And the worm joins the hunt.

See the character sheet for the full details, but here are the major points about the dwarf revision:

Base resilience is 30% (instead of 25%). When you charge, any monster that’s not your target, but adjacent to your charge destination, is so intimidated that they skip their next turn. Hunker causes resilience to apply to all attacks, and Hunker II & III increase resilience and uppercut percentage. The frenzy bonus goes up if there are more than 3 adjacent monsters. Gird loins is triggered if you hunker and do not counterattack, and the bonuses are increased by 1 to +2/+3/+4. When charging during a feat, there is a 75% (instead of 50%) of cleaving.

And the purple worm is now part of daily hunts. There are two worms per hunt. The size of the worm is based on the hunt difficulty. The dwarf can call the worm.

Now enough talk, you … well, just get back in there.

Just testing out the current changes. I like the confusion when charging. Sorry I never mentioned it earlier but I’ve always found calling the worm to be of limited use because your character basically loses a turn and is a sitting duck to adjacent enemies. How about if calling the worm also defended, or some other effect?

Is the worm being stunned from a nearby charge feature or a bug?

first hunt since the change, and I got nailed twice by worms. They weren’t even in spots where I could back away and they could go after other monsters. Would have done better than 61 without them, but probably wouldn’t have gotten to 80.

Thank you for all of the advantageous improvements!

Now he looks like a Brawler! :-)

Played a career game with level 11 dwarf doing all the things a dwarf should do. Charging into a Rat’s Nest with +1 weapons, hunkering when surrounded by 5 monsters, taking on some ginormous monster with a sum total of +5 attack including the charge, …

And he brawled his way through :-) I cleared all the caverns and all the mines and half the ruins with no more than a +2 sword and a +5 shield and he still had more health potions than when he started.

8,2 roll against me. Resisted. Another 8,2 roll against me. Uppercut. Result! I got lucky there, though. He did take hits. But nothing he couldn’t handle. The resistance and uppercut percentages looked fair. Disorienting the monsters during a charge totally changes how he can fight. He fought well when surrounded and when he can charge (and not so well when not). He’s weak against mummies (-2 despair outweighs +1 frenzy). But every hero needs a nemesis. Swordsman is weak against archers.

Haven’t tried him in the lair yet. But it feels like he can do well there too. I don’t think he’s overpowered. Gameplay is definitely different from both the swordsman and the huntress.

Great changes! Thanks.

Finished that game with strong weapons. He might be a little overpowered, actually, seeing as I trounced 12 dragons only using one leap scroll and seemed to take very few hits.

Got 93 wereboars in the hunt. Should have been 100. No issue witb the worm - I played the dwarf :-)

But for comparison, I got 114 with the swordsman, despite losing a hit to the worm! That was an exceptional run, though.

We reduced it to one worm per hunt, as one worm should suffice for dwarven purposes, and to avoid an excess of unwanted worms for non-dwarves.

With a level 17 Dwarf, the new Dwarf seems slightly more useful than it was before, but definitely not overpowered.

I went into some Career games (dragon numbers in the mid-40s) with the intention of letting the Dwarf do most of the fighting in the Lair. There were a couple of times that the Dwarf did succeed in clearing a room while losing less than 1 potion. However those were rare exceptions. Most commonly, potions were lost at such a high rate to dragons that it was clear that a solo performance was going to be an impossibility.

Presumably, higher-level Dwarves are better at dispatching dragons sooner, better at defense, and taking less damage as a result. Other people with higher-level Dwarves will have to share their experiences with the new setup.

Either way, I think that it is important to make sure that high-level Dwarves are not so strong (compared to lower-level Dwarves) that they succeed (easily and consistently) despite bad decisions in the play. We know what that looks like, having recently seen the overpowered Swordsman in operation for a few days. Now that the human Swordsman is a mere mortal again, however, my level 17 Swordsman is almost unusable against dragons, as they almost never miss.

It leads me to suspect that the “slope” (how much the character gets stronger as its level increases) is probably too steep–but, again, that depends on whether players with higher-level Swordsmen are finding them to be strong enough (or defensive enough). I’d be curious to know.

I think there’s a typo in the Hunker III description - is it 50%? (Currently, the description seems to be the same as for Hunker II.)

Thank you for adding the worm. But when I charged past it, I stupefied it. By the way, that ability really helps a lot, so I am no longer beaten up by charging into a frenzy position. But, can immobilizing the worm be avoided?

I’ve played the new dwarf several times now. I like playing him. It’s clear that my very first game with him was exceptional. He’s not overpowered, and does take hits in the lair, so you still have to actually think what you’re doing. Which is the point of the game. (He really benefits from leap scrolls in the lair.) But my earlier points do stand. He is now a much better character to play with a distinctive gameplay and well able to hold his own in a brawl :-)

I agree with Agamemnon that disorienting the worm as well as everyone else on a dwarven charge is rather disappointing. Especially when the worm then takes a hit from a monster that didn’t get stupefied by the charge. The elf or human need to disorient the worm though.

He doesn’t work well with Haste scrolls. The loss of a potential Massive Hit or Heroic Strike on the first attack charging into a pack more than outweighs the +1 you get for Haste. Also, disorientation is slightly odd when charging with Haste. The disorientation is reported on the first turn. Then, when you hunker expecting an attack on the second turn the monsters are still disoriented. While that’s advantageous, and probably fair since otherwise Haste gives no advantage, it’s not intuitive.

Think I spotted a bug where I charged with the dwarf at the edge of the dungeon and a monster on the opposite side got disoriented. Sorry Masterleep I didn’t report it at the time.

See recent topic to discuss the latest dwarf changes.