Bloodshed vs Brutal Strikes - Clarity in Negative Effects

[Teeklin]

Right now I'm sitting here with 10 points each in both of these abilities and trying to decipher how they are working leads to a core issue with the game at this stage: lack of clarity in builds.

For people who don't know, Bloodshed is "All your attacks may apply bleed" and Brutal Strikes is "Your critical strikes may now apply bleed" instead.

But when I'm looking at this pause screen and this boss, all I see is the icon for Bleed with 4917 stacks on the boss. How many of those stacks are from Bloodshed, dealing 19000 damage and how many are from Brutal Strikes dealing 22000 damage?

When is each even rolled? If I crit and I hit that 50% chance on brutal strikes to cause bleed, does it roll again for bloodshed and apply a second stack of bleed if it hits that 25% chance?

It's like this for every negative effect in the game and it leads to a lot of issues when trying to theorycraft builds and/or trying to see what's actually effective in each given run at the end and what was a waste.

There are a lot of ways to address that. You could make different icons for each negative effect stack with differing amounts of damage (i.e. showing multiple bleed icons under each boss, each with a diff amount of stacks that you could hover to see how much total damage for). You could also standardize the amount of damage that any negative effect stack gives (i.e. it doesn't matter if Bloodshed or Brutal Strikes causes it, it's still going to deal X damage. But maybe brutal strikes gives 2 stacks of bleed when you crit instead of one if you want it to deal more because of higher rarity).

But either way, this is a great roguelike survivor game and a big part about those games is theorycrafting builds, trying to see what works and what doesn't, and this is a big barrier to being able to do that effectively.

Keep up the great work, loving the new patch!

[Matzuek]

I definitely agree with this, boss icons could have a toggle option in settings for "Simple" and "Expanded", where "Expanded" would still show how many stacks of a negative effect are applied, but would instead be separated by the skill icons which applied the stack, basically what you were saying. So in your example, it would show (estimated) 1400 stacks applied by "Bloodshed", using the bloodshed icon, and 3517 stacks applied by Brutal Strikes, with the Brutal Strikes Icon. Like you said though, does brutal strikes give 2 stacks of bleed when you crit when it's upgraded, or is it still one stack but with increased overall damage? I assume it's 2 stacks, but I'm not 100% sure on that, and that's the part that should be addressed first in my opinion.

While that all may be addressed in future updates, I think another easy fix to help explain in-game mechanics for now is to have a small mechanics guide book to access in-game so players can read up on basic things, like how Bloodshed increases damage by applying additional stacks of bleed, not by actually making those stacks do more damage (if that's true), and also explaining whether or not those additional stacks of bleed also effect skills like "Poisonous Blood", where "Whenever you apply Bleed you may now apply Poison as well.".

Do they all synergize with each other? Right now, I assume they do, but it's hard to know for sure and while the wiki is great, it misses a lot of information and is basically a giant wall of text. I love this game because I love theorizing builds and this game stands above the rest for me because of all the data it provides, and I love data. I think the developer(s) should continue expanding the data analytics and statistics aspect of the game by simply pushing tooltips and toggle options to allow for more clarity as needed. That would be huge.

I know a lot of what I said kind of just reworded what you were saying, but I wanted to add to the conversation and all of that is to say, I agree with your sentiment! I love the game and I love seeing all the progress so far.

[Vexillarius]

Pretty sure status damage is static and you just apply the modifiers to it and add more stacks as it levels up. Having multiple icons is not needed as it all just the same thing.

[< blank >]

completely agree. buff/debuff stack numbers need to be known for buildcrafting. the skill cards, the boss itself, and or somewhere in the pause screen would work well. "max potential stacks" data would be helpful too...the more data the better (for those who want it).

[Ulyaoth]

Absolute agree with OP.
Number of Stacks could be displayed in the tooltip, since Stack Numbers are definetly important for certain Builds.
And I totally miss Stacks applied on every Skill, that directly applys DoTs.

To give some insights: (not sure about amount of Stacks per Card anymore)
1x Bloodshed = 1 Stack of Bleed with X dmg (+/x modifiers) at 25% chance
2x Bloodshed = 2 Stacks of Bleed with X dmg x Number of Bloodshed Passives
Chance rolls on every hit

1x Brutal Strikes = 1 Stack of lBeed with X dmg on crit
2x Brutal Strikes = 2 Stacks blabla
Chance rolls on every crit

Poisoned Blood = 1 Stack of Poison with X dmg at 40% chance for every individual hit that applies Bleed in any way
If you apply 1000 Stacks of Bleed in one hit, you only get 1 roll for Poisoned Blood with this hit.
2x Poisoned Blood = 2 Stacks
Chance rolls on every Bleed Application once per Application

Bleed Stacks are simply added together
Bleed damage is added together in one large pool