Someone mentioned that golden whetstones stack additively (e.g. one whetstone = 1.25x dmg. two whetstones = 2.50x damage). And I wanted to see how well it'll work with the assassin dagger and barbells. After tons of tries, this is the result. The dagger is too weak normally. The only way you can pull this off is if you somehow have scaling infinite block as you try to get kills with the dagger. In most games, you die before the dagger ever begins scaling. Finally, by the time endless dungeon starts, the enemy's hp scales faster than the dagger can scale. I might be doing 900 dmg a hit, but enemy has 2000-3000 hp each. The game above I was super lucky in getting 4 whetstones by floor 11.
I'm loving to see the game grow in depth. Kudos to the entire dev team. I think it would be interesting if certain items had interactions with other items. Such as the piggy bank breaking if a heavy item is dropped on it, cute things like that.
I reciprocate TheRealAskz's opinion. Spikes discourage players from whacking enemies with their wand(s) and stacking up damage early each battle.
The trade-off for realism would be balance. This suggestion would make wands more powerful than they are now, and yet, players still manage to exploit them in spite of the downgrades they received recently.
If the developers ever consider excluding wands from spikes then they must add an effect that blocks magic damage (e.g Magic Protection) and unlike dodge which can be decreased by attacking the enemy, it should last until it has used up all its turns.
First off, just wanted to say I’ve been playing since the relic update and this game is incredible with even more awesome potential than I can imagine, thank you so much for all your hard work making and improving it and I look forward to what it will become.
Note that I have no idea how hard it is to program anything into the game and limited sense of game balance so take any of my suggestions purely from the perspective of a player who wants to do fun things. I’m sure you have plans for half my suggestions already, just putting stuff out there.
The new archery is kind of mixed bag, early on it’s really bad because your bag is so small and later it takes up so much space it’s kind of iffy unless you get the now god tier bow relic mouse wood, upon which you no longer care about the rest of your inventory because everything dies horribly, especially if you can get extra actions. As you can see from my bag above this is insane, I had less than half my inventory full, 18 open spaces and this is the second build I’ve ever had it make past the level 15 boss.
My problem with the space hog nature of archery as is is that it seems like it would either be a good weapon for like 3 times the space investment of other equivalent weapons or you have to go all in on it and have very very little room for anything else like I did, which felt really limiting. I’m not really sure how to fix it, if you went static arrow damage without the open space boosts you’d probably have to do something to limit the number of arrows used, maybe disabling nearby arrows or reducing damage by number of arrows or something. The only other thing I can think of is making some items that count as open space for archers or a special archer bag or something weird like that...
Honestly what I expected you were going to do with archery was what you did with magic, arrows with limited shots/round and quivers as free action reloaders, but I can see how going with the same kind of thing again might be boring.
The new structures were great, my brick builds in the past usually ended horribly but the new utility of conduits makes them more viable for mana builds and I do love building my wizards tower. Though it looks like that’s going to be a lot harder with them being rare now. Some kind of brick/structure weapon(maybe something that gets power from surrounding structures along the line of the fish/key/curse swords?) and structures that make things could be fun future options. My dream of a full backpack castle may one day be fulfilled.
Better items that make disposable weapons would be nice. Perhaps make the ethereal weapons and ethereal weapon generators more viable? Most are just way too clunky/space hogging to use. Something like a quiver that makes darts would be cool too.
I swear I get King every wand run I do and die pathetically unless I happen to get the candle relic, why do magic wands trigger spikes? Gets me in cleaver and hatchet/shiv runs too. Better anti-spike options would be great, as a player who loves killing enemies via death from a thousand cuts I hate spikes with a passion.
Speaking of status effects, more reliable ways to remove poison wouldn’t be amiss, one of these days I’d love to actually use these poison ivy I keep finding.
The cauldron nerf makes me sad, my build entirely based on using it to make star potions for a chance of golden whetstones was the most fun I ever had on a run. Insanely luck based but hilarious, one of 2 times I ever made it past the level 15 boss was the first time I ever tried the build. 10 golden whetstones on a jagged blade was insane, never did manage to repeat that when I tried it more but man it was epic. Reliable ways to produce star potions or the new glitch potions could be fun if insane.
Vampiric weapons seem to still suck pretty bad, at least in the 2 aborted attempts I tried. Maybe I’m just not using them right.
Forge events seem heavily weighted towards shield boosts, I’ve gotten shield boost around 20 times as often as weapon boosts, which really sucks cause I don’t like shield builds and usually don’t carry them. Letting some of the shield boosts affect armor would be nice, or at least mean they weren’t useless to non-shield users.
Speaking of events, your nifty mini game events outshine most of your non-mini game events so much I’m immediately disappointed whenever I see a potion/book/wand/fish/archery/whatever seller pop up even on the rare occasion I actually want any of those things. Maybe having them set up like mini shops instead would be more appealing as I almost always get useless garbage even when I do try to use them, wasting money for nothing.
Always keep in mind fun is way more important then anything else including strict game balance. People remember the runs they did crazy things in a lot more than those they did the same basic common sense tactics in.
never used it, but rogue mask seems like it sucks ngl gives 1 haste and 1 weak and it's legendary for some reason i'm pretty sure a literal flower can do better
It does have its use cases. Mainly, Haste Forge event. That +1 haste? Makes it so you do not lose haste buffs on you. Still, the moment you get two haste forges in a run, which is rare, it becomes a moot point. Also, cultist exists.
Defeated the Grandmaster with Archery, which I never thought I'd get to say. For context the middle arrow has a golden whetstone used on it. Also the dodge Buff is a godsend however if an attack does a debuff and damage it does not dodge both, only the attack. Not sure if I just needed 2 stacks, if it's intended or if it's a bug.
Edit: Also when you later add different bags please add an extra long one for archery builds.
I'm gonna say this much, the relics have finally made the ethereal weapons worth using.
Ps: If you manage your way into an endless floor, avoid Sables at all cost. Maybe this would have gone differently if I had the hourglass along the bombstone in my inventory.
After the last patch I played a bit and had to leave when I came back this is what I came back too, I'm on the wrong side of the map and my inventory is all messed up (missing item and wrong spots) but the game acts like normal.
Its amazing !!!!! like slay the spire, but better )
in 5 runs got to boss, endless mode scales stats way much (imho) some items have "create " wich i supose means "create gold" maybe ? pls continue this amazing game p.s. whetstone + shivs = eazy combo
Items can go behind the text that says how many items you can take during combat rewards. Which can be a little bit annoying. Maybe make that text slightly transparent?
Also the ethereal staff now says "Creates in a space that is in this row"
And the piggy bank just says "Creates"
And the "Goilden bow" (is that deliberate?) just says; "When an arrow kills a non summon enemy creates ".
My best build ever: Strategical benefits are the following:
1. Each turn I receive 6 mana automatically: 4 by helmet, taking 1 energy, 2 by coat for free
2. Also, I have 15 mana at the start of the combat, which allows getting +30 dmg on each weapon immediately, which gives the possibility to kill 1-2 enemies before they harm me in any way
3. And fox rapier improves the shield each use, so it helps during the long combats
Nevertheless, tactics also matter, and this build gives great tactical possibilities having 6 mana at the beginning of each turn: I have 3 tactical tools to cover any strategy drawbacks:
1. -12 to spikes & rage
2. +6 to self-regen
3. +24 to armor
4. any combination in the middle
So, it was a great pleasure to play this build and almost no risk at all;)
Early game, it feels bad because it's a limit on growth, and leaving valuable items untaken because you can only have three at a time just seems stupid (From an organizational point of view)
Late game, it feels bad, because it generally stops affect you. The number of times, after the first boss, that i've taken more than 2 items from a fight, I can count on one hand.
Still a work-in-progress! The main thing is that we're still looking to double the number of items in the game so we need to give the player more options after each fight or they won't have very good odds of finding things that work together.
Maybe you could choose more in the beginning and it tapers off?
More at the beginning would be a great compromise. That way you could start your build and being more selective about items would make more sense.
That follows the previous natural progression of unlimited items. By floor 5 or so I've usually committed myself on a build and most items I don't pick up...just healing or synergy items for my build.
Perhaps start with a significantly larger "Selections per Combat", and then have some particularly good items have a drawback that reduces your picks per combat, that way it'll naturally reduce via progress, as their builds solidify.
This is the best run I've had in a good while but with the bomb stone with the blade summoner doing 120 damage then resummon the blade summoner works with 4 energy to do 120 damage 2 times and I was just trying to try out the new item like the conduit which are awesome.
Nice game, though I never bothered to finish it as I, like others, had issues with the saves. Every time I had reached far into the dungeon, the “continue game” threw me back to level 1 again.
Essentially soft-locked in this fight. Couldn't deal enough damage to kill the healer early because my sword was locked to two uses per fight, but if it ever attacked me it would take a ton of damage...but it never attacks.
I will start off by stating that I am very happy to see that my balancing suggestions from earlier were implemented. Firstly, the status conditions can finally abate and eventually run their course which prevents stacking status conditions from being a viable strategy. Furthermore, it made some encounters easier. Secondly, magic is now finite in numbers since you can no longer stack manastones. Now, I can say with confidence that the major balancing issues have been fixed.
With that said, I feel the new relics, which I guess were inspired by other games featuring permadeath, were added too soon to the game. They are completely broken right now and were added right after a patch to fix the pre-existing balancing issues of the game. I know that a game can get stale if nothing new is added to it, but even then I have seen great suggestions in the comments that could have been taken into consideration instead. For example, someone suggested to allow the player to switch from their base backpack to another with unique gimmicks. There could be a backpack that can either increase or decrease the damage output of a weapon depending on where it's placed or one that can improve the effects of foodstuff while reducing the effectiveness of potions. However, the update provided us the relics which can be used in tandem to completely take advantage of the game. First of, there is the comment under mine, but also I managed to combine multiple relics together to create an abomination of a powerhouse, the elephant fossil (I can not remember the real name), the stopwatch, the knives and the empty bottle all provide substantial damage bonuses to my weapons for a small drawback. Thanks to the knives, I could deal over 150 damage on my first turn after which the damage output resets, though the stopwatch also added +3 for the duration of the battle (See build in screenshots below).
Long story short, I'm not that much of a fan of the relics. If anything, the treasure chest that you can open right after beating the boss should have featured legendary items instead of the run-of-the-mill common that I can find casually in every chest of the dungeon.
Another problem to note is there are items that are worse than others, this is made blatantly evident with the club, the spiky club (Not to be confused with the spiked club) and the mace. The regular club is the best weapon out of the 3 while the mace is the worst one out of the 3. The regular club deals 7 damage points and adds 1 weak to the chosen enemy, the spiky club deals 7 damage points and adds 1 slow to the enemy, and the mace deals 10 damage points and adds both 1 weak and 1 slow to the enemy at the cost of 2 energy.
From worst to best, the mace is bad simply because you can usually only use it once per turn due to its energy cost, given it's 2 while Purse without any energy item has 3 energies to begin with. Even then, the damage does not add up, it adds down. If you somehow manage to use the mace twice, it deals a total of 20 damage points, but both the club and spiky club if used 4 times deal 28 damage points. Although in my opinion that would not make the mace a good item, I think the least it could have is a base damage output of 14 to match with the club and spiky club. As for the club and spiky club, it comes down to the status conditions. Currently, and since it is a roguelite, weak is better because it ensures you do not take too much damage from enemies while allowing Purse to dispose of them at a decent pace. Slow reduces the armor that enemies put on, but most enemies don't ever shield up and all the ones that do, except for the Armadillo, only defend themselves every pair of turns or every 3 turns, so the player will always have the enemy open for an onslaught. Compared to the spiky club, the club is useful on every enemy in the game, except the Snake and the Wizard Frog.
To this day, I still have yet to understand the meaning of the pick and the bricks. The pick is a weapon with a base damage of 0 that gets +1 if a gem is near it, but gems are so rare, so I could never use it. If you compare it to the cursed blade (I'm sure the name is different), the key sword and the fish sword anyone would quickly realize how bad the pick is, at the very least the aforementioned weapons have a base damage output of 8 or 7. As a weapon, it is even more insulting than the mace. If I'm being honest, players use a pickaxe to mine diamonds in Minecraft: why not give it a base power of 4 and whenever Purse kills an enemy with it you get a rare gem in exchange? As for the bricks, why would I use them over armor pieces? I guess they only become useful once you get your hand on the berrserker's ring because this gets disabled if any armor of shield item is in Purse's inventory, but given I have seen it a total of 4 or 5 times across all my runs this makes the bricks pretty much pointless.
Aside of new balancing issues from the relics, I was pleasantly surprised of all the additions. The forge is a fantastic idea that allows the player to improve existing items, the chance guy who operates the roulette and the cards minigame lets the player get new items or get trolled by a curse. The trader allows the player to exchange an item for another item of equal rarity, if the player has a useless legendary item they can try to trade it off for another legendary item and last but not least, I encountered an optional miniboss who you can fight to get rare items from. Personally, I fought him because I was short on money for the healer and I had already defeated all the enemies on the map, I did not take any of the drops other than his money yeah, the fox rapier sounded like a pretty cool weapon, shame. Existing events have been recontextualized to each feature a NPC, the healer is a porcupine for example. Before that, the only event with a friendly NPC was the shop with the toad.
This patch made the dungeon feel less empty and more interesting to explore, I have no idea on which quirky character will show up next on a random chance if I ever step on a random event spot. That is definitely a plus in my book!
Lots of good advice! I think relics help structure your run and force you to make large decisions about what you want to do. I do think they need a lot more balancing and it is definitely possible to find a few that are too strong. Also, It is definitely true that different backpacks and modifiers would be a great addition! I hope to implement them once we start working on the metagame.
Also I agree that the PickAxe is unfortunately hated. It will also be updated in tonight's patch!
Despite the hotfix it is still possible to go infinite with shield spirit and elven wood. If you have >3 bows and a coal then you can use the bows with the shield, then use the coal to refresh them, giving you infinite energy.
This game is incredible! I love how interesting the item placement in the backpack becomes. It’s a fun puzzle trying to work out how to get the best of all items.
and what is the name names of the merchent, healer, archer, forger, suspishoise trader, and how does her backpack expand and does she have brothers and sisters, and if so I would like to see games of them.
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The shady trader can trade you exactly the same item, which seems odd.
ya but, at least he did not give you a worse item
i really like the game. didn't encounter any bugs.
Description
on the Hawkeye's Bow is unfinished/ missing text.
Does anyone know what it does?
Sorry! Seems like a glitch related to the wheel!
I still don't understand what makes it different from a regular bow.
It fires arrows from 2 sides, letting you stack them more/different from usual.
Someone mentioned that golden whetstones stack additively (e.g. one whetstone = 1.25x dmg. two whetstones = 2.50x damage). And I wanted to see how well it'll work with the assassin dagger and barbells. After tons of tries, this is the result. The dagger is too weak normally. The only way you can pull this off is if you somehow have scaling infinite block as you try to get kills with the dagger. In most games, you die before the dagger ever begins scaling. Finally, by the time endless dungeon starts, the enemy's hp scales faster than the dagger can scale. I might be doing 900 dmg a hit, but enemy has 2000-3000 hp each. The game above I was super lucky in getting 4 whetstones by floor 11.
I'm loving to see the game grow in depth. Kudos to the entire dev team. I think it would be interesting if certain items had interactions with other items. Such as the piggy bank breaking if a heavy item is dropped on it, cute things like that.
How deep is the dungeon? And how much time, approx., does it take to finish the game? Asking as the game won’t let me save my progress.
at the moment the core run is 9 floors. Which can take 30 minutes to an hour to complete
Thx for reply.
If bows aren't affected by spikes, I feel like wands shouldn't be either.
no
I agree. I mean unless your beating them with the wand...
I reciprocate TheRealAskz's opinion. Spikes discourage players from whacking enemies with their wand(s) and stacking up damage early each battle.
The trade-off for realism would be balance. This suggestion would make wands more powerful than they are now, and yet, players still manage to exploit them in spite of the downgrades they received recently.
If the developers ever consider excluding wands from spikes then they must add an effect that blocks magic damage (e.g Magic Protection) and unlike dodge which can be decreased by attacking the enemy, it should last until it has used up all its turns.
Review/Comments/Recommendations
First off, just wanted to say I’ve been playing since the relic update and this game is incredible with even more awesome potential than I can imagine, thank you so much for all your hard work making and improving it and I look forward to what it will become.
Note that I have no idea how hard it is to program anything into the game and limited sense of game balance so take any of my suggestions purely from the perspective of a player who wants to do fun things. I’m sure you have plans for half my suggestions already, just putting stuff out there.
The new archery is kind of mixed bag, early on it’s really bad because your bag is so small and later it takes up so much space it’s kind of iffy unless you get the now god tier bow relic mouse wood, upon which you no longer care about the rest of your inventory because everything dies horribly, especially if you can get extra actions. As you can see from my bag above this is insane, I had less than half my inventory full, 18 open spaces and this is the second build I’ve ever had it make past the level 15 boss.
My problem with the space hog nature of archery as is is that it seems like it would either be a good weapon for like 3 times the space investment of other equivalent weapons or you have to go all in on it and have very very little room for anything else like I did, which felt really limiting. I’m not really sure how to fix it, if you went static arrow damage without the open space boosts you’d probably have to do something to limit the number of arrows used, maybe disabling nearby arrows or reducing damage by number of arrows or something. The only other thing I can think of is making some items that count as open space for archers or a special archer bag or something weird like that...
Honestly what I expected you were going to do with archery was what you did with magic, arrows with limited shots/round and quivers as free action reloaders, but I can see how going with the same kind of thing again might be boring.
The new structures were great, my brick builds in the past usually ended horribly but the new utility of conduits makes them more viable for mana builds and I do love building my wizards tower. Though it looks like that’s going to be a lot harder with them being rare now. Some kind of brick/structure weapon(maybe something that gets power from surrounding structures along the line of the fish/key/curse swords?) and structures that make things could be fun future options. My dream of a full backpack castle may one day be fulfilled.
Better items that make disposable weapons would be nice. Perhaps make the ethereal weapons and ethereal weapon generators more viable? Most are just way too clunky/space hogging to use. Something like a quiver that makes darts would be cool too.
I swear I get King every wand run I do and die pathetically unless I happen to get the candle relic, why do magic wands trigger spikes? Gets me in cleaver and hatchet/shiv runs too. Better anti-spike options would be great, as a player who loves killing enemies via death from a thousand cuts I hate spikes with a passion.
Speaking of status effects, more reliable ways to remove poison wouldn’t be amiss, one of these days I’d love to actually use these poison ivy I keep finding.
The cauldron nerf makes me sad, my build entirely based on using it to make star potions for a chance of golden whetstones was the most fun I ever had on a run. Insanely luck based but hilarious, one of 2 times I ever made it past the level 15 boss was the first time I ever tried the build. 10 golden whetstones on a jagged blade was insane, never did manage to repeat that when I tried it more but man it was epic. Reliable ways to produce star potions or the new glitch potions could be fun if insane.
Vampiric weapons seem to still suck pretty bad, at least in the 2 aborted attempts I tried. Maybe I’m just not using them right.
Forge events seem heavily weighted towards shield boosts, I’ve gotten shield boost around 20 times as often as weapon boosts, which really sucks cause I don’t like shield builds and usually don’t carry them. Letting some of the shield boosts affect armor would be nice, or at least mean they weren’t useless to non-shield users.
Speaking of events, your nifty mini game events outshine most of your non-mini game events so much I’m immediately disappointed whenever I see a potion/book/wand/fish/archery/whatever seller pop up even on the rare occasion I actually want any of those things. Maybe having them set up like mini shops instead would be more appealing as I almost always get useless garbage even when I do try to use them, wasting money for nothing.
Always keep in mind fun is way more important then anything else including strict game balance. People remember the runs they did crazy things in a lot more than those they did the same basic common sense tactics in.
The tasty fly? does it have any purpose other than making shure i dont see any shops?
it halves the price of things in shops forever if you give it to a shop
thank you. now i just need to find a shop and a fly
good luck with that i'm nearing endless final boss and i haven't found a shop
never used it, but rogue mask seems like it sucks ngl
gives 1 haste and 1 weak and it's legendary for some reason
i'm pretty sure a literal flower can do better
THANK YOU IT FREAKING SUCKS
it didn't suck before effect nerf and its nerf it didn't give weak
It does have its use cases. Mainly, Haste Forge event. That +1 haste? Makes it so you do not lose haste buffs on you. Still, the moment you get two haste forges in a run, which is rare, it becomes a moot point.
Also, cultist exists.
Haste forges make sense, but I don't think +1 haste will combat 4 slow, and especially not 4 weak, since you'll have it forever if you don't clear it
I don't think this is intened behavior, but when you give an arrow vampiric damage the vampiric damage will trigger thorns.
It might be intentional. If Vampiric sword and axe did not trigger on spikes, it would lead to inconsistencies.
finally finished the game for the first time :D
Defeated the Grandmaster with Archery, which I never thought I'd get to say. For context the middle arrow has a golden whetstone used on it. Also the dodge Buff is a godsend however if an attack does a debuff and damage it does not dodge both, only the attack. Not sure if I just needed 2 stacks, if it's intended or if it's a bug.
Edit: Also when you later add different bags please add an extra long one for archery builds.
holy shot, big brain
Hey I commented last week about being able to download the game and I'm just curious how that is going?
We hope to have information next week! We have been working nonstop but theres just so much behind the scenes. Hope you're enjoying the web builds!
if you have the itch.io app you can download it.
there’s an app??
There is some text missing from the Ethereal Staff. It does not say what it creates.
I'm gonna say this much, the relics have finally made the ethereal weapons worth using.
Ps: If you manage your way into an endless floor, avoid Sables at all cost. Maybe this would have gone differently if I had the hourglass along the bombstone in my inventory.
I tried reloading many times but it's stuck like this.
i got the shield gives haste and my shives did 50 damage each beat the boss damageless
Its amazing !!!!!
like slay the spire, but better )
in 5 runs got to boss, endless mode scales stats way much (imho)
some items have "create " wich i supose means "create gold" maybe ?
pls continue this amazing game
p.s.
whetstone + shivs = eazy combo
Items can go behind the text that says how many items you can take during combat rewards. Which can be a little bit annoying. Maybe make that text slightly transparent?
Also the ethereal staff now says "Creates in a space that is in this row"
And the piggy bank just says "Creates"
And the "Goilden bow" (is that deliberate?) just says; "When an arrow kills a non summon enemy creates ".
Ok, I think this is just a universal issue now...
My best build ever:
Strategical benefits are the following:
1. Each turn I receive 6 mana automatically: 4 by helmet, taking 1 energy, 2 by coat for free
2. Also, I have 15 mana at the start of the combat, which allows getting +30 dmg on each weapon immediately, which gives the possibility to kill 1-2 enemies before they harm me in any way
3. And fox rapier improves the shield each use, so it helps during the long combats
Nevertheless, tactics also matter, and this build gives great tactical possibilities having 6 mana at the beginning of each turn: I have 3 tactical tools to cover any strategy drawbacks:
1. -12 to spikes & rage
2. +6 to self-regen
3. +24 to armor
4. any combination in the middle
So, it was a great pleasure to play this build and almost no risk at all;)
after moving the character everything is back to normal, and I was 65 hp ok, I got a real heart attack
after loading the game from the save point, hp reset to the initial value, before saving I had 55 hp and now I only have 40!
help me
a sry that was just updated
make a downloadable version, because I have recently deleted my cookies and the record has been deleted
Limiting to 3 items per fight is... bad.
Early game, it feels bad because it's a limit on growth, and leaving valuable items untaken because you can only have three at a time just seems stupid (From an organizational point of view)
Late game, it feels bad, because it generally stops affect you. The number of times, after the first boss, that i've taken more than 2 items from a fight, I can count on one hand.
Still a work-in-progress! The main thing is that we're still looking to double the number of items in the game so we need to give the player more options after each fight or they won't have very good odds of finding things that work together.
Maybe you could choose more in the beginning and it tapers off?
More at the beginning would be a great compromise. That way you could start your build and being more selective about items would make more sense.
That follows the previous natural progression of unlimited items. By floor 5 or so I've usually committed myself on a build and most items I don't pick up...just healing or synergy items for my build.
Perhaps start with a significantly larger "Selections per Combat", and then have some particularly good items have a drawback that reduces your picks per combat, that way it'll naturally reduce via progress, as their builds solidify.
This is the best run I've had in a good while but with the bomb stone with the blade summoner doing 120 damage then resummon the blade summoner works with 4 energy to do 120 damage 2 times and I was just trying to try out the new item like the conduit which are awesome.
Nice game, though I never bothered to finish it as I, like others, had issues with the saves. Every time I had reached far into the dungeon, the “continue game” threw me back to level 1 again.
Essentially soft-locked in this fight. Couldn't deal enough damage to kill the healer early because my sword was locked to two uses per fight, but if it ever attacked me it would take a ton of damage...but it never attacks.
I ran into the same issue with a pacifist build and the Frog Wizard. They never attack me and eventually I die to poison.
I guess I’m forced to reload and try for a weapon to clear this floor, and I just got the pacifist ring, too. :(
Just sitting here–sharpening my club–like a psychopath.
This is a review of the latest patch.
I will start off by stating that I am very happy to see that my balancing suggestions from earlier were implemented. Firstly, the status conditions can finally abate and eventually run their course which prevents stacking status conditions from being a viable strategy. Furthermore, it made some encounters easier. Secondly, magic is now finite in numbers since you can no longer stack manastones. Now, I can say with confidence that the major balancing issues have been fixed.
With that said, I feel the new relics, which I guess were inspired by other games featuring permadeath, were added too soon to the game. They are completely broken right now and were added right after a patch to fix the pre-existing balancing issues of the game. I know that a game can get stale if nothing new is added to it, but even then I have seen great suggestions in the comments that could have been taken into consideration instead. For example, someone suggested to allow the player to switch from their base backpack to another with unique gimmicks. There could be a backpack that can either increase or decrease the damage output of a weapon depending on where it's placed or one that can improve the effects of foodstuff while reducing the effectiveness of potions. However, the update provided us the relics which can be used in tandem to completely take advantage of the game. First of, there is the comment under mine, but also I managed to combine multiple relics together to create an abomination of a powerhouse, the elephant fossil (I can not remember the real name), the stopwatch, the knives and the empty bottle all provide substantial damage bonuses to my weapons for a small drawback. Thanks to the knives, I could deal over 150 damage on my first turn after which the damage output resets, though the stopwatch also added +3 for the duration of the battle (See build in screenshots below).
Long story short, I'm not that much of a fan of the relics. If anything, the treasure chest that you can open right after beating the boss should have featured legendary items instead of the run-of-the-mill common that I can find casually in every chest of the dungeon.
Another problem to note is there are items that are worse than others, this is made blatantly evident with the club, the spiky club (Not to be confused with the spiked club) and the mace. The regular club is the best weapon out of the 3 while the mace is the worst one out of the 3. The regular club deals 7 damage points and adds 1 weak to the chosen enemy, the spiky club deals 7 damage points and adds 1 slow to the enemy, and the mace deals 10 damage points and adds both 1 weak and 1 slow to the enemy at the cost of 2 energy.
From worst to best, the mace is bad simply because you can usually only use it once per turn due to its energy cost, given it's 2 while Purse without any energy item has 3 energies to begin with. Even then, the damage does not add up, it adds down. If you somehow manage to use the mace twice, it deals a total of 20 damage points, but both the club and spiky club if used 4 times deal 28 damage points. Although in my opinion that would not make the mace a good item, I think the least it could have is a base damage output of 14 to match with the club and spiky club. As for the club and spiky club, it comes down to the status conditions. Currently, and since it is a roguelite, weak is better because it ensures you do not take too much damage from enemies while allowing Purse to dispose of them at a decent pace. Slow reduces the armor that enemies put on, but most enemies don't ever shield up and all the ones that do, except for the Armadillo, only defend themselves every pair of turns or every 3 turns, so the player will always have the enemy open for an onslaught. Compared to the spiky club, the club is useful on every enemy in the game, except the Snake and the Wizard Frog.
To this day, I still have yet to understand the meaning of the pick and the bricks. The pick is a weapon with a base damage of 0 that gets +1 if a gem is near it, but gems are so rare, so I could never use it. If you compare it to the cursed blade (I'm sure the name is different), the key sword and the fish sword anyone would quickly realize how bad the pick is, at the very least the aforementioned weapons have a base damage output of 8 or 7. As a weapon, it is even more insulting than the mace. If I'm being honest, players use a pickaxe to mine diamonds in Minecraft: why not give it a base power of 4 and whenever Purse kills an enemy with it you get a rare gem in exchange? As for the bricks, why would I use them over armor pieces? I guess they only become useful once you get your hand on the berrserker's ring because this gets disabled if any armor of shield item is in Purse's inventory, but given I have seen it a total of 4 or 5 times across all my runs this makes the bricks pretty much pointless.
Aside of new balancing issues from the relics, I was pleasantly surprised of all the additions. The forge is a fantastic idea that allows the player to improve existing items, the chance guy who operates the roulette and the cards minigame lets the player get new items or get trolled by a curse. The trader allows the player to exchange an item for another item of equal rarity, if the player has a useless legendary item they can try to trade it off for another legendary item and last but not least, I encountered an optional miniboss who you can fight to get rare items from. Personally, I fought him because I was short on money for the healer and I had already defeated all the enemies on the map, I did not take any of the drops other than his money yeah, the fox rapier sounded like a pretty cool weapon, shame. Existing events have been recontextualized to each feature a NPC, the healer is a porcupine for example. Before that, the only event with a friendly NPC was the shop with the toad.
This patch made the dungeon feel less empty and more interesting to explore, I have no idea on which quirky character will show up next on a random chance if I ever step on a random event spot. That is definitely a plus in my book!
Lots of good advice! I think relics help structure your run and force you to make large decisions about what you want to do. I do think they need a lot more balancing and it is definitely possible to find a few that are too strong. Also, It is definitely true that different backpacks and modifiers would be a great addition! I hope to implement them once we start working on the metagame.
Also I agree that the PickAxe is unfortunately hated. It will also be updated in tonight's patch!
This game is incredibly fun, would reccomend. there are some issues with saves not working but these dont annoy me too much.
Despite the hotfix it is still possible to go infinite with shield spirit and elven wood. If you have >3 bows and a coal then you can use the bows with the shield, then use the coal to refresh them, giving you infinite energy.
Bows will be changed in an update later today!
It kinda works on android
Very fun game!
This game is incredible! I love how interesting the item placement in the backpack becomes. It’s a fun puzzle trying to work out how to get the best of all items.
Are we able to override saves? I keep get thrown back to an older save despite saving multiple times :/
and what is the name names of the merchent, healer, archer, forger, suspishoise trader, and how does her backpack expand and does she have brothers and sisters, and if so I would like to see games of them.
can you add more bows and arrows