The attack is fine, but it is useless to try and balance against the monsters on floors 11-15 due to their high defensive stats. More striking debuffs to counter, magic resistance, HP, block, and dodge would be most welcome. I would go as far as to say that a level 15 monster shouldn't be markedly harder to kill than a level 10 monster, so that for modding anything that works up to floor 10 will still be effective down on floor 15. Their stronger attacks and spells will still leave them more dangerous. I don't think a compensatory buff is needed in other departments, either. This is around the point where the player isn't going to get that much stronger unless inconsequentia really favors them or something.
I'm in agreement with this. A lot of builds suddenly go from viable to completely pasted in the RotDG floors, because they just can't kill the monsters fast enough to prevent themselves from being pasted.
Tesseracts. Fighting more than one Tesseract at a time. Boss Tesseracts. Yes, a small nerf would be really great. Especially for Going Rogue players. They basically stomp you unless you have 300000000 acid res (and even with alch, plaid, and some other buffs it still hurts)
Everything will still die given some effort and not having the entire zoo after you at once. And I don't see why any boss should be labeled a threat to anything except melee fighters out of consumables and every skill on cooldown, since even a subpar caster build nukes enemies handily. When I was decked out with equipment, No enemy, even most bosses, survived more than two castings of recursive curse. And all slimes hurt anyway. They are one of the few melee threats that well, still pose a threat other than corruptor types and other enemies doing bulk damage through resists, not that it makes a difference. It isn't like they aren't beatable entirely. And as for fighting a boss one on one in going rogue toe to toe, why is that even an option? nuke them safely from a distance.
It's fun. Because dying is fun, right? Seriously, though, with enough block (which every melee fighter should have) even a boss isn't dangerous if you have 50% health or more. It's finding four or five of them in a zoo that gets dangerous, and even then Hoglanterns, invis potions and Communism provide you plenty of viable melee escape options.
Of course you'd always go for ranged first. But the later floors either are too open to find a botteneck, or too closed (and then you get pinned by AOE effects). Mobs also dramatically increase in size on DL 14 and 15, so it becomes very unlikely that you'd ever be able to fight a monster one on one. It's usually 2-4 at a time. It's partly the monsters, but also a result of how dungeon design and the RNG ramp up (difficulty) exponentially as you near Dredmor.
I'm sorry your builds aren't good enough, but I'd recommend stronger builds or an easier mode (just about anything can get to level 15 on Dwarven mode with a little work and a bit of luck) instead of trying to nerf everything on lv 11+.
How unsympathetic to us modders (at least those of us who try to be balanced!) Also, the devs have been nerfing the overpowered skills in the core game a lot anyway. The reason why everything 11+ has to be nerfed is because if you don't then anything that is effective on 11+ is OP. Indeed even to get to level 11 you likely had to be using something like promethean, psionics, killer vegan, tinkering, or fungal arts. A couple of these have gotten nerfed. It's not fun when lots of content is obsoleted by tanky monsters.
If your build was balanced, it would be neither too strong nor too weak. Proper damage scaling to your stats should allow you to create a skill set that gets progressively stronger at about the same rate as the game gets harder. Also I disagree with your assessment that you need overpowered skills to reach lv 11, and that any skills that let you reach lv 11 are necessarily overpowered.
You two are both saying the same thing, but from two different perspectives. Sure, if your build wwas balanced, it wouldn't be too strong or weak -- that's just A=A. The question Kaidelong is asking is 'is it possible to balance skills against the (possibly imbalanced) monsters of DLs 11+?
Scaling by floor level, very aggressively (IE two-digit multipliers) is the only way I can currently think of to keep a skill effective into the late game without making it totally broken early. ..Can damage be scaled by floor level even?
nope. They tried to implement a floorScale for Banksterism, but the messy floor numbers on Mysterious Portals, Wizardlands, Diggle Hell, and the Pocket Dimension made it basically impossible.
