RNG dependance in EL and D:C

My opinion is that this dependance is very bad and shouldn't exist in races that rewards points. If one guy gets all easy zones he will probably be somewhere in top-5 of el race no matter how he plays. If one guy gets terrible zones he either dies or will be at 50th place or something. I guess for GGG zone with arcers + arc ribbons + alchemists + vaal constricts is equal as difficult to zones with little green spiders, monkeys, black zombies and lets say bandits. But in reality first zone is death. And it's not even worse possible combo. And I not mention drops rng - if you got dischargers, you can negate their damage by equipping topaz rings? Nah, you need to find it first, and one ring doesn't do much difference. The weapon rng, ms rng, qs rng, gear rng and zone rng makes EL probably worst race in terms of competitive. And any race that rewards points is competitive for me.
This can be fixed by adding chests with fixed rewards, and evaluating all mobs by their difficulty, so every zone will have different enemies but equal difficulty. Once per 2 levels zone could be little more difficult.

Now lets look at D:C. Before halls its pretty much doesn't matter what you get, garbage first three zones doesn't matter too. Because to win this race you only need to get dense halls with decent amount of blues. And of course some weapon rng and resists rng if you are not a caster. Witch dont need anything cus you can pretty much destroy anything naked with flameblast. So, back to halls density rng. Great halls+good packs allows you to get almost lvl 28. Decent density with good packs is 27. Default halls is lvl 26. Bad is lvl 25 (even after grav). This means, that if two players with same class and experience (both racing and character) enter halls one at the same time, one of them will definetely loose by a lot amount of exp. I think this could be fixed by extending race to few more levels to give players more options about what to do in limited time.
So, what is your opinion on this RNG madness, is is good or is it bad? How to fix this if its bad?

Disclaimer: EL is probably my #1 favorite race format. It's a charming, insane clusterfuck, rng fest and it's fuckin' great. It's not for the faint of rng. Among other things, i like that you often get to use skill-class-build combinations that don't come up in any other format. The changes you propose scare me. :P

Making EL not give points would effectively remove it from the game, since it only exists in races. Assuming they then added it to the game outside of races, i wouldn't even play it. The constant sense of urgency from competition is a key component of its fun.

Adding fixed chests at each zone would makes it a very different race, starting to get similar to Descents. I'm totally fine with an EL+chests variant, as long as EL continues to exist in its current form.

Balancing mob rng would also make it not-EL, ruining it for me. Again, i'm fine with a "balanced EL" variant, as long as current EL continues to run. Sure, the ridiculous zones (like boof's 2nd zone just now - high density with dischargers and cold snappers) can be challenging, but that's part of the fun for me. Absurd combinations you would never run into normally, that puts everyone, including the very best players, to the test.


D:C is probably my #2 favorite race format. Adding more levels to it would make it more like legacy Descent. I like how different they are currently. Legacy is more about getting as far as you can, while D:C is about farming efficiency and timing. I didn't initially like that about D:C, but it has grown on me a lot. It's yet another deep facet of the game to get good at.

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jstq wrote:

So, what is your opinion on this RNG madness, is is good or is it bad? How to fix this if its bad?

I don't mind it. I fear that fixing it would mean turning the game into a memorizer, and that's not the kind of game i like to play. RNG forces you to adapt on the fly. If you remove all types of RNG, there's no game left. Or rather, a game that gets very stale very quickly.


Edit: here's an example of why EL is great, and that RNG can be a good thing: flask rng. Flask rng has been all but removed from every other race type. The only place with true flask rng that's left is EL. When unlucky, this puts us into very uncomfortable situations, which puts our skills to a tremendous test. If you remove flask rng from EL, that skill is no longer put to the test in any race. That's a bad thing.