How often did you fuse?

[sucinum]

Here i'll restart one of the evergreens amongst polls
I personally fused about 120 cm *erm* times but i didn't do too much the past few years. The times, where i fused each day with another party are definitely gone (i think it has something to do with diablo 2...), so everyone had the chance to add some fusions to overtake me

[Antman]

You won DM 120 times?!?! Wow, thats impressive, even with my record wins i have probably only won it 7 or 8 times. And a few of those i did as fast as possible so i didnt do everything in the dungeon, hardly anything infact.

[sucinum]

in my excessive dm-times i fused for weeks once a day with another party - that was about the time, when i joined the internet-community, but could not access inet from at home. so i had loads of time and motivation
i did stuff like 1, 2 or 3 chars, mage-only, ninja-only, fighter-only, speedraces (not too fast, i trained them to adepts and did not dodge too much monsters, only some goodies) and loads of other stuff
very funny to play mage-only with halk and stamm (you need to warcry a lot at the beginning ).

[zoom]

well, it must have been around 20 to 25 fusions , i really cannot tell, but that seems a bit high.
but if you count taking a save game at 13th level and redoing it over and over again... and the one or two fusions of csb....
then that will more or less be the "exact" range.

I was searching for all items that there are, and doing every riddle room monster always taking 4 members and never using ful bombs or charges ... ended up with a pile of stuff in the screamer room or down at the dragon staircaise.

[sucinum]

nono, 1 party - 1 fusion
we better not count ALL fusions, i once fused with the same party for ~3h

[zoom]

woooah!
If that is the case i fused maybe 10 times. I cannot recall it properly , i did focus more on the puzzles and training...

[Tom Hatfield]

Does zero count? I never actually finished the first DM, though I did play all the way to the Ra doors twice. First time I had one Ra key. Second time I had two Ra keys. These were both on the SNES version by the way. Took a VERY long time. I never played all the way through the PC version, though I really should since it's so much faster. (RTC whoops ass like a grand master ninja.)

I've gone through DM2 four times (three times with the same party), beat Dragoth once. (I never really care about killing the bad guy in that one; mostly I play to see how much money/equipment/levels I can accumulate, how many 6th-level guard minions my priest can cast before drinking a mana potion, etc.)

CSB I never really liked. Never played past the first level.

Nexus, got tired of working out the controls/signs. I might give it another go one of these days, but I pretty much dove out of the console phase when I bought my first PC in 96 — until Halo hit the X-Box of course, but I'm done with that, too.

[Charlatan75]

Hello

Hmmm... just like Zoooom I cannot answer... I probably fused the dark naughty guy around 10 times... so even the first answer "1 - 40" looks a bit excessive! ^^

Charlatan75

[zoom]

This is funny, there are two types of players/or more..

The ones that mainly play csb and others that prefer dm.

How comes? Would appreciate comments,

For me, i like dm more, because it is linear built, you have an endboss: the dragon, and you get better items, the more you descent. You have a problem e.g. a door and when you have solved it, you can go on. like explore or fight and go on. retreat and rest, fight. go on...
csb is not so linear, and it is too hard a start, no "real beginning"
well, actually the beginning is quite cool, but you soon get lost by falling down and all the secret walls that there are. So you have to try and error, to stand a chance, which is somewhat frustrating.

another question:
WHAT ARE THE BAD THINGS ABOUT DM CSB Dm series in general?

some points i read or heard:

you have to collect the arrows, so you do not use them.(later in the game, good ninja levels (master ranks)are therefore rarer than fighter or wizards.

no one to talk to, no shops(well,dm2: the real drawback of the shop was that you could buy the best items! wtf??!)

maybe that there was no music.

graphics are not very uptodate.

I love dm series, to make it clear.

[beowuuf]

bad things - combat can be

after a while there is something very pedestrian about having to keep hackign away or fireballign a creature that blocks you

sometimes fights are too easy with the two-square dance, and other times they are more about how fast you can click healing spells and combat options than
Staging combat for DM/custom dungeons seems an easy thing to get wrong - opting for large health monsters as a way of creating difficult fights, rather than playing on interesting ways of having to defeat creatures, or requiring tactics and movement and preperation as opposed to two square dancing and toe-to-toe slugging

i must admit not being able to get back into playing dungeons simply because, for now, my tolerance for step chop step chop step chop is down a little.

[Gambit37]

I agree with that last comment Fuzzybum. (?) Hence, in my forthcoming CSBWin adventure I want to try and avoid massive health monsters or impossible odds and instead concentrate on puzzles. Difficult monsters will figure, but I hope to create novel ways for the player to deal with them...

Working title: The Tower of Lost Souls

[linflas]

and the one or two fusions of csb....

when/where did you fuse something in csb ?

[Tom Hatfield]

This is off topic, but I feel an urge to reply to beowuuf's comments.

I totally agree: the combat system in DM is completely unrefined. I never really noticed years ago when I first played in on SNES because it was such a cool game, and things like shoddy combat were pretty much the norm. Stick-and-move combat has never excited me in any form. More often than not, it's frustrated me, because I prefer stand-up fights to non-stop dodging, and the monsters in DM are usually too powerful for that.

I would have preferred the designers put more emphasis on character stats to calculate dodging, and less emphasis on how fast you can press the arrow keys. It would have been interesting to get "locked" into combat and let the characters' abilities be the deciding factor, with an optional "flee" command that would let you regain control over movement. I'm thinking something vaguely like the turn-based system in Might & Magic. Not quite, but very close.

Fusing in CSB? Nah. The term "fuse" has become synonymous with "finish the game," that's all he meant. Doesn't really matter that you can finish DM without fusing. An ending is an ending, right? The real purose was to keep the Firestaff out of Chaos' hands.

[beowuuf]

I don't like locked in combat either though, as then you just sit back bored and it all comes down to stats.

Moving is fine as long as it is in your control, and it is tactical. But just dancing around in a circle hacking is boring. I still cite grave of filius as the first challenge i ever had, trapped with three draogns in a decent area. There large health wasn't a huge issue, as then it just added a stamina component to the challenge of keeping some tactical movement going.

[Sandman]

Geez, I fused DM not more than 7 times. Still I haven't found enough time playing CSB (and it's pretty difficult), so I will fuse CSB in near future (I hope!). And although I like Skullkeep the most, I have completed it maybe 3-4 times. But that's because I cannot run it in DOSBox and DM/CSB exist in more than one Windows version! Maybe when I will grow older I will fuse more often.

[zoom]

@ linflas:
i see it this way, you "fuse" the corbums in the ful-ya pit, although that is not quite the right expression.(after all, sth. had to be fused!!^^)

[FallenSeraphin]

Tell me something, how hard is to make fluxcages around the Dark Lord and the hit Fuse ? i did it about 4-5 times (then i stopped playing and moved to CSB / CBSWin and RTC) and it was eeeeeeasy. Sandman is right, CSB is a lot harder, but you have a LOT of room in DM !!!