Radiants suck.

[BlaixenU]

(I wrote a majority of this with Cybergrind in mind, but changed my mind later. If I make any cybergrind-related points, that's cause of that) For background, I used to be an extremely active cybergrinder back before the update dropped. I'd run it at least every 3 days and had managed to reach wave 97 on violent through a stroke of luck (however it wasn't as rng-dependent as it is right now). After the update, I stopped caring about the cybergrind as a whole, almost never running it aside from some bursts of motivation every few weeks or months. Despite that, I've reached a personal best of 59 on violent on current cybergrind.

To start off, Radiants as a whole should've never left the whole "niche difficulty boost" phase that it was in before the 'Back to the Cybergrind' update. Their whole premise is to lazily add difficulty in exchange for a really awkward gameplay experience. It isn't just the absurd tankiness, because I've actually enjoyed the health boost mods that exist to a moderate extent, but the combination of faster firing speed forces you into a playstyle where you either sacrifice everything to kill only one enemy, or fly away and play really passively to deal small percentages of damage in short bursts. This, in turn with the fact that faster animations mean that the visual cues of incoming attacks were all screwed into being next to useless, makes it really difficult to approach radiant enemies at all.

It's not just that, as some of the numbers involved in many of the radiant enemies just feels lazy and felt like they had extremely little playtesting at all. Without any 'god strats', swordsmachines, malicious faces, and schisms all feel really tanky for the area of the enemy heirarchy that they inhabit, however with the fact that their health is DOUBLED when becoming radiant, dealing with them becomes even more of a chore. Radiant swordsmachines get a pass since you can easily ledge camp and put them in front of oncoming fire, but for Malicious Faces and Schisms? They are absolutely terrible to deal with. You can't even kill a radiant Schism with an electric railcannon shot. The amount of health that radiant malicious faces and radiant swordsmachines have is the same as normal Mindflayers and normal Ferrymen, which are both enemies entirely designed around being difficult and being the center of attention among the entire arena. Moving along, the numbers of more of the fodder feel absolutely ridiculous. Radiant soldiers and strays have projectiles which are practically just hitscan attacks rather than projectiles, causing some of my own PBs to be cut short because of them. They also have a movement speed buff which makes them impossible to track when they arent shooting you. One of the one enemies I hate the most in it's radiant form is the Drone, which becomes needlessly tanky for how annoying it is. Many of the numbers are just flat 2x buffs with little thought put behind them.

The lack of properly tuned design isn't something that the developers don't know either, because minor patches have come after the cybergrind update that showed that they know some of the numbers are just pure BS. Hideous Masses never spawn radiant in the cybergrind, to the point that not even radiant idols can give them temporary radiance anymore. Drones can only spawn radiant up to a cap of 50%, meanwhile every enemy has a certain wave at which they spawn radiant 100% of the time. This just goes to show how much the developers know yet choose not to mess with the radiants in cybergrind.

Now we move onto the Campaign, where radiants prove to be the most annoying. I myself, someone who's P-ranked P-2 in ULTRAPAIN before the recent buff, struggle to get past even 2-2. The flat buffs felt like no fun and my drive to try and beat every level with forceradiance fell the moment I even started struggling. This is shown in full swing, where even nearly a year after radiants being added, P-2 has YET to be P-ranked, which is huge considering the fact that means that the community's best warriors have all tried their best but threw in the towel at how utter nonsense the challenge is.

Considering all my complaints, before the introduction of radiants I was an avid fan of flat buff mods, so I feel like radiants still have great potential for ULTRAKILL. Mere stat tweaks could be enough to solve the problem as a whole, along with a current bug having been found where Radiant enemies aren't accounted for with the correct weightage in the Cybergrind enemy token system (the system that chooses enemies in the first place). Hopefully radiants CAN be fixed, because my gut says that they have the ability to be really fun for anyone that cares.




...radiant Sisyphus is fun, btw.

[Hook Master]

Radiant modifiers always felt like a poor man's ULTRAKILL MUST DIE that solidified the idea that we were not gonna get it until post launch because of course we aren't

Difficulty in ULTRAKILL has always shown to be the team's weakest area considering they have to account for the normal difficulty curve of a new player playing the entire game through in a standard run and the insane people who grind the game to its core with hundreds of hours to squeeze the most unholy efficiency out of every encounter

These two players make up the majority 50/50 split of the playerbase and radiant was clearly a shoddy attempt to bridge them with "increased difficulty" but nothing that would actually take effort like new enemy placement or types

[pepaso]

i find radiant as just artificially lazy high difficulty. They dont have new attacks or behaviours, just faster and tankier

[Wylie28]

Clownicus payasicus a écrit :

i find radiant as just artificially lazy high difficulty. They dont have new attacks or behaviours, just faster and tankier

Are they like Doom Eternals spirits? I actually really enjoyed those.

[pepaso]

Wylie28 a écrit :

Clownicus payasicus a écrit :

i find radiant as just artificially lazy high difficulty. They dont have new attacks or behaviours, just faster and tankier

Are they like Doom Eternals spirits? I actually really enjoyed those.

Idk I haven’t played doom eternal because it would make my pc a bomb

[Hook Master]

Wylie28 a écrit :

Clownicus payasicus a écrit :

i find radiant as just artificially lazy high difficulty. They dont have new attacks or behaviours, just faster and tankier

Are they like Doom Eternals spirits? I actually really enjoyed those.

Imagine if every enemy in an arena was spirit buffed and there was no post kill window to stop them from going to a different enemy
It's literally just a flat stat increase

Clownicus payasicus a écrit :

Wylie28 a écrit :

Are they like Doom Eternals spirits? I actually really enjoyed those.

Idk I haven’t played doom eternal because it would make my pc a bomb

Unrelated but probably not Eternal was super well optimized on launch so you could probably get away with running it

[Stret]

i agree the radiant implementation is bad but i disagree with many points here

, but the combination of faster firing speed forces you into a playstyle where you either sacrifice everything to kill only one enemy, or fly away and play really passively to deal small percentages of damage in short bursts.

thats something perfectly learnable, you can still gain an agressive playstyle again if you get used to them, even if perhaps not entirely as agressive as before
radiants only genuinely become a problem in this regard for waves 65-70+. My PB is 68 (87 before update) so i personally never had a problem with them after i got used to it

the visual cues of incoming attacks were all screwed into being next to useless,

works on my machine
the only issue is a few specific ridiculous moves like mindflayer slap that become way too fast

malicious faces too tanky

theyre absolutely great, by far the best radiant enemy, its not even close
their health lets you destroy them with a longer shotgun combo, makes nailgun chip more relevant for safety, yet it still makes chargebacking more encouraged
the sharpshooter snipe is still quite dominant

Radiant soldiers and strays have projectiles which are practically just hitscan attacks rather than projectiles,

not even close
not sure about the soldiers but radiant strays are absolutely amazing. if you feel like they are too hard to dodge then you simply need better movement
This is literally the only way a stray will ever be a relevant enemy.
Once again, after i got used to them, they started feeling like much less of a problem. Their sheer movement speed to chase you is a much bigger concern than the projectile speed, the fact they can quickly run from one end of the arena to another is by far what
most hurts the potential for the player to be agressive

P-ranked P-2 in ULTRAPAIN before...

doesnt mean much because ultrapain is (or at least used to be) an absolute joke in the default preset, compared to stuff like higher cg waves

partly agreed on the forceradiance part : Forceradiance p-rank obviously shouldnt be a standard for measuring radiants, because thats not their implementation. But the reason why P-2 forceradiance prank is so hard is mostly because of the aspects of radiants that are poorly designed
But it really doesnt make sense to use forceradiance as an argument against cybergrind at all, because cybergrind radiants dont have the increased damage, which is what makes forceradiance twice as hard when it comes to stuff like p-2. Similary, if forceradiance p-2 kept everything with the same damage, there would definitely be quite a lot of p-ranks by now

[<#76428a>Sharkbilby]

If they didn't have the whole speed buff everything would be fine but anything above 1 speed breaks the game entirely imo

[BlaixenU]

thats something perfectly learnable, you can still gain an agressive playstyle again if you get used to them, even if perhaps not entirely as agressive as before

It's no denying that, with the way that radiants' speed stats have been implemented, trying to predict their attacks has become far less of a strategy compared to simply staying out of range and dealing long range damage. You can either deal a sustained amount of damage without the risk of dying or gamble with death and get close enough for a heal or shotpunch in. It's much more risky to get near the enemy than to actually properly engage with them in the style that ULTRAKILL encourages.

works on my machine
the only issue is a few specific ridiculous moves like mindflayer slap that become way too fast

this isn't a matter of lag
mindflayer slap is undeniably terrible, but some radiant attacks like Cerberus' dash and Virtue insignia become much harder to dodge, especially with the latter's attack speed outpacing normal walk speed (which really does make a difference when you're in tight rooms where you need to make tight turns alot, regardless of the average speed you possess).
The finely tuned visual cue animations become less useful for how quick they play before the attack actually begins.

theyre absolutely great, by far the best radiant enemy, its not even close
their health lets you destroy them with a longer shotgun combo, makes nailgun chip more relevant for safety, yet it still makes chargebacking more encouraged
the sharpshooter snipe is still quite dominant

After some thinking, yeah, among the roster of radiant enemies, surprisingly malicious faces are the ones who possess some level of balance that can still be managed which cant be said for alot of the remaining enemies in the game. If you want to actually kill a radiant malicious face without losing a substantial amount of health, you'll still have to play passively (as you said), and learn either:
1. extremely agile movement while using the shotgun
2. a well timed overpump dash
3. how to chargeback malicious faces (mind you, radiant ones)
4. sharpshooter kills.

The flaw with the first one is that it takes way too much effort to learn in place of something as easy as simply not playing closely, and the remaining options are all instakills, which just nullify the argument of health altogether. Like the Mindflayer, an enemy notorious for constant talks about game balance especially in the cybergrind where more than 2 can spawn at once, the requirement of needing to instakill them to have fun is not an indicator of their good design, but rather an indicator of how desperate the playerbase is to get rid of them so they dont have to deal with them.

not even close
not sure about the soldiers but radiant strays are absolutely amazing. if you feel like they are too hard to dodge then you simply need better movement
This is literally the only way a stray will ever be a relevant enemy.
Once again, after i got used to them, they started feeling like much less of a problem. Their sheer movement speed to chase you is a much bigger concern than the projectile speed, the fact they can quickly run from one end of the arena to another is by far what
most hurts the potential for the player to be agressive

mb here, didn't mean to mention strays, lol. Putting that aside, soldiers genuinely feel way too punishing for how small of a role they possess. normal soldiers occupy the role of not letting you sit in one place for even just a few seconds, whereas radiant soldiers prioritize not letting you slow down in a long radius, The inability to interpret their shotgun attack windup mixed with the speed of their projectile has aided in killing me many times.

partly agreed on the forceradiance part : Forceradiance p-rank obviously shouldnt be a standard for measuring radiants, because thats not their implementation. But the reason why P-2 forceradiance prank is so hard is mostly because of the aspects of radiants that are poorly designed
But it really doesnt make sense to use forceradiance as an argument against cybergrind at all, because cybergrind radiants dont have the increased damage, which is what makes forceradiance twice as hard when it comes to stuff like p-2. Similary, if forceradiance p-2 kept everything with the same damage, there would definitely be quite a lot of p-ranks by now

The whole post was about radiants in the whole game. I think I clarified it before the meat of the post even started, but I don't blame you for forgetting that since most of the post was made with only Cybergrind in mind. I feel that the reason why P-2 forceradiance is so bad is because of the two major rooms it has that combine almost all of the enemies that are hyperbuffed due to radiants. Double Mindflayer room has: Radiant Mindflayers, Radiant Malicious Faces, Radiant Swordsmachines, and Radiant Virtues. Mindflayers and Virtues are dreaded for their speed, meanwhile radiant malicious faces and swordsmachines are dreaded for their health, which creates the biggest challenge for the entire level. And that's not even mentioning the Hideous Mass room. I haven't reached there yet (not in my 120 minutes of trying to get past forceradiance double mif room), but I can only imagine how it is to fight with Radiant Sentries, an unkillable Radiant Hideous Mass, three Radiant Cerberuses, Radiant Swordsmachines, and a Radiant Ferryman. To me, forceradiance serves to practically demonstrate how unbalanced the radiance stats are, with the difficulty of P-2 with the command enabled showing you where some enemies are too strong for their own good.

[pstjames]

dude they should give enemies radiance at 25-50% health and add warnings before they pop radiance like devil may cry dante must die!

[BlaixenU]

dookie fresh a écrit :

dude they should give enemies radiance at 25-50% health and add warnings before they pop radiance like devil may cry dante must die!

This is how it works for Malicious Faces in ULTRAPAIN. Sorta a meh implementation.

[ayin (LC is 70 percent off)]

they could just pull a whiplash and make disabling them a major assist

[Honest]

Skill issue