YASD and stuff

[pjoxt]

http://i.imgur.com/odZGqdx.png

Had a decent run going, as you can see from my character & party I was the mainhealer in a very defense oriented party, or as me and my friend call them; healball. The malingee carried me through early game but at this stage was kinda irrelevant, and the other demons without skills displayed were mostly unmodified. Oh yeah and old screenshot of main character, final stats were Magic 78 & Vitality 37.

Found the blessed gandayah on like tower 2 and it was credit to team for the entire run, buffing my dudes up and then being pretty much a mana battery. Maj. Kasha got absolutely blasted a few times, had to revive it twice, probably won't try to use it as a frontliner again despite its' nice resistances. Used a gold offering to get python, he was a pretty good tank. I should try to not have a team where most of the key demons are weak to the same element, but in the end that didn't matter because I walked into a group of 3 chachapumas and their friends. Mass charge into stun and confuse, half dead before I get to act, so I try to move behind my snakebro, panic prevents that, so I tried to use a healing item, panic prevented that too. DED on floor 14.

I feel like this is the majority of my midgame deaths, if it's not walking around a corner and getting blasted by 5x elemental enemies that use an element you're weak against. Maybe I need to teach everyone the calm spell, or maybe I just have to stop using autoexplore after the first 10 mins. Most of the times when I die I feel like the consumables I had on me didn't / wouldn't have helped at all, and I die having all of my runes etc. I'm either prevented from using the items by a status effect, or the enemies burst harder than the healing items heal in 1 turn. Never had a mobility consumable, not sure if they exist. I used a sleep rune once and that was pretty good. The party healing gem is by far my most used consumable, in battles where all of your demons are taking damage at the same time, but I feel like nothing's going to save you if an enemy lands a panic etc.

Also this is probably just me but after I lose a run that did pretty well, I feel bored of the first few levels, cause I'm like fuck these slimes and goblins, let me have cool demons again, so I faceroll with autoexplore and go die .
Gotta take a break before any serious attempts can continue.

[Ferret]

There's a few solutions to the situations you describe, granted you may have already tried some of them, but here's a list:

1) Calm is certainly the most reliable answer... but, it's also the one that doesn't do much else if you don't need it at the moment (it also doesn't solve all of these issues: Paralysis requires Cleanse instead, and Shock can't be removed by any ability.)

2) Backup healers. This is probably the solution I would favor most, even if playing the summoner as a healer. Teaching some other main party demons a heal can really bail you out in situations where you either don't have control of yourself or are taking too much damage to heal through alone. Draw Wounds can be fairly useful for this: it won't prevent your buddies from doing what they would normally do since it is a free action, and it can work even on low Magic/high HP brute demons that are normally poor candidates for heal magic. It will still heal less per cast for them, but they will have the HP to keep spamming it if necessary without immediately getting in danger themselves.

3) Demons of your own with control spells. Demons love to use control spells if they have them available: even relatively humble ones like Dazzling Gaze/Glare can give you some breathing room to recover from trouble.

4) Soul Armor. Most people usually go for big beefy (and expensive) Soul Armors, but you can get some good results from relatively humble Soul Armors that swap out a weakness you find particularly troublesome and/or give a resistance/immunity to an element you really don't like facing. Fire, Electricity, and Mind in particular tend to be weaknesses that can get you in very bad trouble very quickly. It isn't to say that being weak to other elements won't bring problems too, but they tend to be slower onset problems that you may find easier to dig out from under than the sudden onslaught of very high Fire/Elec damage or Mind-based lockdowns.

5) Consume. Delete Demon is also a free action, which not only makes it quick to do, it also means it can't fail due to Panic or Paralysis. The free action bit lets you use it to power heal through otherwise overpowering situations, the Panic/Paralysis-proof aspect gives you a reliable heal mechanic in a situations where there otherwise is no such thing. (Refresh is also a free action, btw, which means it also is a reliable way out of those two conditions and of healing during them, but it has a cooldown.)


Your observation about items in Demon is generally correct: they aren't quite as escapey as they tend to be in other roguelikes. Wind Card is an obvious exception, but other than that, most items in Demons are designed to:

1) Help escape from moderately sticky situations.
2) Assist with captures you aren't well suited for at the moment.
3) Help *prevent* very sticky situations, if you recognize them as such and begin using the items earlier rather than later. It is acknowledged that they probably are not enough to get you out of a very sticky situation once you've landed in one, other than Wind Card and maybe Night Rune.

I admit I agonize a bit over the first few levels of the Tower.

On the one hand, I can see your point (and I don't think it is just you) about them being a little vanilla for advanced players. On the other hand... 90%+ of games end in death on Tower:1-3. I don't *mind* that death rate terribly much.. I just don't want to see it get much worse.

One other question: What do you feel auto-explore does that you would do differently that would make you safer if you weren't using it?

[pjoxt]

Yep, I agree with 1), 2) and 3). Calm and backup heals is a must, and crowd control of your own is strong. I like putting the whisper type spells on frontliners.
As for 4) I don't even consider this as an option.

With the way most of deaths happen, consume only saves you from the crowd control deaths and only delays your death by 1 turn for burst deaths. If it's a long drawn out battle then deleting a demon will just make you lose that battle faster. Even if you miraculously survive a battle by using consume, now you're 1 demon short, unless you have a slot reserved on your team for consume/recycle fodder, which I can never seem to do. I can't even fit all the demons I want to use.

Soul armor costs too much to use and requires me to waste a relic upgrade slot on something that isn't fast summon, detect monster or max monster limit.

Autoexplore is fine for the most part, I suppose in my previous post I meant the faceroll mindset I used to get into when my party was doing well. With detect monster however, you want to have more control over where you go first and from what direction you pull the next group in order to avoid double pulling. In general you can have better positioning when you don't use autoexplore.

I'd like to see more variety in the demons' abilities, resistances and weaknesses within the groups. Most of the time it's fine, but this 5+ akateko / abatwa meme has to stop.

[Ferret]

Re: 4) That's fair. Consume hasn't been as loved as I'd hoped, so I've been considering buffing a bit by giving a permanent stat bonus if the demon was sufficiently leveled and/or unique. You will still probably have to save a slot or even two to use it properly (as you say, I don't necessarily recommend using it on your key demons, you probably want to have slots set aside for fodder for it), but this change would reward you for that long-term pain with a steady set of stat bumps... or a not so steady surge, should you defeat an enemy summoner and manage to capture and consume several of his pre-leveled demons.

Re: 5) Soul Armor did get a slight price decrease in the 10/13 build, but even before that, there have been people who swear by it... and, there have also been people who swear by never using it. This usually is a sign something is right about where I want it. It *is* ridiculously expensive, at least for good ones, but being able to have semi-customized and very good overall resistances, permanently should be.

I can see your point on auto-explore... but given the (very) long-term goal is to eventually no longer need auto-explore at all, maybe I'd do better by looking into allowing click-to-move on the minimap? I think that'd accomplish what you're looking for too, and without further investment in tech that I one day (no time soon, I confess) hope to have interesting enough levels to justify getting rid of entirely.

"Meme groups", which barring the very early levels make up maybe 1/7th of all encounter groups, do have a few specific purposes:

1) Very early on (basically just Tower:1, Tower:2, and Tower:1 &1/2), I use them to avoid throwing too many new abilities at new players at once. This is one of the very few concessions I make to new players in the early floors of the tower. I recognize it unfortunately does also contribute to making those fights a little less interesting for pros, but I haven't found a better answer here yet.

2) They sometimes are used to introduce a particularly nasty enemy type, giving you a chance to see what's inherently horrible about them before that horrible thing is paired with something that provides synergy. Take your the Akateko example. You almost always will encounter a pack of just Akateko first... and even that is pretty horrifying for many parties. This early experience helps prepare you to properly appreciate the danger later when you find them paired with Banshees that can heal them, Ben Nefilin that can hinder your actions while fighting them, etc.

3) Sometimes it's just the way that particular enemy works best. This is more the Abatwa example. Poison wants to stack. Archers want to shoot over things. Abatwe are poison archers who can be shot over by other archers. In this case, there aren't really many other enemies that provide better synergy for these.

All that said, they do only make up about 1/7th of all encounters, or roughly 1 enemy group per level. RNG might cause you to see more than or less than that, of course.