Observation and Suggestions

All hail the new roguelike Mage Guild!



I think that this new roguelike will be extremely succesful with the roguelike community.

As a fan of roguelikes, I have played many of the popular roguelikes, such as ADOM. Nethack, Angband, Dungeon Crawl, etc. etc., this one has the greatest potential to be a contender. With a unique system of item alchemy and the revolving around mages in particular, adds the initiative to plan out all your magelike moves instead of going directly into combat.


I love the item mixing interface and I also fell inlove with the tiles when playing in tiles mode! I got a bunch of different pictures in my head of monsters when I played text mode haha. I also like the concept of obtaining the orbs to gain levels and to gain new knowledge of spells, prevents players that like to dive deep thinking they can find good items and beat the game in seconds. I am that type of players hahahaa. This game is great with the amount of tactics involved, such as running from monsters and carefully making sure you stay near the fountain of mana! haha.

I would suggest making sure that items that are out of sight aren't necesarily out of mind. Such as greying out the item so you can go back to it if you still desire. Also, it would be nice to have a list of some sort telling the player what you have equipped on your staff, and also the duration of the effects. I understand that there are coming monster descriptions, great !

Thanks,
JM

Well, I appreciate the high praise, and I hope I can make MG live up to it.

Your suggestions have been added to the Great To-Do List. Keep an eye on the development blog; the next couple days here will see me sorting out what's going into v0.6, and I'll post an update there when that happens.

Sounds great Nahjor!

I'll bring more suggestions and observations!

Thanks,
JM.

Here are my observations and suggestions on game balance.

Every spell school has something to offer and is, in my opinion, viable for character builds. Due to much higher frequency of magic fountains than health fountains though, I think every character is really going to want either light or dark as a means of turning that mp into hp. I don't know whether or not drain is still useful at the end against the high damage monsters, but heal saved my life a hundred times over.

The balance for the edges could probably use a little bit more work though. Enhanced Power is the equivalent to one potion of gain energy, and Toughness is the equivalent to five potions of gain life.

Melee Training is really strong as it is, because it's the only way to deal damage that costs no mp. In other words, any character that does not have that edge is helpless if they find themselves if they run out of energy. I personally think that it's really nice to have that to fall back on, or even as a primary means of attack.

Staff Bolts on the other hand, seem like they could use some work. Their damage at the beginning is very nice, but keeping it up to par with the enemies in the dungeon will require a massive investment in its edges, and since each rank in Powerful Bolt only increases it by 1, it will likely still be left behind by other forms of attack in the end.

Compare staff bolts to the elemental Lightning Bolt spell. Lightning does more damage initially (at least I'm pretty sure it does...) and can be learned on the first level with the first orb. Once they become available, you can take the Elemental Attunement and Elemental Mastery edges to gain +5 damage in only two edges. To get the same increase with staff bolts you would need to use 5 of them, which is more than half of how many you should expect to get in the game. Lightning bolts are also perfectly accurate without the need for any additional edges. Staff bolts can still miss even after taking the Accurate Bolt edge. Lightning bolts can also pierce through lines of enemies, hitting multiple targets in one shot. To obtain this ability, a staff bolt user would be required to take the shaped bolt edge as well. Finally, lightning bolts have a chance of inflicting paralysis, which staff bolts cannot permanently gain.

Short version: I consider the lightning spell to be a viable weapon after taking only two edges. For staff bolts, the player must take *at least* 7 edges (enhanced power x 5, shaped bolt, accurate bolt) to get to what I would consider a comparable form of attack.

Considering that lightning bolt only costs 1 mp more than a staff bolt, I think staff bolts come out looking pretty bad by comparison.

I don't know if Alchemy Training is worth taking. Fast preparation of the potion you need is useful, sure, but I don't think it's worth the valuable edge point, and a good player should be able to plan ahead well enough most of the time to get by without it. I'm not sure about Advanced Alchemy though; being able to produce whatever potion is best for the situation instantly would definitely open up tactical options for the player.

As for the other edges, Charge Control is nifty, but with staff bolts being as weak as they are late game, it doesn't seem worth bothering there. Charged melee attacks are good, but I would place more value on simply taking another rank of melee training all things considered. Finally, Contingency is very nice, and I strongly recommend taking it once or twice after you've made it more than halfway through the dungeon (taking it at the start is kind of wasteful, in my opinion).

Lastly, I have not tested the spell school edges, but they generally seem good. Guessing based on the descriptions, and it is only a guess, so naturally take this with a grain of salt, I would say that the Dark edges seem the weakest, and depending on how Alien Mentality and Physiology work, those two could well be overpowered.

So here are my recommendations:

Staff bolts are good at the start of the game, but require way too big of an investment to be good at the end. Perhaps lowering the base damage by one or two and then increasing the bonus of Powerful Bolt to +2 would be in order? I definitely think that either the base accuracy of staff bolts or the bonus from Accurate Bolt should be increased as well. It may be worth considering giving staff bolts 100% accuracy, and just take the RNG out of the question altogether.

If Melee Training seems too strong right now, it might be good to lower the bonus to +1. This would be really terrible for melee attacks as they are now, so it may be good to add +2 or so to the base damage of melee attacks. This could also make the early game too easy though. It's kind of a tough problem. As a last resort, I suppose you could give them a chance to miss as well as an "Accurate Strike" edge (or something like that) to take an edge point or two away from melee fighters, but I really like the dependability of melee attacks personally.

Enhanced Power needs a huge boost. I mean a really gigantic boost. At least to +5, or even up to +10 would not be unreasonable, I think. To be the equal of Toughness as far as levelling and stat gain potions are concerned, it would need to be +15, and I don't feel that Toughness is overpowered.

Charge Control is not a bad edge, but I think more could be done with it. If staff bolts were improved, that would probably be enough by itself to make it valuable.

Here's an alternate idea though: what if charged shots could become the perk that make staff bolts worth using in the first place? What if there were an edge that caused the charge level to go down by 1 every time the player takes a step instead of depleting completely? This would allow the tactic of charging up a shot to 3, and then ambushing an enemy around a corner with a level 2 attack, which would be good for those blasted summoners, and other annoying enemies.

Another idea would be to add new edges that open up after taking Charge Control like Advanced Alchemy currently does. A "Quick Charge" edge that makes charging faster/instantaneous like the alchemy edges do would be helpful, and a "Free Charge" edge that would take away the mp cost of charging, but would still make them take a turn could be good also (though obviously both of these together is not a good idea).

Anyway, that's everything I can think of. I tend to be pretty verbose, so sorry for the gigantic size of this.

Don't worry about verbosity, I tend to do the same thing. And it helps that I agree with a lot of what you've got, there. Ok, let's see...

As far as pure spells go, you're right, having light or dark is a very important thing. When you figure in the school-specific edges, though, it gets a little better; arcane and cosmic both have methods of restoring HP. They don't do so as directly as light or dark, and arguably not as well, but the schools having gaping holes in their capabilities is by design (Dark has no long-range effects of any sort, Arcane is incapable of inflicting damage directly, etc).

The edges could definitely use an overhaul, I agree. Most of the other game elements have been significantly overhauled since the earliest designs, but edges have generally only been tweaked.

As it stands, taking one rank of accurate bolt is sufficient to be able to hit (almost) every mob 100% of the time. IIRC, there's exactly one creature that can still dodge, once you've taken accurate bolt. It's probably worth doing to simply make accurate bolt cause a hit 100% of the time and be done with it. As to the value of AB in general, most mobs can't dodge at all. Pulling statistics out of my butt, I'd say only about 10% of mobs have any evasive ability whatsoever, so AB only matters on 10% of the total critters.

Powerful bolt...I'm leery of upping this one. See, the catch is, by the bottom levels, you're not really intended to be chewing through mobs left and right. Getting through the lowest levels should involve careful tactical placement, use of large quantities of items, and generally bringing every spell and tactic you have to bear on the situation. So, I'm saying that, generally, weakness of staff bolts by the end game is intentional. Now, whether they're at the exact right level of weakness is another question altogether. Honestly, I question the inclusion of powerful bolt at all; I don't particularly want to make it stronger than it is, but as is, it's not really especially worth taking.

That actually brings up a pretty good point; comparing staff bolts and lightning bolt. Thing is, the elemental school really only does one thing. It blows stuff up. Yes, it has dig and boulder and so forth, but generally, it inflicts direct damage. I'm much more OK with an elemental school user blasting through mobs left and right than I am with allowing the staff bolts to do that. It also bears noting that in order to get both of the elemental school edges, you have to be heavily invested in the elemental school. I agree that lightning bolt hits a little harder than it should for its cost (and I'll probably weaken it a tiny bit), but I don't think that's a strong justification for adjusting powerful bolt or the elemental edges.

Enhanced power...yeah, it needs upped, no doubt. I've been kicking around lowering gain energy from +3 to +2, but regardless, enhanced power isn't where it needs to be in terms of power. This'll get fixed.

Melee training IS a tough problem. I'm OK with the concept of a melee fighter build. I'm not OK with the concept of a melee fighter that tears through the toughest mobs in the game like tissue paper. Again, by the end of the game, you should be being forced to use every last trick and tactic. The other issue I have with melee training is that it tends to make the early game trivial, as you can 1-shot just about everything with melee attacks.

I tend to dislike the miss chance thing, for the simple reason that it breaks the paradigm that melee combat is auto-hit in MG. I think lowering the edge's damage boost, but upping the max ranks would probably help with the problem; right now, it's at +2 with 5 max ranks; ultimately, that makes your melee attacks deal 11 per smack. I'm considering dropping it to +1, but raising the max ranks to 8, making the final end-game damage 9. That way, the melee fighter build is still viable, but you can't get it without sacrificing your other edges.

I really dig your ideas on charging. I was looking for more places to add 'trees' of edges, and charge-related things might be exactly the place to do it. I'm not sure exactly where I'll ultimately go with this one, but you've given me some food for thought, and there will definitely be something along those lines in 0.7.



A well-thought-out analysis with some good ideas backing it up- thanks!