The blood essence bullet ability is broken

[Joseph Sneed]

It is basically essential to an enduring run as it is the only consistent way to heal. Even at only 2% when using a scatter gun and getting multiple kills it DRASTICALLY increases your survivability. Even nerfing it ultimately would not solve the problem as even at 1 or even half a percent it is still the only ability that allows you to basically heal on demand. I honestly would not even say it is so much that the ability is broken but that there are simply not enough ways to heal chunks of health. The only other major ways to heal are the totems that are found randomly and will give you like 20-30 health with no upgrades or the rare bit found in crates thats rarely more than 5 health. I honestly would like to use other bullet abilities but this ability is simply essential to a run. There need to be other abilities or ways to heal consistently so this ability isnt so essential.

[Joseph Sneed]

I will add further that I have found the combo of the rotating barrel shotgun with the perk that reduces cooldown time on abilities combine with the perk that gives you a permanent damage boost for the run every time you use an ability absolutely broken. These combine with the blood bullets and a decent second ability make you borderline unstoppable. This 3 perk combo dwarfs every other ability in game by a significant margin. Throw the vampire perk on top of it and its even worse.

[stywoo]

I agree about bullets of vitality. You should only be able to use special bullets a limited number of times. Making it heal for less wont make a big difference since you never run our of it.

[Dark Master]

Originally posted by stywoo:

I agree about bullets of vitality. You should only be able to use special bullets a limited number of times. Making it heal for less wont make a big difference since you never run our of it.

We agree with this. During testing we came to the conclusion that instead of changing the amount of healing, we instead limit 1 healing bullet to only be able to perform healing once. So even if you hit a group of enemies or use it with Wraithshot and pierce through a dozen enemies, the bullet will still only perform 2% healing. This way one "Bullet of Vitality" spell is capped at magsize*2% healing (so for instance, in the case of a Night Quartet, 8% at most).
Healing power will affect this though, and at 200% healing power, it'll still be a really OP healing option. Just not so overpowered that you can instantly heal from a very low health value to max.

[Dark Master]

Originally posted by Joseph Sneed:

I will add further that I have found the combo of the rotating barrel shotgun with the perk that reduces cooldown time on abilities combine with the perk that gives you a permanent damage boost for the run every time you use an ability absolutely broken. These combine with the blood bullets and a decent second ability make you borderline unstoppable. This 3 perk combo dwarfs every other ability in game by a significant margin. Throw the vampire perk on top of it and its even worse.

That's actually a really great combo, thank you for letting us know! With builds like that, the big question is always "do we want to nerf the fun?" As you really need to be creative with the tools the game offers to come up with builds like that and you also need a bit of luck to be able to build it. But we'll definitely take a look and see if this particular build needs any nerfs!

[Joseph Sneed]

Originally posted by Dark Master:

Originally posted by Joseph Sneed:

I will add further that I have found the combo of the rotating barrel shotgun with the perk that reduces cooldown time on abilities combine with the perk that gives you a permanent damage boost for the run every time you use an ability absolutely broken. These combine with the blood bullets and a decent second ability make you borderline unstoppable. This 3 perk combo dwarfs every other ability in game by a significant margin. Throw the vampire perk on top of it and its even worse.

That's actually a really great combo, thank you for letting us know! With builds like that, the big question is always "do we want to nerf the fun?" As you really need to be creative with the tools the game offers to come up with builds like that and you also need a bit of luck to be able to build it. But we'll definitely take a look and see if this particular build needs any nerfs!

my suggestion would be to change the ability that gives you a permanent buff to give you like a 5-8% damage buff but only for the level you are on. A permanent damage buff is kind of just broken in general no matter how you try to rework it. The rest of the combo would still be strong but not totally broken if that change was made as you are only generally going to get a max of like 4 activation each per level before you run out of enemies and have to advance through the portal. This would still give you the higher damage numbers but you would have to survive long enough to start getting them. As for the blood bullets as I said I think the issue is it and the vampire ability are the only consistent ways to heal. I would suggest adding some kind of carriable health item that can be used on demand that heals like 30 health without any bonuses but you can generally find one every level or two. The health totem is just too inconsistent as sometimes I can go as many as 5 levels without finding one and even then it does not heal that much unless you have a huge buff to healing. The rarity of healing is the real problem with the blood bullets as no matter how you nerf them they are still going to be almost mandatory as they are the only consistent way to heal even if they only provide like 5 health at a time.

[Dark Master]

Thank you for providing details about your thought process on the permanent damage buff, we are likely to make this change for the next version!
As for healing, several changes are coming regarding this as we get a lot of feedback regarding lack of healing options and we found ourselves using the "Caring Aid" perk (from Nia Blessings) as the exclusive source for healing and without it, runs do become significantly more difficult.

[iamgeorge82]

Originally posted by Joseph Sneed:

Originally posted by Dark Master:

That's actually a really great combo, thank you for letting us know! With builds like that, the big question is always "do we want to nerf the fun?" As you really need to be creative with the tools the game offers to come up with builds like that and you also need a bit of luck to be able to build it. But we'll definitely take a look and see if this particular build needs any nerfs!

my suggestion would be to change the ability that gives you a permanent buff to give you like a 5-8% damage buff but only for the level you are on. A permanent damage buff is kind of just broken in general no matter how you try to rework it. The rest of the combo would still be strong but not totally broken if that change was made as you are only generally going to get a max of like 4 activation each per level before you run out of enemies and have to advance through the portal. This would still give you the higher damage numbers but you would have to survive long enough to start getting them. As for the blood bullets as I said I think the issue is it and the vampire ability are the only consistent ways to heal. I would suggest adding some kind of carriable health item that can be used on demand that heals like 30 health without any bonuses but you can generally find one every level or two. The health totem is just too inconsistent as sometimes I can go as many as 5 levels without finding one and even then it does not heal that much unless you have a huge buff to healing. The rarity of healing is the real problem with the blood bullets as no matter how you nerf them they are still going to be almost mandatory as they are the only consistent way to heal even if they only provide like 5 health at a time.

But aren't broken builds part of the fun of this kind of game? It's much more important in my view that every run feels unique and there's usually a viable build somewhere in the R&G of the run (i.e. you never die and think "that run was a waste of time, the perks I was offered gave me no chance").

[Joseph Sneed]

Originally posted by iamgeorge82:

Originally posted by Joseph Sneed:

my suggestion would be to change the ability that gives you a permanent buff to give you like a 5-8% damage buff but only for the level you are on. A permanent damage buff is kind of just broken in general no matter how you try to rework it. The rest of the combo would still be strong but not totally broken if that change was made as you are only generally going to get a max of like 4 activation each per level before you run out of enemies and have to advance through the portal. This would still give you the higher damage numbers but you would have to survive long enough to start getting them. As for the blood bullets as I said I think the issue is it and the vampire ability are the only consistent ways to heal. I would suggest adding some kind of carriable health item that can be used on demand that heals like 30 health without any bonuses but you can generally find one every level or two. The health totem is just too inconsistent as sometimes I can go as many as 5 levels without finding one and even then it does not heal that much unless you have a huge buff to healing. The rarity of healing is the real problem with the blood bullets as no matter how you nerf them they are still going to be almost mandatory as they are the only consistent way to heal even if they only provide like 5 health at a time.

But aren't broken builds part of the fun of this kind of game? It's much more important in my view that every run feels unique and there's usually a viable build somewhere in the R&G of the run (i.e. you never die and think "that run was a waste of time, the perks I was offered gave me no chance").

In my view its broken when you feel like you have to go out of your way to get that specific build. It just simply outclasses any other build by orders of magnitude in how strong it is making you feel like you have to go for that particular build.

[iamgeorge82]

Originally posted by Joseph Sneed:

Originally posted by iamgeorge82:

But aren't broken builds part of the fun of this kind of game? It's much more important in my view that every run feels unique and there's usually a viable build somewhere in the R&G of the run (i.e. you never die and think "that run was a waste of time, the perks I was offered gave me no chance").

In my view its broken when you feel like you have to go out of your way to get that specific build. It just simply outclasses any other build by orders of magnitude in how strong it is making you feel like you have to go for that particular build.

So I kind of agree (I've found probably a better build but yes that one is much stronger than the rest) but I don't think the answer is so much to nerf that one as to make others more viable. For example having some more reliable health regain through other means (then you could nerf vitality so the overall health regen of that build stays the same). Basically:
1. All other builds to have some more reliable health regain
2. Make some of the other perks a bit more powerful so those builds are fun - e.g. I never tend to bother with poison or lightning as they always seem underpowered and uninteresting

I would also say (this was a tip the Devs gave me) if you dont want to use BoV then you can get the perk from the portal of your girlfriend which gives 12% health every time you go through the portal, and then the soul essence perks where you increase health effectiveness by 20% a few times. You then easily get enough health before each area and can choose a different bullet perk like the fire ones and go for a more dps explosive build. - BUT this does mean doing a lot of soul essence rooms same as with BoV so still a bit restrictive.

[UnLimiTeD]

Sorry for the necro;

Originally posted by Dark Master:

Originally posted by stywoo:

We agree with this. During testing we came to the conclusion that instead of changing the amount of healing, we instead limit 1 healing bullet to only be able to perform healing once. So even if you hit a group of enemies or use it with Wraithshot and pierce through a dozen enemies, the bullet will still only perform 2% healing.

While I see the necessity, one has to be careful to not promote self-defeating behaviour.
Players will always take the most efficient way, even if it's completely unfun and they subsequently quit.
So it might more sense to limit health gain for every extra hit enemy to 1 or some such, otherwise, you'll have players trying to pick off the remaining 5 enemies one at a time while kiting for a minute to squeeze the maximum amount of health out of them.
At least I think that would be unfun, as it means purposefully playing against the strengths of the weapon. I do admittedly not know how some bullet abilities interact with certain weapons.