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Caravel Forum : DROD Boards : Holds : Loan Shark (Slayer manipulation)
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6.0/10 (6 votes)
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Author Name:12th Archivist
Submitted By:12th Archivist
Hold Name:Loan Shark
Theme:Slayer manipulation
Author's Difficulty:
Number of Levels:1
Number of Rooms:28
Number of Monsters:831
Version:DROD: The City Beneath (3.2)
High Scores:View High Scores
Hold Karma:0 (+0 / -0)
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File: Loan Shark.hold (17.9 KB)
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License: Other
From: Unspecified
icon Loan Shark  
Hello, everybody!

For you who appreciate history, the puzzles in this hold originally started out as levels Three and Nine from my other hold, Krighton's Castle. After some thought and consideration, I decided to cut down the content in KC, moving all the slayer levels into this hold.

For those of you who think history is boring, let me explain this hold. This hold is all about slayer manipulation, slayer manipulation, and more slayer manipulation, in case the theme did not make it clear enough by now. If you fear slayers, or just generally dislike them, this hold is probably not for you. (Although larrymurk's Psycho Therapy helped counter serpent fear, right?)

Depending on your skill with slayers, this hold could range anywhere from slightly difficult to brain-melting, if only because the slayer might *never* do what you want him to do. Always annoying.

I tried to make every room revolve around actually using the slayer, and not just making the slayer an annoyance while you solve an unrelated puzzle. I think I did this quite well, with only one room where the slayer was not somehow very important to the puzzle.

There are no secrets in this hold, so no need to go searching for them. Finally, this hold was built and exported into 3.2, so no need for GatEB.
06-27-2012 at 03:08 AM
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larrymurk
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icon Re: Loan Shark (0)  
I find this hold to be fairly difficult, still haven't solved 5 rooms on the 1st level.

Some rooms seemed to be a bit repetitive. The room would be broken into 4 areas that pretty much involve the same manipulation.

All in all, there seems to be some fun/difficult slayer manipulation rooms.
07-02-2012 at 03:04 PM
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mxvladi
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icon Re: Loan Shark (+2)  
I've started this a while ago, then got bored. Now, I decided to return to this hold, finally conquered it... and, surprisingly, I'm still the first one to do so. And that is despite the hold being pretty small and being published for almost a month by now.

Is it because this hold is fairly difficult? No, not really. The real problem with this hold, in my opinion, is that it's extremely tedious in a lot of places. What Larry said about repeitiveness is true – in most of rooms, I need to repeat the *same* manipulation trick lots and lots of times. Whether that is manipulating guard/slayer to cut tarstuff, or trying to lure slayer somewhere, or whatever else – if a room features some sort of manipulation trick, I have to repeat it lots of times while solving it.

By the way, just adding slayer in the room won't make a good slayer puzzle. There are very few rooms which are actually based on slayer manipulation. In many rooms, slayer just serves as "an annoyance while you solve an unrelated puzzle"(quoting hold description here, which claims that there *aren't* such rooms). In some cases, it's actually safe to just kill the slayer because it's totally unrequired to solve the room(for example, Larry's solution to 1N 2W involves killing the slayer before doing anything else). And finally, there're few rooms actually based on slayer manipulation(those were probably the most interesting rooms in this hold).

Quite a few rooms left me wondering whether what I did is intentional... In fact, there're some rooms where I'm *sure* my solution is unintended. Not sure whether to blame an architect(who waited for several months before submitting the hold, and still received no comments) for this, though.

...

However, this hold has a few rooms which I've enjoyed, and I'm looking forward to replaying them:

1N 3W – one of those rooms which are actually based on slayer manipulation. Fun.

3N 2W – a bit more annoying than 1N 3W, but still okay room and fits the theme.

3N 1W – I'm not really sure what you *wanted* me to do here, but I had fun trying to get my(most likely, unintended) solution to work. :P The hitting-conquer-token part of solution(which can't really be broken) is pretty fun, too.

3N – good puzzle. The goal is rather clear, so the player is left wondering *how* to archieve it. There're no filler elements here, I don't have to repeat the same trick a lot of times etc. Not straightforward, too: it's one of the few rooms where I actually had to think about the solution. It's a shame that in order to play this, player will have to get through all your tedious rooms. It also, sadly, has a speech bug: in some cases, slayer says "good" speech(aka "omg I lost how it's impossible", etc) even when I'm actually about to die in a few moves(didn't kill some golems so green door is locked). I'm not sure there was any easy way to fix it, but IMO it would be better not including that speech there it all if it doesn't always work properly.

2S – scroll in the game claims it's “decidedly poor room”. Actually, it is slightly less tedious than many of the required rooms.


I had a hard time rating this hold for difficulty and overall/fun. In a lot of rooms, the solution was just a matter of fine manipulation rather than thinking(and I don't want to give high difficulty rating for rooms like that), and as I said, lots of rooms are tedious... however, there's fine stuff here, too. In the end, I decided to rate it 5,5 for difficulty and 6 for fun/overall.

[Last edited by mxvladi at 08-05-2012 11:18 AM]
07-18-2012 at 04:27 PM
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