Just lost another char (an Oni Fire Elementalist) against Duvessa. Managed to separate the 2, took out Dowan without much trouble and Duvessa wasn’t even aware of it. She still gets permanent berserk the moment she sees you. Giving her berserk the moment she sees dead Dowan makes sense to me and if that were the trigger that would create some interesting tactical opportunities.
As is if you kill Dowan first, you just have to leave the level until you are much stronger. 36 HP, permanent berserk, generally a melee weapon for 20+ damage per turn is just nothing any char on D5 can take. So this feels like a trap, kill Dowan and your char is screwed unless you know about this beforehand and quickly find some stairs.
I feel as is it is set up as a trap for the player.
Compare to Siegmund, who also kills plenty of low level chars. But if you read his description it should be fairly clear that he is super dangerous and most chars should try to avoid him when they first see him.
When you encounter Dowan and Duvessa and it looks like the key point is that they are twins and that they can buff each other. So that suggests the strategy should be to separate them so you can take them on one at a time.
But the mutual buffing is mostly irrelevant, once you take out one the other one will be perma buffed and in a stronger way than they can buff each other. So when you encounter them you need to ask yourself whether you can take on either one on their own perma buffed. The whole twin business is just a decoy. And for most chars the answer will be no.
So if you know about this, you just avoid them completely but the monster description leads you to a totally different approach. To add insult to injury both will become hasted when buffed making it close to impossible to run away from them for a char on D4.
It is a question of what the intended player experience is.
If you want ‘here is a monster most players can’t take on’ that fine (see Siegmund) but that should be clear from the monster description (see Siegmund again).
If on the other hand you want ‘here is a pair of monsters, harmless on their own but dangerous together’ (which is much more interesting to me than another Siegmund) than after you kill one the other one should be mostly a push over.
The intended player experience is that you fight them, you die, and you learn to do better next time, that’s the point of a roguelike! They are quite dangerous, and navigating a level that has them can be quite the puzzle, with Dowan harassing you and a hasted Duvessa running at you, and having two of them makes navigating the level without finding them much harder, while their unique mechanic makes so you can’t trivialize them by taking them one at a time. It makes for a more complex and interesting threat evaluation challenge, which is the main challenge of the game and what makes it fun in the first place.
sometimes you’re using attacks that don’t discriminate and they both take damage and Dowan dies first. It’s fine in that case if Duvessa only has a few hp remaining haha
You do better next time by avoiding a level with them completely until you are quite a bit stronger. A hasted Duvessa running at you is a death sentence for most chars on D4. That is ok as a role for a unique but we already have several early uniques in that role.
Having a pair of uniques that are dangerous together but harmless on their own would be a different challenge that doesn’t really exist elsewhere because you can generally try to separate multiple threats by stair hopping which explicitly doesn’t work for Dowan and Duvessa.
You also deal with them by having stealth, as they are relatively easy to exclude and navigate around if they don’t wake up, or by being strong enough to fight duvessa, which some characters are and the test is to recognize when that is the case, or by skipping the level, or by using something like Mephitic cloud which can take care of them very well… there are plenty of means. The one that is always guaranteed for all characters is skipping the level, but then you have a level you can’t return to, which makes the next one harder.
So it’s a matter of how well you know your character and its limits, and what tools you have available to deal with them. They’re more interesting than Grinder for example.
I think at the level where you first encounter them, Grinder is more interesting than Dowan and Duvessa precisely because some characters can take on Grinder and some cannot whereas almost all characters cannot take Dowan and Duvessa when they first meet them.
My melee chars can usually take Grinder without much issues but at 36 or so HP and 5 AC for casters it is usually saver to clear out another dungeon level or two before attacking him. Additionally he often carries a wand which may or may not make him a lot more dangerous depending on the wand.
Dowan and Duwessa on the other hand are avoid on first contact for virtually any char. True, with even moderate stealth you can explore most of the rest of the level before they wake up. Something like Mephitic Cloud works great against them but it is not something chars can reliably cast when you first encounter them. When you first see them, avoid them, clear out 3 or 4 more dungeon levels and then you should be ready for them with most chars using whatever tools the particular char has available.
Same concept as Siegmund but an opportunity lost for something more interesting and not really guessable from ingame information, only from experience.
There are many more characters that are able to deal with D&D compared to grinder. You might be able to kill her, but you are always taking a 5% chance of straight up dying, so it’s usually a mistake unless you have para immunity. The difference is that you either die or you kill her easily, so it doesn’t feel as scary and you end up fighting her again, makes it easy to chalk it up to bad luck when you do die. Which is why we don’t like grinder that much, it’s so easy to think she’s not sigmund levels of threat after getting lucky a few times.
D&D just requires tech to kill. If you need to fight them, you need to pop consumables or abuse whatever tools you have available, and you can never go face first and overpower them, which you can do with grinder if you’re lucky.
I didn’t know there was such mutual buffs.
Last time, I thought they drank some potions. They had a taste of my prismatic explosion though.
I usually kill Duvessa first since the permanent rage. These haste will complicate things. And Dowan is always going to rush at you ahead of Duvessa. But perhaps with haste he can blink away more often (?) I don’t know if it’s a good thing, as haste will also speed up his assault if he’s got a clear range.