Decided to do a Neutral Monk next. Had wack luck with artifacts, but found a bunch of late game wishes so I got the PYEC and EotA anyway. Running through all of midgame with giantslayer sucked tho. Also didn't find a uni horn til like floor 23. Bad luck with spellbooks too despite finding 30 spells.

Got shocked to death by a chest 15 minutes in, but the following run has ascended.
Silly run. Early armor chop was nice, but it didn't have too much. 1st sac cleaver, but a gnome with grimtooth on the same floor nuked artifact wishing chances.
No unicorns until Gehennom was a drag.
Easy run overall.

Gonna go for a tourist next.

EZPZ ascension. The scroll shop trivialized the early game and then an extra WoW was just icing on the cake.

Early HoOA let me wish for the MKoT but I lost in in the quest when my nemesis first hit stole it lol. The Helm still made the ascension run super easy tho.

Very straightforward run overall

Ooh round 3 going super well so far. Shaky start dealing with lycanthropy, bur already have MR and a +6 Excalibur. Early scroll shops are the best. -9 AC and a uni horn have me decently safe. Just gotta avoid getting one-dunked by poison or something stupid like that.

Ate a chickatrice thinking it was a pyrolisk. Run would have been free too. I’m so stupid lmao

Round 3. Knight 3.

Accidentally wielded my blindfold instead of wearing it before attacking a floating eye. 10/10 would play again.

Round 2. Another knight.

1987

The game was horrendously balanced but got some patches that drastically shifted things around.
At launch, because of the way damage worked, it was impossible to kill the ghostlop characters with pressure and they were also way better at quota because the linepull button hadn’t been implemented yet.

It’s been a while, but IIRC they even did the whole “and the matchup is absolutely not balanced” thing too lol
Magdrop V was such a mess

And I think this nicely accounts for why genre/series diehards tend to get so upset with games that stray really far from the “standard” level of difficulty despite cases where it leads to critical acclaim or financial success (i.e. the games are “good” by any other metric)

In the wake of MH Wilds, I was musing with some friends that, at their core, games are just a mechanism to provide friction between a player and an endstate, and almost every gameplay flaw boils down to straying too far from the amount of friction a player expects.

There’s a VSp regular who smokes everybody with Suija. He’s probably won more of the weeklies than anyone else at this point. This character is a menace.