Rusted Chest needs to be easier to find.

[CoyoteXLI]

This game encourages you to play through stages as quickly as possible. Playing quickly is generally the better way to go about things as you don't end up getting a ton of money only to get it turned into the very low impact xp when you leave the stage, at the cost of wasting a ton of time.

You know what's not compatible with trying to go fast? Painstakingly combing every inch of a huge stage for a tiny black square that's about as noticeable as me in public. This makes rusty key a troll item because it pretty much forces you to play poorly to get any benefit from it, unless you have better eyes than Big Brother and also get lucky to even go past it on your way to other things.

TL:DR Rusty Key as is only wastes an item that could be anything else, make it easier to find the chest so there's actually a benefit to having it.

[ItsRay]

Nah I like it. It teaches through failure. My friend still regularly takes like 10-15 minutes on a stage to find that stupid box, get a backup magazine, and die to the first 3 enemies in the next stage.

Learn from your mistakes. Or die.

[GIRL]

Before the horde of comments going, "It would be OP if it was easy to find" or "That's the point of the item", just think about it. Every chest you open should give you some sort of item that gives some sort of benefit.
The Rusted Key works on paper, it's just a delayed reward. Even better if you find an item every stage, since one key essentially = more than 1 item in return.

But OP is right, the game is about speed, and especially on Monsoon, you can't afford to waste more than 5 minutes per stage. Not to mention, if you go out of your way to get a chest, and you get a Rusted Key, the action of moving to and buying that chest is also wasted time.

Just a slight color change, or maybe just a tiny little glowing light on the box, would completely solve this without making the mini-game of finding the lock box too easy or pointless.

Alternatively, I've been thinking they could just make it so the lock box spawns next to where you spawn in every stage. It'd remove the whole "search for the box" aspect, but it'd make it a WAY more valuable item. Hell, if they do that, they could just make the Rusted Key a Green, or even a Red item to make up for how powerful it'd be. A free item every level from a common item might be too powerful.

At the end of the day though, I'm sure there's both tons of people who want the lock box to be easier to find, and a ton of people who don't. But the fact that at least a good number of people have complained about it should at least merit some thought by the dev team. And since buffing is always preferable to nerfing in terms of game balancing and how it makes players feel, it might be worth it to make the box easier to find.

[ItsRay]

Rusted key gets better the longer the game goes on. Medkit gets worse the longer the game goes on. Medkit is amazing for stage 1-2 on monsoon, after that its practically useless. Some items are better than others.

[CoyoteXLI]

rusted key doesn't really get better though because time spent looking for the obscure chest is always wasted, making more enemies spawn if the tp hasn't been finished yet and just ramping up difficulty more if it has.

There's always more benefit to just going to the next stage faster than hunting for the chest. Every once in a while you stumble on it for free sure, but that's pretty rare and in no way better than an extra medkit or anything else at any point. Heck just do another stage and get a boss kill green in the time wasted.

[ItsRay]

Rusted key absolutely gets better.- After one or at least 2 loops you activate the teleporter immidiately after entering the stage anyway and in that time you can still look for the locked box, even easier because it has BIG ASS RED CHAINS ALL AROUND IT.

I specifically said that hunting for the chest is retarded, that doesnt change the fact that running around the map in stage 2 is ALOT SLOWER than running around the stage while the teleporter is active and you have 500+ items on stage 20.

[GIRL]

Originally posted by ItsRay:

Rusted key absolutely gets better.- After one or at least 2 loops you activate the teleporter immidiately after entering the stage anyway and in that time you can still look for the locked box, even easier because it has BIG ASS RED CHAINS ALL AROUND IT.

I specifically said that hunting for the chest is retarded, that doesnt change the fact that running around the map in stage 2 is ALOT SLOWER than running around the stage while the teleporter is active and you have 500+ items on stage 20.

Just because it gets better later on doesn't mean it doesn't deserve to be made better. I mean, I totally agree with you on the Medkit thing, Monster Tooth is the same way. But I also believe Medkit and Monster Tooth deserve to be buffed as well.

And the fact that it's less useful early on is, if anything, even more of a reason to buff it, because it's just wasted effort and dead weight early on. Completely contrary to Medkit/Monster Tooth which are decent early on, all items in the early game should give you a decent boost.

Not to mention, making it a little easier to find isn't going to make it stupidly OP late-game either. If it's easy to find late-game because you move faster and all that stuff you said, then there's no reason it shouldn't be made to be a little easier to find early game too.

[arc361]

They need to make cloaked chests easier to find. There too invisible.

[Samvega]

Originally posted by arc361:

They need to make cloaked chests easier to find. There too invisible.

I don't think that makes sense as an equivalent statement. Cloaked chests are nothing more than treasure to find. The rusted key is an item that potentially feels a bit useless in comparison to others because it's so difficult to find the lockboxes.

[CoyoteXLI]

cloaked chests aren't robbing you of another useful white you should have gotten.

[Zeddy]

Originally posted by CoyoteXLI:

cloaked chests aren't robbing you of another useful white you should have gotten.

They kiiiind of are. Cloaked chests aren't an extra bonus. They take up spawn credits that could've been used for a perfectly normal chest or a shrine. Granted, cloaked chest cost 10 credits and regular chests 15, but that's still enough that a cloaked potentially prevents one more chest from spawning.

If you don't find it, then a cloaked chest appearing in the map robbed you of a useful white you could've had. However if you find it in a timely matter, then it's a net gain because the chest is free to open. The same could be said about rusty key lockboxes, except they're truly free, independent of spawn credits.

Roughly speaking, a level will on average have around 10 chests, so just one rusty key increases items per level by 10%. After so many keys, that extra item increases in chance to be green, and increases exponentially in chance to be red.

Finding the box can be done quickly enough as long as it's not too out of the way. Just go trigger the boss, get to a vantage point, look for a set of red locks that don't seem to contain anything. That'll be either a lockbox or a cloaked.

I'm on record for thinking it'd be neat if more keys made the lockbox grow a little.

[CoyoteXLI]

That all sounds well and good but as it stands you can easily walk right by the rusty lockbox without ever knowing it's there. If you're trying to go fast you don't really want to spend the time running all over the map, you want to kill the boss, get what's in the immediate area and move on. As you're forced to stand in the area to charge the tp surveying the whole map for the box isn't really feasible to do quickly most of the time.

At any rate it should at least be noticeable enough so that you can reliably pick it up if it's within a few seconds run (at base speed). Right now it looks like a rock, or 90% of wetland aspect. Picking it up as-is is just irritating and makes me feel robbed, I'm sure I'm not the only one. Items should never suck.

[Techno Brownie]

I'm weird. A giant frigging tell? Couldn't find that for the life of me. A tiny discolored box in the ground? Oh I see it on the other side of that cliff.

[jamesraylee]

You'll get used to spotting it. Eventually you'll realize that there are practically no box shaped rocks.