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[nenjin]

So I'm at week 12 now. Beat the Apprentice Necromancer (by the skin of my teeth, that fight sucks with no aoe damage.) Got a nice roster of guys approaching Lvl 2, a good bank roll and things seem pretty good.

Part of me still knows it's an illusion of security though. The RNG is still there, a fickle beast lurking in the suppurating darkness, waiting to unleash three crits in a row. But the way my runs at 4 or 5 weeks+ are going, compared to my previous experiences, is like night and day. I can see why people start to call the game easy. When the RNG is going your way, and you know what kind of party you want to run, it's not hard to milk fights and keep stress pretty low. And once you've got many weeks under your belt, you emotionally brush off a bad run. It's just not the same story in the first 2 or 3 weeks for people fresh starting the game.

[joey4track]

Yeah to be honest, I'm not exactly sure how much I actually like this game. I do.. I think, for the most part but it also frustrates me all to hell sometimes. Kinda like Spelunky, I have a love/hate relationship but at least with Spelunky I feel like in the end when I am successful it is terribly rewarding whereas in DD I never really feel satisfied or accomplished. Also Spelunky rewards focus, skill and effort yet punishes for mistakes that you can always learn from despite it's cheap deaths(few and far between) but in DD it's the RNG that usually will screw me over and that just feels cheap sometimes. I dunno, I do love the feels and the style of the game but I think I may have to give it some more time for it to develop and come back at a later date.

If I can actually pry myself away from it- it really does have quite and addicting if not masochistic quality to it.

[nenjin]

Yeah, I can unequivocally say I like the game. But it both attracts and repels me. I finish a decent run and instead of immediately queuing up another one I hesitate and wonder, will this be the run that completely wrecks my shit? I'm pretty focused on the game while it plays so when a run ends I feel a little drained. Normally I'll play games I like obsessively for a while, but with DD I'm reluctant. I'll play a week or two a day maybe. TBH, I think I've been a little traumatized by the exceptionally horrific runs I've been on. The game is so deliciously meta like that.

[joey4track]

Yeah, that's the thing about this game, it's really unique in that way. As addicting as it is for me, each run is so stressful, demanding and exhausting that I will usually pause and play something else for a bit in between runs. Especially because after each run I am not even emotionally or mentally ready to pick up the pieces and try to trod on forward, lol. The gameplay itself really does convey a desperate feeling while the combat(even though turn-based) feels visceral and every blow feels like it's all on the line.

I like it but it's very taxing. You know it's messed up when I'll play Spelunky to actually calm down after a run in DD 

[Cthulhu]

I get that feeling too.  The "Look how well I'm doing, I don't want to see this all go to fuck and I know it will.  Look how happy my guys are, how can I pull the trigger on them?"

I get that feeling occasionally, got it on Angband once on my first really successful character.  The worst I ever got it was playing This War of Mine when one of my characters saved a lady from a soldier and then killed some bandits and we had a ton of food and supplies and everything was going great.  I was like "These people are going to suffer horribly if I keep playing.  This isn't over at all" and it was really distressing.

And I was right.  Things got awful and everyone died.

[revo]

I just finished my first veteran level run... or well failed it. i was running grave robber-vestal-bounty hunter-leper level 3 2 3 2 respectively. I got nearly destroyed and only found 1 of the 3 bodies i was looking for. the increased health dodge and greater damage just  Iwouldnt let me kill them quick enough or outheal them. It was just a slow process of widdling my team down until they were all at deaths door with no food and i had to retreat. I guess its back to destroying apprentice runs before i can deal with these.

[Retropunch]

Completely agree with not wanting to start another run up straight away. It's really strange, I enjoy it and look forward to playing it, but after one run I'm completely done.
I think this is a bit to do with a 'risk vs reward' kinda thing. In most dungeon crawlers, when you get to the end of a branch/vault (like a run I suppose) you are rewarded well and feel to have really achieved. With DD I have to mainly just patch my team up, get one or two very small upgrades and then just plough back into it - which leaves me feeling drained.

Whilst I realise this feeling of desperation is what they were aiming for (and I salute them for it), I do wish they could reward the player more to keep you wanting to push on. This could either be in more gear to try out, more frequent levelling and upgrades to skills which feel less incremental and more interesting.

[Scoops Novel]

I like how success sounds authentic in this, but on the other hand i hope there's some kind of testament to the many who spluttered away in the dark. With a game like this, I'd hate for the characters to eventually feel interchangeable (compounded by the class system) and your heroes forgotten. I'd prefer at least fighting their ghosts to that. Ideally, some fates should simply be unknown...

[Elfeater]

I feel like the hero cap for bosses is not a good feature, maybe bump it up to where you can bring them 1 or 2 levels above the boss.

[Zangi]

They would need to buff up the bosses.  With luck and a good plan, a boss can be destroyed just as easily as a party of maggots.

[Sindain]

They would need to buff up the bosses.  With luck and a good plan, a boss can be destroyed just as easily as a party of maggots.

Yeah, the thing about the bosses is they all are weakest to a very particular team composition and strategy. If you happen to know that strategy they can be destroyed pretty easily barring some really bad luck or rough trip to the boss, but if you don't know the strategy you can very easily just get completely demolished.

So if you don't want to spoil yourself it would probably be a good idea to throw a couple expendable teams at a boss so you can learn it.

That being said, I think there are more elegant ways to handle the level cap then the current method, so I don't really support it in general. However, the bosses don't particularly need an exception.

[Dostoevsky]

That being said, I think there are more elegant ways to handle the level cap then the current method, so I don't really support it in general. However, the bosses don't particularly need an exception.

Perhaps it was just the whims of RNG, but there was one time I ran a team through a mission where everything went right-- kept stress low, the foes generally fell before my team like wheat before the scythe, and was a smashing success all around.

Come the post-mission screen, every member of the team got hit with either 'soft' or 'calm'-- not terrible traits, but bad traits. While in some ways it seems pretty silly ("oh, those bandits barely shot me!") that might be a balancing mechanism. Use your crack team on a challenge, they get rusty from the easy tasks.

[ChairmanPoo]

My experience is the contrary - I correlate lower stress with fewer negative traits.

[nenjin]

I can't really tell either way. Redhook said in the past that quirks were earned by the stuff that happened to the hero or that they did during the dungeon run. Maybe they were referring to quirks earned from Curios. In practice it seems highly random. I've had guys who preformed great walk away with just a negative quirk. I've watched guys who've gotten clobbered get a positive quirk only. And then I've watched back rank fighters get both by the end.

[ScottP]

I pledged to this, can't wait to try it out. Looks really fun!