Cynder
@ Stream: HAE BIG GHUY.
wink heart Quote:
Skizzors
Stream: I joined KoL a while ago and tried getting into it for a bit. Not really into it.
sweatdrop But I love TH..
Same for me actually. I don't know what it is, but TH is just so much better in my eyes, but then again I need to give KoL another go around since, as I recall, you can actually "beat" it now. Though I am curious if they've introduced the scaling encounters like TH has.
There's one or two areas with scaling encounters now in KoL (and some of the random holiday encounters scale too), but KoL's strong suit is that there are enough areas with a variety of optimal play styles that you can effectively always be fighting something appropriate to your desire for softcore challenge or balls-to-the-wall badasserey.
Further, they expanded the road from start to beating the Naughty Sorceress from 11 quests to 13, expanded the individual quests, added about a dozen side quests, continued tweaking the existing content, and have just enough stuff for players who have ascended (beaten the sorceress and re-incarnated) to feel rewarding without making it feel like they're pandering to the ascenders.
Then they also added some options for tweaking the difficulty of your ascension runs in both the raw difficulty and dietary paths.
Difficultywise we've got the Casual run, where you start again at level 1 with all your old gear and money, but no real award once you finish except to start over again. Then there's a Normal run, where you go through 600 "ronin" turns where you only get 20 pulls of one item or 1000 meat (currency) from your ancestral storage per day and at the end you designate one skill to become permanent on all normal runs with that character and a meat gem good for making nice jewelry. Next you've got the Hardcore run where all you get to keep are your familiars (reduced to 1 lb each) and all your gear and meat goes into a vault until after you save the king... but in return after ascending you get a stainless steel item from the class you just finished, a bag of 2-5 meat gems, and designate one of your skills to mark as Hardcore Permanent...
And then... Bad Moon, also known as HardestCore. A method of play so abusive that you have to unlock it by going through a whole hardcore ascension without using a single Clover. The dev team explained Bad Moon as "being all about mixed blessings". Start with the basics of a Hardcore run, but lock away all your old familiars (you need to get any required familiars on each Bad Moon run), forget all your Hardcore Perm skills, and kiss the good fortune of the Clovers good-bye. At the same time, most areas in the game get a special Bad Moon adventure where you usually get a temporary buff or benefit, but an equal curse... or savage beating. Think along the lines of using the wish "Man, I wish there was some way I could damage this troll I have to wrestle bare-handed" and having the DM grant it by lighting you on fire. Afterwards, you get bragging rights and usual hardcore prizes, but replace the Stainless Steel item with a Brimstone Item with high end enchantments (usually something like +50% in your main stat, -20% in your minor offstat, and some other bennie like extra spell damage or turns per day).
As for dietary, there are three, each with their own bonus prize added to the ascension prize... and two get different versions of the "Liver of Steel" skill that lets you expand your drinking cap from 15 to 20. However, I don't believe you can mix Bad Moon and Dietary paths... that would just be insane.
Teetotalers cannot drink booze. Period. You don't even get a "drink" link to click on under the items in your inventory. In addition to the "Stomach of Steel" skill, you get tins of Retenez L'Herbe Paté (1 for normal, 3 for hardcore).
Boozetafarians cannot eat food. You just drink heartily. Liver of Steel remains the same and you get one to three barrels of Single Barrel Scotch.
Lastly, there are the Oxygenarians. No food, no drink. All you can consume are the Spleen items that neither of the other paths disallow. Moxie Weeds, cans of Distilled Magic Juice, and Wads (obtained by using a level 15 Seal Clubber skill to smash enchanted items). In addition to the Breathetastic Canned Air you get upon ascending after this run is the Spleen of Steel skill, which allows you to use more of these preformance-enhancing substances than any normal player without your spleen exploding.
Further, if you take the Oxygenarian path on a Hardcore run (commonly referred to as Oxycore), the stainless steel item a Hardcore run would normally earn is replaced by an even more badass Plexiglass item.
Maybe I'll someday make the run for Plexiglass, but I'll need a whole bunch of unpathed Hardcore runs to build up the skillset to make it livable.
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