Danger calculation

It's well known that endurance is a huge factor in danger calculation.

The armor of "greater health" often tricks newbies into thinking it'll help them while it usually does more harm than good because it raises their danger level too high. There are other items such as the flaming valpurium sword +10 which are basically bait for newbies, and I like that concept in general.

But I've also had characters who just have shit luck. Can't find any armor which means they get hurt badly often, which raises their endurance frequently, which makes them face more deadly enemies. And it ends up being a vicious circle.

Any thoughts on reducing the impact of endurance on danger level?

The way danger is calculated basically takes into account how hard you and your foes are to kill - it calculates how much damage you're likely to dish out (ie. your accuracy, damage, speed) and how much punishment you can take (ie. dodging, blocking, HP), then does the same for monsters, then compares this to get relative danger value for you and monsters you can see in wizmode spoilers. If you look at the danger value, then equip better gear and get more stats, then look at the values again, you'll notice that danger of monsters have dropped, as they will have harder time killing you. When spawning monsters, the game looks at normal danger of the floor it tries to spawn monsters on - and because danger of monsters drops as you get stronger, it can spawn stronger enemies in lower danger areas.

Basically, because you have more HP, you can take more damage before dying - so the game spawns monsters that can dish out more damage to compensate. I understand that it's rather weird how more health means you're more likely to die, but changing the way danger works without completely upsetting game balance would probably be a nightmare...

Another thing, though, is that some very dangerous monsters use HP thresholds to limit their spawn only after you have that much HP. This can cause problems if you gain large amount of HP without the gear to go with it, and this might be more easy to rectify. Maybe we could change HP thresholds to some gameplay milestones, adding flags like "do not spawn this monster before the player kills Jenny", "do not spawn this monster before the player descends at least to GC4 (but spawn it anywhere afterwards)".

As r-k says, the danger system relies in part on calculating the next monster to throw at the player based on number of moves required to make a kill, which relies in turn on HP and equipment. So it's kind of delicately balanced and so difficulty to make changes without inventing a new game.

On a related note, there's a PR up to fix the occurrence of powerful zombie spawns: https://github.com/Attnam/ivan/pull/295

Yeah I was hoping it would be easy to just tweak the effect of endurance/HP to be slightly lower. But I guess it's probably too delicate of a balance to even mess with