Minor Annoyances and Suggestions

[90s 3D Render Silos]

So for starters I want to say that I've been really loving the game so far, and being an old hat at Isaac and Gungeon means I've taken to it like a fish to water. But a few things have gotten stuck in my craw as I've started entering the intermediate-expert phase of learning the game so I figured I'd throw out my 2 cents. I realize some of these complaints might just be down to a skill issue but eh, I wanna rant anyway.

1) Boss RNG elements. Now admittedly I know this will have less of an impact in 2.0 because of the change to Mementos, but I wish bosses were just the tiniest bit more consistent. It's very annoying to lose a perfect less because of what I'd call a genuine mistake and more because the boss rolled the dice and did attack A at the wrong time versus attack B without me really being able to know. (Some of these might be addressed in 2.0?)

Denial: Might not actually be RNG at all but I find it weirdly hard to consistently figure out the timing on the player-seeking slam. I've also been faked out before in the small room variant because with so much less lead-in time I confused the seeking slam for a reset to the center of the room. Like for real, I often have way more trouble perfecting Denial compared to Anger just for this one reason.*

Anger: That said, Anger has some annoying aspects. Starting with the obvious RNG of how often and where the summons will end up (and if they'll be cursed). And then the jump towards the player. And also the minor one of falling off the platforms while stomping towards the player. But the biggest issue is definitely the adds. Maybe at least bar them from being cursed if the boss isn't cursed?

Bargaining: Aside from the random-ish bullet spray on a few attacks, this fight for me is more an issue of visual noise and a rub your head and pat your stomach kinda thing. Keeping track of the boss (for aiming purposes), the incoming attacks, AND whether or not I'm standing on ice gets to be a bit overwhelming. Now that I know the trick with the multiple ice spikes attack it's not so bad, but I kinda wish the spikes were a bit less visually tangled around the boss. Everything is also kind of the same color and there's extra noise from the reflective icicles. (Tbf, I might just need to fiddle with my highlight settings.)

Depression: The most obvious of the bunch I think, the seeming option select where the boss can choose to do the spiral bullet spray post big laser when you're on the wall behind instead of the mini-lasers. There's also some inconsistency with the jumping, but it usually feels more reactable so I don't feel as strongly about it.

Depression Alt: This was brought up in a thread elsewhere, but I would definitely like to see chevron indicators on the red tell lines to show which direction the tentacles are erupting from.

Engima: I've had a real frustrating string of runs lately where Enigma loves to teleport to one side of the arena and just stay there the entire fight. There's also definitely some times where the fight gets overwhelming due to rapid switches between moves, usually to and from the clock attack and back again. In general this fight seems to punish short-range builds a lot harder than the other bosses.

Acceptance: Largely feels fair, but timing threading the needle on the spears always feels really iffy to me and might be affected by movement speed bonuses? Also a similar problem to Enigma where sometimes the boss does the same two attacks over and over and if they're the ones that I find easier to dodge the difficulty goes down, and if it's two I struggle with the difficulty goes way up. It feels bad to get stomped by a bad combo of attacks, and it feels bad to feel like I got a noticeably easier fight just because the AI didn't feel like switching things up. From what I've seen secondhand, the true final bosses can also have this problem.

2) I can imagine the answer is probably no and there's entirely fair reasons for it, but would it be possible to split apart the various achivements/unlocks/etc. for perfecting the dual bosses and their areas? Combined with my previous complaint, it always feels particularly bad to get a clean Enigma fight only for Acceptance to go crazy or vis versa. I'm not quite there yet but needing to perfect Last Resort AND Mother AND Regret in order to get full credit seems like a total ordeal or dumb luck with an extremely broken build.

3) *This goes for more than just Denial but am I the only one that really struggles with the vertical red indicators? Depression's lasers can be dodged by tap moving without really needing to think about it, and the laser mages I can just keep on moving, but regardless it never feels like I'm actively dodging those, just hopefully avoiding them.

4) Secret rooms. I like the way each type of secret room can be found, but the need to tag them during combat can lead to a sort of...asymptotic effect where if you're really struggling then they can be too risky/difficult to search for and if you're doing too well they can be hard to find because the room is completed before you wanted it to be. Different gun types and relics add to this problem, making it feel even more outside of my control. Given how many extra pickups you can accrue from them over the course of a run, this feels not entirely unlike the gap between whether or not you can get Mementos in 1.0. I'm sure 2.0's new room system will change the nature of this, but for how much better or worse I'm not sure.

5) I know I'm not the only one who's done this - went out of my way to stay on the frogs' good side for the entirety of level 2, then the final room was a tiny one and I managed to not pre-activate the frog secret, wasting my efforts. Would it be too much to ask that the special secret rooms drop the need for pre-activation if you've previously fulfilled the rest of the requirements? I can already bet I'm going to run into this at least once while toting around the Prism or trying to feed the Loop Lord...

6) With 4&5 in mind, a random idea: Could explosive weapons (Cancer Bomb included) gain a bonus where they can open secret rooms outside of combat without needing to tag them ahead of time? Though I guess this might create a weird balance effect where it would create a soft-removal of their downside by feeding you more health via the guaranteed secret rooms. On a similar note, any thoughts on giving the simpler Celestial weapons more unique interactions/bonuses? Spear is getting buffed in 2.0 but it still seems kind of limited - maybe it immobilizes enemies it stabs? Wand is very basic but effective...and I have no idea what else it could do that wouldn't overlap or be kinda OP like eat enemy bullets. Gemini Saws...just add a bleed proc?

[90s 3D Render Silos]

Addendum, since I just had a few more runs that made these stick out:

One, now that I've gone through it again I think the real thing that affects Anger's adds is a layering problem. You can't really see what the adds are up to if they're overlapping with the boss. This is also partly the problem with Bargaining and I'm starting to wonder if it's actually something the plagues many, many regular room layouts where damage comes from "nowhere" because certain enemies love to crowd on top of each other, rendering many tells obscured if not unseeable.

Two, re: Depression. I remembered the one thing that is funky and feels a bit unfair/RNG with the jumps. Sometimes Depression only jump 3/4s across the room (or in one of my latest runs like 7/8ths weirdly) at which point there's a lot of uncertainty as to what comes next. Often I'll try to take advantage of the gap only for Depression to jump again into the wall. Presumably this is avoidable with a really careful drop to the ground and a dash, but oof. Other times I get caught jumping back over because Depression decided to jump to the other side for another mega laser. (Is the jump distance affected by slow effects? Not sure how I feel about slow effects having a potential downside against bosses for how much it can screw up their patterns...not that this is anything new in the action roguelike space.)

Three, the graphics for the base Shotgun's projectiles seem to be misleading? If they reach full bloom it really, really looks like they should hit more often than they actually do. I first picked up on this with random level 5 enemies, but it's easily replicated even with the training dummy and no relics where purely based on the graphics you can watch the projectiles overlap with the enemy sprites and inflict no damage.

In general as I've played the Shotgun has always felt really off to me and this might be partly why. I'm also not a fan of how unwieldy it can actually be to land shots, especially on smaller/faster enemies, because it feels like there's a mismatch between the firing angle(s), shot speed, and/or maybe where the projectiles originate from. Maybe this is just a me thing though, idk.

[90s 3D Render Silos]

Achievement gripes: Defeating corrupted Enigma/Acceptance doesn't count as defeating a corrupted guardian. Black markets don't count as a shop for the purposes of clearing out 5 shops in a single run, which seems kinda unfair given both the randomness involved and the fact that it's actually harder to clear out a black market than a regular shop.

[90s 3D Render Silos]

Denial (at this point you can tell which attacks were more prominent in my recent fight(s), apologies for the disorganized pile of random complaining): The tells for the two flavors of bullet spray have issues. Usually I can see them well enough, but sometimes it's really hard to pick up on them. Refreshing my memory with some Youtube runs, the main issue quickly revealed itself - status effects tinting the entire boss sprite, which messes with the color contrast on the eyes, as well as phase 2's raging red tint. Though even baseline it feels like the red color used could be bumped up just a few notches to make it stand out more. Damage flashes might also be adding more visual noise and partly obscuring the full "countdown" animation.

Off the top of my head Denial is the only boss that uses in-sprite animations as part of its attack patterns in that way, so I don't think the problem applies to any of the other bosses, though maybe it does to some basic enemy types. Can't say off the top of my head.

[90s 3D Render Silos]

Well here's a minor silly one... When using the high definition font, it turns out fish are measured in ibs rather than lbs. :P

Originally posted by 90s 3D Render Silos:

Three, the graphics for the base Shotgun's projectiles seem to be misleading? If they reach full bloom it really, really looks like they should hit more often than they actually do. I first picked up on this with random level 5 enemies, but it's easily replicated even with the training dummy and no relics where purely based on the graphics you can watch the projectiles overlap with the enemy sprites and inflict no damage.

This seems to affect other stuff as well. The tips of beams from the beam gun also don't seem to quite match their actual hurtbox.

Also I had my first experience with an aggressively bad anti-synergy...I think maybe Laser Diode + Spin Gun? It seemed like it kept the properties of regular bullets so the beams' damage would get "spent" on impact (in this case with Anger's face) but they'd also stick around no longer doing anything until timing out like normal spin gun shots. I don't think it was explicitly bugging out, but it sure felt buggy and unpleasant enough that I actually scrapped the run outright.

[90s 3D Render Silos]

Unless I've missed something the Pisces Rod seems extremely finicky for what it offers. You need:

- A full charge (admittedly not usually hard to have due to how it works).
- For a frankly still hard to spot sparkly to decide to spawn.
- To actually cast the line into the sweet spot or somewhere close enough, which I've found to be tricky to actually do.
- Presumably don't screw up the fishing QTE itself.

All for a dripfeed of random items, albeit good ones. But that's way too many conditionals on top of the opportunity cost of giving up a more immediately beneficial celestial weapon, imo.

Why not allow it to be used anywhere once you build up a charge, with rewards rebalanced to compensate? Or allow fishing anywhere for lesser rewards but keep the sparkly spots for rarer items?

[90s 3D Render Silos]

I seem to have a real regular issue with seeing enemies spawn in, particularly if they're anywhere near my character. I'm assuming it's another layering issue, because all of those graphics are placed behind them. Though with the added issue that my eyes can only focus on so much of the screen at once.

On top of that, it feels like certain enemies have their contact damage activate faster than the actual spawn animation, leading to damage from "nothing".

Finally, damage auras really, really need a few frames of grace time and more visible ranges. In the former case enemies can spawn in (or minibosses can teleport) so fast that damage is nigh unavoidable and completely unpredictable. And in the latter case more often than not I get clipped by single pixels of the aura sneaking through room geometry. Neither feels all that fair. Cramped rooms also massively compound these issues, on top of the RNG nature of minibosses and their possible size.

[90s 3D Render Silos]

Chest chest seems statistically borked. Compounding issue of all but requiring Lil Chest (and/or some crazy high amount of Luck), requires chests to then actually spawn, and then requires whatever invisible RNG roll to make it happen. Except I'm all the way at the tail end of progression which messes with things - more relics in the pool make actually finding Lil Chest a crapshoot (not to mention the later in a run you find it, the worse the odds of a double chest get) and alternate secret room "rewards" like fortune machines seem to interfere with the odds of getting chests to appear. I know I can turn off the latter, but it seems really silly to still be bottlenecked by this when I'm otherwise like 97% done with the game. It really doesn't feel good to be this beholden to RNG, especially when it seems like other systems like prison keys have built-in RNG mitigation, and especially when its controlling a "big" run-level unlock.

Originally posted by 90s 3D Render Silos:

Denial: Might not actually be RNG at all but I find it weirdly hard to consistently figure out the timing on the player-seeking slam. I've also been faked out before in the small room variant because with so much less lead-in time I confused the seeking slam for a reset to the center of the room. Like for real, I often have way more trouble perfecting Denial compared to Anger just for this one reason.

Long since figured this out btw. Despite being essentially the same attack, the timing is distinctly different depending on whether Denial is still on screen or not. Which isn't the most intuitive thing in the world to a new player.