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For example, poison can only be countered with healing, but this game was made to intentionally make healing a scarcity.
If only dodging the poison was an option because that would make sense.
Eventually, that will be fixed since the developer has planned to fix the curse mechanic.
There's providing feedback and then there's whining, which are two different things. Guess which the OP was doing...
A heal wand and manastone are pretty easy to come by and counters poison easily with the new 2 regen per mana ratio, at a cost of only 3-4 inventory slots.
Not to mention that to topple it off, the player needs to wait a turn to receive the healing effect from the wand and there were times where my build was not meant to wait around because it was a high damage build with nothing to protect me, but thankfully by that point I usually find another source of healing.
In fact, I am complaining about not being able to find that item but, there were times where I would never find a single consumable when I needed it the most, so I could not rely on that either, and most of them are Common. That'd not the first time the rng royally screws me over either, I already complained about never finding the Letter with one character while I did for the other three.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1970580/discussions/0/3362523432284920481/
Then, there's the problem that given the past record of the developer, it is gonna be nerfed subtantially eventually, and when given the right opportunity. Every healing item so far received the same treatment:
*The Seasoning used to be Common, it became Rare.
*The Gemstone Heart used to be Rare, but it became Legendary and it was changed to no longer heal the player when an adjacent weapon is used, instead it does it whenever a non-summoned enemy is killed.
*The Splint used to be Rare (Which at the time was strange since it was a worse version of the Gemstone Heart), however, it became Legendary.
And that's not all! A few healing items were silently retired, notably the red healing potion and the Vampiric Gemstone.
Every other healing item, that is not a consumable like the Bandages and the Vampiric Blade, have a rarity starting at Uncommon and that's where the My First Wand is an outlier. Because of this, it is gonna be nerfed, I am certain of it and that worries me.
Currently, this item, this single item won me about 4 out of 5 games.
If a single item is almost a necessity to win a game, then there is a problem with the game's balance, and that problem mainly stems from the poison effect as mentioned earlier because it is impossible to prevent it (And good luck getting a Cleansing Rag or a Venom Sword, I heard one was Rare, the other Legendary) and it is nearly impossible to heal between fights. Ostensibly, healers are scarce and sometimes locked behind doors, but since the newest update it is no longer possible to tell whether there is a healer behind a gate or not because they are hidden behind a fog of war.
That's the crux of my comment. My issue concerns the way the poison was implemented into the game, and the fact that healing is intentionally a scarcity due in part due to the amount of healing items that are rare or legendary and in part due to the way the rng works. So, even after 20 fights and 3 floors you are never guaranteed a Bluefin, a beer or a My First Wand.
If you find healing (outside of mfw, there's vampire knife, vampire axe, toilet paper, heart gem, and most importantly the regen ring upgrade - one of the best forges in the game), then poison shouldn't kill you as long as you sequence your fights to do avoid multiple hard fights in a row.
If you don't find healing, try to burst the poison enemies down before they poison you. Take burst-focused relics like hourglass and tusk (easily worth their downsides), build for overwhelming burst damage, etc. I think 2 or 3 of my last 10 runs killed the hard 5 final boss on turn 1, so it is doable.
Otherwise, you can use consumables to either heal back the lost HP or do more damage. Poison enemies only have around 120-150 HP, a few extra points of energy at the right moment can save you a ton of health.
I am not sure whether we are on the same page. The main reason why the wand is so good is because it provides healing, so it is far inferior to healing items with better healing properties, and that tend to take much less space at the same time. For example, I would rather use the Regenerative Whetstone over the My First Wand.
However, the problem I highlighted in this comment was the fact that healing is almost mandatory to win - every single playthrough where I did not need to heal, I had a build with a high damage-per-energy ratio. The only 2 times this ever occurred was once with the Halberd, the Letter and some gemstones and once when I was playing the gamemode "Ninja Bird". I swear the shurikens really deserve a nerf and any accessory associated with them should too. A possible hypothetical would be Cleavers, but I'm never lucky enough to get a strong Cleaver build running.
This fact highlights another problem with the way the balance-items-based-on-analytics method that Jas makes use of. Because healing is nearly mandatory to win, healing items are bound to appear in players' backpack after they defeat the final boss all the time and thus the developer must think the items are overpowered, thus he nerfs them, and this is just so silly.
Don't just take it from me. I have seen so many people complain about the poison ailment (or dying to spikes, but these ones were just mad) that it is becoming bothersome in itself. I have not written any of this on my positive review either because many more people did it before, only it was formulated differently. Moreover, they call the game unfair and while I do not agree with that, I understand why they think it is.
Take your original thought on paragraph 2, then try to beat the game in Hard 5 or Unfair without ever healing at all, healing is banned. Unless, you manage to find a Pickaxe and an Archangel armor early, you are never gonna win.
Take it from me who has 130 hours of playtime on record and played the Itch.io version before it was on Steam.
Concerning what you said on paragraph 3, what if I end up fighting a Snake that is being guarded by 3 Hare defenders? How do I "burst the poison enemies" if it takes a minimum of 1 energy just to kill one of these goofy rabbits? How do I kill the snake with my Jagged Sword/Pickaxe/Vorpal Blade before I get myself poisoned?
This is why I said on another thread that the Halberd was exponentially more powerful than any other item in the game because it is AoE and unlike its counterparts (Lance, Elder Staff), it has no major drawback, but I digress.
And you also forgot that I mentioned on my reply that on occasions I will never find consumables for no apparent reason whatsoever.
Yeah, good job replying while not understanding what I was trying to say.
I do not think anyone including I would complain if the game had either one of these things: An item or the ability to prevent poison that is properly accessible (maybe shielding prevents poison? Or, at least, I want the dodge effect to do this for a start), or being given the possibility to heal between fights as to reduce the cost of life from misplay and/or unavoidable damage.
I am fine if a game is difficult, but fair. If I make a mistake and die from it then that was entirely my fault, nothing else to say about that and I will personally call out anyone who complains about the game's difficult for the sake of it being difficult. This is why I love the starting area, I start with a Wooden Sword, food and a Rough Buckler, and I am on my own. I love this! The game is not hand-holding me nor telling me anything, and I have to figure out the gameplay loop on my own. Do I defend to not take damage from the enemy or do I attack to end the fight quicker? This is what the game should have been more like, no poison, no cheesy Cleavers, only real strategy with a touch of Resident Evil inventory management.
I am also fine if there are unavoidable damage, but I am given options to fight back. This is kind of the current meta of the game and why permanent healing items like the My First Wand are so popular. This is good and fun on its own because it forces the player to be adaptive and change their strategy mid-fight if anything goes wrong. For example, being fed a curse.
Every other game I played, be it 'true rogue clones' or 'strategy-oriented hard games with permadeath' fit in either of these 2 categories. I will give you 3 examples: Pokemon Mystery Dungeon lets the player recover some health on level up, plus the level ups are permanent (Roguelite mechanic); Peglin is clement - It gives the player the opportunity to heal instead of taking an item between fights; and last, but not least, Slay The Spire is hard, but fair. For example, the poison effect is exclusive to the Silent, a playable character. It is never applicable to the player, only the player is capable of poisoning enemies through this character. If you lose in Slay the Spire, it is probably your fault for not preparing correctly or misplaying (Still, the draw phase is down to luck unfortunately :( ).
I am afraid that the gameplay ends up following neither of the principles above which will only make the game less fun and less interesting, and this will not just upset me...
Without either this or that, the game only becomes frustrating, and I know for a fact that people will likely leave and never play the game again. Plenty of complaints under the review section already because of this nonsense.
Aside from poison its fairly easy to avoid damage in the first place, and for poison there's no high damage sources of it unless you're playing a very protracted fight for some reason. I dont think any of the endzone bosses use poison.
I don't think the gameplay is perfect. The item balance is all over the place, some items and forge options are really underpowered to the point of just being sell fodder, and the difficulty curve feels hard in the first area, then pretty inconsistent after that depending on if you find a broken combo. That being said, the game in its current state is consistently winnable. The build variety is good if you choose not to take regen + cactus every time it's offered. Despite the high-variance item pool and reliance on a specific set of items to beat poison, the fact that you see seven items after every fight means that practically every run will find something. It might not be consumables, or healing, or energy etc. specifically, but if you look at the sheer volume of items you see throughout a run, something will pop up.
Unless your very first fight is small bee + vole, that encounter is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
Also, about StS - I think two big reasons why the game is considered fair, despite its randomness, is because of:
1. Perception - poison in this game felt outwardly unfair the first time I encountered it. In StS, most things just "feel" fair, but a few feel unfair the first time you encounter them, but are in reality fine with experience (eg. shivs vs. the Time Eater boss). Maybe to improve this the game could ease the player into poison, as a mechanic? Or make it more obvious how to deal with poison in some way
2. Evidence - people have played the game a LOT. If someone's pulling out spreadsheets and doubling the previously established winrate with a character, then clearly the game is just really deep, and I'll take other people's word for it that runs which I lost were winnable. I say give the game some time - people will discover new strategies.
So in the interest of evidence, here are some of my recent runs (you'll have to take my word that only the X-ed out game and one other game where I died on floor 2 were lost). I'm not an expert, I don't even know what the different biomes do, but I think the game right now is pretty good and this is what convinced me of that.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2872516421
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2872516546
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2872516642
Conclusions: healing is definitely good, it appears in most of my winning runs, but I'm not convinced that it's mandatory
I'm pretty concerned about not finding a 4th energy, since that seems to restrict viable builds a lot with 2-cost weapons and haste/rage forges getting hit especially hard
The Grandmaster uses burn which is a much nicer version of poison, but unless the player has a shield with haste, or a huge damage-per-energy ratio then this fight will go wrong, always.
If you were wondering why I was acting passive-aggressive it is because you are talking to me as if I just discovered the game yesterday, but maybe you did not intend it that way. Sorry about that.
The fact that the game is consistently winnable does not change the fact that the only way to win is to find an item (or group of items) so overpowered that they kill the enemies rapidly, or being able to find one of these: a healer, any healing accessory or consumables and if we narrow it down to "win consistently", then we only have the healing accessories left. If somehow you know of another way to win the game other than healing-a-ton or huge damage-per-energy ratio then I am all ears.
Here's an example of that fact from a recent failed playthrough, no poison involved either.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2872697812
The boss I was going against was the Badger Boss. I only have 6 health points left because there were no healers on the previous 2 floors and the few consumables I used did not heal much, plus I had the luck of encountering 4 fights in a row with 4 or 3 enemies and they all included either a snail or a sable - Red snails have unavoidable damage too because of slime curses. You can see on the screen capture that I have a My First Wand, but it might as well not be there because it really does not serve much of a purpose without a good amount of mana to power it up.
Before you ask, I reloaded the save and tried different set-ups, I tried putting the Fox Rapier above the shield to get as much damage out of the barbells as possible, but that was not enough. I thought about throwing away the barbells to regain back my energy because I thought it was better: the more I use the Fox Rapier, the better my shield gets, so this was probably it, but that was not good enough either.
In a hypothetical scenario, if I hadn't lost all my health on unfair fights, the boss would not win as easily since he and his minions together dealt between 2 to 8 damage to my health per turn, so I would have had time to scale and take the upper hand.
My example with Slay the Spire was to highlight that poison is inherently an unfair mechanic, therefore, the developers of that game made it available to the player only. I do not think Jas should remove poison entirely, but I do not ask for much other than to make poison avoidable or make it easier to receive healing. Adding items that "yolo" or "yeet" the poison is only a band-aid on the issue which really does not address it, especially given the fact that the Cleansing Rag is rare, the Venom Sword is legendary, the Cleansing Potion has limited uses and can screw over the player because it removes all status effects, both good and bad, and lastly, the Potted Aloe is both uncommon and does not address the poison effectively upon being used since the enemies can reapply it just as easily, it is merely an healing item.
I said nearly mandatory, the only other winnable option is a build with a huge damage-per-energy ratio like the Cleavers, Shurikens or some weird contraption with the Shield Spirit, but that ultimately comes down to either the player having a source of healing or the player dealing enough damage, so that the enemies they encounter don't even get to have their turn.
Maybe the games a lot easier on experimental compared to what it used to be then.
On my non-magic runs i found curses to be more troublesome than poison.
However, yes, you are right about that - Poison used to be mush much worse in earlier versions of the game. Instead of hurting the player at the end of their turn, it would hurt the player at the beginning of their turn which means that it is more survivable now than it was before.
It is a fact actually. Curses are way worse than poison, and often for the same reasons as poison: Unavoidable damage/Overused in the game. In addition to that, curses are a game design flaw since they break the pace of the game and takes the player away from the game so that they figure out where to place the bugger which only exists to make their life worse.
Though, I do not think it is really worth talking about since it is gonna be changed according to the roadmap. First thing first, I hope that the curses no longer take input from the player, because this is just silly.