're closer to
level 7 monsters (iirc, from my tests last week). Fighting two in an open room can be like either of those cases, depending on how good you've gotten at dancing around monsters. So I gave them an SL of 5 and hopefully people can figure it out from there.
If you do have a herder_big as the highest SL monster in your dungeon level, my tool will tell you the Suggested Level is 5 for that dungeon level. But really if you asked me personally, I'd say it could be 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 depending on all the other factors my tool can't read. Or maybe in your dungeon you don't even fight it in the traditional way, so it could be anything!
Balance is very important when things are out of balance, but less important as they get closer to in-balance.
Well I could go on for days about this kind of stuff, but I've tried to keep it to the relatively key points here. If you've got some ideas about how to rate difficulty, I'd love to hear them!
Neikun wrote:I tried it with a dungeon that had some floors with nothing on them at all, and I got no reading.
Something to look into?
Hmmm, yes, very well could be something! I'll look into it! But I'm working this weekend so I won't be updating anything immediately.
