Shattered Pixel
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Bombs and Identification | Patreon Poll #57
🕑 Added 2024-09-16 18:33:06 +0000 UTCHey Patrons! No, sorry, this is not a poll about bringing back bomb IDing, but rather about some followup changes to soften the blow a bit.
I’m going to gauge your guys interest on two changes in particular, I’d like to know whether you want them at all, and whether you’d like them ASAP (i.e. in a v2.5 patch). There are 3 choice for each of the two proposals based on that.
The results of this poll will help me determine which changes to make, and whether to make them in a patch for v2.5 or a future update.
Poll Options
Please vote for all the options that you like, not just for your one favourite! I allow multiple votes as it means that a higher proportion of people will end up voting for the winning choice. Note however that multiple choice polls have been finnicky on Patreon for a while, so you may need to refresh the page/app to verify your choices or vote for multiple options.
All patrons are encouraged to share their opinion by commenting and voting, but only the votes from Golden+ Supporters are counted when determining a poll winner. Votes from Shattered Supporters are worth double!
Stones of Detect Magic: A replacement for stones of disarming, these stones would instead be more about identification as a counterpart to the scroll of Remove Curse used to create them. These stones are usable on equipment items, and tell you whether they are being affected by positive and/or negative magic. This would effectively ID their curse state, and also tell you if the item is upgraded/enchanted. This provides a lot of the same value as scrolls of remove curse, with the added utility of soft-IDing weapon upgrades, but doesn’t help you actually remove any curses you detect.
I do appreciate that losing stones of disarming is unfortunate here, but I think it’s a reasonable trade-off when there are already so many ways to disarm traps, and relatively few ways to identify equipment. I also do see how these stones are in many ways equivalent to a scroll of ID, but I’m fine with that as Remove Curse is a more valuable and less common scroll to begin with, and experienced players very often use up scrolls of ID to produce different items via alchemy anyway.
Those of you who played back in v0.7.0 might recall that this is a bit similar to the old stone of detect curse, which I ended up removing for being strictly worse than the remove curse scroll that creates them. My hope here is that the soft upgrade IDing turns the stones into more of a sidegrade, while keeping them in the same wheelhouse as scroll of remove curse. It also means they serve a very similar purpose to the now-removed bomb IDing exploit.
Bomb Buffs: Bombs themselves are also pretty lackluster, especially now for experienced players. Previously I’ve been hesitant to over-buff them and let players do too much burst damage, but that hasn’t really been a problem in Shattered’s design for a while now. Here are some things I’m considering:
Right away, bombs bouncing when thrown right on a character is going to go. This mechanic specifically is a leftover from balancing the bomb vs. the Tengu fight allll the way back in v0.2.4. Tengu is a lot less vulnerable to burst damage now, so there’s no reason to keep that mechanic.
I also think I can make a pretty straight damage buff to bombs, increasing their max damage by 50%, which would be a 25% boost to their damage on average. Again, this is largely possible because burst damage just isn’t as effective as it used to be.
I also think I could make bomb AOEs more effective, improving their use-case against multiple targets. This would at least mean that bombs deal their full damage in their 3x3 effect (currently they do -33% dmg outside of the center).
Crafted bombs would need to be evaluated case-by-case, but I expect that they could largely benefit from all these changes too, meaning more damage and more general AOE effectivess. I’d also be interested in possible handing out some outright buffs to some crafted bombs while I’m here, but no promises on that just yet.
Comments
Shattered Pixel
Those trap filled + chest rooms are mainly intended to be solved with a potion of levitation, which is guaranteed to spawn on the same floor. Especially early on the traps can often be disarmed with basically anything as well.
Robert Heinig
Then I must have missed some of those ways. I thought the mapgen was consciously tweaked to only gen trap-filled+chest rooms that can be solved with just one of the stones by aiming next to a wall - with very few exceptions. Now - Storm Clouds more than twice as expensive, energy-wise (but is was fun back when you had to find a gap in one of the trap-dense-gold rooms with nonsurvivable traps) . Blink way more expensive if you have to sacrifice the only TP scroll you're guaranteed (at least I believe there's a mechanism to guarantee one up to shop 2). Or hope for loot you won't be guaranteed every runthrough. Or set them off and bear it - real fun for Disintegration or Grim which you can't goad to hit another, closer actor. I may misremember some stuff, but the Stone of Disarming was a standard staple for every run and came right after augment and enchant in stones importance... To me. Oh well, I'll cope. Eventually. Maybe it's a blessing to goad me into more biking even in bad weather... 🤪
Shattered Pixel
Sorry to hear you missed that, but were stones of disarming that important to you? Part of the reason why I decided to make this change is that they felt fairly redundant to me, as there are already lots of ways to handle traps, both with alchemy recipes and in general.
Robert Heinig
Now that 2.5.3 is out I'm appalled I missed the "replaces disarming" bit here. Ouch. I think I'll revert to 2.5.2...
BlackwingRed
Ah ok cool!
Shattered Pixel
No I don't think I'm going to have the stones fully identify an item, which would be necessary to show the number of upgrades,
allowiscous
Followup question. Will it show the amount of upgrades like when you transmute an upgraded ring?
Acedion
Thanks for the lengthy explanation. Maybe I'm biased, because I hardly ever use the stones of intuition (except for confirming an almost certain diagnosis of potion type) and then boil them down for alchemy. It's also puzzling, why they give the same 3 charges after getting used once (I would lower this). There are many other small things that are a bit strange to me (how does the Huntress use her bow from inventory? It's an artifact and should use an artifact slot; shields are not weapons, should be usable as artifacts etc.) but let's keep this just about the stones ;) Thanks once again for all your hard work on this small but awesome game.
Shattered Pixel
It really isn't. A scroll of Identification is an item of its own, and currently holds onto some unique use vs. the stone of intuition and the scroll of divination, which are two items you can directly convert a scroll of ID into. If I tacked this functionality onto intuition stones then there would be little reason to ever use scrolls of ID directly. By having them be created by remove curse scrolls they compete with different items, and I don't think these stones will make RC or antimagic useless in the same way. It's also worth noting that by making you pick between using inution to ID consumables or equipment, it would go against one of the points of this change in improving the general availability of identification.
Shattered Pixel
yes they'd be a normal runestone and part of loot pools
Shattered Pixel
Not 100% decided yet but probably I would just have it curse-ID the item so the player doesn't have too much to keep track of, which would show the curse type.
BlackwingRed
I do like the stone of detect magic idea myself. Will it detect the specific curse or just say it's cursed?
Acedion
When you add the function to a separate item (stone of detect magic), that's just as easy to get as the stone of intuition, the end result is the same, just overall more confusing.
Shattered Pixel
I'm afraid that's sort of the point of those stones, you're trading in the ability to ID equipment for the ability (dependent on luck/skill) to ID up to 4 consumables. If intuition could also soft-ID equipment (even with just 2 uses) then there'd be no reason to ever use plain scrolls of identification.
allowiscous
Stones of Detect Magic was what I was hoping for. Being able to identify curses and upgrades before hand is a valuable tool to have available.
Veek
I’m assuming these potential new stones will still be present in runestone rooms / other sources which can make finding these rooms a bit more exciting
Acedion
I think that instead of replacing the stone of disarming you should add the planned functionality of the stone of detect magic to the stone of intuition, as it is useless for weapon/armor identification right now.
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