Strength changes

[Ferret]

Now that there's been a bit more time to look at things since the Strength changes, I think some adjustments are probably going to be in order.

To compare, here are the old and current defense values characters used to have at varying levels of Strength/level:

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Defense Values
STR/Lvl  0/Lvl  1/Lvl  2/Lvl  3/Lvl  4/Lvl  5/Lvl
Old      100    100    100    100    100    100
Curr     75     100    125    150    175    200


I think his was the right direction for the most part, but some adjustments need to be made. Working to improve melee was the right idea, but nerfing magic-user defense probably wasn't. It's also looking like the adjustment for melee defense was too high in general.

Still, that's to be expected, my usual approach to fixing balance issues is to swing for the fences and see what happens. It usually helps me get to the right place faster than trying lots of tiny incremental adjustments.

The proposed values for the next build will be:

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Defense Values
STR/Lvl  0/Lvl  1/Lvl  2/Lvl  3/Lvl  4/Lvl  5/Lvl
Old      100    100    100    100    100    100
Curr     75     100    125    150    175    200
New      100    112    125    137    150    162


That will put mage defense back where it was before, and will smoosh the curve (that's a technical term) for melee defense, both reducing the maximum amount while also making it start giving benefits a bit earlier: even just 1 Str/Level will be enough to see some benefit. 2/lvl will be unchanged from how it is right now, only Str levels greater than that will see an actual reduction.

Based on this, I probably will hold off on any adjustments to magic melee abilities themselves for this build: Magic still has the advantage of also having easy access to healing and ranged attacks, and with that and defense being set back to where it was, they might be running even with melee's newly adjusted defense bonus now. We'll see.

Thank you everyone for the feedback I've received on the changes so far. It's been a big help.

[mbj]

Did you see my recent orb of power death where I died from full health in one turn to two of those ice yeti things throwing boulders? I usually skip message logs because they're usually unimportant so I don't know exactly what happened, but that was pretty funny.

[Ferret]

You pretty much hit the worst case scenario there, checking all the boxes on horribleness:

Weak to element: Check (I assume, unless you had Soul Armor'd the physical weaknesses away)
100 Power Attack: Check (strongest attack damage in the game)
Minimum Strength: Check (I assume this was the case)
Properly Stated Attacker: Check (Yeti have fairly impressive Strength)

About all that was missing was +POW and/or -DEF, but yeah, with Min Strength throwing a -25% on Defense, the other three were dragging defense, way, way down.

In theory, this is no different from playing a Deep Elf in DCSS, which is why I was originally okay with this. The problem comes in the type of choice that leads to it.

If you pick a Deep Elf in DCSS, you know up front "I'm gonna be squishy and I need to be really careful."

If you choose not to spend points on Strength or Vitality in Demon, I'm not sure that communicates nearly as clearly how risky a decision you're making. I mean, yes, one raises Defense, once raises MaxHP, but I'm not sure it would ever be clear that not raising either means you're basically agreeing to Deep Elf status.

Then too, I'd never be comfortable with surprise one turn kills from full health unless there were some truly bad decisions leading up to it... and truly bad decisions should not include "reasonable sounding stat allocations, such as not leveling physical stats on a mage"