Any hope for a tweak patch?

[MTaur]

Sorcerer: Level 1 god. Is this a problem, or are we happy with how it washes out?

How about 1HP restored per mana spent per 3 levels, rounded up? (1HP per mana at lvl1, 2 at 4, 3 at 7, and 4 at 10)

If starting mana got nerfed at the same time, though, it would be a double whammy. Still easier than most level 1 goatpersons, but that's not saying much...

[Darvin]

[Lujo]

The full list of what Knockback allows for on it's own (especially when it costs 0 mana) is rather long and includes, among other things, stuff that's technically exploits. Not that I mind that explicitly, but it sure as hell can't also be a servicable (if not more than serivcable) default damage prep thing on top of your other default damage prep thing.

I could write down that list if anyone's curious, it might be quite fascinating. It's possible that it's actually breaking TT potions and has been for quite a while, because if you stack two of them with the reflex potion you have double damage - and noone's really sure how knockback interacts with resists. I know it's a huge deal in much of the lvl1 bosskill nonsense because of the hefty damage.

EDIT: And about the sorcerer, yeah, breezy early game, Elven mana pool with your CP free to be used elsewhere. Also from the get go, so you can ding like a bastard all game long. One of the very few classess that doesn't really feel like he's in a VT run when he's in a VT run because both his early and his late game are front loaded in terms of development. In regular runs, you have enough power to spike 2 higher level monsters at the same time (hardly anyone can do that), and when you go VT you just "even out" and do what other people do normaly - fight one higher level monster at a time, except other people can't really do it all that well on a VT run with hardly any exporation and development, and he can.

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But that one we kinda know, the mace on the other hand is something everyone kept quiet about and it's quite busted. I suspected it (or rather knew it) for a long time, as I said, those lvl1 boss kills came from somewhere, but if stuff is tweaked, it looks like the biggest offender now that I've had a chance to spontaneously develop a habit of prepping it on anything ever. I'm surprised it's large size isn't giving me any pause in still prepping it on anything ever. And what's more, I find myself regularly converting Taurog junk, and not converting it, just... think about that... And the latest thing is prepping it with a god which kills one of your item slots in a strat which also involves prepping the Titan Guitar O.O

[MTaur]

I personally don't like the health regen as a amount. It's definitely hilarious early, but still pretty nice late. Maybe scaling up to 4 would be too much. But a mana nerf would interact with that too.

[Tinker]

[MTaur]

[Lujo]

Re: Previous post - The heal isn't so marginal when you think about it. It helps you munch on popcorn and with Witchalok Pendant it lets you munch on FAT popcorn (not to mention give the boss a ding beind the ear occasionally). What's really annoying is that the fat mana pool is so huge, the heal is rather useful, but the third ability is marginal at any stage. I whish he had an actual third ability and a less stupid mana pool (which would also nerf him a bit which in all honesty he does deserve).

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INTERFACE SUGGESTION:

I know the devs have spent time and effort recently to minimize everything for the mobile version and stuff, but I've recently been enjoying the release victory screen and how it lets me tell a story with way less text. What I'd love is if it had a way to record boons taken. This would not only help the player get a better feeling of what they did (or overdid) on a run, but also let us reduce the ammount of text needed to tell a story.

I wouldn't even mind it if the victory screen had buttons which let you swap the "monsters killed" list to "boons taken", or whatever, I cut them up in paint to compress them anyway. That's kinda half the story, honestly, in a sense the more important half...

[TheSchachter]

[Lujo]

^ Regarding the Bear Mace - the idea that took people over a year after release to discover it is misleading. We knew about it, and were sitting there not knowing what to think about it or whether it was a balance issue because for the good part of the beta a ludicrous damage providing item (the old Trisword) had been a thing. Nothing looks worth nerfing copared to it, and if it's not getting nerfed you can't really make a decent complaint about anything else, or ever notice somethign you've been using all along as problematic or omnipresent. Or even go looking for more damage. That's how knockback was "discovered" - waaaaaay before now - because the moment the trisword dissapeared people just started cheezing IT as hard as they could because they couldn't just auto-prep / look for the trisword on every run. And the whole thing about how trisword was keeping the power of knockback somewhat obscure is in the arsed up and unclear way knockback damage reads to the user compared to the intuitive and clear "you do +X more" damage which is also calculated in the Damage stat on the UI. Binlor is the god of shoddily presented bigass damage, and was completely obscure as a god of bigass damage for some time in the beta just because of the presentation - but we DID discover him and abused thim every which way.

Especially Avatar, the guy who was the first on the boards to clean everything but VGT with every class - he just used a ton of Binlor for Wall Clearing, but since he didn't know about TT (because he never had a reason to try try him) he didn't know that you could cheeze that hard and do lvl 1 bosskills with it. We've been abusing knockback for ages, it's just that the habitual abusers never reported it as a problem, and someone who preps Binlor and the Trisword on every run isn't gonna report the Bear Mace because it can be prepped on any run.

Most things in this game were "discovered" by either the devs nerfing or removing something which was a no-brainer prerp, or someone avoiding something like that by sheer force of will and being a "hipster" and stumbling onto something. Knockback strats are only being complained about now because I actually wrote it, and I wrote it because I don't expect the devs to do anything about it - we've been abusing knockback all the way back in the beta, and I knew all about it's power years and years ago I didn't go "look ma, no trisword!" on lvl 1 boss kills out of nowhere.

And many of the broken things are caused by the devs themselves or testers (me included on occasion) asking them for ultimately missguided buffs to incentivize people to use stuff. Bear mace used to be +10% if I remember correctly, and someone negotiated a buff to it, so now it's a thing you can fall into a pattern of prepping eveywhere that's also stronger than it has any need to be. When you have the old trisword in, everything that does damage looks lacklustre and can get people asking for it to be buffed. When you don't have the Trisword, you can really ask youself - why in the world does the Bear mace add the most +% damage of any item? Does it?

You can also attribute any potential obscurity of knockback to the ever-clumsy wording and unclear way Pissof works. Is it 60% on walls, and 50% on monsters? Is it only 25% on both mosnters? What is it? And why? Who has time to read that thing when Burndayraz does clear damage, etc. Pissorf orc Bloodmage can farm the vicious token money in any VT dungeon where you can reach the boss at lvl1 with no effort at all, Pissorff solves Bloodmage Gold with about as little effort - we knew about all this, there just wasn't enough done about it. The current pekaboo exploit was probably discovered by people before, and possibly reported as an exploit, but noone got too attached thinking it's an obvious glitch that'll probably get fixed, it just didn't.

And by the time Knockback was (probably) the last of the real exploits out there we had a veto on talking about power levels of stuff because the beta had been going on forever and the game had to come out ASAP. If knockback worked in a clearer manner and if things with knockback actually told you how much damage they did on their tooltip, people would discover them way more easily. Not that everyone and their grandma wasn't abusing it, we had a phase where we were prepping Binlor EVERYWHERE, because there was noting in the game stronger than wall removal that comes with bigass damage. Every time someone would complain about not being able to solve a dungeon, he'd get told to just go Binlor Paladin at it, and whatever it was got done.

Bear mace is like that - wall removal / knocback with more damage than it needs to have, except you can prep it on any run, with anyone, on top of the locker item. I don't mind widely available knockback, but it really doesn't need to provide more damage than the gauntlets.

I do whish knockback actually got developed properly though. There's no "knockback protection" on monsters, which is why the Orc Bloodmage can farm the VT. Telling how much damage a knockback item is adding (or reading the tooltip) is a pain. Does it go through physical protection? Doesn't it? All you have to do to discover it's broken is just find a reason to apply it, but most of the time everything else just looks clearer. Keeping things uninteligable as a way to leave them broken and then go by the "yes but it takes game experience to discover them" is just wrong - because it doesn't take game experience it takes going "I'mma use this thing that I'm not sure what it even does instead of a million things I'm sure exactly what they do and know they work".

Sorry, I still don't think the devs will ever do anything about any of it, but just encouraging the attitude "if noone found it it takes being a genious to find it" instead of the probably much more generally beneficial "everyone who's sidestepped the fact that's it's been terribly implemented has not only discovered it but been abusing it for years in various ways, and someday someone might get around to sorting all that out". It's all too easy for the devs to accept any argumentation that backs the former up, while coming to terms with the second takes both asking the question of whether they actually arsed up, and then allocating time and effort to do somethign about it.

And they did kinda arse up, and the world isn't gonna end if they don't do anything about it, but their game might end up being even better. They might just shrug it off happy with what they've got, noone would really blame them it's still a great game. But more sensible knockback, with more user friendly tooltips would be a very good thing.

[Lujo]

Kockback deserves that "Stuff it does and stuff I'm unsure if it does" separate thread.