Troika disciple

[Squeak]

I have been playing a bit with a Troika disciple. I enjoy the randomness of the gifts/punishments and the overall powerful melee of the class.
What I don't understand though are the quests. I try to be at a depth that is considered challenging by the Purple but I haven't figured out what prompts him to give me a quest. Does a certain amount of time need to elapse from completing the prior quest or is it enough to be on a deep enough level? Do I need to keep going down even if the level feeling says I am deep enough? Can I spam stairs or recall until I get a quest?
The other thing that is unclear is what prompts the purple to give me a new spell. Is it killing a certain level or type if monster or is it just random?

[Sideways]

Originally Posted by Squeak

I have been playing a bit with a Troika disciple. I enjoy the randomness of the gifts/punishments and the overall powerful melee of the class.
What I don't understand though are the quests. I try to be at a depth that is considered challenging by the Purple but I haven't figured out what prompts him to give me a quest. Does a certain amount of time need to elapse from completing the prior quest or is it enough to be on a deep enough level? Do I need to keep going down even if the level feeling says I am deep enough? Can I spam stairs or recall until I get a quest?

The deeper you go, the more likely you are to get quests, but if the feeling says you're deep enough you can at least theoretically get quests at that depth. You might run into other limits, though; you only get so many quests per dungeon, and there are also some limits on how many you get per CL, although those tend to only become relevant in the late game. (Having done previous Purple quests at the same CL may also increase the depth you need to be at.)

Random Troika quests will stop generating altogether if you can no longer qualify for further rewards, either because you completed all of them or failed too many. I don't think there are any time, stair or recall limits, although quests only generate on new levels so stair-shuffling between already explored levels will never trigger a quest.

The other thing that is unclear is what prompts the purple to give me a new spell. Is it killing a certain level or type if monster or is it just random?

It is largely random, though the monster's type and level do affect it quite a lot (deeper is better, uniques are better, big HP bags are better). You are also more likely to get new spells if you don't have very many yet. (In spite of that, getting spells tends to be fairly rare - probably too rare - in the early game and more common in the late game; by the end you'll likely be very close to the 20-spell maximum.)

[Squeak]

Thank you for the information!

Do the spells you get have anything to do with the monster that is killed? There was one time I got slay orc after killing one of the orc uniques. Was that entirely by chance?

[Sideways]

Originally Posted by Squeak

Thank you for the information!

Do the spells you get have anything to do with the monster that is killed?

The monster's identity doesn't affect which spell you get if you pass all the rolls for getting a spell; there can be some correlation in that you get less impressive spells early on and also kill less impressive monsters early on, but if you got your first slay spell for killing Cthulhu, it would still have a 50% chance of being slay orc.

[Squeak]

Played quite a bit with Troika disciple and eventually managed to complete 10 of the 15 quests before dying. While the reward for the initial 5 quests is great, the reward for the second 5 is quite underwhelming, especially considering the difficulty of completing them. Excluding the quests, Troika disciples play like weak chaos warriors with an especially annoying patron and lots of limitations. Particularly annoying is the penalty for teleporting while healthy. As such, I think that the quest rewards need to be completely worth it.

It seems that to be able to complete all 15 quests, you need to exclusively focus on doing them. You don't want to do any of the built-in quests or explore any of the dungeons to their bottom level because then your level goes up and the Troika quests become incrementally harder. You basically need to go to the minimal dungeon level that satisfies the Troika and then recall back and forth until you get a quest. The mechanics of getting a quest are currently quite opaque. It looks like you are limited to 2 quests per dungeon, so once you are done with 2 you need to move on to the next dungeon. It would be nice to get some indication in the level feeling as to whether you can still get a quest in your current dungeon. I tried getting a quest in the Chameleon cave but was never assigned one - is it impossible to get a quest there?

In addition, spells are quite rare in the beginning and are, again, underwhelming. By the time you get magic missile it's hardly useful. The slay spells are nice but also tend to come quite late and I frequently already have a weapon that posesses the same slay. Perhaps spells could be also be at least partially tied to the quests so that you get them more frequently?

I don't mean this to sound whiney. This is an interesting class to play with a different play style than other classes. I just think it could benefit from some tweaking.

[Sideways]

Thanks for the feedback I don't plan to change the 10-quest reward; it feels strong enough to me (and is very thematic). I'll look into ways to make quest availability more transparent, though; and I agree that spells are too rare in the early game.

You're right about Chameleon Cave, random quests never trigger there since the only monsters there are chameleons.