Playtesting feedback

[Ulbert]

I really love the changes this mod makes. The survivor and item changes feel great, and the teleporter change makes it a lot more fun and adds a layer of decision-making (can I make it back before the teleporter loads up?). Here are some of my thoughts and suggestions:

Survivors

• Commando
  • Primary, secondary and utility are perfect.
  • Suppressive Fire is really good now, but it was already a lot better than the grenade. Grenade feels clunky and pointless in comparison.
    • Ancient Scepter makes Suppressive Fire absolutely insane, just about deleting any enemy and letting it apply over 200 stacks of bleed.
• Huntress
  • Actually feels great to play.
  • Flurry still outclasses Strafe, esp. with the buffed proc coefficient.
• Engineer
  • Mobile turret always sprinting is great, enables a lot of item interactions.
  • I also like some of HIFU's changes
    • Holding primary just shoots 3 grenades without charging. Much less clunky.
    • Harpoons have infinite lock-on range.
    • Pressure mines capped at 2, lower cooldown of 4-4.5s (other changes disabled). This prevents spamming 900% damage mines and makes them more engaging to use.
    • Bubble has knockback
      • They make a ton of changes to the bubble but I'm not crazy about the others.
• Artificer
  • Love all the changes.
  • Ion Surge as a utility feels great, but it has a bit of anti-synergy with Flamethrower.
    • I like HIFU's take on making it move diagonally instead, but the 5s cooldown definitely felt too short.
• Captain
  • Love all the changes.
  • The special icon doesn't seem to show a cooldown, it just pops up when it's ready.
• Void Fiend
  • Amazing. I can't imagine playing this survivor without this mod now.
• Mercenary
  • Making the 3rd hit not scale with attack speed is a really elegant fix.
  • I also use HIFU's change to Slicing Winds to make it easier to hit.
• Acrid
  • Overall much more fun to play.
  • Poison feels vestigial and unimpactful since it's so hard to apply and only lasts 6s. I changed Bite to also deal poison damage and quite liked it. They're both melee and it's thematic that the claws and fangs both deal poison (venom, really).
  • Contagion is really fun
    • Not sure if intended, but it can go on for a pretty long time. I've seen it kill a jellyfish, spread to another jellyfish and repeat until they were all dead.
  • Virulent is strong, but lends itself to a more passive playstyle. I didn't want to waste time attacking something that's set to die within 10s anyway.
    • Thinking about how "virulent" means "promoting the rapid onset of severe illness", I experimented with taking it in the opposite direction.
    • I made the DoTs deal their damage over a shorter period of time. (i.e. 50% shorter duration, 50% more damage so it deals as much as the original 6s).
    • This made for a really fun but aggressive playstyle where I had to work to reapply DoTs before they expired.
    • Neurotoxin performed better here. Since I changed Bite to Poison, it was impossible to stack Blight within 4s with just the utility.

Items

• Newly Hatched Zoea on Engi is broken. The turrets get their own reavers and jailers and reapplying turrets spawns more without despawning old ones.
• Lens-Maker's Glasses
  • I saw some of the past discussion on this and think it'd be good to make it scale hyperbolically, starting at 15% like Tougher Times.
    • It would make crit easier to build but harder to cap out (e.g. 10 of them would give 60% crit, making other items that give crit still valuable).
    • Also fits the philosophy of making the first stack more valuable.
    • Lost-Seer's Lenses could also benefit from hyperbolic scaling since in my experience, it's fine at 1 or 2 stacks but quickly gets out of hand with higher stacks.
• Power Elixir
  • Activating at 50% is a bit awkward with shrines.
  • They're also really strong. Grabbing a few of these makes it very hard to die.
  • There should probably be some cooldown for how often they can proc, or maybe cap the number of restored elixirs to one per stage.
• Brilliant Behemoth
  • IMO this item is the exception to the rule and should just get diminishing range scaling without damage scaling.
  • It's already a 60% multiplicative damage boost on every attack, no need to buff it.
• Executive Card
  • Instead of allowing players to get way more items, I think it'd be thematic to be able to activate it and get a buff (or deal damage) based on how much you spent in a stage.
  • It'd also be an inverse of the Crowdfunder (which encourages you to spend less so you have enough money to use it).

Thanks for making this mod! It's a must-have for me that I recommend to anyone.

[Moffein]

Thanks for the detailed feedback, I appreciate the thought you put into it!

• Survivors

  • Commando

    • In Vanilla, Suppressive is strictly worse than the grenade since its DPS is the same as the primary fire. With the RiskyMod buffs, I think Suppressive does end up being better than the grenades, but I can still think of a decent amount of use cases for them (better with Bands, better spammability with Lysates) though I do think they're a lot less useful now that Phase Round lightning handles Commando's AoE problems. Maybe a slight AoE buff could be in order.
    • As for Scepter, RoR2's Scepter skills in general aren't really balanced at all, and I think the grenade barrage has enough of a cool factor to be worth taking.

  • Engineer

    • I've opted to leave him mostly close-ish to Vanilla for the sake of familiarity, since he's a survivor that already performs fine enough.
    • Harpoon lockon range change sounds good, I can look at adding that.

  • Artificer

    • I've tried HIFU's Ion Surge and I quite like it as well. Would be nice if the mod had an option to have it as a standalone skill.

  • Captain

    • Special not showing cooldowns is due to the way his skills are set up, unfortunately. Both beacons take up hidden skill slots, while the special slot just handles the skill that allows you to select beacons.

  • Mercenary

    • Can look at adding the Slicing Winds hitbox tweak.

  • Acrid

    • Main reason Poison is so restrictive is because it allows you to hit and run bosses and whittle them down when you're outscaled, which ends up being a major factor in Multiplayer runs. It's not really noticeable in the middle of a fight, but it's a huge contributor to his total damage output.
    • You make a good point about Blight applying Poison, but I'd like to leave it as-is since I'm personally a fan of being able to be aggressive with building up Blight stacks by spamming Caustic Leap + Bite at close range.
    • For Virulent, swapping duration for DoT effectiveness sounds pretty fun. However, I'd like to keep Virulent as-is precisely because it enables a slower and more passive hit-and-run playstyle, since Contagion already has the aggressive playstyle covered.

• Items

  • Zoea

    • I'm surprised that it's not on the turret blacklist like Queen's Gland/Empathy Cores. I'll fix that.

  • Lensmaker's Glasses

    • With SotV diluting the item pool, I think a flat 10% is a pretty reasonable number for Glasses now. I also don't have much of a problem with capping crits from Glasses alone because there's only a few other +crit items in the game, +10% from Harvester+Predatory and +5% from Shatterspleen if RiskyMod changes are disabled.

  • Lost Seer's Lens

    • Hyperbolic scaling would definitely be a good change for this, but I don't use the item enough to really make a good judgement (since I blacklist it in my runs), and ultimately the core problem of rapid hitters stacking it and instakilling things still remains.

  • Elixir

    • Yeah, I'm not quite happy with the state of the item. It's in a weird spot where it's incredibly strong in solo, but gets punched through super easily in multiplayer. I don't think there's any way to make it good in multiplayer, so I'll probably start by reverting the barrier percentage to the old value of 50%.

  • Brilliant Behemoth

    • Damage bonus was a holdover from an earlier build where the range scaling was removed. I agree it probably doesn't need it now.

  • Executive Card

    • Main reason I left Executive Card as-is is because it's a divisive item, where you love it or hate it. I don't like it but I understand why people do, which is also the same reason why GestureEnigma is a standalone mod as opposed to being included in RiskyMod as originally planned.
    • That being said, I like the sound of that rework, and I think you could have some success if you pitched it to some of the custom item mod makers.