Tks for Sun Ring Nerf

[No One]

Only you left the focus ring in. /facepalm

[No One]

More on this:

Originally posted by No One:

Turns out, on a typical party, using +damage instead of focus rings just barely makes a profit.
And I was wrong, battle ballad still requires a specialized party, or you will actually fall short. So the above is MAA only.

2.5% extra damage...optimally. It's fine if you're into that, I suppose. Red Hook occasionally does their theorycrafting, and it looks like this is one of those times.

Except the part where the buff has to go off, and you're vulnerable to missing until then; and the buff goes off on the first turn, the important time for putting on loads of up-front damage.

What I'm saying is that focus rings need to be nerfed or removed. They hit cap you on standard enemies. That makes them mandatory. Also they have pretty good crit, which relieves the stress so many people are complaining about. So, double mandatory.

Of course removing it would make the whole game significantly harder. It would probably require a blanket rescaling of enemies. Or heroes, I suppose: same relative distance, fewer variables to fix.

"But No One, battle ballad makes you go faster." And just hitting a dude makes them dead faster. The speed is wasted when a) you would have gone first anyway, which is always true for some heroes in round 2 and b) when the enemy won't die this turn, which is usually true for some enemy. I tried it once. In the ruins. It's easy to simulate counterfactuals if I just sickle-hit rather than ballad up. I actually gained from just hitting way more often than I fell short, as compared to ballad. With a bleed. On skeletons.

Though they are good for bosses and other long battles. However, those are a tiny fraction of all battle turns. And maybe weald dog packs? They're more annoying than dangerous, though.

The expected value of these buffs would be great if it were +damage instead of +acc. At rank 5, 220% damage for the MAA and 176% for the JES.

First problem: you need to cap acc. You can prevent RNG screw and therefore you should. Second problem: you want to frontload damage. Stress dealers can't focus fire if they're dead. Especially as they're fast and you basically need a PD with +spd quirks to prevent them from going at all, it's really important to kill them ASAP to minimize the odds of them capitalizing on their first strike.

Because you need to acc cap, you can't pick and choose when to use the buffs based on situation. If you don't use them ASAP they lose even more value over just hitting, and you risk RNG screw. You decide before you leave whether you need the buffs for acc capping or not, so you decide before you leave what the JES/MAA are going to do in their first turn.

Losing out on an MAA's damage on the first turn really stings. He can hit row 3, you know, which is often a bone bearer or witch or wretch or drummer. And crush can crit, while command cannot.

At least ballad sort of kinda lets you ambush round 2, so you give up an attack round 1 to go faster than the stress dealers in round 2. Combined with inspiring song, ballad really does trivialize incoming stress damage. So I suppose there's that. It does slow down your damage output, though.

Come to think, what happens when you combine the two? Have an MAA and a JES, and use both turn one? You can use even more damaging trinkets. Calculating...you gain 7% damage. Optimally.

And think about this: sure a lot of going first happens in the second round. However, you gave up two attacks going 100% before the second round, using the method of going in the first round. And you give up the opportunity for those attacks to go first in the first round. This may break even, if you're very lucky. As I said, I did a test in the ruins and found out it did not. (If speed buffs rerolled initiative on application it would actually be pretty great, but they don't.)

(By 'optimally' I mean if everyone attacks aside from buff turns. No healing. If not everyone attacks you actually lose damage.)
(By a specialized party for ballad, I made some simplifying assumptions because I'm just ballparking numbers. Namely that everyone does the same damage. If you have a leper or a usually-transformed abomination, then giving up a jester turn to buff their damage can be pretty okay, thus breaking even. More so with lepers because ballad solves their speed issue; they're very unlikely to go first in the first round in any case.)

So basically these skills are good if a) you're really struggling on a boss and want to sacrifice hallway efficiency for boss efficiency or b) you don't have enough focus rings yet.

However, in most cases, the best party is to avoid taking characters that need ballad's speed buff, and use focus rings so you don't need either AOE's accuracy buff.

All this because
>focus ring
>exists

[One Man Army]

Please no nerf. One of the few good remaining rings.

[No One]

Yeah, don't nerf, just remove it. Focus ringn't.

[FinetalPies]

Just don't use it if you don't like it I'm not sure what the issue is?

[No One]

This is the one* game that's supposed to be hard without self-imposed challenges. If we're talking self-imposed challenges, then every game is hard.

*(actually a few)

[Lujo]

Yeah, it currently seems you can just walk into everywhere with the ring and that trinket which adds 2 speed and +8 dodge for minor downsides to correct the ring's downside. On all 4 guys, more or less, because why not? Seems to be the obvioust best setup with only really a few run/character specific alternatives here and there.

[One Man Army]

I do agree with your post @No One, wasting a turn to buff or debuff enemies is a really bad turn investment unless it's a boss fight or that hero had nothing better to do like a jester at the back or a man at arms that is build to tank.

You are losing an attack turn, to try and apply a buff or debuff that has a double roll to work (can miss and can be resisted) and at best you will break even on it in the following turns.

The best strategy was and is still is to kill the stress dealers first and the rest later as quickly as possible, until you can reach a safe stall duration.

So in the end the devs have created a game where, +ACC,+SPD and are the most important stats, forcing the player to have to hunt for trinkets with those stats.

After that it's pure damage either through the form of +%DMG (Late game,because it scales better) or +%CRIT if your hero already has good crit chance, or +%Stun chance +SPD if the hero is a pure stunner.
In torchless runs you also prioritise +Scouting as well to avoid shuffle.,because bad one can end your run.


As far as the trinkets go, there will always be a go to trinket and you have to keep in mind the likelihood of you ever finding four focus rings.
If you are playing on bloodmoon(Max 100days to finish), usually you won't get more than one or two until the very end of your run.

[No One]

While of course there will always be a best trinket, there shouldn't be such a standout obvious best trinket. Focus ring pretty much prevents RNG screw, on top of having better raw stats than a legendary bracer with a minor downside instead of two significant ones.