Do you even bother with devil deals now?

[Dutczar]

Devil deals were already getting worse in AB + due to worse items in the pool, but now after the balance changes there seems to be little reason to go for them unless you have 6 or more heart containers lying around, and even then that's only a "maybe" with nerfs to some items for soul heart generation, increased drops for red hearts (if I understood the patch notes correctly), or boss challenge rooms which are more accessible on red heart builds compared to soul heart ones (it's easier to have red hearts on the floor to recover afterwards) - running with only red health actually might be worth the risk of lower devil deal chances. At least before you could get some cheesy deals by buying 2 heart deals at 1, but not anymore. Abaddon has been nerfed, most black heart generation has been nerfed, and I've yet to get it but Brimstone too apparently, so I don't even know what I'm looking for besides something like Void (available in Angel deals too, lmao) or Mega Blast. Familiars have been buffed, cool, but I'm still not going to pay a heart container for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Sister Maggy.

You even get a boost to angel deal chances if you skip the first deal. Speaking of which, besides being as good (or bad) in item pools, angel deals give you the item for free and usually give you heart containers, again with the new meta seemingly focusing around them.

Also as a side note, not even a week and here we have a patch to buff tinted rock chances and shops back. I swear to god, nobody actually playtests these DLCs before release besides maybe loading up a boss and fighting it a few times. I'm surprised the actual new content is somewhat balanced.

Edit: I forgot Krampus and Curse of the Blind exist. These are worse than I thought.

[Djej Funny]

to me i would be fine with devil deals being weaker if synergy items were more common than usual, just seems like edmund wanted to nerf devil deals without knowing why people went to them in the first place

[Toxi]

Publicado originalmente por Dutczar:

Publicado originalmente por toxicitzi:

Really?... I've been trying sometimes to play Sacrifice rooms and all I get is either a penny, or a normal chest, after walking about 3-5 times into the spikes, almost like any other time I've ever tried Sacrifice rooms since Rebirth and been very disappointed in them.

The 6th and 7th plays are the big ones, with 33% chance for an Angel Room teleport and Angel Room item respectively, coming to around 44% chance for an item at all. Maybe it's my runs and luck, but getting enough plays hasn't been hard with health pickups around the floor. The 9th and 11th are Angel fight for better chances or for a rerollable item, and 10th is either around 30 pennies or 7 soul hearts. And the resources from early plays are nice.

Crown of Destiny is pretty good imo, a double damage item that doesn't suffer from Dimnishing returns. At no DMG ups it's maybe worth a bit less than 2 dmg up devil deals, but as you go on, it's a pretty big buff. Keeping the buff sounds hard, but I rarely had problems with it. Spear of Destiny is a good damage source with some form of invincibility to back it up, or just small mob clearing with bad tear rate. I believe it's twice your damage per tick?

Didn't know that, I think Sacrifice rooms got buffed in like AB, or AB+ then? before, it was always just, Chests, or more Chests, at the cost of almost all your life lol... Ez game, I'm almost dead, but now I've got 5 or 7 chests, What are you gonna do now Game??

as for the Crown of Light, it was very good, on the floors I mean, but any hit taken disables it for the room, so, expecting to take 0 hits from the new final boss, that is some omega wishful think there.. :p
This is where almost any other upgrade I would have taken over it, I'm not confident in taking 0 hits, especially in the parts of the game where I need good stats the most.

as for spear of destiny, the problem with that is, I was at the final boss, so, zero chance of using it. It's not that it's a bad item, it's more indicative of how I think Angel rooms are awful and didn't need to be so unnecessarily scarce, certainly not for the whole duration of 6-7 years that this game was out for.

[shiftcore]

hardly anymore. i know people are saying some of the items in there still do some big dmg, but compared to items like jacobs ladder and flame tears they do hardly any dmg now.
i'm really unhappy with the item changes because i enjoyed devil deals, it was exciting getting them. now its just disappointment. better to reroll your run till you get any of the two i mentioned, then you'll be good.

they just swapped the meta around which imo has ruined the game, for a game you want to play for hours, no online competitive option, it was completely pointless, now you are just making me use other items and focus on only those, and actually limited players since before we had a lot of choice now it seems very limited. i liked using brimstone and abbadon and a lot of the others. now the risk isn't even worth it anymore.
bad choice i hope it gets reverted. regardless of if the game is too hard or not, these changes shouldn't of been implemented, its not like this game is going to be regularly changing what items are the meta, so now im stuck with these crappy items i don't wanna use anymore, that i used to love using.

[drexciya]

Almost never. They're hot trash. So much bad game design in this xpac.

[GamerGuyMike]

i'm starting to avoid them
more than half the time i get a deal i end up dead a few floors later

[Dutczar]

Publicado originalmente por toxicitzi:

Publicado originalmente por Dutczar:

Crown of Destiny is pretty good imo, a double damage item that doesn't suffer from Dimnishing returns. At no DMG ups it's maybe worth a bit less than 2 dmg up devil deals, but as you go on, it's a pretty big buff. Keeping the buff sounds hard, but I rarely had problems with it. Spear of Destiny is a good damage source with some form of invincibility to back it up, or just small mob clearing with bad tear rate. I believe it's twice your damage per tick?

Didn't know that, I think Sacrifice rooms got buffed in like AB, or AB+ then? before, it was always just, Chests, or more Chests, at the cost of almost all your life lol... Ez game, I'm almost dead, but now I've got 5 or 7 chests, What are you gonna do now Game??

as for the Crown of Light, it was very good, on the floors I mean, but any hit taken disables it for the room, so, expecting to take 0 hits from the new final boss, that is some omega wishful think there.. :p
This is where almost any other upgrade I would have taken over it, I'm not confident in taking 0 hits, especially in the parts of the game where I need good stats the most.

as for spear of destiny, the problem with that is, I was at the final boss, so, zero chance of using it. It's not that it's a bad item, it's more indicative of how I think Angel rooms are awful and didn't need to be so unnecessarily scarce, certainly not for the whole duration of 6-7 years that this game was out for.

I already beat the final boss once without taking damage, and twice by taking 1-2 hits. It's pretty doable I'd say with a good build and enough projectile protection. And of course, even if it's only for half a fight, that's still around a 1,5x damage multiplier over the whole fight. Assuming we are talking about the same boss.

For spear of destiny, I could say the same about Athame or Maw of the Void being close range, no? And unlike spear of destiny, those are the "good" items. Comparing to the "bad" devil deal items, I'd take the spear over Shade or My Shadow any day.

[Toxi]

Publicado originalmente por Dutczar:

Publicado originalmente por toxicitzi:

Didn't know that, I think Sacrifice rooms got buffed in like AB, or AB+ then? before, it was always just, Chests, or more Chests, at the cost of almost all your life lol... Ez game, I'm almost dead, but now I've got 5 or 7 chests, What are you gonna do now Game??

as for the Crown of Light, it was very good, on the floors I mean, but any hit taken disables it for the room, so, expecting to take 0 hits from the new final boss, that is some omega wishful think there.. :p
This is where almost any other upgrade I would have taken over it, I'm not confident in taking 0 hits, especially in the parts of the game where I need good stats the most.

as for spear of destiny, the problem with that is, I was at the final boss, so, zero chance of using it. It's not that it's a bad item, it's more indicative of how I think Angel rooms are awful and didn't need to be so unnecessarily scarce, certainly not for the whole duration of 6-7 years that this game was out for.

I already beat the final boss once without taking damage, and twice by taking 1-2 hits. It's pretty doable I'd say with a good build and enough projectile protection. Assuming we are talking about the same boss.

For spear of destiny, I could say the same about Athame or Maw of the Void being close range, no? And unlike spear of destiny, those are the "good" items. Comparing to the "bad" devil deal items, I'd take the spear over Shade or My Shadow any day.

Fair enough.
I should've been more specific that I meant that more in terms of learning the new final boss, for which I would be trying to poke it at my own risk of not knowing what might come next. :p

[Dutczar]

Publicado originalmente por toxicitzi:

Fair enough.
I should've been more specific that I meant that more in terms of learning the new final boss, for which I would be trying to poke it at my own risk of not knowing what might come next. :p

Again, even more perks for Angel Rooms, because you end up with more HP for that fight, especially if you bring a Sun card. Unless you find a way to get 9 or so HP consistently on Devil Deal runs, the only way I can see being Dark Bum (who despite the nerf might be better now since Hard Mode has better red heart drops now apparently), and I wouldn't rely on getting ONE item. Only Lilith can get Dark Bum consistently, and that masochist likes red health builds so she can take more damage for Cambion Conception. It's also debatably better practice if the fight lasts longer but you can take more hits, and it shouldn't impact your chance of victory much - like I said in the previous comment, if you can beat the boss with 6 hits on 1,5x damage, you can probably do so with 12 hits and without that damage.
Edit: To clarify, I didn't mention 2x damage, because I admit that at that point, the ability to skip some boss phases or rush through them is helpful. But a) Due to boss armor, you likely won't be getting 2x damage just by going for devil deals, and b) even WITHOUT boss armor, you need GOOD devil deal items, refer to yesterday's run I did for my stance on the Devil Deal pool.

[Jan]

Tbh i cant recall a devil deal that was fun or worth taking since repentance.
Most of them just ruined good runs.

[Rio]

Publicado originalmente por Jan:

Tbh i cant recall a devil deal that was fun or worth taking since repentance.
Most of them just ruined good runs.

Money = power is still pretty good. And I see it now and then. Its even better when you only get bad shops.

[phrog]

Publicado originalmente por Pastapockets:

Edmund has hated Devil Deals ever since the very first major Isaac speedrun event stream, where most participants just reset until they got goat head. Every weird change to the game's balance has been a symptom of his impotent rage against this. Ironic that a guy who professed to literally never expecting the game to catch on would be the most elitist about how to play it.

I see many game devs have this and it's annoying because it breaks the games.

[Dutczar]

Publicado originalmente por ⛧Black⛧:

Publicado originalmente por Jan:

Tbh i cant recall a devil deal that was fun or worth taking since repentance.
Most of them just ruined good runs.

Money = power is still pretty good. And I see it now and then. Its even better when you only get bad shops.

Well, some of the items are still good. Especially if you're doing Boss Rush and Hush as I mentioned, and also don't mind resetting a few runs until you actually get said good items - if you go by only the top 10% of the items in each pool, Devil Deals give you a slight edge, mostly thanks to Guppy, so the best speedruns will still come with Devil Deals. Dailies too by extension, but from my experience these are cherry picked to give you some good synergies, so of course the bad item pool doesn't matter.
But the Angel Room item pool also has some big ones - even besides Godhead which is a relatively hard unlock, you have Sacred Heart, Crown of Destiny, Trisagion, and a new item which gives you a secondary Brimstone beam like Tech 2 (and flight). And those are just the ones right off the top of my head, the latter two I actually got recently. Plus, with the Treasure Room item pool getting better (imo), these bonus rooms are no longer the base source of damage and a good run. If I want to go "okay, this time I'll go kill ??? or Mother" to get an unlock, Angel Rooms are more reliable (and give you access to Mega Satan for more options with said unlocks)
And even I go "I want to do Boss Rush", I will STILL mainly need good Treasure Room items and early damage ups, so even if Devil Deals have an edge, it's a relatively small help. And remember, bombs deal 2,5x damage than before - even a yellow Big Fatty dies in 4-5 from my experience. You don't need big damage for early bosses if you have resources, which on a good run that you'll need for Boss Rush you should have - a single damage up and some small familiar or tear effect should be enough for room clearing.
The problem is, on average, a random Angel Room item is going to be better than a Devil Deal item, AND it's free. Even if the first Devil Deal happens to be good, there's a good chance the rest will be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ anyway, and I won't get much, if any benefit from them, whereas I know Angel Room will give me at least 2, maybe 3 items on average, ranging from nice help to run carriers.
Also worth mentioning that you don't have to skip the first Devil Deal or force Angel Room chances. I skip it out of spite, but in case there IS something worthwile, you can peek, but I just don't see why you would ever lock in Devil Deals fo the sake of getting more Devil Deals down the line, unless you got something stupid like 6 heart containers floor 2. (Edit: Funnily enough, I thing skipping might still be better for Devil Deal runs. You skip the most likely garbage first deal, get Angel Room next, then - if I get how this works right - you won't have to face Krampus until you get a 2nd Devil Deal you enter, so you won't have a wasted bonus room, and can buy a Devil Deal later in the run when you know if you can afford it. Though that's for someone else to try these hybrid runs, I'm just gonna bomb the Angels and keep on being an Angel boy, because I HATE THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DEVIL POOL.)

By the way, another edge to having 5 or so HP when going into devil deals is that you can actually play any Devil Beggars you find inside without leaving for hearts, who actually have better pools than the Devil Deal one, I'd say. Which is funny, because I think they are meant to be a bonus, not the main appeal.

["Donut☆]

It's sad what happened to devil deals. I liked devil deals because you got rewarded for playing well. Going for angel rooms (you get a guaranteed one if you don't go into the devil room at all) seems to give me better runs now.

I understand what they did with the cost mechanic, but common, why add even more crap to the already dilluted item pool? Also, dark bum and brimstone are a bit overnerfed imo.