Feedback ( Please Read )

[BoY BleaK]

I apologize for the long read now.
30 hours of crawling, 2 prestiges, several characters to floor 30+, some to floor 40+. Just a couple things to note:

Restarting at the Dwarven Caves:
There is currently NO ( to my knowledge ) way to get a character BACK down to the lower floors from the higher floors once you have progressed beyond them. This makes it impossible to complete some quests ( Spiders do not spawn floor 10+, Lichen collection, Goblin Village, Crypt, Cursed Blade to just name a few. ) meaning you need to abandon your character and start a new run. Allowing players to choose a starting point after an extraction would immediately rectify this in case you have quests to complete, especially with a group.

Legendaries:
As of this writing, there is only ONE ( 1 ) legendary in the game ( Enchanted Trident ), and after 20+ hours of attempting to hunt others down, finally came to this conclusion and checked the forums to double check, which others have echoed. Adding this as an incentive to the difficulty tab is baffling and, while not lying, definitely skews player perception by the phrase *increased chance to find legendaries*. The game is obviously being worked on, but this should be higher up on the incentives list to give meaning to the grind, as fighting 30+ bats, 2 snakes, a scorpion, 10 slimes, and 2 goblins to open a chest on hard just to be rewarded a common item is a horrendous looping experience. Speaking of loot.

Loot:
As a game completely centered around looting and getting that serotonin injection from doing so, there is a HORRIFYINGLY low amount of loot. Playing on Hard at floor 40+, battling through hundreds of enemies just to open a chest for a Sharpening Stone ( white common trinket that is LITTERED throughout Floors 1-10 ). The odds of white items coming out of chests is honestly way too high, and constantly grinding is just not worth it. Having runs of 8+ players become Loot Goblin sessions because everyone wants something, but there isnt enough loot to go around. An ample INCREASE to the rarity of loot per floor you descend, maybe also a way to increase the amount of chests per location. Maybe even a currency and a goblin shop keeper? This way even if you buster out on gear, theres a chance to spawn a Shop Keeper and purchase items on a randomized table to help your character along. SPEAKING of events.

Random Events/Rooms:
These just outright do not spawn enough. Out of the dozens of resets and new characters, I have seen the Crypts less than 5 times. Goblin Village, maybe 3 times max. Cursed Blade? Less than 5 times. Spider Nest, maybe 6 or 7 times. Bomb Rooms, 4 or 5 times. Lost Encampment, probably the most common event with the least impact on a run outside of a quest, around 10-15 times, but no more than that. Some of these rooms I have never seen spawn outside of the first 10 floors. ( Crypt, Cursed Blade, Spider Nest, Goblin Village ) I FEEL like I might have seen a Bomb Room spawn outside of the first 10 floors, but not vivid enough to actively say yes to, and if it does, it doesnt happen often enough FOR me to remember it. These need to actively be turned up more, have a chance of spawn on other floors, OR refer to the first feedback and allow players to restart at Floor 1 after extraction as long as the proper bosses have been cleared.

Expertise Points:
At the later levels, these just get ludicrously too long to get. 200+ enemies per point is absolutely wild and time consuming. Have the points start off normally, but let this cap at a solid number. 50-75 per point seems FAIR. At Floor 40, the enemies are too strong to sit around and mess with in an attempt to amass the genocide needed to make your character strong enough to compete with said enemies. On Hard, the Bats ( who have 100+ HP and the accuracy of Chris Kyle ), you want to completely avoid in most circumstances because its just not worth dying and losing the run over, even more so when you need 200+ more kills to get a SINGLE point. God FORBID you're playing Alone and STILL need to amass that many kills, you will be there for hours. With no competitive multiplayer component, no leaderboards, and nothing but your enjoyment with friends and by yourself, stifling the casual power creep behind a monstrous numerical objective is daunting if not outright, mood killing. Put a simple cap on this.


I see the game is still passionately being worked on by a small crew, and there is a checklist of alot of things going on im sure. These are the standout issues I see from turning this casual find into a real F2P gem. I hope this sees someones eyes and you guys put some real energy into this. Appreciate all of your hard work, and I hope I get to put some more hours into this in the future once the new updates come.

[GhostSpartan117]

Hey! Thank you for playing the game and taking the time to give your thoughts! Gonna respond and add some info where I feel I can :)

Restarting back through floors 1-10 is a core part of the game, the tasks offered are designed in a way that generally speaking at a higher level you'll get more tasks which take place on later floors offered to you, but you will still always have to go through 1-10 for some certain tasks. I don't feel this is bad by any means. Aside from creating a fresh character, we don't currently have a great way of allowing people to backtrack through earlier floors without being too powerful, and being able to carry friends using a fully geared character is something we want to prevent.

We've actually been meaning to add more legendary items to the game, but each legendary takes quite a bit of time to add as we want them to feel very powerful and unique. I completely agree that we've dropped the ball on this and we should have added a few more legendary items to the pool earlier, but honestly its just been on the back burner while we're focused on adding other things. You can expect to see new legendary items added soon as its something we know the players want.

Loot is always being shifted around, based on our own testing I'm happy with the current loot odds and just feel that more needs to be added to each pool so that drops feel more varied. Rare and Epic items are designed to actually be quite rare, easy and normal are balanced in a way that you can comfortable clear the game using only common loot. Completely agree with you on event rooms though. We are not happy with how often they are spawning, I feel there's something wrong with the generation regarding them but its a complicated issue and we are actively trying to both add new event rooms. We want to make them spawn often enough without them spawning too often. The game should be balanced in a way that through 10 floors you'll find 2-4 event rooms. Also a in-run trader is planned!

Agree with you on the power creep issues regarding floors 21+ and expertise. Without giving too much info, we plan to change exactly how mobs grant you expertise points so that on later floors you won't need to kill such a ridiculous number of mobs. Floor 21+ will change a lot over the next few months. Floors 21-30 will be a new biome, and floors 31+ will become a proper endless mode with new loot, and a new curse system that will make the game a lot harder but also more interesting per floor past 30.

Glad to hear you've enjoyed the game so far at least! Hope you check out our future updates as we still have A TON planned for Cave Crawlers, and have no plans of slowing updates anytime soon!

[Drackmore]

Originally posted by BoY BleaK:

Restarting at the Dwarven Caves:

It kind of makes sense if you think about it. How many loops Caves do you think people will do before actually committing to the crystal mines and just blitz the guardian? The answer of course is a lot. Finding an extraction rope is basically required to use so you can go back to a check point and redo earlier floors for more Expertise Points.

Originally posted by BoY BleaK:

Legendaries:

Yeah the legendaries are pretty lackluster, both statically speaking and variety. I've used the trident and frankly its rather lackluster compared to others weapons. Crystaline Spear, Twin Bow, Honey Axe, etc. The lightning strike proc is just so laughably low there's no point in trying to rely on it which is kind of the entire point of the trident. If you're not going to try and make use of the lightning strike you may as well just get Mithril or Crystal spear, hell even the eldritch spear is a better option. I quite like that yellow/orange spear with 3 reach and the passive that gives it .1 more range stack per hit.

But the lack of other options is pretty sad. Bows would've been easy to give a yellow variant to. Just take the twin bow, bump its stats up a fair bit, and add a decent % chance to hit adjacent enemy/ies or hitting an enemy an enemy adds more dodge and move speed.

Axe? Give it a good bleed proc, and when I say good I mean good, not this 1 point tick garbage that's not even useful on floor 1. If it wasn't for the fact the bees move from target to target during their short life span the honeycomb axe would be worthless (though a little more knockback or some slowing debuff inflicted by the bees would be a nice buff)

Armor would be fun, lot of options to play around there. Rusted Lead Booties of the escapist gives extra mobility whether this is an extra double jump, more dash range/speed/force, etc sky is the limit. Elvish Cloth Hood of Block increases block chance by 60% until hit then you're slapped with a buff that removes 60% block in favor of dodge and it flips between the two. Sniper's Eye Gemstone more or less just a slimy sheath but for bows and higher stats/proc rate.

We've already got one miner's helmet with a light on it, no reason not to make a legendary variant where the light is actually useful.

Originally posted by BoY BleaK:

Loot:

Yeah loot is odd. Last night a friend and I were playing. Had to fight the slime with just pickaxes because literally the only things that spawned were leather helmets/boots, sharpening stones, and an absolutely disgusting amount of cloth bandages. I think by the time we got to the ass end of Floor 9 we found a dagger, but those things are just so terrible there's never a reason to use them unless you absolutely have to get rid of a few dagger tasks. Actual loot rooms would be nice to find at the end of dead ends. Speaking of dead ends, it'd be nice if the caves were significantly more complex.

But yeah you talk about white trinkets. we had it the opposite, once my friend and I hit crystal caves, we stopped seeing any healing items and got nothing but garbage white cobalt daggers. My friend did get lucky on like floor 8 and I managed to find that purple twin bow (despite being ranged, and not being the target of the crystal boss he was still the first to die >_>;)

Originally posted by BoY BleaK:

Random Events/Rooms:

I agree, I'm nearly at my first prestige. I've seen the spider rooms maybe three times, lost miner camp like ten times, gobbo camp just twice, phantom blade upwards of five or six times (have only made the mistake of taking the sword once though). I've only seen an actually bombable wall ONCE. For the longest time I thought those were like hidden walls or some ♥♥♥♥ hiding secret treasure. Nope, literally has a huge bomb sign on it. But the spawn rate is practically non-existent. The sad thing is, I got that bomb wall only once and it was on a fresh character on like floor one or two with no bombs having been dropped at all.

Speaking of random events. Whats up with the crypt? The performance there ALWAYS tanks. There's a massive cluster of enemies behind two different walls usually bats and snakes. And no way as far as I can tell to open the walls like you do with the respec shrine.

And Respec Shrines, you know out of all the events I would say those spawn at an adequate rate even if we ignore the forced spawn on boss floors. Though, it would be nice if there was a chest or two in the mob room. As an incentive to do the room outside of some easy expertise progression if you got a bomb.

Originally posted by BoY BleaK:

Expertise Points:

Yeah the amount of kills you need for a single point gets absurd. If I get lucky and manage to extract three or four times before the crystal guardian I still only get just a scant few points and I can barely get anything with them. I've done this with my friend numerous times and I barely can get any points to put into spears to actually get anything beneficial. Worst part is you have skills like, I think its called, Slam for spears. Hits the enemy for a decent amount of damage but more importantly stuns them but you have a limit to only TWICE a floor. The skill itself is not strong enough to impose such a restriction on its use first of all. Second off there's like three or four skills after that which all rely on you stunning the enemies to actually get anything from those passives which in turn themselves only last a few scant seconds. Now why would I invest ten to twelve talent points on a bunch of crap I can only exploit like twice a floor. The damage and bonuses aren't even good enough to bother respeccing in to just to use against a boss.

And the entirety of the torch line? Hahahahahahaha. Literally only one node in that entire tree that is worth even reading the tooltip for and that's the first skill that increases your torch's life time. Which frankly, I would just remove that skill and adjust the torch times to add an extra 2 minutes to each one. Maybe if I can get a game with 10 people then running torch bearer might be actually something worth considering but as it stands that's like twenty skills that are wasting screen space. You could literally replace it all with core body upgrade like flat speed, dodge, block chance upgrades or super basic and boring ♥♥♥♥ and it would be a vast improvement over the torch tree. I think the biggest issue the tree suffers from (outside of the skills just being terrible) is the fact that it prevents you from offhanding torches.

But as is with the miniscule amount of SP we get, I have to decide do I want to be completely gimped in terms of combat boosts but able to survive by speccing into the armor tree, or do I want fruitlessly hope that my ally will be able to pick me up if things go bad (something that is absolutely impossible to do during the Crystal boss fight because there is literally ZERO down time for the boss focused player). And if you're running solo you may as well just spec into defense as the added survivability is required.

[BoY BleaK]

Originally posted by GhostSpartan117:

Hey! Thank you for playing the game and taking the time to give your thoughts! Gonna respond and add some info where I feel I can :)

I appreciate you taking the time to read my feedback and have absolutely nothing to add other than thank you for working diligently on the game. Everything you've typed out has added clarity and understanding to the thought process, and I appreciate that to understand the vision on the game state.

Me and my group are definitely looking forward to the changes you have in store and will absolutely be back.

[T00by]

Heya, interested in doing one of these myself soon enough (given you enjoy these posts). If I do so, do you prefer it to be somewhere in the discussions like here, or would it be better to do the same super drop this size in the discord (if so which channel)? Whatever works best for you.

Originally posted by GhostSpartan117:

Glad to hear you've enjoyed the game so far at least! Hope you check out our future updates as we still have A TON planned for Cave Crawlers, and have no plans of slowing updates anytime soon!

[GhostSpartan117]

Originally posted by Zachary0998:

Heya, interested in doing one of these myself soon enough (given you enjoy these posts). If I do so, do you prefer it to be somewhere in the discussions like here, or would it be better to do the same super drop this size in the discord (if so which channel)? Whatever works best for you. :pickax: :krsheep:

Originally posted by GhostSpartan117:

Glad to hear you've enjoyed the game so far at least! Hope you check out our future updates as we still have A TON planned for Cave Crawlers, and have no plans of slowing updates anytime soon!

Discord in suggestions is probably the best place! We're super active there. I only check the steam forums every couple days or so generally speaking.