Greetings and first impressions from a returning player

Back Room Game Design Discussion
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Greetings everyone! I haven’t played for quite some time, but I am still kicking. I ran into Yermak somewhere in IRC a few years ago, and that’s about the last contact I’ve had. I wish all the DCSS players and developers well.

The situation with inventory filling up has been effectively solved. I haven’t noticed any drawbacks, and if there are any, they don’t really matter. This is the single largest change to the game I’ve noted that has increased my fun more than anything else. I am still dumping a few items at the top of the Lair, but I could easily forgo that now—it isn’t tactically important anymore. It’s no longer required to optimize potion and scroll sets just to move between branches. A big thank you to whoever worked on these updates!

I had a bit of a shock with those beetles that fling fire until I understood the mechanic. It cooked a couple of characters before I started taking them seriously. The instinct is to wait in place until the effect ends to avoid drawing more aggro. The mechanic requiring you to move for the fire to go out isn’t exactly intuitive—it’s not entirely clear why “fanning the flames” with airflow helps put them out!

I also appreciate the lack of instant malmutation from several creatures, taking contamination instead. This is a nice change, as it makes tedious strategies—like always walking behind summoned allies—much less tempting.

I like the tension created by not being able to stair dance in the Slime Pits, but some of the slime creatures seem quite powerful, relatively speaking. Slime has always felt a bit out of place in the Lair given the character development required to safely complete it, and it feels even more so now that acid jellies aren’t the only major threat. Even after killing the Royal Jelly (who seems to have less health now?), I still had some awkward trouble with those strange creatures that live inside the walls and multiply. I probably need to read up on them some more.

The shapeshifting game is quite a major overhaul. I’m fairly neutral about it so far since I haven’t tested it much. It could be handy on something like a Gnoll, but I question how effective the system is when you need to train a dedicated skill for it and rely on finding the right drops. By that point, you’ve likely already developed a different survival strategy involving armor (if you aren’t just killing things with spells). For builds not training Unarmed Combat or Shapeshifting, these transformations seem fairly useless, making the drops an automatic ignore or toss. These are just my initial impressions anyhow; I haven’t yet had a run where it made sense to pivot to them.

I’m still adjusting to the spell changes. It’s both fun and difficult checking out the new spells and adjusting to the renamed ones. I see the effort to make them more strategic regarding positioning, and I think that was largely achieved. The spell schools do seem fairly fragmented now—it feels like it takes an enormous number of spell schools to build an effective “mostly caster” character. That’s just a notion though; I don’t have any hard conclusions yet. I’ve been warming up mostly by playing Gnolls so I can test out the range of new things, which conveniently blunts the need to carefully choose spell schools.

Best Wishes,
Svendre

1 Thank
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Hello and welcome (back)! I didn’t start playing until after Yermak left, so I’m guessing we haven’t seen each other before. Onto the points raised in this thread:

  • Inventory: I like the change here, even if any inventory problems I had before could be solved by dropping useless stuff.
  • Bombardier Beetles: These were created to tutorialize a change to monster sticky flame. They’re slow and vulnerable to poison, so poison darts work well against them.
  • Malmutate → Contamination: Having the opportunity to avoid mutations is good, though I still have trouble with shining eyes, especially since their contamination is smite-targeted now.
  • Slime changes: The devs intended to make Slime harder with these changes, as many players felt Slime was the easiest third rune. I had more trouble with Slime than Vaults even before the changes, so I generally just avoid the branch now.
  • Talismans: The ones that meld slots seem to be designed for species with limited slots (Felid, Octopode, maybe a few others). The devs have said that talismans are an incomplete design space and have a bunch of things planned to improve them (more talismans, splitting Shapeshifter into 3 backgrounds, multiple new species with varying relation to talismans, and a Lugonu rework for Shapeshifting support).
  • Spells: I’m guessing you haven’t played much post-0.25 Crawl, as that’s the version with positional magic, though many new spells have been added since with the same philosophy. My first version was 0.30, so I never got to see what spells were like before positional magic.