I was doing pretty well. Level 21! Archmage Dwarf (who would have thunk it?) Pretty decent equipment Level 5 spells, Decent Magic/Con/Will and not terrible Str/Cun either (from items)... The 4 sections of maze, 6 out of 7 escorts all done.

.
Note to self: NEVER do the crypt quest again. Ever. It is pure suicide. Well I managed to probability travel through the sublevels easily enough killing corruption mages then popping out of the rooms and healing/resting in safe places then doing it again. But boy did they almost get me a couple times anyway.

Thankfully that strategy worked enough for me to find the stairs and head down. Managed to get through a bunch of levels.

At the bottom I faced the four (p) acolytes. Thankfully two start off semi hidden by a wall so they can't just blast me to cinders as soon as I enter. However they do managed to kill me before I can kill one. I have 4 lives left. I eventually kill 2 but the demon shows up and after that it is all over. at 900+ hp each acolyte alone was a match for me. 4x + a U is ridiculous. The count down gives almost no time to deal 4k damage within. Needless to say I left another ghost down there along with all the others gathering dust from other players who probably also said to themselves "never again."

Sure glad I didn't even try the Master. Being screwed by Ungodly highlevel Undead would probably have been too much for me.

I did lose one life in the maze (starting zone) before beating it, 1 in the Sandwurm Lair and 2x in the fortress.
I managed to complete an escort quest on level 7 of Daikara AND defeated the (D) boss. This time no scary out of depth monster was around to steal my loot and I found an egg of some interest. Sadly the (S) spiders it summoned were about as useful as bears. :/

Conclusions: It is clear to me that unless I know the strategy for these levels for the character type I am playing I stand no chance at all. The game starts off fairly easy to play once one gets a handle on the changes and the keys etc. But then it rapidly scales off the map. At over 600hp (and 400mp base) I couldn't deal with the end game of the crypt at all. I shudder to think what the areas of the game are like that I have yet to see.

I am imagining to be able to traverse to the east (and survive there) you either need superb luck or the skills of a roguelike diety. Sad really because despite my earlier discouragement I was really enjoying this character and had hopes to develop it to a high level at some point.

I ran into this when I first started, quickly left and never bothered with it again after triggering a few of the monster summons. I decided to check it out again with my current character. I am completely and utterly confused by the "puzzle" aspect of this dungeon and I don't consider myself a neophyte with puzzles (30years of designing and running aD&D/rpg campaigns = some familiarity with puzzles.)

The lines of the poem make no sense. Reordering the lines does not make them clearer. I managed to somehow have one of the "orbs?" turn on instead of throwing mobs at me. But since there is nothing remarkable about that room I have to assume it is just random. Unfortunately going back and touching each of the other "orbs?" does not produce any different results.

So I guess I am stuck on this. :/

http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=24031

Any help would be nice.

Chronomancy development has picked back up. Still busy with the family life though so I can't promise when it'll be done but I have managed to get a couple of talent trees done over the last two days.

Also have a working outline of what I want to do that's up to date so the direction is all there.

Maybe beta 20? No promises but we can hope :)

I am playing a shadowblade, and enjoying it a lot, but I am wondering if you guys get heavy armor or not. Is there good/great armor in the light categories out there?

Decided to try another Shalore Archmage and I am finding some of the talents to be really bad. Displacement shield for instance is complete waste of a slot it seems. It has a huge cooldown time, lasts only one shot no matter how small and is consistently a wasted turn.

More when I encounter them.

This new release of my Gervais tiles mod is compliant with beta 18 and includes most the monsters tiles. Here is the progress state so far:

- Monsters: 80% (encounters, horrors, some xorn and uniques are not done)
- Objects: 90% (nothing more since last release)
- Terrain and other stuff not done

Please let me know if you find some mistake or have some ideas about tiles.

Howto install:
Unzip the file and extract the "data" folder to your "t-engine4-windows-1.0.0beta18\game\modules\tome" folder.

Beware that some regular files will be deleted and replaced. If you want to come back to the previous state of Tome4 beta18, install Tome4 beta18 back in the same directory.

Download:
http://www.elderlore.com/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=5

Fighting the Worm boss at the bottom of the sand pit on an alchemist.
Golem disinterested in joining in, so had to manually request it did something.
5 turns later it hits the boss, or so i assume, as I was blinded by this stage.

I set the room on fire, but ultimately die.
Choose to resurrect, and come back to life on -28/250 life.
A sandworm then hits me for 34 and I have a final death.

Personally, the idea of resurrecting at a negative life would be great if it meant I'd managed to become a Lich Alchemist and my Golem but the first of a horde of minions to do my beck and call.

Hopefully this time the Mighty Girdle doesn't appear the first time I go to town when I'm on very low $$. Very handy item.

Outside of this above mishap, had a very successful run.
First troll boss (Bill) killed at lvl 3 without dying.
Dark Crypt was then comfortably run straight after before I could get back to town to offload loot.
4 escorts all successful.

This time I'd taken the sand pit too casually, as I'd last run it quickly and easily without dying.
Now I understand how perilous it can be with collapsing tunnels and how often one can be blinded without the resists I had last time.
Time to give it all another go.

Atrophy, with golem Petrify.
Attempt 1: lvl 23, died to a monster zerg instant spawn.
Attempt 2: lvl 14, died to negative life resurrect bug on sandworm boss.

Well after spending a good part of the day playing my last character "Hopeless" (aptly named) I died a whole lot of times at once in the daikara dungeon. After that it was really just over for me. I did manage to kill Ranth but had to flee without looting the body because a more dangerous monster awaited in the wings. (Some super nasty undead spell caster, sort of like a Skelly Mage if it had access to all spells and was able to cast something horrendous each turn.)

So that's it for me for awhile. No more TOME until it tones down a little. The frustration of having spent all that time to get a character to level 20 to have him die repeatedly to scaling/power issues is ridiculous. But I blame myself for that as I know I am not a good player even though I have played most of the bands and have extensive experience with both strategy and roleplaying games. Good players seem to sail through the challenges like a breeze and have no problems dealing with anything that I consider unfair or impossible. Even so I hope the game does begin to accommodate those who are not hard core power gamers.

Some comments on the game itself:
a) The UI is dramatically improved from previous versions of t-engine, however some of the things one expects in a band are missing or hard to find. A lot of the hot keys are unmapped which means less functionality. In that same vein the user command box on the lower right could stand to be done a little more efficiently, allowing more than 12 commands to show there with up/down arrows. All in all however this area of the game is just A++.

b)I really love the way the game unlocks different things at different stages and how each achievement is recorded and given some emphasis. The documentation (in game) could stand some work, but overall while not being linear it still gives the player a good idea of what to do next which is imho important in a game this large where you can stumble and die at nearly every opportunity. One thing that would be nice is if the game warned you when you are about to make game changing decisions like ignoring the thief/merchant quest (because you are afraid it will bug out like prior versions) only to discover it never comes again. (Well it never did for me and I spent some time attempting to get by walking randomly around the world map.)

c) The house while hard to accomplish is a deft touch. Giving the player a base is probably one of the biggest things you can do to tie them into the game.

d) The escort quests are stupid hard, unless you get lucky and the & is near the entrance AND the npc @ doesn't idiotically charge the nearest badass and die while your @ is engaged with 3 other badasses. It does help in certain maps to have unpassable channels but I had one quest in this last character where the escort died from collateral damage by a baddy. In fact in the last stage of Daikara the Boss was waiting 5 steps from the entrance in an unavoidable path so the NPC really had no chance at all even though I rushed the boss. In another instance in the same dungeon I suicided twice (killing the enemies around him while taking a beating) to keep the @ alive only to have him kill himself on known traps. :/

d) the game seems to favor spellcasters/ranged attackers at least in terms of monsters. Only a few melee monsters are really challenging much past their half level point. Spellcasters seem intensely dangerous beyond their typical threat level (ie: skelly mages vs skelly warriors.) Archers are likewise deadly without apparent reason. Yes we can go to "realism" because many games do but I feel that gaming isn't fun if that is the crutch we always rely on to make things more "challenging." That said killing them does give a certain satisfaction akin to crushing roaches, irl.

e) one of the nastiest effects in the game is the confuse spell. Not just because it does terrible things to the character but because it screws with the UI and makes using the mouse nearly impossible which I personally detest in games. I prefer to not be actually blinded/confused/stunned by the games I am playing letting my avatars take the brunt instead. After all I am not the character...

Anyway I hope you all have fun improving this. For now I am out...Happy New Years!

Today, to celebrate the release of b18 and the new year I present you the Characters Vault !

This feature uses the new metadata attached to character sheets since beta17 to make a searchable database of all characters. This is a first version, more features shall come later (like sorting), but it should already be quite interesting.

Have fun, and happy new year!