Just catching up with all the feedback, sorry about the delay.
I play on Normal. Before the beta patch, I could power my way through by stacking damage boost perks. So I was considering moving on to Hard. But with the new changes, I'll stick with Normal. So far, I'm mostly dying (by attrition) on floor 3 or 4; I made it to Terminus (and beat him) once. So I don't know how the changes work out on the later floors.
Sounds around about what we were aiming for versus the old versions. Attrition may be a bit too strong, I'm not sure yet, though.
The damage rebalance seems good for the most part. I like that even peashooters seem to do reasonable damage right from the start of a run. So leveling up does present some interesting choices now that damage boost perks aren't the obvious best choice. Mini-bosses seem tankier now--that's good for the most part. However, Arcoris and Loco seem to have too much HP. Arconis took long enough to kill beforehand, what with his speed and being in 2-4 pieces. Now he takes a painfully long time to kill. And I think Loco should have relatively low health as a balance to his crazy movement and bullet patterns. Of the bosses I've fought, only Terminus seems to have too much HP.
The miniboss HP was increased a bit across the board. Might have gone a little too far with Arcoris and Loco, although a few more opinions on this would be good. I do agree that Loco's HP should be relatively low given how crazy the boss is.
Some rooms on floor 1 end up being more bullet-hellish than I would have expected so early in a run. This happens (in certain rooms) with new enemies like pink rampart and dissever and the (slightly more dangerous than before) golden fragments. Haven't decided how I feel about that yet, maybe it is okay. But it usually seems like an uneven difficulty spike compared to the rest of floor 1.
Yeah, I think that generally there's too much dangerous crazy stuff throughout the floors. Misery is going to take a look at the rooms at some point, I think, to reduce the enemy density a bit. I also think that perhaps some of the more dangerous enemies shouldn't be spawning that early on.
Didn't Energy Shield Module constantly drain energy prior to this version? I used to never pick it up. Now you only lose energy when hit. I had a couple runs where that seemed really powerful (absorbs a lot of shot damage). I guess it still isn't attractive if you want to use an energy weapon at all, so I'm not sure what the ideal balance for this module would be.
Yeah, there were complaints that since the energy drain cost was increased, the module seemed like it wasn't ever worth picking up, so I just removed the drain to see how that works out.
I'm opposed to changing modules to drop only in secret rooms and shops. Sure, it's annoying to see one when you already have one. But if you don't have one yet, you're glad when one drops. Such is the RNG.
Not sure what to do about this really, I'll maybe just decrease the drop frequency of modules, although I can add them to the appropriate shops too.
I like the idea of boss locator items telling you who the boss is.
It's good, but I think that will require engine work, so I'm not sure on how feasible it currently is to be honest.
Things I hate more, now that health attrition is greater: loot containers completely blocked by spikes, and the giant barriers that break into pieces that can hurt you.
The player usually has at least 1 shield in order to access that loot, although then it does become a bit cheesy, exiting and re-entering just to access those. Should we just remove that type of challenge? Not sure, but maybe.
The Anangu seem a lot more dangerous than they used to be. Has their fire rate increased? It was especially bad when two of them spawned in a short, narrow corridor . . .
Nope, no changes to these guys.
With all of this, I should point out that I had missiles in all of my deaths/near deaths, but didn't use them: as mentioned above, I either was frantically (and futilely) trying to avoid walls of shots while firing, so that I didn't even have spare time to look at my health bar, much less contemplate using a missile; or, I thought I had the situation in hand, when a shot unexpectedly hit me. In my mind, the primary difference between Normal and Hard is that on Normal, a person can regularly win without using missiles defensively, while on Hard, they cannot. From what I've seen with this update, it will no longer be possible to regularly win on Normal without using missiles defensively. I don't know if that was planned, but it seems like a bad idea, as now beating Normal will require not just some level of reflexes and hand-eye coordination, but also learned reflexive skills specific to schmups.
I think a lot of the difficulty is probably coming from rooms crammed with too many dangerous enemies and these need to be thinned out a bit.
When I first realized health pickups had been halved, I was kinda angry and frustrated. But, looking back, I don't think it contributed to my deaths. There was always just enough or close to enough pickups that I rarely had to enter rooms with major chunks of my health missing. It also had the benefit of making the Happy Face level-up perk and the Scrap Collector Sacrifice Shop perk much more valuable. Actually, now that I think about it, I took one of those two in 3 of my 4 runs, so maybe health attrition could be a real problem if someone misses both of those.
Yeah, attrition is meant to be something that the player can adjust to over the course of a run, depending on how the run is going at the time. If it's not a problem with your current build then just forget about it, if it is then there should be a few choices that you can make to help counter the problem. Grabbing the Bloodlust perks is a major one. If you're unlucky enough to have missed all the more direct options available, then you might need to adjust your playstyle to be more defensive on the run, or seek out healing consumables.
I thought we were approaching too many map improvement items/perks before, but now it's ridiculous. There were at least 2 level-ups that didn't contain any nice perks - they both contained two of the reveal x-type rooms perks, and the other perk was All in the Wrist, which has debatable value; instakilling shootables is nice when they're blocking your path, but really really bad when you're trying to hide from a shot and accidently still have the fire button pressed when you go behind cover. At this point, getting map improvements is so easy, you might as well just show everything from the beginning and free up the space for better items/perks. But that could just be me; I explore the whole map, so I just don't see much value in seeing rooms that I'm going to discover anyway.
That level of perks is probably the laziest group of perks I made, as at that point I was struggling a bit to come up with good stuff. I could remove all the locate room perks and try to add in a few more new ones, but I'm not sure. Anybody like these options? All In the Wrist was originally intended to provide the ability to destroy missile blocks too, but I moved that to Heavyweight to beef that perk up a bit.
The Jack of All Trades perk seems way too OP relative to other perks - not that I was complaining at the time. It is Brute, Small Energy Tank, and Small Missile Pack all in one, I think?
I did reduce the numbers on this a bit after Misery mentioned that it seemed a bit OP, but that version should be in the beta. Currently JOAT is up against BloodyRage,BigGameHunter,TrapMaster,EnergyTransfer, and SecondChance giving the player +10% damage, 2 health, x5% fire rate, +25 energy and +2 missiles. Big Game Hunter gives a straight x10% boost on bosses which is pretty strong, although JOAT is probably still stronger. I think that maybe reducing the JOAT damage boost to +5% would even things out, though. Either that or removing the fire rate boost entirely.
Durable Cells shows up it the secret-special item room. Getting an item that sells for 40 at a cheap shop doesn't feel all that secret-special.
Secret item rooms need an overhaul generally, I think, to make just super cool unique items seed there. The seeding is a bit all over the place at the moment, I think.
The defender drone (I think that's the one) seems to have a typo in the description
I'll adjust that, thanks.
Speaking of missiles, I just realized that while my missile use habits never changed, I never was close to running out of missiles in any of my beta runs, while for previous runs,it was a constant issue on lower floors. I recall that there were some new missile perks early on, or maybe some new items that increase missile capacity?
I don't think things have changed massively on this front. Before the Beta release, I had actually pushed the starting mech missile capacities way down, but there were complaints so I put them mostly back up to where they once were. I did also add a couple more missile capacity boosting items. One other change is that the perks now also give ammo as well as capacity, so overall, yeah, it's probably a bit easier to keep your missile ammo up.
I got the Time Machine consumable on floor 2 from a regular, opens-when-you-pass-by chest. As Misery's stickied tips and tricks post says that it was locked away in Secret Rooms, I was happily surprised, to say the least
That's super weird, regular chests shouldn't be dropping any consumables, probably just a bug, I'll take a look.
I don't know what you guys did to the Cryofreeze module, but it is now easily the most OP weapon in the entire game.
That probably just has its damage set too high then. I'll take a look.
Thanks for the awesome feedback all!