With what race/class did you win ?
Dunadan mage.
How hard/easy was it ?
It was very different from what I'm used to. Much more offense-based. Mages don't last very long at all under attack, but neither do any of the enemies. A level 5 flame spell demolishes everything. It took two castings of that and one of manathrust to take The Master down, if I remember correctly.
Elite monsters are much too strong, at least in the beginning. An elite archer can one-shot players pretty easily, and being hit with a stun attack, even at full health, is often a death sentence. It's made all the worse by the fact that they can do this from the darkness, killing the player off or leaving them severely weakened before they can even see where the damage is coming from.
Regular close range enemies are all but harmless unless they're in groups, and if you're a mage with area of effect attacks, they're harmless in groups too. They could use more variety, like fast/weak and slow/strong enemies, some that attack in groups and that sort of thing. The power disparity between close range and long range enemies is very clear if you look at the first two bosses.
The Shadow is very deadly and can kill off even characters who should be overleveled for Amon Sul in a few shots. It's perfectly capable of taking a player out without ever even being seen.
Bill the Troll, on the other hand, is completely harmless even to a level 1 mage. I'm sure he would do a lot of damage if he could land a hit, but he can't, so it's not relevant.
I feel like fighters are weak compared with mages right now. Maybe they get better when they have really nice armor and can take a few hits from archers/wizards and still be okay. I don't know, I haven't gotten one to that point. From what I've seen though, none of their defensive advantages make up for the fact that a mage can pump out enormous amounts of extremely reliable damage at long ranges.
Any special comments?
I like the character building system, and the way attributes and talents work. More documentation would be nice (how much armor penetration you get from cunning, what protection from magic willpower and cunning give you, etc), but I'm sure that will come.
This is the first time I've seen cooldowns used in a roguelike, but I think I like it. Teleport isn't as much of a get-out-of-jail-free card when you have to wait ten turns to use it again, and cooldowns on attack skills means it's worth investing in several of them instead of using every point to max out one powerful skill.
I think it would be better if the player's light radius were increased. You're not likely to get a better radius than 2 or 3 up until the final dungeon, which means that you can't tell if a monster is there until it's right up in your face. This limits the player's tactical options, and it makes enemy mages and archers even more deadly, since the player doesn't know where to go to retaliate or to take cover. Mage characters can, of course, get around this with spells like Sense or Telepathy, making their advantages over other characters even more pronounced. I don't think it would be out of line to go so far as to double the radius of each light source.
I don't like the way the strength of enemy creatures scales. It makes judging an enemy's strength from their creature type very unreliable, and looking at the stats of each one is too inconvenient. I've seen worms with about 20 hp, and I've seen ones with over 100.
If you want to keep a level scaling system in place, I would recommend instead having the game become more likely to spawn stronger creatures of another type instead of increasing the strength of each creature. That way the player can determine immediately how dangerous a creature is the moment they see it.
Maybe that would be an appropriate use of the different colored creatures we were talking about earlier. If you're low level, you run into white worms. If you're a bit higher, you get stronger green worms (I don't know whether green worms are stronger than white ones currently, but whatever). If you're high level, maybe you get red worms or something. You get the idea. Always have white worms be level 2, green worms be level 5, and red worms be level 8, so the player knows exactly what they're in for when they see one. I'd like that a lot better than I like having level 12 superworms that look exactly like their harmless level 1 brethren.
The game feels incomplete, but it is incomplete, so that's okay. I'm sure when everything is said and done, you'll have made a solid game, just like you did with the original ToME.
I wrote way too much text.
