We’re going to be making some of the hunts easier by increasing the difficulty bonus of the monsters that have proven overly challenging.

To overcome the problem that the weapons only go to +9, we are going to say that you start with one more of each consumable item for each difficulty level over 9. (one more potion and one more of each scroll)

For example:

“You’ll be armed with +9 weapons and +2 of each consumable item. (+8 for Ropers and +3 for Burnt Forest)”

How does that sound?

And if you’re wondering how all the monsters and regions compare in difficulty, here’s a hunt performance matrix that we maintain.

how do you make the hunt easier by INCREASING the difficulty? giving us 1 more of each doesn’t make it easier in that case, you’re just making the monsters harder and giving us a couple things in exchange, how about ADDING more of the monsters we’re supposed to be hunting instead of room after room of non hunt monsters?

The difficulty level of the monsters/regions is what determines the weapon bonus. A difficulty level of 3 would mean +3 weapons. A difficulty level of 4 means +4 weapons. Increasing their difficulty level does not make them more difficult, it just increases the bonus you get.

Obviously the wording was confusing. I changed the original post to say “difficulty bonus” instead of “difficulty level.”

I don’t have a strong feeling about that. A small bonus is OK.
But maybe one could at least limit the number of “wrong” monsters to half of all monsters in a room.
Second thought: If I have a 9-equip, I do not care much about the area difficulty… What about letting us CHOOSE the area, just knowing the monster difficulty level and after that present our weapons?

What could be done more easily than a leaderboard is to put the best performer and species (of last or current day or ever of this kind?) into the introducing dialog like: “The dwarf playername brought x fraying manes to our neighbouring village…”

Thanks for the statistics. They are quite interesting. :-) I would like to see more of those …

Since my previous comment in another thread is much more related to this topic, here it is again:

Hunt statistics (no leader board)

Instead of yet another ranking list I would like to see the statistics of the previous 2 (or more) Hunts – separated by Hunt and with the info regarding enemy, area and equipment.
* They could be shown as bar charts with the categories 0–19, 20–39, 40–59, 60–79, 80–99, 100+.
* One chart for player base would be nice where only the highest score for each player is considered (to not make the statistics too skewed by repeated tries of A.D.s).
* One chart that compares all the scores (by category) reached with the 3 different heros. (There is no swapping, so this is possible.) Not sure if repeated tries by A.D.s should be treated in a special way here; perhaps consider only the best run for each hero?
* Of course, your individually reached score category (or categories) should be highlighted if you took part.

Would very much appreciate the changes mentioned in the OP :)

Not surprising that the monsters requiring multiple hits are the most difficult ones in your table - only six hit points to take out 20 giants (or ropers) is hard especially when you don’t have stacks of scrolls or multiple doorways to give you an edge. I don’t bother playing hunts if the monsters need multiple hits. I think the idea of giving extra kit after +9 weapons might work though. Or perhaps if your monsters need multiple hits there could be a chance that they drop extra kit when you kill them. I’m sure you could balance it so the hunt can’t go on indefinitely.

I like Rellik Nogard’s suggestion for what’s basically a high score for the hunt to give some target to aim at and to give you an idea of whether your effort resulting in (say) 41 monsters was amazingly good (ropers) or entirely ordinary (snakes).

Rand9999 is absolutely right. This why 60 werewolves are as difficult as 80 Minotaurs. But the bonus is the same (+4). With high “terrain bonus” this reduces a bit, because guarding gets a reasonable option. Without that option, attacks against multi health monsters are with human just a gamble for cleaves.

Don’t know what you all want with these ropers. I just killed 69 of them and it could have been more. All you have to do is: Consume TEN TRINKETS!

Well it’ll be interesting to see how that hunt performance matrix changes after this hunt then. I got 20 (yes I thought I’d give it a go!). Bare Hand got way more than me, and Rellik got 69.

The most interesting thing I noticed was that with +8 weapons the chance of getting a Feat was high as the ropers are low defence and the swordsman always gets Press. And if your hero is high ranking that gets you +quite-a-lot on the next monster (and another move) which ups your chance of getting another feat on the next hit. It’s some advantage if you can take out 3/4 of the monsters in the room without them getting a move!

Got 108 Werewolves today with the new human in my single try as unadvanced dungeoneer. I never got over 100 before. It is amazing to parry a werewolve that feels five times bigger than the human. Maybe the chance to parry should depent on the difference of attack/defense or attack/attack (like 10% less per one point in minus). To parry such a (last) beast in a room several times in a row feels … what was the word? … inconceivable… Did you change anything in the hunt already? I got SO MANY werewolves and hardly anything else. So I got +3 bonus for almost nothing …

We didn’t change the hunts, Bare Hand. The number of non-quarry monsters is random, with a fairly high degree of variability.

OK. It was luck then. Maybe one could introduce a memory/bias here to have roughly the same proportions for everyone. e.g. if you place a monster and the chance is 60% to be a “hunt monster” and 40% something else, you can set the chance for a hunt monster not to 60/100 but to (60+6counter_of_non_hunt_monsters-4counter_of_hunt_monsters)/100
So if there are e.g. already 5 hunt monsters, the chance for another one is just 40% instead of 60%. On the other hand, if there are already 5 non-hunt-monsters, the chance to get a hunt monster will be 96%. I think that is just fair. That does not change the expectation value of hunt monsters much, but decreases the overall variance. I don’t know the real values. Hopefully it is closer to 80%, but the principle should be clear. The strength of the bias depends on the constant values. E.g. (600+6hunts-4others/1000) would be a weaker regularization.

there were some multiplication signs that got lost in markdown :D.

I did well on the werewolves too (for me - nothing like as good as Bare Hand!). I thought perhaps because the new human is stronger, or perhaps because the environment gave me a little more firepower than usual?

Thanks for everyone’s feedback. We just released these changes to the hunt:

We tweaked a few of the difficulties, making the hardest stuff easier and the easiest stuff harder.

We added a system for difficulty levels above 9. For each difficulty level above 9, you start with one extra of each potion/scroll.

And we changed the system for monster distribution and density. It works like this: A room will consist of 1 + 0-X quarry, where X is room_count/2 (rounded up) and 2 + 0-Y native monsters, where Y is the room_count/5 (rounded up). Rooms are capped at 10 monsters.