Way too long time player feedback :)

[FluffyKitty]

First of all: I love this game!
Second of all, looking at 178 hours playtime: I should get a life! :)

No, seriously. This is overall just a very well designed game.
Being in software development myself I can tell it's very hard to implement such many upgrades, items, relics with countless interactions with this few problems.

Still, to be more than just a voice shouting praises, I want to contribute by sharing some of my insights after so many hours of playing.
Please don't mistake these as unconstructive criticism.


Max Health / Healing:
This is a VERY complex interaction which can easily break a game in one way or the other. I think it's pretty well done, but minor adjustments might be good.
Especially in the beginning players tend to "bleed out" a lot, meaning that they slowly lose their health over many rooms and eventually die due to not enough food or more precise: Food not healing enough.
This can be pretty frustrating, although overall it's a important mechanic. Without the possibility to die slowly, many game mechanics like damaging curses or relics like "Totem of Life" would get irrelevant.
Still I think losing live to a unfortunate hit is a little bit too punishing at the start of the game, while increasing max-health (armor upgrades) doesn't help at all.
Later in the game, this can actually suddenly turn around. Max health gets important to avoid quick deaths to bad combos, while healing gets easier with relics that provide additional or better food (Butcher's Cleaver, Leftovers, Meal Ticket, Seasoned Popcorn, ...).
My suggestion: Slightly reduce the gold costs for the Salt, Pepper and Cayenne Pepper Shaker. This will make them more accessible to new players while not changing the late game.


Electricity:
The basic idea of another elemental damage source besides fire is good. Giving both a twist (fire setting up oil puddles, electricity shocking through water) also sounds neat. But while the trade-off of fire is ok, electricity is never worth the risk.
Reason 1: While it does help with AoE-ing several enemies at once, it's often a unreliable proc that just doesnt happen, wenn you need it.
Reason 2: "Don't stand in water when playing with current!" is a wise sentence, but in small rooms with lots of water and many enemies a single electricity relic or the blue crystal buff can end your run, since you can't turn it off.
Reason 3: You enter a room with several of the electro-bugs? Have fun with your AoE-proc that loves to hit the blistering ones and kills you.
This would be absolutely ok when there was a reliable way to prevent these accidents AND the advantage of using electricity yourself was big enough to take a risk. Unfortunately it's not.


Relics which are way too risky:
- Bottled Lightning, see last paragraph. Never worth picking up.
- Conductor, see last paragraph. Combine with pifers ring and enemies blowing up gold depots in flooded rooms. Fun!
- Galoshes: In theory this could be neat - if not being able to jump on oil was a big deal. Worst: Try against charged golem - you can't see the water anymore that electrocutes you!


Relics which are probably too week:
- Caustic Vial: It's way to rare that you can really setup a chain reaction to even bother about this thing.
- Cosmic Egg: Bonus EP for the familiar can help, but realistically you get this relic when the familiar is already level 3. And even if not - it doesn't matter.
- Lunch Box: Clunky to use - can't choose what to put in. And even when you get a grilled ham inside, it will just pop out after a meaningless 1 hp hit and gets eaten.
- Recycler: Either you don't have enough bombs to blow up chests or you don't need that extra item anymore.
- Wayland's Boots: Besides the rare occations where a chest is behind spikes you never need those. Also ruin the "step on spike for chest" rooms.
- Wet Blanket: Doesn't feel like it provides a meaningful advantage.


Relics which are probably too good:
- Key Blade: In the late game where it's pretty easy to reach 99 keys with doubling up bombs and then imp-pot-switching, this relic just breaks the balance. Even with "only" 30-40 keys the damage bonus is way too high.
- Map: This might be controversial and of course I like to have it. But it pretty much nullifies too much of the gameplay. Djinn-Familiar or Potion of True Sight get reduced to fiding crawl spaces.
- Miniturizer: Effectively doubles your amount of chests. Maybe reduce to a chance.
- Petrified Rock: Pretty much you-win ticket. Bomb all spots with at least 3 breakable tiles to get even more bombs, keys, talismen...
- Nullstone: It should really not prevent stuff like health-costs at altars or for transmutes. Way too good.


Problematic curses:
- Sweaty fingers / palms: getting one of these early on ends the run. You can't enter rooms which hinders you from removing the curse, from healing at pilfer's. Maybe reduce the proc-probability so it's not THAT punishing.
- Tariffs: Also a run-ender when getting early. Double keys for rooms and chests, double health for altars - it's too much in early game to recover.
- Bottle Stopper: If Potion slots are reduced to 0 then please at least allow the player to pickup and insta-drink potions like with Compulsion-curse.
- Powder Shortage: Way too punishing early in game while meaningless in the end. No good idea here.


Othermine:
Overall a pretty fun challenge.
I'd just reduce the impact of RNG in the first antechamber.
- give the player at least 2-3 combined sword/throw upgrades in the chest
- maybe remove the bomb-upgrade or at least limit it to 1 or 2. Runs that start with +4 bomb and no sword/throw are not worth starting.
- maybe let the player start with 1-2 bombs and keys. Bad RNG on the first floors often leads to many unaccessible rooms which is quite frustrating.

[Mr. Aqua]

I agree with the majority of this. Got not much to say other than that.

[ZT Xperimentor]

Well said and I pretty much agree on everything . . .
Spot on about the healing vs max health problem across the game length.
Glad I'm not the only one pointing out the the galoshes & golem cheapness either, also the potions slots being reduced to 0 preventing you from drinking any; ran into both frustrations first hand and reported them in game, as if that does anything.

I agree on the electricity but would point out the fire is just as risky; some rooms are filled with oil and if you got the salamander tail, or there's torches in the middle of room, you can easily end up setting yourself on fire. However I'd say the electrified orb is more of a risk than bottled lightning, since it loosely orbits you it's not difficult to tag enemies in puddles you're standing in; like the concept but there's too many situations it can backfire too.

To expand on items that are too weak.
- Blood bomb, unless you get lucky with popcorning items to amass a stockpile early, it's rarely a good idea to waste bombs in combat. Not to mention enemies can shove them aside, and spinning blade traps and the like will kick them around further endangering yourself. Besides the lack of synergies, more often than not you'll never have enough bombs to consider the synergies worth while when you find them. Tsar bomba included.
- Lucky charm, picked it up about two dozen times and only had it activate once; only to die within seconds anyway because pilfers were triggering the room traps.
- Aegis, it just never gives enough survivability to make it worth picking up; later enemies will outright kill you regardless with massive damage, or you get comboed in tight quarters.
- Bramble vest, only but always counter attacks melee range enemies, ranged attacks will trigger it too which you'd expect to always be a blessing, not so regarding the previously mentioned fire & electricity. Similarly you can take reflect damage unintentionally from this via the lightning bugs, suicide rats, walking bombs, and various oil or explosive barrels.
- Crippling poison, like salamander's tail and bottled lightning, a 'chance' for extra damage makes it frustrating when it's only chip damage anyway, the slow can be a life saver but it's still too unreliable to feel satisfying.

Items that are too good though is where I'll differ noticeably.
- Miniturizer & petrified rock are too rare to build a run around, and by the time you do find them it's just another 'win more' effect tacked onto your list of bonuses.
- Null stone you can't pick up without getting a bundle of curses with it, at least I've never seen it appear outside the demon's deal room between floors.
- Battle standard, everyone picks it up because it enables even terrible runs to nuke the most problematic enemy in any given room before they're in danger. Especially when combined with war paint, both are fairly commonplace appearing in the treasure rooms and shops.
- Dillon's claw & shadow's fang, it's no secret how strong critical hits can be, particularly if you get any blessings or relics that boost your base damage.
- Masa, it gives a significant melee damage buff for a minor ranged damage nerf, unless you've already got a ranged only run going, there's rarely a reason not to take this.
- Hyperstone, another massive boon that can appear anywhere, granted it only benefits melee damage but it's another that's never ignored.
- Rabbit gloves, like the null stone I've never seen it appear outside of the deals, but if you can acquire this early then it can make a run from the dozens of free items; the only problem I've noticed is that the free item seems to be random, sometimes it's just a mundane consumable like a key or steak, other times it's a relic or potion.

Problematic curses, I got a few more to add here too.
- Pilfer's nightmare; with their already sudden and random spawning ontop of usually being faster than you, this is another death sentence if you get this early. It becomes insanely troublesome if you also have the explosive decompression curse, effectively doubling the number of enemies to deal with every room.
- Mutation, Empty coffers, Rigged, & Metamfiezomaiophobia; also run enders if any of these are given early due to bleeding out supplies with dwindling wiggle room, each of the four trigger near constantly despite being labeled as 'a chance' of happening.
- Crumbles, makes all items laying on the floor get destroyed in one hit, it's already a known irritation that most items can't be pushed around but break in a few hits, this curse seems to have been created out of spite. Fire in all it's forms, spikes, traps, collateral damage from enemy attacks, all of these will instantly break any new items dropped in the room.
- Arachnophobia, in itself isn't too bad to deal with taking your time to single out each enemy instead of trying to kill multiple at once; however if you have any of the 'eater' curses or the poison mushroom, expect to loose sooner than you think due to hemorrhaging your advantages trying to progress.

[FluffyKitty]

Wow - I'm pretty happy about the good feedback! :D

I agree on:
- Blood Bomb is useless, right. I completely agree
- I actually like the crippling poison debuff on enemies, but it's rather on the weaker side, right

Not sure:
- Rabbit gloves - never found them useful, but maybe was unlucky. Of course they shine in rooms with relicts for curses

I beg to differ:
- Null stone: Yes, it gives curses, but those are easily remove at altars due the the nullstone. Or with the blue anti-curse drink
- Salamander's tail: pretty great because like Lava walkers it allows to light torches for the fire puzzles.


Most interestingly, I pretty much disagree about all the curses.

- Mutation, Empty Coffers and Rigged are all pretty bad, but I don't think they are TOO bad for a major curse. They should hurt.

- Pilfer's nightmare: I consider this one funny, love to boot every pilfer anyway. With decompression it get's dirty, but still... not unfair imho

- Metamfiezomaiophobia (you copy/pasted this one, right :) ):
I like this one too. When I'm cursed by this one, I expect every chest to have teeths. You can rangepull these and they are easy to kill. And somehow (not sure if true) I even have the feeling that the chests yield even more and better stuff than those without teeths.

- Crumbles is highly annoying, especially because I forget it all the time (being stupid is no excuse :) )

- Arachnophobia is pretty hard, but interesting. I like to play around it! Jump away after killing blow and range 1-2 shot the spider

[ZT Xperimentor]

It's nice to hear my rambles are read for a change too!

Poison in general seems too strong having a significant slow tacked onto it's DoT, both from enemy sources and when the relic procs; I like it, but feels like it was kneecapped to prevent abuse when it could've been two different relics that were reliable effects.

Yeah the rabbit gloves are a crap-shoot, picked them up twice so far but only got one free relic from the shop, usually it's just potions or some other consumable pickup.

To counterpoint your counterargument on the null stone, yes there's ways of removing curses, but as far as I know it's always randomized which ones get cured. And unless you got multiple potions or waivers (or whatever those tag things are) available, some negative effects are going to linger. What makes it a problem is what curses are acquired when you initially pick it up; Tariffs as you mentioned can prevent you access to alter rooms but also applies to penance, Security Theater likewise hinders access to shops, and Malicious Intent doubles the health cost of penance too, then there's Uncreative which can remove the option to do so.

Salamander's tail . . . in hind sight I forgot you can use it to cook food for more healing, but it becomes a self harm hazard when oily enemies become prevalent, and a persistent accident waiting to happen if you have the galoshes. That's why I threw it in with lightning for being a mixed blessing.

Granted three of those were major curses so they're not likely to popup unless a deal was struck, but I was pointing out they're most lethal to a run early on as well, later on when you have resources to remove or work around the curses of disappointment they're a non-issue; and also being deceptively reliable to activate when worded to sound like a 50/50.

Pilfer's nightmare you've failed to convince me otherwise, later on in the crystal caverns and magma core they contribute so much to being chain-hit for massive damage due to so many dangers either rushing or shooting at you. Besides blocking your thrown pick preventing you from taking out worst threats safely, while loosing even more gold and/or health. Explosive decompression I find funny when I've got some other gold altering relics, but the pilfers are still a cheap annoyance purely there to pad the game progression.

Doh you got me, yeah I had to look it up because there was no way I was spelling that right from memory, and I was drawing a total blank on the word 'mimic' at the time lol. And I'm impressed with how fluid mimic's animations are for such a fast enemy, though it's made me paranoid to preemptively attack every chest regardless if I have that curse or not.

After loosing most of my gold from a bombushka going off in a shop when I was hunting for secret rooms, yeah I've quickly sided with sticking to throws since they don't normally damage items laying around, the only exception being the transmutagen bomb but I usually don't get offered that. But I concur that items breaking in one hit is blatantly obnoxious.

Funny enough I don't mind the Arachnophobia curse either, and have found a few (potentially unintentional) synergies that make it worth keeping, Like I described it's mostly only a problem if you get another particular curse that considers your violent gameplay progression.

Now that I think about it, my success is one hell of a mixed bag anyway. Reascued all the npcs and slain the seer boss in less than 50 deaths, sounds impressive sure; but I still haven't killed the other half of the bosses, upgraded my potion slots, fully upgraded any of the shops or base values for peasonts, haven't learned any new blessings and only unlocked a couple familiars. I'm not trying to become a speedrunner, I make too many stupid mistakes for that lol; just kind of surprised how lucky some runs can be to that extent, so yeah take my objections with a grain of sea salt XD