Post edited 5:32 am – May 27, 2011 by Justine

Keith dear, you may want to reconsider that promise. I am currently on my 6th iteration of the game on endless mode and show no signs of dying in the immediate future. While my score is not yet in the billions, the million milestone has been passed.

Some thoughts on Endless Mode:

Most of the time Endless Mode plays out as the Irish Potato Famine of 1845 with you playing the role of Irish peasantry. Now I know that since Endless mode fittingly has no actual end, it has to end in tears eventually. However, I'd vastly prefer going down fighting than slowly withering under hunger's inextricable death-grip.

As a point of reference, bring to mind the charge of the Rohirrim on the fields of Minas Tirith in Return of the King. Now change that scene so that the Rohirrim never reach the fields because they starved to death during their (rather short) ride downhill. That is where the Endless mode's heroism factor is at the moment.

The "difficulty" of the game is uneven. (Citation marks because wizard rules over this mode as well.) Transition from Hell back to the Bandit Hole means much easier combat for 3-6 levels to come.

ETA: Also experience does not apparently scale with difficulty, so you only substantially increase your score only 3 levels out of 9. After Hell, I'd suspect that Bandit Hole and Dungeon, even on higher difficulty, pose very little threat even on the second way round, not to mention later iterations when your character tends to be substantially more powerful.

I've been one-shotting pre-hell monsters (with the exception of Bandit Hole robots who are immune to magic, Dungeon robots who are strangely enough not immune but quite resistant, and blue knights who take three hits to go down.) for a couple of iterations now. This means that I have to worry about combat only when I get back down to Hell. Even then it's not really a challenge, but rather a logistics arrangement.

I'm confident that I will eventually reach the point where ranged monsters are able to one-shot me to death and thus end my game, but I don't see that happening very soon. Even then there'd have to be two, since I can always confuse one to buy myself time if I can't one-shot them with my wand or Crystals. I assume this is not intended.

Some info on how I've been going about conquering endless mode:

-Fairy Wizard wand/teleport/purify build

-By now, +5 leather and +5 wand

-No scorefarming

-No intentional starvation avoidance

(I admit to not eating rotten food, because as much as I hate starvation, I'd be killing myself with those hams.)

-VERY MUCH forced starvation avoidance. I think I went through one iteration of Hell or Dungeon without any food dropping on any levels. Anyhow, without Purify I would've been dead by Dungeon/Hell on the first way around. I haven't been stingy, so whenever I found food I ate it if I was starving. Because I absolutely hate starving.

-Every singe Health and Energy potion used to boost maximums. (Currently at: 104HP/124MP)

-Combat has been straightforward wanding/teleporting. Now that I finally bothered to pick up Magic Crystals it's made my game even easier. Two-shotting mini-Satans? Yes please.

Status update:

Lost count of iterations. Probably no more than 8 or 9 at the moment. A counter would be nice just for reference's sake. It could be appended to the level information, like Hell 3 (Endless 5).

Started one-shotting mobs in Hell. Bone Devils and flour-tossers kick the bucket invariably, Bullies and Clowns with some inconsitency.

Here's a snapshot of my current stats.

All skills are capped, put 2 extra points in Fairy Blessing.

This report is in the full interest of helping develop Endless mode into a fun and challenging way to play 100 Rogues. I understand that these overperformance issues are likely Wizard-specific, since no other class has as effective avoidance, healing, damage output (Scoundrel is a contender, but since 3xVengeance requires melee range, successul hit and 3 killing backstabs and is single-target only, it loses to magic crystals 9 times out of 10), disaster recovery (Fairy Blessing), equipment (starting weapon damage scales with energy = awesome), but I'm not convinced the difficulty still scales properly in regard to Bandit Hole and Dungeon. I'd likely prefer it would get harder faster, so that after Hell it's not all sunshine and picnics for 6 levels.

One consideration is that player power is very effectively limited. Weapons and armor echant only to +5, skills have maximums and leveling becomes infinitely slower after the first time around. In theory, raising monster HP as difficulty ramps should not be necessary, as there is a limit to how much damage a player is capable of dealing out. The wizard circumvents this limitation, though, as energy can be boosted effectively without leveling and spells and wand damage scale with energy increase.

It would, however, be sensible to bring up the monster stats of Bandit Hole and Dungeon up to Hell standards after the first loop. Now they're less than an inconvenience on any later round-trips. From there on they could be tied to a linear scaling. They'd just need that basic toughening-up since on the second round they're no longer facing a starting hero but one that has plodded through Hell once already. From there on, player power increase is very slight.