Lewd Dungeon, Chapter 383

Chapter 383 – Tuning

I sighed as the boss fight on the seventeenth floor ended in a resounding victory for the Azure Flames. The whole thing had been very quick. Quicker than I would have liked for a boss battle. Needed to see if I’d accidentally made the fight too easy, or if they were just that good.

The initial strike had been avoided with [Danger Sense], it looked like. The skill was a useful one for traps and ambushes, but most adventurers never got it ‘naturally’, either through a class or profession, or as one of the offered General Skills. In order to get it, they had to buy items from the System Shop, which could be very expensive, especially at the levels most of my adventurers were at.

Of course, the skill wasn’t all-powerful. The System did not allow for single skills to be that overwhelming without having a good number of prerequisites that needed to be taken first, or something similar. As a skill, [Danger Sense] scaled with the user’s WIS, giving them a ‘sixth sense’ about dangerous conditions. Additional observation-related skills and extra senses added into [Danger Sense], expanding the kinds of danger it could warn someone of. Both of those were strengths, but also weaknesses, depending on who was using them.

For instance, a Fighter would naturally focus on STR, DEX, and CON, depending on their style, which would leave fewer points for attributes like WIS. Only the truly stupid neglected their other attributes entirely, of course, but it was a simple fact that most Adventurers focused their attribute points in the things that they used most, allowing teammates to cover their shortcomings. So, a Fighter did not usually have the WIS to get the most out of [Danger Sense].

Stealth types, like Rangers and Rogues, tended to have better observation skills, since they were relied on to scout ahead of a party, and find traps. These skills played into [Danger Sense], making it far more effective in their hands, than the Fighter’s. But those classes did not typically get actual [Danger Sense] as part of their normal kit. They might get a limited version like [Trap Sense] or [Predict Ambush], but the full skill was usually limited to professions like Survivalist, or ‘awakened’ as a General Skill through long experience spotting traps and ambushes.

In Gracie’s case, her WIS was decent, but not exceptional. However, as a mage, she was sensitive to magic, and had appropriate skills in that area, which is why her [Danger Sense] warned her about the boss’s incoming spells, which should have been a surprise attack. It probably wouldn’t have been a lethal strike, unless she was really unlucky, but the attack would have definitely put her out of the fight until she could be healed, forcing the group to defend her, which would have reduced their offensive potential. That alone would have made the fight far more difficult than it was.

Also, having three mage-types and two tanks in a party was rare. With the High Wizard being able to focus solely on locking down the boss’s spells, the two tanks occupying the golems’ attention for a few seconds, and everyone else focusing their fire on the mage, that kind of ‘kill them before they can kill you’ style was very risky under normal circumstances, but worked perfectly in this case. Most groups wouldn’t have that much offense to bring to bear after dedicating one person to blocking the mage and two to drawing off the golems. If I treated this group as an outlier, then it ought to be fine, right?

Balancing encounters on ‘normal’ mode was difficult. I couldn’t make them too easy, or people would lose respect for the dungeon, and its threats, which would cause more problems down the line. If I made things too difficult, however, then that started leading down the road the late, unlamented Freedomland travelled. I needed to make things tough, but fair, which meant that I couldn’t just eliminate every winning strategy and force parties into slogging through fights in a single style, predetermined by me.

That said, I could work on some counters. I didn’t want the fight to be too hard, but I did need to make sure it didn’t become a cake walk. Yes, the easy win for this group was mostly due to their composition and spending gold on expensive skill tomes, but resources spent like that were a part of a group’s preparation, and I shouldn’t penalize it too heavily. The question was, what changes could I make without the difficulty spiking too much?

In the end, it boiled down to the simple fact that the entire fight revolved around the boss. In the current form, if he went down, the golems went down, which meant that groups could ignore the daunting task of damaging the golems, and focus all their attacks on the mage. Being a mage, he wasn’t exactly tanky, even if he had the [Stone Armor] spell, and a [Stoneskin] racial ability, dramatically increasing his defense. The question was, what could I do about it?

There were three main options, as I saw it. First, the mage could have a companion for extra offense or defense, or possibly as a healer. Maybe even set it up as a random spawn, like I did with the Water Temple’s boss fight. That would make it so every fight felt different, and a single tactic wouldn’t overwhelm all others. Not a bad option, but not the best.

Second, I could make the mage harder to lock down. There was the [Stonemeld] spell, which allowed the caster to slip inside the surrounding rock and move through it, allowing them to hide from attacks. The mage wouldn’t be able to cast spells while inside the stone, but they could move around the arena, popping out where they wanted to attack with hit-and-run tactics.

Alternatively, I could give the mage some resistance to counterspelling. The [Hardened Magic] skill made it so that a mage’s spells were harder to counter, break, or dispel. In the last fight, it was likely that half the mage’s spells would have made it through the High Wizard’s counterspelling attempts, unless they took the [Improved Counterspelling] skill, which would be more skill points they couldn’t use for other things. An item with provided a set percentage resistance was also a possibility, especially since I could easily adjust the potency of the item for higher difficulty levels, even making the mage immune to counterspelling entirely on Nightmare mode.

As for the third option, that was making the golems independent constructs, rather than a direct part of the mage’s powers. That would require more resources on my end, but would mean that parties would have to take down the golems, even after the mage went down. My only issue with that is that not all groups had weapons of the higher-quality materials or with the better enchantments needed to break through a golem’s defense. The Azure Flames, for instance, would have been at a distinct disadvantage if they’d had to take on the golems directly, since they did not have the weapons to effectively cut through their rocky bodies. The battle would have become one of attrition, and the longer it went on, the more likely it was that someone would make a mistake, and the golems would crush them.

Of course, I didn’t have to limit myself to just one of those options. In fact, I quickly decided to go with all three on Nightmare mode. After all, that was the ‘people are coming to try and kill me’ difficulty, so there was no reason to hold back or try and be fair to them. Anyone who wanted to come and kill me would need to bring their A game, at the very least, because I was going to do everything in my power to ensure that they died, or were captured.

But for the Normal and Hardcore modes, the ones covered by the normal dungeon contract and the ‘guns’ contract, I still wanted things to be tough but fair. That was the reputation I’d built for myself, so I needed to consider what would be the best path forward. I could probably get away with picking one option on Normal, and two on Hardcore. That would also provide a nice progression to using all three on Nightmare, which appealed to me.

In the end, my choice came down to a simple fact. The boss was supposed to be the main threat for this fight, so they should be the first one getting an upgrade. I added an amulet to their equipment, which made it so that they gained a base 25% resistance to counterspelling, and added another 25% if their CHA was higher than the counterspeller’s CHA. In the last fight, the INT-based High Wizard would have been getting resisted on half their counterspell attempts. On Hardcore mode, this would be increased to 50% each step, and on Nightmare it would be a flat immunity, and would cause a stun effect if the counterspeller’s CHA was lower than the boss’s.

For Hardcore mode, the golems would also be independent constructs under the boss’s control. No killing the mage and getting to ignore the golems on the higher difficulties. Along with the counterspelling resistance, that would make the fight much more challenging, without making it obscenely so.

Naturally, the Nightmare mode would have all of that, plus one to four extra defenders, with random classes. And an Earth Sorcerer who couldn’t be counterspelled, fighting underground. Was it fair? Of course not. That was the point. On Nightmare mode the gloves were off, and people needed to expect me to be actively working to kill them at all times.

Looking at the other fights on the floor, I didn’t really have any notes for them. The fights may have looked easy, since they all ended quickly, but that was more due to the party having good tactics and teamwork, as well having enough power to make the difference. For instance, the fight against the hunter could have gone very, very differently if the whole team wasn’t prepared ahead of time to use a bunch of heavy defensive moves, and their sneaky types hadn’t managed to find the hunter and were in position to strike before the first shot was ever taken.

No, the Khav-Szarol side of the floor was working as intended, for the most part. Even the marketplace features were working well. It was fortunate that the mental magics for reworking phobias went as expected. Arachnophobia may only affect somewhere between 3% and 15% of the world’s population, but even normal people tended to get a bit ‘kill it with fire’ when faced with spiders the size of cars. The fact that those spiders had classes and could sometimes use magic did not help the issue.

Unfortunately, figuring out whether there were any issues with the Shatterchain side of the floor’s fights and events would have to wait until later. Possibly much later. While not all the parties who ventured into my dungeon indulged in [Slave Collars] and the like, many of the most powerful ones who came here regularly had at least one slave in the party. Something like 35% of the total, and 52% of the high-level parties, last time I checked. If you included people who had noncombat slaves, the numbers grew.

There were some notable exceptions, of course. The Jadesins mercenaries were not slaves, and had never purchased any slaves. The Demonthralls, Catalina’s party, were all her Thralls, not Slaves, which was an important distinction under the System. However, they were the exceptions, rather than the rule.

Part of that was due to my dungeon’s design, of course. Actually, a large part. Several areas, like the Black Temple, actively encouraged dominance and submission games, and the plethora of aphrodisiac-wielding monsters and traps encouraged people to lose themselves in pleasure. And once you started down that slippery slope, it was hard to stop. Other dungeons, like Scaleskin Burrow or Silver Mercy, had very different numbers when it came to parties with Slaves or Thralls.

Perhaps I should talk to Catalina, and see if she could send one of her teams over from LA, to test the other side? Or reach out to one of the other Guild leaders. It would be good to get a team from outside the Miami area. Or perhaps even from Bluemountain? There was a thought. Perhaps Black Knight would know a good party to send over.