And a more refined swordsman

We’ve introduced a method to support hunts greater than 9 difficulty. For each difficulty level above 9, you start with one extra of each potion/scroll. We’ve also updated the system for generating monsters in the hunt. For full details, see the forum.

We also finished some adjustments to the swordsman, which we’ve been doing over the last week. For more on that, visit the The New Swordsman forum topic.

As always, we look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Hunt Change Details …

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.

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

The “Massive hit” feat changes seem to be an extreme debuff in late-game content and especially e.g. ettin, rat, or snake hunts. It makes feat chains nearly impossible, and in rooms chock full of of low-defence, high-attack, multi-health monsters, feat chains were the main fighting chance vs. large numbers, and with essentially a -3 to the roll for it, and feats now capped at +7, these are now nearly impossible. For example, in an ettin or snake hunt, it was common to attack with e.g. +9(wep)+5(feat)+3(dwarven charge) vs. a monster with +2 defense. The requirement to continue the feat chain used to be a total of 20+ (natural 3 or higher on d10, 80%), while now it’s 30+ (natural 6 or higher on d10, 50%). The effective difference is huge, particularly for beginners, where the max feat bonus may only be +3 or +4.

In the past, I’ve reached 80+ on ettin hunts in harder locations than today’s hunt (+3 bonus locations) using both elf and dwarf. Today, in a +1 location with +9 gear, more than about 40-50 seems completely intractable due to this change. (Tried it with both elf and human.)

Since the original issues with human that led to this change have been resolved in different ways, can we revert back to the original massive hit system, especially as feats are now capped at +7 instead of the old +8?

I didn’t have a single cleave today in my hunt. I therefore killed only 79 dung monsters although I always tried to fullswing them. I didn’t count my attemps (sometimes there was no full swing, sometimes I already damaged them), but it must have been around 30 “valid trys” at least. I should have a chance of 20%. That means that might have been just bad luck (1/1000)… but still. Maybe 30% would be better as first skill level for the human… or some similar concept of like “rage” if it does not cleave although it could…

I’ve notices that 10-room monsters now seem incredibly common after the new changes, with often several consecutive rooms with 10 monsters. Often, there is litt

Sorry about the incomplete submission; cat stepped on the keyboard.

Anyhow, in e.g. a room with 10 dung monsters, many of them mammoth+, there is often not a whole lot that can be done strategically (without using several scrolls): especially with human or dwarf, it can be impossible to move at all. With elf, there’s nowhere to go. Thus, attacking and defending are often the only options, while being surrounded by 4+ monsters from spawn. Would it be possible to lower the probability of encountering such ridiculous rooms?

I don’t normally play hunts with multi-hit monsters but I thought I’d give this one a go. And yes I found that the rooms very quickly got completely full of monsters. Not really that much choice of strategy when you enter the room and are immediately two deep with 2 hit monsters: put a flame scroll under the gas spore to try and knock a hit point off something and then defend. Unless there’s one 8 point thing and some pipsqueaks in which case haste and hope you take it out and everyone else misses. No chance of Cleave or Bull Rush and nowhere to leap.

Thanks for the extra potions and scrolls, they truly help! They also make it more fun, because of the longer time you can spend in the hunt.

The Misty Bluffs artwork is very cool, in more ways than one….

Yes, the rooms often have 9 or more monsters, and you frequently begin in rows two deep, which only benefits the Swordsman, but he can only handle so many rows unless feats recur.

We just changed the hunt monster distribution to work like this:

2 + 0-X monsters, where X is the room count capped at 14. Rooms are capped at 10 monsters. The chance that a monster is quarry is (30 + room_count*5)%, capped at 80%.

Why cap X at 14, if the result is capped at 10?

That way the monster count in later rooms is almost half the time at the maximum of 10 … :-(
(0-X = 8…14 result in 10. These are 7 cases out of 15 possible.)

Yes, that’s why. Do you think half the time is too much?

so basically you just set it to where a lot of the rooms have 10 monsters because i just fought through 15 rooms and 5 of them had 10 monsters

Yes that’s exactly right Earththunder. After a few rooms half of them have 10 monsters like Spirit Chaser just worked out and Rowdius confirmed he intended. So 5 out of 15 rooms sounds about right.

Hi Rowdius - How do you calculate how strong the monsters are in the hunt? I have some sympathy with Earththunder complaining that he came across a spectre with only +4 weapons in the hunt against the Kobolds (especially if you’re playing the elf :-)).

Do you have a formula so you aren’t likely to come across naturally strong non-quarry monsters while the quarry ones are still small?

I thought they were going to make the rooms a little easier? NOT harder, but i guess I misread what they said because before the update i was getting maybe 1 room in 5-6 being full, now it’s 1 in 3

It goes up with how many rooms you’ve beaten, Earththunder. Once you get to the 14th room, the chance of 10 monsters is 7 in 15. Spirit Chaser worked it out. But the good news is that by then, 80% of them are ones that get you points :-)

I got 48 bugbears in the Hunt (wretched spellcasters!). It would be really nice to know if that was earth-shatteringly brilliant (not, looking through the deeds for others who did the hunt) or totally rubbish (also not).

I liked Rellik Nogard’s earlier suggestion for a high-score on today’s hunt. It would be nice to know what was average/decent for today as well. I suspect Rowdius likes hunts to score around 40 on average (I think that’s fine) but it does vary with the place and monster.

(Not quite sure why some of my messages are magically appearing twice in the forum recently!)

Yes, that’s why. Do you think half the time is too much?

I think that perhaps the rate of increase is too fast. So how about something like 2+0-X capped at X=14 but where X is half the room count? Or in general 2+(0-R)/k where R is the room count capped at 14*k. Adjust k to find the best rate.

I got 58 bugbears just now, but apparently I got 60+ this morning because it says I need 80 to get the next bonus, I think I had gotten 63 but not positive.

And yeah, would be fun to be able to see what the highest for the day is and also maybe do something like you do with the dragon weekly contest but do it for the daily hunt.

I like raand’s proposal. Do others agree that the progression should be slower?

raand9999’s proposal with k=2 or k=3 sounds good to me.

I agree with slower progression; 50% rooms with 10+ monsters is insane. Maybe k=3 sounds good to me (if I understand correctly, 50% would be hit at 52 monsters defeated in this case). I do feel that 50% chance of 10 monsters seems a bit high, especially on multi-health hunts; maybe a 33% or 40% chance would be better?

As stated in today’s news, we went with this forumula:

3 + 0-X monsters, where X is the room count divided by 2 (rounded up) capped at 14. Rooms are capped at 10 monsters. The chance that a monster is quarry is (15 + room_count*5)%, capped at 75%.

So you do eventually reach the point where half the rooms have 10 monsters, but you don’t reach that point until room 27.

I played the Ettins with the new speed and it was way better. A little slow actually getting to any Ettins at all (I think 5 or 6 rooms) and a spectre to fight past first but that could have just been bad luck. After that, there were Ettins :-) And not long after that, there were challenging numbers of Ettins, but not so many that there was no space left. Extra potions and scrolls were helpful. I played the swordsman and the extra 10% cleave chance for Full Swing II was really noticeable. It felt like more than 10% (possibly because everything was multi-hit). Eventually I got downed by an army of Ettins in a room where I couldn’t see myself or any of the monsters surrounding me! But I got 41 Ettins.

So on a sample of one game, I felt the new changes worked well :-)

Is there a reason why the message “You’ve rid the room of ghosts” no longer appears?