WIP: Early game balance

4/1/2017

• Removed randbosses from cities

This MR is going to cover any "misc" early game specific changes as well as outlining the overall early game issue. The inscription, debuff, and shop MRs are also part of fixing this to varying degrees. I'm going to avoid putting in any hacky randboss changes until the important debuff/inscription changes are decided on since what actually needs to be done will depend on that.

We generally think of early game balance issues in terms of special problems that come up on higher difficulties, but I don't think this is accurate. Rather, we should think of this as ways the game systems are prone to breaking at low levels, and higher difficulties causing this to come up much more often. For example, the bonus levels and talent levels NPCs get have little to do with the actual problems. It is almost entirely about randbosses, hence why nobody cares about cheesing starts on Nightmare. These are the issues that generally come up:

• The tiering system is very extreme at low level, easily leading to situations where one power has no chance of beating another

• Armor isn't tiered but it is a flat form of damage mitigation that can easily 0 your entire weapon damage if something happens to spawn with 2-3 good sources of it.

• Options to deal with debuffs are very limited early. This remains true even if you start scum for specific inscriptions as a priority, and is exacerbated by "cleanse this or you are nearly 100% dead" debuffs like Stun and Confusion, which happen to be common on classes and thus randbosses.

Note the lack of talents doing especially high damage in this list. That is rarely the problem, except in the situations where you get forced into a sustained damage war but can't retreat (debuffed and can't leave on first level of a zone). Consider the following scenarios in the 1 to 10 level range:

• A bear randboss combines its 10 base armor with 2 talents that sum to 35 armor total

• A randboss combines 3 or more talents to total ~30-40 defense

• A randboss spawns with 2 or more sources of stun and an additional 1 or more sources of "cover" debuff to protect it, such as bleed or poison

• A randboss aggros its friend behind it and once engaged you get hit from off screen by Pacifism Hex, Burning Hex, and some random curse

By mid game these are not problematic scenarios. You've had more than enough time to assemble enough talents and gear to have flexible options for various situations. Early game, they are often impossible fights, forcing you to go somewhere else or often if its the first level die due to the impossibility of retreat.

Its worth noting that AoA avoids a lot of these problems innately. There are a lot of shops, and a lot of similarly leveled areas that you can switch between if a problematic spawn blocks your progress. Better illustrations of the issue are Insane Infinite Dungeon (literally impossible to pass floor 2 most of the time, my record is floor 3) and the more linear Embers of Rage (rares had to be outright banned here or progress was impossible on a bad spawn).

A number of hacky mechanics have been left in the to avoid these issues:

• Shops giving tier 3 items which are far too cheap and easily accessible

• Damage charms doing too much damage at early levels

• Drowning rares and randbosses in cities giving loot and bumping Insane starting levels to level 6(ish) usually

• Insane characters start at level 2 and with bonus gold

• Removing randbosses from early game EoR

Hopefully we can phase most of these out, though I strongly suspect artificially limiting early randboss power more than it already is will be necessary. This is among the best of the "hacky" solutions because it is largely invisible to players.