Salty whining

[Monkooky]

Ok so the popular thing to hate is blaze cannons.
Sure, those are annoying and can kill you from three rooms away and all.
But you can kill them.

White waiting widows, on the other hand, are the worst.
Wake it up, HEY GUESS WHAT THE ROOM IS NOW FULL OF SHOTBLOCKING WHITE DEATH.
Try to shoot it?
NOPE THERE'S BULLETS IN THE WAY.
If you've got something with slow bullets, they're actually completely untouchable.

Also, while I'm salty, can we talk about how Sunder is actually the hardest boss in the game?
Seriously, both it's shot patterns are way less dodgeable than anything The Warden or Terminus have- and since it shows up on floor 1 or 2 you're seldom able to kill it before stage 2 gets bad.

[Misery]

I have had the thought, multiple times, of possibly removing the Widow's shot-blocking ability, or simply changing up how it works.  I am currently undecided on that as of right now.

The amusing thing about the Widows though:  I didn't design them.  Chris did, actually.   Finally something I cant be blamed for here

Though I did enhance them for Hard mode.   So if you're in that mode, maybe a LITTLE blame.

I am curious though:  What kinds of weapons are you using when you are finding them to be impossible to damage?  I actually was finding a very similar problem with a specific other enemy (and that enemy is getting changes) when using a very slow-firing gun in a somewhat recent run.  It may be that slow-firing weapons have potential issues that have not previously made themselves present all that often (since fire rate increases had been super easy to get for a LONG time).  Might need to change up a couple of enemies to work with that better, I'm not sure.


For Sunder, hmmm.  I'll give you these:

Normal mode:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgQSkpMgftw

Hard mode:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owT7SrzQLEQ


Those are demonstration videos showing how the patterns are meant to be dodged.   Note the constant circling motion during phase 2.



Anyway, just wait'll the perk overhaul update shows up.   It'll give you a couple of new things to hate.  I kept mentioning Inferno Cannons, for instance....

[ptarth]

I hate Sunder too!
I think it is the stop and go nature of the avoidance path. I tend to either not stop and the pattern gets out of whack. Or not go, and eat the bullets.

I wonder if there is a slogan in there.
"Starward Rogue come taste the bullets"
"Starward Rogue eat the bullets"
"SR to go or not to go eat the bullets"
"SR gotta catch 'em all"
"SR Catching Bullets for Fun and Profit"

[Misery]

Any of those sound pretty applicable here.

[Monkooky]

Weapons which we wielded while white waiting widows walloped wus:
Guardian blaster- Hitting was nearly impossible!
Solar Flare Gun- Honestly seems rather bad in general at the moment. I could hit sometimes but damn this gun just doesn't do much damage.
Phase Pistol- Hitting was nearly impossible!
Minigun- this is cause I ran into it unnaturally early. Floor 3 or something
Weak Minigun (The Deep Blue one)- I was relying very heavily on my energy weapon, but ran out of ammo. Hadn't found a new gun by floor 6 either.



As for Sunder: yeah that dodge pattern doesn't actually look too bad. It's still possibly unintuitive enough that he should maybe show up later. Also, it may be undoable for short range weapons on Hard- it looked like you were skirting the edges of the stage, and didn't really have much opportunity to do otherwise.
tl;dr still salty but now I have no one to blame but myself

[Misery]

Hm, if a main weapon has shorter range than the default gun, it needs to be changed.  All major patterns are balanced around that being basically the minimum and default range.

[Monkooky]

Check out the splattershot. It's range is really quite low.
It's actually one of my favorite weapons (brawlhalla is my favorite place) but it's incredibly bad against bosses.

[Pepisolo]

Just tested Sunder on hard with the Splattershot. It's doable, but the slight lack of range does hinder you a bit, so I upped the range a bit.

[Chthon]

I never take the splatter shot unless I have homing shots. Only with homing shots does it at least equal the range of the basic guns (as the shots increase in velocity as they approach and thus increase their range)

[GiftGruen]

What about making the waiting widow shots not block every shot, but only ones that are weaker than itself? Not sure how SR handles that, but in TLF every shot had a base damage number visible, so I guess comparing the player bullet damage with the www's and killing the weaker one wouldn't be a lot of work to implement? Alternately, make them not block energy weapons shots.

Would make slower, but stronger shots strong against them (or alternatively, makes you hold onto your energy in rooms with them present).

[Misery]

If there's a way to do that, I have no idea what it is.

All attacks do have a base damage value, yes.   But I'd rather not complicate how it functions any more than I have to.  More likely the blasted Widows are just going to need changing since slow-firing attacks might actually be slow-firing now like they're supposed to be.  It's the Widow's rapid use of the blocking burst that makes it so bloody hard to hit with something that doesn't fire very often.

I suspect this issue is also going to affect the Blademorph enemy.  That thing with the spinning swords, totally blocks your bullets with them... getting at that thing with a FAST firing weapon is a pain.  I usually just fling missiles at it out of impatience.

I don't suppose anyone's tried a slower weapon against that specific thing? 

[Pepisolo]

Just my personal views....to be honest I didn't even know that the widows had shot blocking on their shots. Or I forgot ... or something. The only problem I've had with the widows in the past is that for such an agile enemy, they were also pretty tanky, so were a bit annoying to grind down. HP values might have changed recently, though, I'm not sure. I don't recall being annoyed by them lately, though.

Blademorphs since the nerf and move to Fearsome have become pretty easy,  I think. I don't think I've taken a single bit of damage from those guys since. Regarding slow firing weapons, all you have to do is stand at mid range and the Blademorph defenses open up a fair bit. Even at long range I think a slow firing weapon can get through the defense with careful aiming. So, yeah, I definitely don't think there are any problems with those.

Edit: You could remove the widows shot_destroys_other_shots and change that to shots_can_withstand_x_shot_interceptions instead. This would at least allow more shotgunny or bursty weapons to push through the widow's shot.