Shuriken are OP

[Oragepoilu]

Hi, on the last exp,
Shuriken are a ranged weapon destroyed on use.
There is a few types, that include :
-spawn shuriken in all slot
-spawn shuriken up/down all slot
-spawn shuriken left/right all slot
-spawn shuriken 4 slot around it
-spawn shuriken on the same slot

Because of this, it's insanely easy to beat the game (1 turn/ fight) with nothing but shuriken. And by nothing else, I mean NOTHING ELSE AT ALL.

Infinite shuriken with 0 requirement but having some space. I'd bet you have a better chance to win the lottery than failling use them.

I would suggest doing some change.

[noel.set]

Agreed. I killed the boss in one turn and still had a backpack full of shuriken afterwards.

[Meddyan]

Agreed. First blind run, half way through I wound up with 4 shuriken bags and without even trying to optimise for space I slaughtered everything in my path. I walked into the final fight with about 6 Alpha Shurikens in stock, didn't even need to use a single one before he dropped.

Tusk and Hourglass for huge damage bonuses at no downside helped a lot tho

[MirrorImage]

3 Shuriken bags before the second boss. Found a 4th on about floor 24. No enemies got a turn since about floor 8.

Yeah, definitely way too many shurikens that make more shurikens. The Alpha Shuriken definitely is way too OP, even for Legendary (I just abandoned a run on floor 28 with about 10 of them in my inventory).

[Meddyan]

An elegant solution to start with might be to prevent shurikens from spawning anything of the same or higher rarity than itself. That way, eventually it trickles down into the common ones which go away, rather than rolling another alpha shuriken that restarts the whole damn cycle.

[noel.set]

The quantity problem is greatly exacerbated by the availability of damage scaling items. I had Glass Bottle and Bombstone on my run... it was absolutely nuts.

[MirrorImage]

Glass Bottle, Bombstone, Hour Glass, Tusk, the thing that adds damage on adjacent item use.

Yeah, by the time I gave up on my run, most of my shurikens were doing 50 damage base, and on occasion I'd get one doing 200+ if the copies lined up right.


The issue with shurikens is their ability to go infinite. "Create shurikens of lower rarity" is certainly one option, but that means that you'll eventually run out without a bag that creates them, and I think that would limit their usefulness too much. I have an alternative proposal for balancing them that still allows them to be (occasionally) explosive, but also reins in the infinite:

Make all Shurikens cost 1 energy to use, but also, give them an ability where they become 0 energy to use at the start of the turn. Or, leave them at 0-cost, but any created shurikens are disabled until the end of the current turn. In either case, it means that it's much more difficult to use just-created shurikens in the same turn while still allowing something like the ludicrously powerful Alpha Shuriken to exist mostly in its current form.

[TheCowofEternalFlame]

I posted this in another topic, but I feel one way they could be balanced is to have all the rare+ shuriken have the same trigger as the Golden Star, as in have it be an on kill effect. That way the one that replaces itself and the one that only adds in empty adjacent spaces both still allow for some level of continuous use (and viability) of shuriken, but to get a big explosion of them you'd need to think about when you're using the big ones.

[TheCowofEternalFlame]

Another, though I feel less fun, option would be to remove most the shuriken that give you more shuriken and make it so the shuriken bag instead gives you a shuriken at the end of every turn rather than every combat. Though they would likely need to make the bag uncommon to balance that effect.

[Meddyan]

Whatever they do, dear god do they need to do something - because shuriken spam is only fun the first time, and finger crippling tedium after that.

I just did the Bird Ninja challenge, and it was boring and tedious af with zero challenge. I clicked about three hundred or more times on the final boss, and probably thousands during the challenge itself. By floor 5 I already wanted it to be over with, rushing the floors and not even bothering to optimise usage.

[philosophile]

Just tried Shuriken run. Everyone is right..... This is way too easy.

Thoughts: Alpha Star is really the broken item here. What can we do to nerf it without killing a shuriken build?
Possibilities: Reduce the spawn rate of Alpha Stars. If we can hedge the spawn rate of them to even half the spawn rate currently, it might do a lot.

Limit spawns to just the pocket (but that would simply encourage people to build a single pocket).

The other spawning shurikens aren't nearly as problematic. If Alpha Star created HALF of the stars it did, it would still be really good, perhaps not being broken though.

Limit Alpha star as a unique item.... You can only have one in your entire bag at any one time. This might still require a spawn rate nerf.

Bite the bullet, and get rid of Alpha Star. This might severely cripple Shuriken builds, but it would make the scaling of the game more in line with the other builds. I think it would be worth building shuriken bag builds without alpha star. If Alpha star goes away, it might be worth considering buffing some of the other spawning shurikens.

[Oragepoilu]

Even removing alpha wouldn't solve the issue alone, I'm swimming in shuriken before I even try to use them (alpha).
Need more "blank" shuriken, or some code that control how many you can have/how they respawn.

[Jas]

Shurikens are still being balanced - but we did update them a bit! Hopefully this starts to make them more balanced!

[meow]

Getting a shuriken bag basically wins the game for you, honestly. The chances of getting a shuriken that spawns more shurikens is really, really high and you're practically guaranteed to eventually get a "spawn a shuriken in every empty space" shuriken you can hold onto for bosses which will domino into even more shurikens that spawn even more shurikens forever and ever and ever and ever...

[Oragepoilu]

Originally posted by Honk: Showclown:

Getting a shuriken bag basically wins the game for you, honestly. The chances of getting a shuriken that spawns more shurikens is really, really high and you're practically guaranteed to eventually get a "spawn a shuriken in every empty space" shuriken you can hold onto for bosses which will domino into even more shurikens that spawn even more shurikens forever and ever and ever and ever...

Old topic, old version. Please stop necro.

[meow]

Originally posted by Oragepoilu:

Originally posted by Honk: Showclown:

Getting a shuriken bag basically wins the game for you, honestly. The chances of getting a shuriken that spawns more shurikens is really, really high and you're practically guaranteed to eventually get a "spawn a shuriken in every empty space" shuriken you can hold onto for bosses which will domino into even more shurikens that spawn even more shurikens forever and ever and ever and ever...

Old topic, old version. Please stop necro.

it's still a problem