raixel wrote:I wouldn't call it "abuse", I'd call it "strategy". It isn't abuse any more than slamming a door on a guy's head in DM and then when they walk away, open it and wait for them to come back before doing it all over again is abuse. Or the "stair dance". Frankly, the monsters in LoG are faster and smarter than in DM. If it wasn't for that door trick, there would have been places that I couldn't get by. Remember, not everyone is as good of a player as you or some of the pros on here and might need these tricks to keep the game from being frustratingly hard. Also, I use this trick a *lot*. Most of the monsters are fast enough that unless you time it just right, youre gonna get nailed. Hard. So no, please don't remove it.
I should have said, "one thing in LoG that I have abused, is to attack, close the gate - wait for cooldown, open and repeat." This is a strategy that allows me to survive tough creatures that can kill my characters in a single cooldown cycle, but I feel like I'm exploiting the game design rather than fighting fair; and I feel like this isn't what was intended. The same goes with stair dancing - I've done it, but I feel that it takes the excitement out of the fights because I feel safe if stairs or a gate are around. Another thing I would probably do if I was writing LoG, is have monsters chase you up the stairs if you try this more than a couple times
Here's the thing... in DM, when I reached a point when I was consistently getting my butt kicked and it stopped being fun, I would find and area with regenerating monsters and train for a little while. Some would call this grinding or whatever, but for me, it was a matter of getting the characters to where I needed them to be in order to continue the game. This allowed the player to essentially adjust the game difficulty to their skill level. Sure, you could spend weeks doing nothing but raising character levels, then mow down the rest of the dungeon, but that wouldn't be fun either. It was a matter of raising levels just enough to reduce constant sudden death, in particular because reloading from floppy disk took _forever_. I think that there may be similar areas in LoG, so perhaps this will allow me to get my characters to a point where I don't have to use the gates.
In LoG, if the playtesters were able to get through the game without using the gate or stair tricks, then I'm not sure what to say; maybe I'm getting too old to keep up with games. It does seem that some areas would be quite tough without this strategy but then there are those that seem to say that they have no problem avoiding monster attacks and attacking from behind. I'm not that quick with most of these adversaries, or perhaps it is a bad idea to play this game with my controls going through a wireless USB hub that is probably adding just enough latency to screw me up.
What I have read is that LoG was not designed so that you can survive fighting toe to toe, which I'm not sure should be necessary for all of the monster types. In DM, I had to use a much more active strategy for some of the monsters, increasingly later in the game, or when mana was depleted, but not all the time. There is something satisfying about being able to hold your ground and fight it out as quickly as you can.
Finally, any such features as door breakage or monsters that can use stairs (if these were ever included in LoG), should be optional and user configurable, and not mandatory IMO. If I were a game designer, I would be a firm proponent of letting the player choose their preferred style.