Locking stuff behind rng-grind is ungood.
Viewing post in Surviving Magic Academy as a Demon Lord - Demo comments
Increase the chance to 1.6% or something reasonable at least. And add RNG protection in case you still fail to get it in hundreds of tries. Otherwise, don't have it acquired from this at all. Yes, I've literally been through this node hundreds of times (over 200-300, I started counting after a while) and it is not fun.
The massive vitality bonus from immortality does give a massive score boost, does it not? 1.6% is still exceedingly rare in consideration of how many runs you'll actually be making. This doesn't bias towards runs, but players -as it stands, if you're making hundreds of attempts at the node, there's still a good chance you'll never even get it after finishing the whole game when it releases. Others will, however! It's just plainly unfair regardless of whether it's optional. Everyone should get a similar, enjoyable experience.
It's hell even if you savescum. If you don't, it's over an hour of dedicated grinding, on average, before you get one (still like 20-30 minutes if you do).
I designed the Screaming Mandrake to be sort of a mid-game ingredient. You’re meant to have a good stockpile of them by the time you reach the late game. I understand why it feels unfair right now, though, since we’re still in the early game and there’s no reliable way to obtain it aside from RNG.
I’ll try to add transmutation in the next update. Once players can create Screaming Mandrakes on their own, that will mark the transition into the mid-game phase. At that point, getting an extra mandrake from RNG drops won’t matter nearly as much as it does now.
Maybe I leaned too much into a roguelike mindset here. Random power spikes aren’t uncommon in that genre, while most incremental games are like “numbers go up” in a more predictable curve.
So far, I haven’t seen any major anomalies in the leaderboard. I don’t collect gameplay data, so this is all I have to go on for balancing unfortunately.
Allowing random lucky runs is fine. Normal incrementals are usually treated as specifically curated experiences, but they don't have to be, and they're usually more fun the more it feels like you're sequence breaking.
Incremental game players usually hate RNG in their games because it means you can't just brainlessly follow a guide, and allows you to blame bad RNG instead of your strategy. It's best to make sure you always have an RNG-less path to success in general anyway, though if it's possible to get extremely unlucky (e.g. getting 0 truffles if there's no alternatives) it'll be frustrating when it happens anyway.
In current balance, I'm pretty sure the haste potion is more important than the screaming mandrake for getting good runs, anyway. That one I'm curious about how you'll keep from being essential to get on every good run in the future, since it's kind of boring needing a specific RNG roll on that action (which has to be done pretty late in the run too, because of the no calmness gain side effect)
My point wasn't having 'lucky runs' in general, but having odds so bad there's a good chance you'll just never get the thing, ever. Although, personally, I'm never going to do the RNG and instead savescum every time - I don't care about guides or it being braindead but I do want a consistent experience that doesn't have me resetting or refreshing the page dozens of times.
And yeah, vitality potion makes you invincible to calamities. Haste ensures you don't die to fatigue or hunger (assuming you can find the bed). Either are pretty game-breaking, tbh; anything that breaks balance is still going to do so regardless of if you lock it behind rng.