Void Item Balance Suggestions

[gaforb]

As it stands, the majority of the void items outperform their standard counterparts, or even when they are only as good are usually worth taking solely to gain the extra item (A plasma shrimp in a run where you haven't seen an ATG, for example)

Lost Seer's Lenses

Gain a diminishing 0.5% (+0.5% per stack) chance to instantly kill a non-boss enemy. Regular kills reset the chance.

~Chance is halved each time it triggers
~Killing an enemy normally improves the chance by 0.5%, to a maximum of (0.5% * stacks)
+Keeps iconic instakill effect
-might still be too strong

Alternatively if you're okay with ditching insta-kill, there's this idea below:

Lost Seer's Lenses (Rework)

Every 5 seconds, Gain 100% Critical Strike Chance on your next 1 (+1 per stack) shots. Corrupts all Lensmaker's Glasses.

+Removes RNG, allows careful players to line up big attacks with when they have crit ready
+Fun railgunner/bandit passive interaction
-Blast Shower Abuse, but the already low cooldown makes this more of an intended synergy if you really want to invest in it.
-May be hard to keep track of in the heat of battle.

Needletick / Collapse

10% (+10% per stack) chance to trigger Collapse in an enemy, dealing 200%-1200% after 5 seconds. More triggers accelerate the collapse. Corrupts all Tri-tip Daggers.

Vanilla collapse is strictly better than bleed in almost all cases, the only downside being it takes a minimum of 3 seconds to actually do the damage. With the above changes, it may also be able to be re-added to Void elites without them instakilling the player

~Proccing Collapse on an enemy with no stacks of collapse applies 10 stacks, which then decay at a rate of 2 per second.
~Whenever a stack of Collapse is removed, reduce its damage by 100%
~Proccing collapse on an enemy with any stacks of collapse instead removes one stack of collapse immediately and increases the pending damage by proc*100% (offsetting the reduction from removing the stack)
+The damage for having 100% collapse chance is capped at ~1100% DPS, a fair trade for bleed's exponential scaling.
+Enemies with Collapse will be genuine threats if you are careless, as opposed to a single grazing blow being a death sentence.
+Proc scaling is equivalent to bleed's, but slightly better for low-proc attacks since the lowest base damage is always 200%
-may be unintuitive, can't tell myself since I thought of it.

Weeping Fungus

After sprinting for 1 second, heals you while sprinting for 2% (+1% per stack) of your health every second. Corrupts all Bustling Fungi.

+No autosprint abuse
+Usually makes the player have to choose between dodging and healing or using offensive skills, rather than easily alternating both.
+Stacking value reduced to half, similar to bungus
-Probably still just better than bungus in all situations

Below is a wackier idea that leans into the standing still aspect of bungus a bit more

Weeping Fungus (Rework)

While standing still, emit a Void Pulse every 5 seconds that nullifies enemies within 10m (+3m per stack). Heal 5% max HP for each enemy nullified this way. Corrupts all Bustling Fungi.

~First pulse triggers after 1 second, same as bungus. each thereafter is 5 seconds apart.
+Interesting Void design that evokes theme of loci or Void Seeds
+Useful partial stunlock for allies to take advantage of
+Still good on engi turrets
-Range scaling may be an issue at larger stack counts

Polylute

25% chance to fire lightning for 40% TOTAL damage up to 3 (+2 per stack) times. Corrupts all Ukuleles.

+Scaling from 3+3 to 3+2 to match uke.
+Brings damage more in line with other greens (Vanilla ATG ~ 30% increase, this is now ~30% as well)

Benthic Bloom

Picking up an item has a 20% (+10% chance per stack) chance to upgrade 3 random items to the next tier. Corrupts all 57 Leaf Clovers.

~No longer converts entire stacks of items, just a few at a time
+Still gives you plenty of new items and probably takes your important speed ones
+Scales evenly with both speedrunning and full-clearing stages
+Still tends toward all-reds, but you can mitigate the 'downside' by not picking up items
+Works when camping on a single stage with sacrifice

[gaforb]

Also unrelated but wanted to suggest having Void Fiend's corrupted special be a bit quicker since at the moment the amount of time it takes to actually trigger makes it pretty much never worth it. I'd also suggest having picking up void items simply slow the rate its corruption drains, instead of increasing the minimum it can drain to. This still allows for pretty easily staying corrupted 100% of the time once you have enough void items, and also gets rid of the awkward window where you have 20 or so void items and end up flicking back and forth between the forms way too quickly.

[Moffein]

Void Lens I definitely don't like the instakills since it makes rapid hitters able to stop playing the game. First idea sounds promising. Rework sounds a bit convoluted. Probably won't touch this til a later date.

Needletick Rework sounds interesting, but I'm not entirely on board with how it ends up requiring rapid hits and multiple stacks to get much use out of it. I'd like to make it so that Bleed benefits rapid hitters who can keep up stacks while Collapse benefits slower-hitting characters who don't get much use out of Bleed stacking, though I don't know if this would actually work in practice.

Weeping Fungus Having it only activate after X seconds of sprinting sounds good, and mirrors Bustling Fungus. On that note, lowering the time it takes for Bungus to activate is something I'd like to do as well to let it be more generally useful for more characters. Rework sounds like it could be an entirely separate Green tier item after some tweaks to the numbers.

Polylute Stacking hit count changes sound solid. Not too sure about reducing the damage. Mathematically it makes sense, but taking Polylute in the first place locks you out of Ukuleles for crowd control, though I'm still not entirely sure if Ukuleles are that impactful with the mod changes.

Benthic Bloom This sounds pretty solid, I like it.

Void Fiend I think the minimum Corruption increase is a neat mechanic (and I want to add an alt special for when you reach 100% Corruption). After doing some testing, it seems that Corrupted Form's duration already scales to remain the same even if your minimum corruption increases, and the Corrupt-on-Kill mechanic becomes more potent with higher minimum Corruption since the percentage remains the same. I'll likely leave this as-is for now, but will add the faster Corrupted Special.