About the nerf to Anvil Enhancements

[SatanBless]

Some complaints about the damage nerf that I have seen are quite excessive, however I have noticed Halu 5 endless runs are noticeably harder to complete, because of the Anvil change and feel like this should be re-evaluated.

Anvil's have been hit very hard this update, especially for solo weapon runs on characters who used to be very good with them (Multi projectile main weapons, like Mumei, Irys, or even Ame, anyone with a multi projectile weapon).

Anvil's used to apply a base weapon enhancement to each projectile of a weapon, now however, the damage added by Anvil is spread across all projectiles equally.

In case of Irys's weapon as an example. At awakened, Nephilim Blast has 7 projectiles, which (Before multipliers) would deal 1-4 damage each, for a total of 7-28 damage for a full blast, 17.5 damage average.

This gets multiplied by your ATK, Crit Damage, etc, but Anvil's improve base damage, which would multiplicatively scale with everything else, so the rest of the calculation doesn't matter as much for the total numbers we will arrive at.

In 0.5, if you add one Anvil enhancement on to Nephilim Blast, the base damage would increase to 3-6 for each projectile, for a total damage of 21-42 for a full blast, average of 31.5 damage. Meaning, you gain 80% damage from 1 anvil.

Then, if you add 2 more Anvils, for 3 total Anvils, you would have 240% base damage, that is 2.4x damage with 3 anvils.

Now however in 0.6, this is completely gutted, and has made solo weapon on many characters impossible unfortunately.

In 0.6, Anvil enhancement damage is spread over the total projectiles of a weapon, so that +2 base damage gets divided among 7 projectiles, where now a single Anvil adds 0.28 damage per projectile.

Yes, that is right. One Anvil on Nephilim Blast in 0.6 increases the Base damage from 1-4 to 1.28-4.28 for each projectile, for a total damage of 9-30 per Blast, 19.5 total damage.

Or, an increase in base damage of ~11% for the first Anvil.

Before, in case of Irys's weapon, 1 anvil was +80% base damage.
10 anvils was +800% base damage.

Now, Irys needs 10 Anvils to gain +100% base damage.

That is an overall loss of damage of more than 700%.

Literally, with 10 Anvils, you are now dealing 7 times less damage than you would be doing in 0.5 in the case of Nephilim Blast (Scaling may differ for other weapons, but a similar decrease is to be expected).

A damage loss of 7 times, is simply excessive. No wonder those builds cannot kill anything anymore by the 25 minute mark, as that amount of damage loss is simply unprecedented.

This feels like an oversight, rather than a purposeful change, since this change in the formula completely gutted how these weapons used to perform.

I also find it a strange change, since there wasn't anything wrong with anvils being strong on low base damage weapons, at least, this attempt at "balancing" the scaling so that anvils are equally useful on all weapons is not a good way to go about it.

Multihit weapons did overperform with anvils compared to single hit weapons or weapons with less projectiles (Dragon Fire as an example, compared to MiComet), but now anvils as a whole are almost inconsequential, and a lot of previously powerful builds are scaling very poorly.

This hasn't just affected Solo weapon runs, but many other weapons, such as Dragon Fire, Frozen Sea, Bone Bros, Elite Cooking, Breathe in Type Asacoco, Broken Dreams, etc, etc.

Any weapon with multiple projectiles is affected by this, on top of the base damage nerf to all collabs (Which the numbers aren't known yet, but they aren't that consequential, compared to the anvil formula nerf).

[Not Kay]

In the old system, enhancing ANY weapon is a straight +2 (default) base damage to each attack of that weapon, regardless of how many projectiles it has.

Irys shoots a total of 14 projectiles (7 x 2). So if Irys enhanced her weapon just once at level 7, that's 14 x +2, +28 base damage.
A melee character like say Calli, enhancing her weapon is a +2.

Genuine question, are you suggesting that Irys getting +28 base damage via 1 enhancement while Calli getting +2 on the same one time enhancement, is fair and balanced? Is this not "simply excessive" in the first place?

You also mentioned that this change made solo weapon on many characters impossible.
Have you seen Aruran just clear Stage 3 Hard using Risu (a character with 5 projectiles as her main weapon) via Solo Weapon?

[Dlanor]

To OP: The issue with bringing up all these examples of "700% damage loss" is that they are completely irrelevant. Balance doesn't care about the past. Judge the balance for what is in the game now. You can't point at something that was broken and then say it's a problem that it's fixed now unless you have a better reason than that you like broken things.

Is there a reason you think IRYS needs 700% more damage than she has in 0.6, without bringing up the fact that she could do it before? A damage loss of 7 times wasn't excessive, having 8 times the damage she needed before was excessive.

IRYS is still doing very well when I play as her, and I have a feeling you're not losing every match as IRYS either because in the end this game is very easy if you choose to take all the upgrades and buffs available to you.

I don't know why you're implying solo runs are impossible on many characters now either. I doubt there is a single character I couldn't complete a solo run on any stage with given enough attempts, and I'm not even that good at the game. It would surely take me many attempts at something like S3H with some characters, but eventually I'd gain the skill and have RNG line up and win. Solo runs are not the main game content, the game can't fully balance around them, but they are absolutely possible even in hard mode.

Just give it a few weeks and people will settle on the next "broken thing". Perhaps abusing the healing Super Collab with Fauna or Mel, perhaps giving Ollie 500 HP and then intentionally dying over and over to convert that to +1000% damage, we don't know yet, but there will be strong strategies. Hopefully none of them are as widespread as "just use any multihit thing on an anvil and it gets 8 times the damage it should", but there will certainly be strats for you to use.

[MrHoxworth]

80% for a single anvil is straight busted and should NOT be in the game, how in your mind it clicks that +80% dmg at the cost of 0 gold with 100+ chance is resonable

[AnonTwo]

It's really not going to hurt Irys much. She was already probably the best character in the previous patch, and that wasn't even taking anvil into account.

[Intra]

Originally posted by Kay:

Genuine question, are you suggesting that Irys getting +28 base damage via 1 enhancement while Calli getting +2 on the same one time enhancement, is fair and balanced? Is this not "simply excessive" in the first place?

Isn't the problem that anvils either are useless or OP? When they are OP they are good like Dragon Fire and otherwise it means that anvils are just a shortcut to maxing your weapons and items out so you can farm passives. The damage made builds OP but with how weak it is now, it's literally just like having extra levels early and barely valuable late. And Dragon Fire appears to work after testing it just as about as normal (compared to Irys at least) and it was probably the singular strongest synergy with anvils so I'm confused.

I feel like you need to classify weapons for the anvils so they get unique bonuses by the class instead of a blanket +2 that then gets gimped by being a spreadshot weapon or a slow multifiring weapon. You have to account for overall DPS for the boost, because a slow firing multishot weapon is losing tons of DPS from this nerf.

Perhaps a flat percent multiplier is a better solution? So Dragon Fire and other single shot that fires rapidly aren't too strong with the anvil yet slow firing multishot weapons like Irys aren't useless with anvil.

I think 10% would be a good start, might be a little on the weaker side.