Ocean Shallows complaints and suggestions.

[Terraziel]

I'm putting this here rather than straight into mantis (though I am going to put at least two up), because I want people who play on other difficulty levels to comment on how they find them.

Personally I find the ocean shallows, specifically the cave systems, to be the hardest combat in the entire game, by quite a margin, to put some numbers up....

(Tier 2)
Carp - Attack 210.9, Health 36,000
Blue Whales - Attack (see below), Health 90,000
Blue Whale spawn - Attack 14.1, Health 4,500

These are the basic enemies in the oceans, to get these numbers from anything else it would have to be either a boss or a late game unlocked enemy.

Now there are at least two actual issues (the aforementioned ones going in to mantis), firstly, giant boss rooms mean HUGE numbers of monster spawners, i've got a screenshot of a cave with 18 spawners in it, and spawning enemies like the above that's like fighting a dozen boss battles at once. The second issue is that Black Whales still seem to do melee damage, and 957 a hit is a tad excessive.

But to get back to the basic point, I feel the oceans need some intermediary enemies, jellyfish, blowfish, trilobites....aliens.....anything, something so that the current enemies can be the rarities that they should be.
I say it like this because individually the enemies are both interesting and fun, if tense, to fight but what are you supposed to do against a swarm of enemies that do 200 damage a hit?

I shall note that I do not think that the fact that it gets easier with the "good swimmer" enchant mitigates any of this, as a basic region it needs to be fun without the enchant.

Personally, I think we need at least two things in addition to new enemies, one is a way of getting easier movement without the enchant, a spell that grants it for a few seconds say.
The second is a way of floating upwards, perhaps an "emergency flotation device" as a stash item, something to allow easy escape without having to do the functional, but entirely crummy feeling, riding of platforms. Ooh, or do a "transmogrify into dolphin" scroll....

[x4000]

The riding of boxes is way better than platforms, just FYI.

I can't argue with the need for more intermediary enemies, though.

In terms of a way to move faster temporarily aside from the enchant, that's kind of missing the point: until you get that enchant, you're kind of stuck not being able to do much in this area of the game, and once you have that enchant you're forced to use that enchant slot for those purposes rather than for damage reduction or similar.

In terms of the boss rooms with too many monster spawners, that's something that I'll have to look at but if you have a general recommendation of what percentage you'd like that cut by I could do it.

[keith.lamothe]

Going where the carp are is just not a healthy proposition, as many a dwarf can tell you.


... what? Balance?  Oh, fine

[Terraziel]

In terms of a way to move faster temporarily aside from the enchant, that's kind of missing the point: until you get that enchant, you're kind of stuck not being able to do much in this area of the game, and once you have that enchant you're forced to use that enchant slot for those purposes rather than for damage reduction or similar.

I buy this argument for the preventing acid water damage part of exploring the oceans, but once you are allowed into the area "forcing" you to find an even further upgraded version of the enchant seems, unfair, it's almost like saying "here have a sneak peek, now go grind for a better enchant so you can actually come in", and as some fairly basic spells requires getting to depth 3 in the shallows it shouldn't be dependent on what is an advanced enchant.

The way I see it the movement increase enchant would remain valuable even with the spell because ideally you want the effect all the time whilst in the ocean, not just temporarily, as for the record I really was only meaning for the spell to last 1-2 seconds at best, to give you that last little bit of dodging ability, and the spell wouldn't remove the need to have an acid water resistance enchant on.

In terms of the boss rooms with too many monster spawners, that's something that I'll have to look at but if you have a general recommendation of what percentage you'd like that cut by I could do it.

With the way it stands I'd say a cut of somewhere between 75-66%, blue whales are essentially able to hit you from anywhere in the room, and lots of carp can be more damaging than the boss. That is with taking the 18 as the example, but roughly 4-6 spawners feels like a good quantity, rather even with that significant a cut I don't think the spawned enemies would be marginalized. Obviously with some lower scale enemies it would probably need to be put back up.

Going where the carp are is just not a healthy proposition, as many a dwarf can tell you.


... what? Balance?  Oh, fine

My problem is playing on a difficulty sufficiently removed from the "normal" difficulty that it is hard to judge the actual impact of things, a minor balance issue on a lower difficulty gets multiplied in scale by the time it gets to me.

[CodexArcanum]

I thought the oceans were a bit ridiculous as well, and I was only playing on Hard.  I eventually toned it down to Normal - 1 (Apprentice?) just so I could get to the 3rd level of caves without digging my fingernails into the mouse in frustration.  There's also a (bug|feature?) where-by occasionally a boss room spawner will go ballistic and release a stream of monsters, and I had carp and whales popping in just as fast as I could kill them.

I don't mind the movement speed issue quite so much.  I can't move very fast anyway since I have to plant lights constantly.  The fact that so much of the area is dark only makes the monster problem more ridiculous since getting swarmed by blue whale spawn when you can't see them is a sure way to bite it fast.


On the front of adding more monster variety, I don't see why limited migration couldn't be enabled, unless that exception is just too difficult to code in.  Enemies like amoebas and espers would work out alright in the oceans (if they were acid immune).  Now obviously I can see why migration from out of the oceans isn't allowed.  Although it would be interesting to have, say, carp in grassland ponds or occasionally get into a flooded room in a building that has a whale hiding out in it.

[Terraziel]

I don't mind the movement speed issue quite so much.  I can't move very fast anyway since I have to plant lights constantly.  The fact that so much of the area is dark only makes the monster problem more ridiculous since getting swarmed by blue whale spawn when you can't see them is a sure way to bite it fast.

Well, Enemy movement speed is a function of difficulty, so on the higher difficulties the movement penalty becomes more and more of an issue.

on the note of planting lights constantly, as someone who swore off emit light enchants I highly recommend using light snake, even in situations where the crawling behaviour doesn't help it has a much larger light radius than ball of light so is good for taking a quick glance ahead of you.

[BobTheJanitor]

At the risk of cementing a reputation as someone who always whines when things get hard, I entirely agree that the oceans are too difficult compared to the rest of the game. When I needed to get ocean depth unlocks I tried until I was ready to headbutt my monitor, and then just gave up and turned the game all the way down to 'baby's first platformer' difficulty and just quickly plowed through it one shotting everything. Now admittedly, that was too easy, but I was frustrated, and it was soothing.

I'd always sort of assumed it was work in progress though. And I haven't actually tried them since the last patch, so maybe they're improved? (Or when you accidentally fall on a whale now do you just take massive damage and then also bounce back up so you can fall on him again?) But to balance the difficulty curve between the land and the water levels, the water levels need to have their difficulty cranked back three notches or so. Right now it's sort of a difficulty spike so large you can see it from orbit. Or they could be made into alternative challenge areas (for self-haters or masochists) that can be skipped without breaking the normal unlock progress.

[KDR_11k]

Yeah, in the current state adding a swarm of Dopefishes and thermonuclear sea mines would barely increase the difficulty of the ocean shallows.

[keith.lamothe]

Yeah, in the current state adding a swarm of Dopefishes and thermonuclear sea mines would barely increase the difficulty of the ocean shallows.

You had me at "thermonuclear"

[TechSY730]

Yeah, in the current state adding a swarm of Dopefishes and thermonuclear sea mines would barely increase the difficulty of the ocean shallows.

You had me at "thermonuclear"

You fools! Don't give them ideas. 

[x4000]

In general, what I'm thinking is this:

1. Make the shallows tamer in various ways, and make alternate ways to both get coral, sea essence, and the related unlocks in those areas.

2. Leave oceans as they are, aside from the insane boss room imbalance, and actually over time make them even harder.

3. Don't put anything that is required in the oceans, but let those be another one of those "optional but incredibly difficult" sorts of areas that people like to have.  That way waiting for an acid gills enchant with the fast swimming ability isn't really a big deal, and exploring the ocean feels suitably hardcore (consistent with everything else from the wild garden age), while the ocean shallows are basically safer because... well, they're shallower and so there's less stuff to get you.

[BobTheJanitor]

(consistent with everything else from the wild garden age)

All the rest of that sounds good, but this little parenthetical statement just got me thinking, if we have land from every age, we should have water from every age right? Frozen ice age oceans, underwater future robot city oceans, steaming oceans with lava bubbling up from whatever age the lava flats are in, etc. And were there any ages that didn't have acid for water? If not, how exactly does the biology of the average resident of Environ work? I mean, how are the plants even growing?

I know, I know, post-1.0 stuff. But it sounds fun.

[c4sc4]

Sounds like you guys could use this enchant.

But yeah, it was really frustrating getting to the 3rd depth of the ocean shallows, I was really tempted to turn down the difficulty to do it but I managed to do it without changing the difficulty. The only reason I did it was to unlock the sea essence so I could use Tidal Pulse on my new continent, so an easier way to get sea essence would be good for new players so they don't tear their hair out trying to unlock it.

[BobTheJanitor]

Yeah host a server real quick so I can come steal that enchant from you, thanks.

Actually I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way, but I can dream. 

[Terraziel]

I like the sound of the changes as well, indeed distinguishing the ocean and ocean shallows more is something I had considered suggesting above.

This is all a little off topic but...

For the oceans....and this could be unnecessarily complicated to do but and is just something that popped into my head, how about making them deep rather than wide, as in, for the first chunk you enter from the sides as normal, but all the entrances to the others chunks are down rather than left\right, with the only real ground the ocean floor at the end of the region, however deep that maybe.

So essentially the region would just be you plummeting down to the ocean floor far below, maybe make it really variable how deep it goes, and tie the risk\reward in to it  so you could just end up with 3 chunks and not find anything, or i could get "lucky" and get 7+ chunks and end up having to fight, well some boss monster that lives in giant ocean trenches for an arcane ingredient.

All the rest of that sounds good, but this little parenthetical statement just got me thinking, if we have land from every age, we should have water from every age right? Frozen ice age oceans, underwater future robot city oceans, steaming oceans with lava bubbling up from whatever age the lava flats are in, etc. And were there any ages that didn't have acid for water? If not, how exactly does the biology of the average resident of Environ work? I mean, how are the plants even growing?

I know, I know, post-1.0 stuff. But it sounds fun.

Again with the, Obviously post 1.0 disclaimer, but one of the suggestions i made somewhere around here was that this sort of logic should apply to all the areas, e.g. so the map gen says "this area of the continent was a city" and then have it cut up in time, so you might have a region from when the city was a tiny village, or one from when it was a thriving metropolis and then one of it falling into ruin. For the forests and the like it would be increasing levels of environmental destruction and industrialization.

3. Don't put anything that is required in the oceans, but let those be another one of those "optional but incredibly difficult" sorts of areas that people like to have.

Picking on the "required" bit, the real question to my mind, and this applies to other "hardcore" areas is, will there ever be specific rewards for these areas? something special to make it worth the effort. Things that leap to mind.....

1) Special arcane ingredients for Special spells. (basically an arcane ingredient that is used only in the specific spell(s) so that it doesn't interfere with anything else)
2) Easier access to arcane ingredients.
3) Special Items

Now obviously there are problems with these, the issue with 1) is no matter what spells you use, personally I was thinking non-direct damage spells of some sort, unless they are balanced perfectly, people will feel obliged to do struggle through the areas. because people are like that.

The same sort of things apply to 3), it would have to be of such utility (either very specific or horribly general) that people don't feel like they Have to have it.

2) is probably the one with least upfront issues, it makes rummaging through the hardcore areas a sort of implicit secret mission. I was thinking of things like rare rooms with magma\deep magma in the deeper lava flat caves, or sea essence for the oceans.