Red Reaper?

[Pepisolo]

I haven't had much complaint with it over the last few versions.  The Banshee on the other hand...

I think it's more a matter of learning what Banshees are about. Yeah, the pattern is monstrous and scary, but once you learn how to deal with them they're not too difficult, I don't think. If you spot a Banshee, don't immediately just shoot because they never fire back at you until you fire at them. If you prepare for them -- and you can take this as far as clearing the room first before dealing with them -- you should be able beat them 9 times out of 10 without taking any damage.  Attack, then run either behind them as far away as possible or behind some suitable cover, then just finish them off when they're zipping around.

I do think they need to be in a different category though.  One problem is that they're appearing in some rooms where their attack doesnt actually fit properly (meaning, there's nowhere to move to in order to avoid it).

They're also super common right now.

A slightly higher category would help with both things.  I dont know which one to suggest though.

I think as far as enemy categorization is concerned, you're the best one to probably make a call on this. Chaos_adder 3x3, maybe? Certainly sounds apt.

Pretty much this.  Killing them isn't a problem, it's the fact that a lot of times they spawn in small rooms where you have nowhere to run, or later versions that fill up a medium-large sized room before you can find cover.

There is a 3 section room where the middle section has a ton of pipes (you know the one).  I was on floor 4 cruising around in the Flame Tank and took out a couple of easy mobs.  Then BOOM, red tide...      Eat that one and move up to find red variant banshee in the middle.  Nuke it real good and run like hell to find a TP pad... nope red tide death...     GG... bleh

Thanks for the feedack, I'll look into changing its category, which should help.

[keith.lamothe]

Reaper brought me to school the first few times. When I found my sprint button and realized where I could hit him it became trivial, even pre-nerf. Sprint, wait until he turns, shoot for ~2 seconds, rinse, repeat.

Banshee reminds me of the witch in LFD2 (though I haven't played that, just going off the description) : if you spot one, don't do anything, line up a kill shot (missile, if necessary), and pull the trigger.

But yea, the RNG can hammer you with a Banshee in an unreasonable place. After a while, you have an instinctual heart-skips-a-beat reaction to seeing one of those initial bullets when you didn't even realize there was a banshee there. And then it all hits the fan.

[Pepisolo]

Banshee reminds me of the witch in LFD2 (though I haven't played that, just going off the description) : if you spot one, don't do anything, line up a kill shot (missile, if necessary), and pull the trigger.

Yeah, the witch from LFD2 was one of the inspirations behind the Banshee, actually. The intent is that you have to keep an eye out for them and prepare accordingly. A Banshee will only heavily punish you if you treat them lightly. They're supposed to be scary, too, and make you stop and think if you see them around.

[keith.lamothe]

The effect is more fundamental for in my case: it makes me actually pay attention rather than just ramboing everything. Since I don't generally play with an eye towards keeping the gamestate (i.e. brief testing), I tend to not consider my surroundings closely.

That makes Banshee a happy panda.

[Captain Jack]

Banshee reminds me of the witch in LFD2 (though I haven't played that, just going off the description) : if you spot one, don't do anything, line up a kill shot (missile, if necessary), and pull the trigger.

Yeah, the witch from LFD2 was one of the inspirations behind the Banshee, actually. The intent is that you have to keep an eye out for them and prepare accordingly. A Banshee will only heavily punish you if you treat them lightly. They're supposed to be scary, too, and make you stop and think if you see them around.

I love Banshees since their shots destroy missile blocks. Seeing one means a free health shard. Plus there's that rush of firing away and then taking off.

[keith.lamothe]

True, the clearing of the bombable blocks is actually enough of a tradeoff to make me conditionally glad when the game seeds a Banshee. I'm very stingy with missiles.

[Pepisolo]

The effect is more fundamental for in my case: it makes me actually pay attention rather than just ramboing everything. Since I don't generally play with an eye towards keeping the gamestate (i.e. brief testing), I tend to not consider my surroundings closely.

That makes Banshee a happy panda.

Yeah, Banshee certainly likes to put a stop to any Ramboing that's going on, heh.

[Misery]

The Banshee has shown me one thing though:  Drones can be exploited really badly.  When I saw that they could actually stop that enemy from being able to fire at all, I went and experimented with them some more...  I'd said that something needs to be done about them before, but after some real time with them last night, they might be outright broken.  I'm thinking that drones in general need to have their ability to block shots removed.  Even just one drone can take an enemy like this and make it do.... absolutely nothing.  I tried this against heavier targets, smaller ones, and bosses, and, most of the time, it can work, and it's not that hard to do.  Even the game's final bosses can be made trivial with a drone.

 And that's with just ONE of them.  2 or 3 makes you unstoppable, and it's not hard to figure out how to use them to do that.  By the time I had 2 drones I'd stopped being at all careful, even when dealing with Hard mode bosses, because chances are, I wasnt getting hit by anything.  At 3 drones I DEFINITELY wasnt getting hit. 

It's just like what happens when you start to get defense flies in Isaac; bullets are just no threat anymore.  It works in THAT game because Isaac isnt exactly meant to be very balanced, but here is a little different.

[PokerChen]

 I've been trying to find those drones for a while, perhaps they're in the zenith trader rooms I've been been into? (Yes I would agree shot block is a balance concern.) The size and design of the sprite, however, does suggest that it should be able to be hit.

 None of the other testers seems to be noticing the same thing - perhaps they're really rare at the moment? If players are only able to find/purchase 0-1 of these in a given playthrough, then I wouldn't think it's unbalanced.

[Misery]

I've been trying to find those drones for a while, perhaps they're in the zenith trader rooms I've been been into? (Yes I would agree shot block is a balance concern.) The size and design of the sprite, however, does suggest that it should be able to be hit.

 None of the other testers seems to be noticing the same thing - perhaps they're really rare at the moment? If players are only able to find/purchase 0-1 of these in a given playthrough, then I wouldn't think it's unbalanced.

They were rare for awhile because the item pools were all sorts of screwed up.  Chris is fixing those up alot now.  I suspect that hardly anyone has even been able to get any up until one of the most recent updates.  Even the item room pools were screwed up; if you noticed Leaky Battery and that one thing that requires you to sacrifice an energy weapon showing up super often, that's the reason why that was happening.

To find drones, go to one of the Robot Shops.  That's what they sell.  They were selling consumables before, which made no sense and was just an error basically.  Some of them can be expensive though.  But they're no longer rare at all.  In my last run, I was able to get 3 of them by floor 3.

Either way, I'm going to talk with Chris about the things; my thoughts are to make it so that most of them cannot block shots; they're already powerful WITHOUT being able to do that, unlike similar items in similar games.  Something like the "Basic Drone", which literally says on it that it JUST blocks shots, should be the only things capable of doing so.

There's other issues with them right now, such as the fact that drones + shopkeeper = uh, trouble, to say it without spoiling anything, but the blocking bit is the big one.  It's literally capable of shutting down even the toughest bosses.

[Misery]

I haven't had much complaint with it over the last few versions.  The Banshee on the other hand...

I think it's more a matter of learning what Banshees are about. Yeah, the pattern is monstrous and scary, but once you learn how to deal with them they're not too difficult, I don't think. If you spot a Banshee, don't immediately just shoot because they never fire back at you until you fire at them. If you prepare for them -- and you can take this as far as clearing the room first before dealing with them -- you should be able beat them 9 times out of 10 without taking any damage.  Attack, then run either behind them as far away as possible or behind some suitable cover, then just finish them off when they're zipping around.

I do think they need to be in a different category though.  One problem is that they're appearing in some rooms where their attack doesnt actually fit properly (meaning, there's nowhere to move to in order to avoid it).

They're also super common right now.

A slightly higher category would help with both things.  I dont know which one to suggest though.

I think as far as enemy categorization is concerned, you're the best one to probably make a call on this. Chaos_adder 3x3, maybe? Certainly sounds apt.

Pretty much this.  Killing them isn't a problem, it's the fact that a lot of times they spawn in small rooms where you have nowhere to run, or later versions that fill up a medium-large sized room before you can find cover.

There is a 3 section room where the middle section has a ton of pipes (you know the one).  I was on floor 4 cruising around in the Flame Tank and took out a couple of easy mobs.  Then BOOM, red tide...      Eat that one and move up to find red variant banshee in the middle.  Nuke it real good and run like hell to find a TP pad... nope red tide death...     GG... bleh

Thanks for the feedack, I'll look into changing its category, which should help.

I would say for category, actually, Chaos 5x5, instead of 3x3.  This being because of the huge nature of the thing's attack.  It's not really at the level of something like a Fearsome type, due to it's initial passive nature, but it's definitely a big threat.  Particularly with the fact that it's attack is capable of hitting the player multiple times if they get caught in it.

This'll also ensure that it gets put into rooms that are designed for such things.   It's getting placed into spots made for small foes right now.