Magic using baddies vs Physical damage baddies in RTC
Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 3:44 pm
I've just played through RTC DM and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks for all the hard work that's been put into it. It's really great!
One thing I really noticed though, and it's something I don't recall from the original (though it's been ~15 years since I played the original!) is the difficulty of the magic using baddies vs those that just use normal attacks. Wizard Eyes in particular caused me massive headaches early on - they react instantaneously and lob lightning bolts from quite a distance. One minute my party's walking down a narrow corridor then next minute bang bang they're all dead.
So, couple the fact that they have ridiculous reaction times with the fact that they're silent, attack from the distant darkness and in many places respawn and you've got a baddie which is 10* tougher than anything else at that level. Once you know where they are (half the time that's after a reload for me ) you can just lob a few fireballs down the corridor and get out of the way... but I dunno, they just seem out of place, difficulty-wise. (Materialisers are similarly difficult - again mosly because their reaction times are so fast and they attack from the dark.)
Now I don't really mind the difficulty as such; I like difficult games and I'm reasonably competent at DM, so really my main point is that while wizard eyes and materialisers are so tough, everything else is relatively weak. Even stone golems and animated armours are trivially easy to kill, relatively speaking. You just stand in front of them and go mano-a-mano while drinking a few potions of vi.
So: Is it a design choice that the magic lobbing baddies are vastly harder than the melee baddies?
Tar!
One thing I really noticed though, and it's something I don't recall from the original (though it's been ~15 years since I played the original!) is the difficulty of the magic using baddies vs those that just use normal attacks. Wizard Eyes in particular caused me massive headaches early on - they react instantaneously and lob lightning bolts from quite a distance. One minute my party's walking down a narrow corridor then next minute bang bang they're all dead.
So, couple the fact that they have ridiculous reaction times with the fact that they're silent, attack from the distant darkness and in many places respawn and you've got a baddie which is 10* tougher than anything else at that level. Once you know where they are (half the time that's after a reload for me ) you can just lob a few fireballs down the corridor and get out of the way... but I dunno, they just seem out of place, difficulty-wise. (Materialisers are similarly difficult - again mosly because their reaction times are so fast and they attack from the dark.)
Now I don't really mind the difficulty as such; I like difficult games and I'm reasonably competent at DM, so really my main point is that while wizard eyes and materialisers are so tough, everything else is relatively weak. Even stone golems and animated armours are trivially easy to kill, relatively speaking. You just stand in front of them and go mano-a-mano while drinking a few potions of vi.
So: Is it a design choice that the magic lobbing baddies are vastly harder than the melee baddies?
Tar!