Feedback and Suggestions

[gaforb]

Thought I'd leave some feedback on the changes so far - That said, the mod overall is fantastic and mostly makes good changes.

Bezerker's Pauldron feels a bit too strong at the moment. I think something simple like just removing the refresh on stack (so it behaves like vanilla predatory instincts) would be best. That way multi-kills are still more valuable, which is a nice callback to it's vanilla use, but it cant get too out of hand. The item stacking behaviour could just add a small amount to the duration of each buff, rather than increasing the number of stacks of it you can have.

Harvester's Scythe also feels a little off. Stacking just the duration feels odd in the same way Fresh Meat used to pre-1.0. I'd suggest making it a flat regen increase similar to slug, and having that value increase with stacks instead of the duration.

For balancing Clover, maybe have the initial stack give you the +1 luck, and then some scaling benefit whenever it successfully re-rolls like "whenever you are lucky, gain $1 (+$1 per stack)". Having it tied specifically to re-rolls means the effect will trigger less often as other effects become more consistent as well.

I had what i think is a really interesting idea for gesture: Something like "Using a skill has a 10% (+10% chance per stack) to trigger your equipment... BUT whenever it does, that skill is locked until your equipment is ready again." Also makes stacking fuel cells with gesture worth something. Probably best to exclude primary skills (or skills with 0 cooldown) from it.

I don't think the bandolier needs the CDR

Chronobauble is difficult since one stack lets most characters keep the debuff on an enemy constantly, making extra stacks kind of useless, but making the buff stack or decreasing its duration just benefits characters that already have high fire rates. What about is the damage bonus was based on how much slower the enemy was, and increased with stacks? Something like "Slows enemies 60% for 2s on hit. Enemies take up to 10% (+5% per stack) more damage the more they are slowed." This would allow for synergy with stuff like tar and Runald's cold slow, and you could even make stunned/shocked/frozen enemies take the full damage bonus since they are immobile.

Might be worth bringing in the changes from Mobile Vagrants, Titan Buff, Lunar Wisp Falloff, Speedy beetles (but reasonable values), Acrid Hitbox Buff and Merc Regen Fix.

For Captain, I think his microbots should be an untiered item (hiding them from the item list) in line with every other passive in the game, and ideally also removing them if you aren't captain and stopping his umbra dropping them. As for his secondary and beacons, you could tie it to his drone theme by making tazed enemies take +100% damage from drones for X seconds (And ideally pull drone aggro to them but AI is finnicky) as well as upping the base damage a little to like 250% - 300%. His beacons being deployables sounds good for sure - maybe reuse the interactability part that the equip beacon has as a "refund beacon" prompt, and give the actual special a cooldown of 10 seconds or so, so you cant just re-call beacons constantly for damage. For the hacking and equip beacons respectively, I personally think the CDR beacon from admiral is a really good replacement for the equipment beacon. The hacking beacon could be replaced with a drone beacon that periodically summons strike drones, giving him a guaranteed way to get bonuses from his secondary changes and microbots.

Artificer's primary could gain a "if it's the last shot, it also applies overheat (the grandparent extra burn damage debuff)" for the fire bolt and "If it's the last shot, it applies Shock" for the nano bolt. Encourages actually firing off all 4 shots. I think giving it the scrap launcher treatment where all 4 shots reload at once (and increasing the cooldown a little to compensate) would be a good change as well. Freezing shouldn't affect Mithrix, that seems like an oversight honestly. And as for Ion Surge, I think the simplest fix is to make the un-grounded version a much smaller height boost, letting you stay roughly level without gaining height.

For Loader, I think you could remove the damage from spiked grapple, and leave it with just a stun. Default grapple could give barrier when it hits an enemy. The more core issue of making the rest of her kit besides grapple/fist worth using is harder though. Maybe something like the big punches consume barrier for extra damage (and lowering the base damage to compensate), and having the speed affects damage be an alternate passive that removes the primary barrier gain. No ideas on what to do with pylon/slam.

That's all I've got for now, probably way too much really, but hopefully there's some good feedback you can use in there!

[Moffein]

Thanks for the feedback!

I agree with your thoughts about Berzerker/Scythes/Bandoliers. For Scythes specifically, I have a suspicion that the crit duration might be a bit too long for a Green item, but my mileage with it varies a lot depending on the character.

I was on the edge of removing Bandolier's CDR for the past few updates, so I think I'll go ahead with doing that in the next one, since the packs are a lot more consistent to get now (and also because it seems to be stepping on Alien Head's toes too much).

Not too big a fan of the proposed Gesture change since trading skills for an equipment-use seems like it wouldn't be very fun, along with the potential for skill locking to break survivors that have context-dependent skills.

Chronobauble's damage bonus being based on slow amount is something I had in mind years back, but I forgot about it. Seeing as how characters now have a dedicated Slow Coefficient stat, it might be worth looking into this again.

For the Boss/Enemy tweaks, I plan to start bringing them in bit-by-bit once the item/survivor balance is in a good spot. They'll probably have some changes from their standalone mod versions. Some of them, like Mobile Vagrants and Beetle Queen Plus, I'd like to add with just a few changes, while others (like Stone Titan Buff) I'm not completely happy with.

I'm on the edge on whether I should include Merc Regen Fix or not. I feel that it makes him better to play earlygame, being able to heal off the chip damage that melee characters naturally take, and I don't think it's game-breaking or even very significant. But at the same time, it's such a minor thing that can be resolved by getting a single healing item that I'm leaning towards just leaving it the same as vanilla.

I'll keep your Survivor thoughts in mind. For Artificer specifically, reloading all 4 shots at once was something I had in mind, with each shot type having bonuses for hitting all 4 shots in a row in a single reload. I was thinking that the combo effect for Firebolts could be a medium-range explosion with high force that can physkill Wisps, and Nanobolts could trigger a chain lightning attack.

[Moffein]

Forgot to mention, Clover stacks giving a bonus when the effect triggers sounds like a good idea. I don't think I'll do money specifically, but something along those lines.

[gaforb]

Couple of bugs reports and ideas:

Ghosts from Happy Mask can spawn minions that don't die (beetle queen, solus control unit). I think this might be a vanilla bug, but some check to pass the ghost decay and VFX onto them would be a nice consistency thing now that it's more likely to happen. The actual effect of mask triggering seemed inconsistent with the buff timer in the corner being ready or not as well but it was a pretty chaotic run by the time i got mask so I may just have missed when they did or didn't spawn.

Guillotine feels like it's in a much better place now than it was before, but I think stacking the threshold for it's trigger might be better than stacking the bonus damage since after 2 or 3 stacks the extra damage bonus mostly becomes overkill. It'd still want to stack hyperbolically like old guillotine's threshold though, probably toward around 60%. Possibly have a limit on how often the guillotine sound can play as well, since rapid fire into an enemy on low health is pretty deafening right now. (also true for instincts with high crit chance, or shotgun crits. Might warrant a separate all-purpose mod to limit on-hit sounds honestly.)

Pauldron feels really fun and rewarding now, massive fan of the change. It does feels like it can scale way too fast sometimes, I'd maybe consider lowering the attack speed bonus per buff to 15%, but in terms of play style it's really satisfying.

Will'O'Wisp without falloff feels a bit too strong, even without the old radius scaling. Also feels like it applies a little too much force at the moment but not sure if that's affected by falloff.

I'd say Bison Steak still feels kinda weak and could stand to just be reverted to it's pre-1.0 behaviour, maybe with allowing the regen buff to stack instead of refreshing the duration

And finally I think Vagrant and Lunar Chimera tracking shots still trigger on-death effects. Maybe give them the same prevention as grovetender wisps got just for consistency.

[Moffein]

The minion bug is a vanilla issue, I'll fix it. It's likely that you're killing some random enemy in the background and triggering the buff as soon as it goes off cooldown, but I'll doublecheck to confirm this.

For Guillotine, I feel that letting the health threshhold be increased by stacks would lessen the item's identity of being based around finishing off enemies, like how stacking Vanilla Guillotines quickly goes from "execute low health elites" to "remove the entire elite's health pool," though the proposed HP threshold limit would somewhat help with that. I can add a thing to limit how often the SFX plays, though I won't be touching Predatory.

I'll take a look at Pauldron's attack speed. Glad to hear it's in a better spot though!

I agree that Wisps are a bit strong in their current state. I wasn't sure if they were strong enough when I removed their radius scaling, so I removed the falloff since I figured "It's only 300% damage." I'll take another look at Wisp, Spleen, and other on-kills that had their falloff removed.

I'll give some thought to Bison Steak, since It's definitely not an item I find myself regularly taking. Gonna have to think of what I want to do with it, since I like the idea of having an HP-boosting item in the vanilla item pool.

I can add the anti on-kill to the other shootable projectiles.

[gaforb]

Hey, cool to see a lot of these made it into recent updates!

I put some thought into gesture, and you're right that it would probably have too many odd interactions to be tied to skills (or locking them, at least.) How does this sound? "You can't activate your equipment. Instead it will activate randomly 1 (+1 per stack) times every 30 (+15 per stack) seconds." The numbers could probably be adjusted but 30 is definitely below the average for equipments so it seems like a reasonable amount, and it's also just shy of making spinel tonic have permanent uptime. This also makes Fuel Cell useless, but there's precedent for lunar items doing that anyway (transcendance, purity, etc.).

A small QoL thing for will'o'wisp (and possibly gasoline, though it's much less noticeable), but the damage it deals happens well before the VFX at the moment, leading to weird scenarios where a group of weak enemies will simultaneously die and play the explosion effect when you only shot one of them. Adding some delay to the actual damage blast would go a ways to making it feel more like an explosion, as well as giving groups of enemies that last second to shoot at you before dying which keeps them threatening later when you have a lot of AoE.

Bison Steak could perhaps grant 'barrier', since every item that grants it currently does refer to it as Temporary HP. something like: "Retain up to 20 (+20 per stack) Temporary HP. This HP regenerates at +1hp/s" So it would offer some important base HP in the early game, and act as a sort of minimum your 'barrier' can fall to later in the run for making brooch (and any other modded barrier items) more reliable. It's also unaffected by curse this way, making it an interesting solution to having no health from spinel tonic/glass/eclipse 8.

[Moffein]

The Gesture rework sounds balanced, but I don't want to touch Gesture unless I can come up with something equally as fun/exciting as Vanilla. At this point I'll probably be simply leaving it alone unless sudden inspiration strikes.

I can take a look at the delay timing of the on-kill explosions, you make a good point there.

Bison Steak change seems overcomplicated, and kills its interaction with items that scale off of Percent HP. I've been picking it up in a few runs recently, and I think it's in a decent enough spot as-is (especially on tankier characters).

[RandomMarine]

Happiest Mask's tweaks make it fun to use now, great work. But one peeve I have with the ghost cap is how easy it is to fill your slots up with mini-mushes that wind up doing nothing but healing for the rest of the stage. Perhaps see if you can make the ghost's health decay begin ramping up if it survives for longer than normal? Enough to outpace mini-mushes at least, but whether or not to make it more challenging to keep them alive using bungus or something is something to consider.

But also, I'm not so sure about just tacking a damage multiplier on chronobauble to make it worth having on its own, hardly fits the theme. Maybe instead of damage, give it a stacking proc chance to inflict an attack speed debuff on top of the guaranteed slow?

[Moffein]

Health decay rampup on Ghosts/Squids is something that has been on my mind for a while, I'll look at adding that.

As for Chronobauble, I definitely agree that the damage bonus is pretty tacked-on. I'm hesitant to touch attack speed since a good amount of modded characters/items seem to be doing that, but adding on a chance-based proc effect seems interesting.

[Moffein]

Just to follow up on some of my previous replies in this thread since it's been a while:

Forgot to mention, Clover stacks giving a bonus when the effect triggers sounds like a good idea. I don't think I'll do money specifically, but something along those lines.

This is still something I'd like to do, but I've put it on the backburner for the time being.

For Artificer specifically, reloading all 4 shots at once was something I had in mind, with each shot type having bonuses for hitting all 4 shots in a row in a single reload.

Artificer's Flamethrower/Freeze changes seem to put her in a much better spot than before, so changes to her M1 will likely not be as drastic. I did some experimentation with recharging all 4 shots at once like MUL-T's Scrap Launcher, but it felt weird because spacing out shots would end up dragging out the recharge as opposed to Vanilla where you keep regenerating stocks no matter what (not sure if this is just muscle memory getting in the way).

Chronobauble's damage bonus being based on slow amount is something I had in mind years back, but I forgot about it. Seeing as how characters now have a dedicated Slow Coefficient stat, it might be worth looking into this again.

Turns out this isn't as straightforward to implement as I originally thought (since Slow Coefficient isn't actually a character stat). I'll be looking at Chronobauble to figure out what to do with it.

[breadguyyy]

Could give chronobauble attackspeed or cooldown slow or something instead of increased damage.

Also could we get a config option for lunar item drops from pillars?

[Moffein]

Can do. I'll add a drop chance config for pillars when I get the chance. For Chronobauble, cooldown slow is something I considered but decided against due to being unable to actually see/gauge its effects as a player, along with inconsistencies in which attacks are cooldown-gated (ex. Lemurians have no cooldown on their fireball).

[breadguyyy]

Would an attack speed slow not effect abilities like that? I just figured those changes would make sense with the item's theme of time dilation.

[Moffein]

AtkSpd Slow works on all enemies (as opposed to cooldown slow which varies). I've been hesitant to add it since I run Enforcer (who has Tear Gas) and Lost in Transit (which has Prison Shackles for -30% AtkSpd), but giving it some more thought, I think adding AtkSpd slow to Chronobauble is fine, since there's no guarantee that either of those mods will be installed, and the slow can still stack with the ones from the mods.

For now, I'm leaning towards simply adding it to the Chronobauble debuff (probably something like -15% to -20% AtkSpd) rather than making it a random proc as was suggested earlier.

[Moffein]

Status update:

• Latest update makes Chronobauble affect attack speed instead of damage taken.
• I'll try to get a drop chance config for the Moon pillars in the next update.
• Ghost health decay will probably be postponed for later.