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.