Sacrifice Item Brainstorming

[Pepisolo]

Ok, the game needs a few more Sacrifice Room Items, so we thought we'd open this up to the community. What would you like to see? Got any interesting ideas for a Sacrifice Item? To start the ball rolling, here's a list of ideas from Ptarth:

Double the Pleasure: Enemy and Friendly shot damage doubled.
Half the Fun: Enemy and Friendly shot damage halved.
Fragile Life: Enemy and Friendly max health halved.
Conservation of Mass: +10 max health, health items no longer spawn (i.e., you only heal from perks and modules)
Bouncy Balls - All shots (friendly and enemy) riccochet
Reverse Course - All shots (friendly and enemy) reflect
Missile Identity - You lose your Energy Weapon (and can never get it back). Your missiles refill to max every room.
Missiling the Point- Max missile capacity is permanently 1, double your energy maximum.
Sticky Plasma - Your shots now intercept enemy shots (catch and hold them for X seconds), but they also do friendly fire damage.
Adrenalin - You do double damage, but you also lose 1 health every 10 seconds.
Coupon Cutter - Shop items are half price.

Do any of these stand out? Let's get brainstorming!

[tombik]

Ok, the game needs a few more Sacrifice Room Items, so we thought we'd open this up to the community. What would you like to see? Got any interesting ideas for a Sacrifice Item? To start the ball rolling, here's a list of ideas from Ptarth:

Double the Pleasure: Enemy and Friendly shot damage doubled.
Half the Fun: Enemy and Friendly shot damage halved.
Fragile Life: Enemy and Friendly max health halved.
Conservation of Mass: +10 max health, health items no longer spawn (i.e., you only heal from perks and modules)
Bouncy Balls - All shots (friendly and enemy) riccochet
Reverse Course - All shots (friendly and enemy) reflect
Missile Identity - You lose your Energy Weapon (and can never get it back). Your missiles refill to max every room.
Missiling the Point- Max missile capacity is permanently 1, double your energy maximum.
Sticky Plasma - Your shots now intercept enemy shots (catch and hold them for X seconds), but they also do friendly fire damage.
Adrenalin - You do double damage, but you also lose 1 health every 10 seconds.
Coupon Cutter - Shop items are half price.

Do any of these stand out? Let's get brainstorming!

Most of those sound neutral if not outright negative. If I remember right sacrifice items right now was not working as Crowns in Nuclear Throne, rather Devil deals in Isaac, am I wrong?

[Draco18s]

To be fair, not all sacrifice items are beneficial (there's one that lets you see the entire floor layout, but there's a perk/pickup that does the same thing, so why would I spend 3+ hp on it?).  But yes, the list there is kind of a mixed bag.

[Pumpkin]

Double the Pleasure: Enemy and Friendly shot damage doubled.
Half the Fun: Enemy and Friendly shot damage halved.
Fragile Life: Enemy and Friendly max health halved.

NO!
I mean... I personally and strongly disagree with these ideas. This personal feeling is based on the fact that, IMO, this game is built upon strong asymmetry. The life and damage for enemies and the player are fundamentally different. Doubling the damages of the player (or halving foes' life) is a huge bonus where doubling damages dealt to the player (or halving its life) seems like something some mildly skillful pals out there might handle pretty well.

TL;DR: asymmetry!

Some other game-changing (the ones around missiles and energy) sound brilliant but balance-breaking.
One more idea for the list: "no more missile count/cap; each missile cost N energy".
But, see, how to balance that with all other energy/missile items? What about items that increase missile cap?
Another idea for the list that I hope is more benign for the rest of the balance: "Each missile fired consume 2 missiles but missile damages x4" (I heard missiles are not meant to deal damage. Now they are!)

A mantra I like:
Think inside the box before trying to think outside the box.

[ptarth]

 

The list was originally a mix of sacrifice shop items and incredibilities with the theme of making the game different. At some point the incredibility note was dropped from the description.

The modifications to health/damage ideas are posed on the balance of shorting (or lengthening) the duration of a run (for better or worse). It is along the same lines of Deadly Assassin, but weaker. Because the changes are symmetrical, the relationship between between damage and health is preserved (except in edge cases).

As an illustration, taking the double damage for everyone idea. It would normally take the player 100 seconds to kill the Warden and the player could survive 3 shots. With this idea, the player will kill the Warden in 50 seconds, but they can only survive 1 shot. It could lead uneven player experiences, with so much damage the player can destroy things very quickly (leading to feelings of overpoweredness), but at the same time, the margin for error is tiny. One "unfair" experience (regardless of how really fair it was) and the run is over. This tends to make players angry if they overlook the consequences of their choice. Side note: Many players overlook the consequences of their choices and lack a good understanding of true randomness (see all games that implement fake randomness to lower the impact of RNG). Of course, I'm not talking about anyone who is reading this, or will be informed of this, it is only those other people who do this, not you. 

[Pepisolo]

The list was originally a mix of sacrifice shop items and incredibilities with the theme of making the game different. At some point the incredibility note was dropped from the description.

Ah, yes, this might be my fault for not reading the emails properly...or something. Maybe I should've made a Sacrifice/Incredibility brainstorm thread.

Most of those sound neutral if not outright negative. If I remember right sacrifice items right now was not working as Crowns in Nuclear Throne, rather Devil deals in Isaac, am I wrong?

Yeah, I believe Incredibilites are the Crownier equivalent in SR.

What are everyone's thoughts on:

Coupon Cutter; Shop items are half price. This seems like a simple -- although potentially OP -- very sacrifice room style item. I'm not actually sure if this is possible in the code immediately, but if not it seems fairly straightforward to implement (for Keith!).

Conservation of Mass; +10 max health, health items no longer spawn. Making it so that health items no longer spawn is interesting. Possibily more of an incredibility style item, though. How about, health no longer spawns but you regenerate 1 per room.

Another idea for the list that I hope is more benign for the rest of the balance: "Each missile fired consume 2 missiles but missile damages x4" (I heard missiles are not meant to deal damage. Now they are!)

Or potentially just have an item that doubles missile damage, maybe. Or is that not sacrifice roomy enough?

[Logorouge]

What are everyone's thoughts on:

Coupon Cutter; Shop items are half price. This seems like a simple -- although potentially OP -- very sacrifice room style item. I'm not actually sure if this is possible in the code immediately, but if not it seems fairly straightforward to implement (for Keith!).

Conservation of Mass; +10 max health, health items no longer spawn. Making it so that health items no longer spawn is interesting. Possibly more of an incredibility style item, though. How about, health no longer spawns but you regenerate 1 per room.

Ptarth is starting strong with so many good ideas.

Coupon cutter is the main one that caught my attention. I'd pick it up in 3 runs out of 5. Though I would recommend reducing the discount to something like 33%, which is already very good with all the costly purchases you can make in a single run.

Conservation of Mass is kinda weird. It's like those powers in other games that prevents you from healing with regular items but give you vampire-style lifestealing, only in this case the vampire power is sold separately. I don't know what, but I think an alternate way to heal should be included with it. Wait, what if the player could regen health using money (3-5c per hp)...outside of combat only? Meh, sounds like a nightmare to balance.

Bouncy Balls, as it is, sounds like a super fun incredibility. If changed to affect only the player, I could see that as an interesting sacrifice item. (I'd love to see Wind try it if it's made as an incredibility)

Adrenalin - Power in exchange for losing health is interesting I think. How about instead of every 10 seconds it would be when you enter a new room? That way the player can calculate the risk/reward at any given time and offset the downside with proper planning. If it makes a player think more, I consider that as a positive thing.

The double/halved for everyone powers, I don't think would work well because of all the pattern based attacks that couldn't follow the change in pace. Make battle too fast and many patterns don't have time to do their thing. Make it too slow and attrition-style patterns become overly dangerously.

I don't understand the reflect and the sticky shot powers, could someone explain how those would act?

[Atlar]

Yeah those ideas sound like incredibilities to me but coupon cutter. This one seems like spot on for a sac item. All sac items are op.
Sac items should be very strong with the only drawback being the health cost, so here are a few ideas:
- +50-100% range for main shot
- friendly bullet size x2-4
- every shop=weapon,defense or drone
- 50% chance energy shot does not deplete energy
- 50% chance missile shot does not deplete missile cap
-same effect as jaywalker incredibility (move through shot-transparent walls)
-25% chance of evasion
-more item drops from enemies
Ask someone else for cool names :p

[Mánagarmr]

Losing health every 10 seconds isn't worth ANY upgrade especially not since you have to sacrifice health to get it in the first place. That's definitely one I would pass up on every time.

Also people seem to have a lot more health than me. A normal run for me will see me have maybe 7 or 8 health by the end. There's not a lot of room to give away 3 to 5 health with that, much less giving yourself about a minute of life by saccing 1 health every 10 seconds. I'd basically die on the first boss as you most likely won't beat it in less than 70 seconds and there's no health in boss rooms most of the time. Even then, a single health pickup is another 10 seconds, providing you're not getting hit.

[Misery]

Losing health every 10 seconds isn't worth ANY upgrade especially not since you have to sacrifice health to get it in the first place. That's definitely one I would pass up on every time.

Also people seem to have a lot more health than me. A normal run for me will see me have maybe 7 or 8 health by the end. There's not a lot of room to give away 3 to 5 health with that, much less giving yourself about a minute of life by saccing 1 health every 10 seconds. I'd basically die on the first boss as you most likely won't beat it in less than 70 seconds and there's no health in boss rooms most of the time. Even then, a single health pickup is another 10 seconds, providing you're not getting hit.

Wait, what?  7 or 8 health at the END?   ....surely you don't mean max health?

I... what?  How.... how is that happening?  I took TWO sacrifice room items on my last run with the damn flame mech of all things, and I still had like 28 max HP at the end.  That was at Terminus: I probably had, ah, 22 at the Warden.  This all being on Hard mode.

What is your playstyle?  I'm wondering where this HP is either going, or NOT coming from.

[Pepisolo]

- friendly bullet size x2-4
- 50% chance energy shot does not deplete energy
- 50% chance missile shot does not deplete missile cap
-25% chance of evasion

These sound pretty interesting to me. Maybe merge the chance of not-depleting ones into a single 25% chance to not use ammo or energy. I haven't looked into whether this is curretly possible in the code, though.

[Logorouge]

-Change your main weapon for something else (specific special weapon or random?)

Sometimes I just get really tired of a weapon and the game doesn't want to give me another. I would gladly sacrifice a few HP to switch things up in those cases.

-Spike immunity (Sorry, I had to. )

[TheVampire100]

Just a quick question. Can we suggest Sacrifice Shop items that are weapons? Because currently we only get perks from sacrifice shops and I think this is the main problem with the whole system.
The varity is not really big, most perks can be aquired through multiple other upgrades and the costs are too high (or too low in the earlier phases) for some stuff. You will always end up with either "I got too much health so I will just buy this thing" or "this isn't so good compared to the price, I will pass it".

I think other stuff coudl shake things really up. A new main weapon, a new energy weapon. I would for example move ALL golden weapons to sacrifice shops. They are too good to lie just around in the game ( I found them very often on the first floor).

[Misery]

Feel free to suggest whatever you want.

I'd like to see pretty much all categories of items appear in the shop.  Originally this didn't seem like a good idea for.... some reason that I don't remember.  But I do think it'd help.  Just have to make sure that whatever goes in there is worth the cost.

[Draco18s]

I would say "yes."

Paying health (rather than credits) for a decent weapon would be an interesting choice.