Naelwyn's Comments

Of the new content: I especially love the poison spitting drakes once I've acquired poison immunity - they are occasionally quite helpful at handling others because of the AoE. It didn't end up being too useful since most of what you encounter with them is also poison-immune. (Nice setup, dev wise.) Mosquitos also add some additional challenge to the very earlygame for ranged users. The game remains pretty darn interesting, I just wish some of the scaling issues were addressed so I could climb past a certain point in the tower without having to stop fighting the enemies. (That point is level 60.) The other thing I could suggest would be capping the cost to increase a stat at 9999 or similar.

Combined with the Highest level reporting (Also reporting the bug) not working and there's no real re-playability from the last time I played well over a year ago, even though there have been numerous patches, I see most of them as a nerf. (The combination of artifact scale capping and summon capping means there is absolutely no way to advance beyond a certain point, where I ran into a wall. I resolved not to abuse time step to go further.) Suggestions for more tower re-playability and adding some risk/reward: Actually killing the element guardians guarantees a legend drop. Let legends scale indefinitely. Let summons scale with the tower.

Replayed this after leaving it for a long time to see if anything new was available, some comments: Revisited this after a long absence to see what was different and the main thing I could see being changed in the patches is the removal of pretty much all the ways to legitimately climb the tower instead of using time stop and RNG, even summons. Why their scaling with the tower was taken out doesn't make much sense to me, essentially condemning another couple builds past level 10, and I don't know why - the other summons still scale, but without scaling summons there is pretty much no battlefield control left available.

Balance Suggestion to allow for longer-term Tower of Chaos plays: Combine 1-2 of: 1) Cap the maximum cost to increase a stat at a number higher than you'd ever seen in a normal playthrough, but much lower than they can grow (42,000 points to next!) in the tower - I'd suggest 9999 points per increase for anything besides magic affinity, which'd be better at 19999. 2) Bosses drop 1 legendary item on death. Make it worth the time to kill them. 3) Subsequent runs in the Tower let you carry over and re-use legendary items you have found previously. Added bonus, gives long-term players a reason to keep coming back to the game again and again. Also added to discussion thread.

Did the cost of Gaseous Form get increased to be starkly more expensive than the other infinite cost spells or have I run into a bug?

I would like to remark: "Goddamned Manticore++." That is all.

Can't believe it took me so long to figure this out, but if you ever need to toggle off your infinite duration buffs, just click the buff icon on the right.

Bug Report: I think the Summoner Skill "Banish" may be broken - I cannot get it to trigger/activate at all.

You can make swamp levels /tremendously/ easier if you have access to Enchantment: Earth Attraction - It will instantly kill anything flying over water.

Exceptional Case Issue: Final dungeon, only the princess is left alive. She took enough damage to die, in part because I was curious how the ending would change if she did. (Holy Hand Grenades, surprisingly effective.) What happens is that "You have unfinished business in this dungeon" and the game cannot end, when I was expecting a bad end for letting the princess die /and/ not defeating the demon.

Aug. 3, 2014 Subclass Review/Help for people trying to get info: Arcane Archer(Mage 5, Rogue 5) Rating: Excellent, tough to qualify/expensive. First level nets you ranged attacks ignoring LOS. Third level gets a passive chance for AoE splinter. Fourth level buffs ranged based on magic affinities. 5th level lets you AoE attack every single foe in range in one shot. Clears whole screens when built for it in two shots. Fantastic class.

Description could use more detail on the Legendary Item "Divine Book" - "Unlimited Energy to Spread the Truth" - I cannot tell if this is just flavour. It doesn't appear to do anything obvious to energy. (No change in max, change in costs of holy/death spells, or reduce exhaustion.)

Subclass Review/Help for people trying to get info: Inquisitor (Mage 5, Priest 5) Really beneficial if you've gone the Elf/Fire route as a mage. The first level buffs your fire damage, the second gives a situationally-useful fire spell. The third level is Holy Fire - it gives you one fire focus for every holy you've acquired, minimum 1 due to priest levels. Can be amazing if you've been lucky in your finds. The latter levels are underwhelming - Boiling Blood (Poison Immunity) is useless because Priest/Mage gets Antidote for 1 energy, and the last level gets a 1-range debuff, a place where I never was as a fire-based nuker. Right now a 3-level subclass.

Ranger (Rogue 5, Warrior 5) is a glorious class. I think Run and Versatility are probably some of the best class abilities you can get. Remember when I said mobility is important? Run is fantastic - if you are using mainly rogue or warrior, make a point to get at least two levels in ranger.

The depth of customization shows a /very/ interesting game that is somewhat marred by a little bit of an issue in monster balancing. Elf Summoner is probably a new player's best bet to beating the game, just be warned that each tick of a turn is going to take ages to process and moving around will be frustrating. Nothing else I've built comes close to it, mainly because it counters a swarm with a swarm. Build Mage->Summoner->Priest->Necromancer. Flood with Skeletons backed up with Wisps and the occasional elemental. The ability to have 4 different elemental summoning spells would improve the playability of that by a lot. Don't go to Monster Lairs with a summon strategy. The boss hydra will rapidly gain heads from summons and rip them to shreds. Best tip I guess would be- Mobility - Have a way to get /out/ of being surrounded. Charge, Teleport, whatever works. Teleport will save you a lot of trouble.

There's a substantial problem with swarming all throughout the game, combined with ranged attacks. No matter what build I've done, any open area is immediately lethal, especially swamps, where I've never lived for more than a few turns. Making the mobs have less potent, less-ranged ranged attacks would go a long way towards playability. As is, one just gets /piled/ on immediately. Going defense mitigates the damage and lets you keep your health high and then you cannot kill the swarm fast enough to be chipped down. Going offense leads to being quickly murdered by ranged attacks before you can get to them. Trying to use choke points fails when some of the ranged units are stationary and all the hearts cannot be picked up due to, again, a swarm of units.

Thousands of battles later, tens of Legendary packs opened and I /still/ do not have any of the last two items missing from my collection, the ones everyone else is making /wonderful use/ of, the linear lightning staff and the magic cooldown staff. This annoys me. I'd like to suggest implementing a minor, but slow, biasing in packs towards items one has less of, so that after going through thousands of battles I'm not stuck unable to alter my strategy to break through a metagame.

In boss fights with throwables (The thief dens) you can wall off the pathways and thus only have pick off and deal with ranged fighters, then you can finish the melee at leisure. It's possible to flawlessly complete every level and kill every foe in the game by making proper use of all of the boons provided by the field. In terms of skills: You want, in order, Heals, Disables (Taunt, Stun), Hard Debuffs (Smoke), And Damage Boosters for your damage dealers. (I used the Rogue and took Double Hit + Passives and the Archer with Shotgun + Passives) Have fun~

If you are finding the game difficult, make sure to use the environment to your advantage and combine it with as many disables as possible. On most levels there are special environmental hazards your foes do not know how to use. Examples are elevators, The Statue in the mansion exterior (Can be ignited to do high damage), Bookshelves (Can be tipped over for a strong AoE and height advantage), and most importantly, the Train which arrives during the second redshield battle. Plan to take advantage of this more than any other, it deals an obscene amount of damage and wins you the fight almost automatically.

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere else, so I thought I'd point out some additional information about "gold" chests. They appear to come in different tiers. On a trial character with 150+ luck and 120 drop rate, I've found two "gold" chests, one of which was green, one of which was orangeish. The green contained a yellowitem with additional abilities. The orange contained a +4 yellowitem with 11 compose slots. I don't know how much of this is from the luck stat and how much is from drop rate, but I hope this information is useful anyways.