Remove Shadow Curse.. it just isnt fun =/

[Ellohime]

I dont find this mechanic compelling or fun. It makes runs feel bad and inconsistent. If it has to stay, remove it from NG+ where it becomes an annoying hassle. I dont mind trade curse stacks for benefits but otherwise, miss me with this. Thoughts from the community? am I alone here?

[Laho]

Publicado originalmente por Kisama:

The problem with curse is that it's bugged; Or at least it was. Someone noticed that when cursed, when they were picking up resist gear it was actually making their resists worse. I noticed it was doing the same to me.

I was able to become immune to curse in a run last night. Start with the Curse resist blessing from the Church, the curse resist food, and get lucky with the Curse resist set and enemies at least will be unable to give you any Curse. You'll still get some if you buy items for Curse.

[Revalopod]

I actually kinda like curse. I'm up to NG+8 with Warlock and curse has never been much of a problem, unless I was greedy and took all the items from 2 curse orb vendors. Braziers alone can deal with all the curse I get from enemies that inflict it, and then with pyres there's more than enough opportunities to rid yourself of curse. If you don't like curse, then don't take items from the curse vendor thing.

[Drogash]

I like the Shadow Curse system, im in NG+10 with warrior, and having a blast, i do 5k damage, and pretty much one shot everything, so its nice to still have to play smart, and stun the mages that give you the curse and burst them down fast, instead of just brainless kill everything and move on,

if i have 20+ curse the boss is gonna hurt, if i have zero Curse, boss does zero damage, so curse is a good thing, so you have to play smart even if you one shot everything,

[Matex]

ng+ in general is terribly designed, if I knew this I would have refunded.
Any kind of defense is pointless you'll be negative 500+ anyway. Nothing scales into ng+ onwards with trinkets. Shadow Curse on top of that.

Multiplayer also needs work since joining into random lobbies mid run is basically nerfing your own character hard, some kind of MM would be nice.

[Dankwulf]

The curse is hella easy to manage, even as a warrior. Granted, my usual run starts with food/drinks/chapel that puts me at only 20% curse gain, there's still things that are a guaranteed stack until I find trinkets to hit 0%. (Which is entirely possible btw)
Though I agree it's not as punishing in later NG+ levels (I'm currently progging NG+6) It still feels gross to have it on you, and it DOES start to scale harder as it goes on. But with the obscene amount of braizers and pyres that exist, it's only difficult to manage if you're bad at dodging attacks or just turn the brain off and zug away

[Light]

I took one look at it and just backed out without taking the shadow curse options. Same with the trader options. Don't take it if you feel its gonna take more away than it gives. That said, the glitchiness that's been reported with the shadow curse should be addressed because that just makes it even more desirable to skip it and not bother using the mechanic at all. It probably also greatly depends on which class you're playing too. Some of the buffs can be good if you have the right setup. The ones I've seen didn't appeal to me though.

[Zarcos]

Curse isn't bad, like at all. I'm steamrolling NG+8 with multiple classes. It's not hard to avoid and you get ample opportunities to remove it. I rarely, if ever, have any curse by the last few floors.

Every class has a way to avoid it and it's penalty isn't really that bad when you already have 100s of negative armor/resist. We're lucky it doesn't reduce your damage, that would be a nightmare.

[Akrimus]

Player stages:
1. unaware of shadow curse
2. angry about shadow curse
3. seeking protection from shadow curse
4. doesn't particularly care about shadow curse
5. using shadow curse

[Garaj]

The biggest problem with curse for me is that a melee hater. As a wizard I don't have a problem: you take big hits from everything anyway so you're supposed to dodge. But when I play warrior it is really irritating: on top of reducing resistances and armor from ng+, that will ultimately make my resistances very negative, I also have to deal with shadow curse and dodge it, even though there're already strong attacks (looking at you, lightning wizard and wisps) and debuffs (aura silence) that are only a hassle for a melee, but also you get shadow curse because you have to get close to enemy? Even if the attack itself deals 0 damage you still get shadow curse stacks? That's not fun

[Hotzenplotz]

Publicado originalmente por Garaj:

The biggest problem with curse for me is that a melee hater. As a wizard I don't have a problem: you take big hits from everything anyway so you're supposed to dodge. But when I play warrior it is really irritating: on top of reducing resistances and armor from ng+, that will ultimately make my resistances very negative, I also have to deal with shadow curse and dodge it, even though there're already strong attacks (looking at you, lightning wizard and wisps) and debuffs (aura silence) that are only a hassle for a melee, but also you get shadow curse because you have to get close to enemy? Even if the attack itself deals 0 damage you still get shadow curse stacks? That's not fun

Most classes can somehow play around curses. As long as you are contantly circling around the enemy they mostly miss.... With warrior I play whirwind axe berserker and jump in with a stun and kill everything spinning around..... I still hate how this damn curse dictates my style of play and feels unfun to me. Iwould prefer they change this mechanic to something else or make it optional somehow.

[Ajax]

Shadow Curse is perfectly manageable, after a bit of experience.

Pyre Level 2: -40% Shadow Curse Gain
Blessing of Light: -20% Shadow Curse Gain (chapel buff level 4 or 5 I think?)
Bishops' Blessed Bread: -20% Shadow Curse Gain
Sacred Cross (rare trinket, part of a Holy items set with more Shadow Curse res.): -20% Shadow Curse Gain
Any Equipment item with the suffix "of Zeal": -20% Shadow Curse Gain

Any amount of stacking of these vastly reduces Shadow Curse. In NG+1 I had 0% Shadow Curse gain with simply the Pyre upgraded to level 2, taking a Blessing of Light from the Chapel, finding some Bishop's Bread at the Traveling Cook, and then luckily finding a Sacred Cross somewhere in the Barracks....

OTHERWISE... Learn what actually procs Shadow Curse stacks. It's always the XXL large mobs or the caster mobs using a spell of some sort. Most of these are AoE, and whilst sometimes difficult to spot in the mass spam, can be easily avoided solo player.
Priority attacks or focus should go to killing these mobs such that SC stacks are minimised were possible. I can run around like a lunatic with my Warrior, just because I RMB Stun SC casters or use Leap Attack to stun them. They get no curses on me.

ON TOP OF ALL OF THIS, there's the Pyres actually in the levels to remove stacks as you go...

I really don't understand the miffage if I'm honest, sure one of my first NG+! MP games I ran around the Barracks in a 4P player game, sucked up 12 curse stacks, died 2 minutes later to overzealousness, but that was totally my newbie inexperience at the time. Sure, it felt rough after rolling Normal. But I adapted.

[dorumon21]

the real issue is that it makes you feel you need to build around "-% shadow curse gain" or have to play the boring game of play extremely carefully, don't rush anything and take 2-3 hours to finish a run (less you warlock or something who doesn't care)

It would've been better to just make each ng+ enemy scaling be quite a bit harder hitting than feel you need to spec fully into shadow curse gain reduction. Basically give armor/res a actual point than just... it exist... till you in ng+ then it no longer exist.

Also yeah, some classes don't have to worry about it, some builds you can do just avoids getting much of it to begin with or just has so much sustain, it don't really matter what happens.

[<color=#CD3210>Lunatic]

I dont see it as any kind of issue, yeah it reduces resistances and armor but so does every NG+ increment.

Besides that you can reduce the overall percentage gain with the pyre building and apply additional point removal, + the later stages of the barracks and court have heaps of braziers you can use to reduce it further, BUT you do get more crit damage per........

[Dusklite]

Removing it I can't really get behind. But it's too random, too punishing and too biased.

Too random: lower shadow curse gain might give you less stacks, but even with only 30% you can get unlucky. Getting curse upgrades to your stats is neat, not finding any curse shops is not. Even finding shops and then getting only upgrades to weapon power on a spell build sucks.

Too punishing: higher NG+ runs come with bigger penalties out of the box already. Getting curse stacked on top can break you easily. And if you feel that you have to use all anti-curse starting options to manage it, you are basically gimping yourself at the gate.

Too biased: melee characters have a far bigger issue with it. Any added tankiness of those classes melt away pretty quickly making your Warrior about as good a melee fighter as your Wizard if you aren't careful. There's also no added benefit not to play as a ranged class if this game mechanic or the other stats and penalties around it do not change.

I mean, sure. High curse runs with incredible power are fun. But so is winning the lottery. I do get that a rogue-lite has elements of randomness between each run, but if starts to predominantly matters what curse shop upgrades you get or if your 30% curse gain actually evens out to roughly a 70% curse protection or if you find curse resist trinkets or pyres, then you don't even need to play this anymore unless you have something like a seed checker to see if the run will be worth playing or just wasting your time.

Anyways, just my $0.02

[Get a Cleu]

The only problem with curse is how dark it makes the screen, I don't mind making the enemies more invisible but the darkness is kinda annoying to all heck.