Pretty standard mage/structure build. Archangel armor lets your shields scale over time (assuming you don't get flamed to death like I did on floor 16). Wizard cap + ancient tome + wizard's robe gives you 8 mana regen a turn. Gemstone heart + cleansing rag to help stay alive vs. poison and damage that overwhelms your shields on the first turn before scaling kicks in. Ring of doom to scale the wand damage, I had fun trying to figure out the optimal amount of buffing to do with the ring of doom (think it ended up being 11 times on turn 1). Poison snake + flame enemy was ultimately the builds undoing, as the flames scale out of control and poison is unblockable. Got to floor 16 though so still pretty happy with the build.
The update definitely made the game much harder. Haven't tried archer/cleaver builds yet since it dropped, this build was just what I ended up getting up and running today.
A QoL idea could be to make a button that would simulate a turn with your current backpack set up sometimes its hard to grasp what would happen with the items
Whetstone is sick with 0 action points weapons like 1 slot Shiv or 3 slot Machete, with it player don't need to use main weapons, just only single use free Shivs.
I have 2 Shivs + 1 Machete (deal damage to All) and i have dealt
pickaxe is OP. Free gems per kill AND stacking bonus damage for each adjacent gem. At this point thats 51 dmg per swing with the pickaxe. With the money axe i cant lose basically, its free money every merchant. Killed grandmaster in 1 turn.
The game forced me to unlock the last square that was holding the earthblade up and even though it was anchored to the top row with the tusk it still fell. If the devs read comments here maybe consider allowing skipping levels and making it so anchored items don't drop since they can't be moved any other way either.
if you anchor another item below it they will support a heavy item above them. I had the same build as you, but with shivs holding up the blade, worked a treat.
had a similar run that let me give these arrows +2 and use them all at the same time with the bow, this screenshot is from earlier in the run but later on I got 5 arrows around the ring and was getting +10 from each use of the ring
there's also arrows that get more damage per manastone connected but I didn't find any this run but still my highest damage run yet.
Archer builds are so incredibly strong it is hard not to win with these and a few good pieces can let u scale really far into endless (such as bomb hourglass with the ethereal arrows wand and mana crystal stacking)
king's spike stacking is a total dream crusher for cleaver builds oh my-
im just strolling along with shield hero, cleavers, and a once per turn 20 dmg weapon, i even have chain knives, and no matter what i do his spikes are just way too much for me, and if i just use the once a turn thing with my shields, his regen becomes too much to out-damage and is 100% game killing
??? mirror shield should've made that a cake walk, just alternate between shielding and hitting him with single cleavers and he gets no rage and no spikes
Minor bug? Used the racoon that trades an item for "same type, increased rarity". Gave him the roof structure and he returned a whetstone accessory. Maybe there is not Rare structure? Or do structures count as accessories?
balloon is a rare structure, but I think you confused the something else with the raccoon, there is an event that trades an item with another one of the same rarity, and maybe you confused these two idk if the raccoon event even exists bc I've never seen it
Wow, Grandmaster boss is nuts. I had a pretty solid build I think, but I couldn't get him past 600 health. The only issues I see with my build is I had to fill up 6 inventory slots with keys to enable the key blade's damage, I went in with no consumables when my build relied on philosopher's stone to put out crazy damage turn 1, and my shield only had 12 block. That said, I was able to put out around 100-150 damage a turn if I didn't have to dedicate any energy to block. What really screwed me was the massive amount of burn he built up stopped me from being able to use the vampiric halberd to its fullest, thus nullifying my ability to heal throughout the fight.
I feel like if I dedicated any more space to armor, my build would be severely compromised and would limit my ability to put out massive damage turn 1 through philosopher's stone, and the payout for having armor instead would have been pretty small throughout the rest of my run, although it definitely would have helped with the burn.
I don't think the Grandmaster is unbalanced per say, but I don't see how a damage-focused run could ever beat him seeing how much damage he puts out every turn. The reason I built the way I did was to blast the curse and poison enemies turn 1, and I made it through basically the entire run without much issue, never really falling under 20 health. I think the key to beating the grandmaster is just to build something that can put up 20 block or more a turn without having to spend energy, and to come in to the fight with at least one of the potions that cleanses statuses, although 2-3 would be even better. From there you would just need reliable damage output of 40-50 a turn and you could eventually chip him down, although I am not sure if you would be able to get through his summons at that rate.
Fish, haste and dodge carried me all the way past the first boss on infinite, then died horribly to the inability to scale any further. But it was a fun ride while it lasted!
The "King" enemy needs severe rebalancing. The only build that stands a chance of beating him is an archery build due to his spikes and regen. Basically, if you get bad RNG and he's the boss and you're not a ranged build, you might as well restart.
He actually wiped my archer, because the spikes trigger per arrow. I got past him with block and whetstones without much trouble on the next run. I think he's well made for end game.
Arrows don't trigger damage on spikes, though. I was able to kill him with an archer build because of that, unless the most recent patch changed it of course.
I think they mean that they can't do enough damage to break the block and the enemy blocks every turn. Why organize the armor and die when you can just close the tab.
Finally managed to get through normal mode after many tries and get a mana build running in endless. Sometimes your very first fight cannot even be blocked perfectly. In many cases, you have to take some beating in order to gain xp because of the new cowardly mechanics. There are many possible deadly combinations of mobs, like 2 sabers in a fight. But worst of all is how high the starting damage for the first few turns can be if you are unlucky.
I basically avoid the blessed swamp now since it is just difficult without much gain. The salamander with 100 hp is simply near impossible to immediately kill, yet it throws a curse at you every single turn.
With the ninja haste interaction gone, I thought of using weak to help myself survive. I also got 2 rags to handle potential poison matchups, which ended up not very useful since I always target them first anyways and it made the game even laggier. I failed to find a mirror shield which wasted a shield forge, and failed to get windmill & legendary hat so I had to keep the armor. With no haste and shield meaning no armor, I simply died to the grandmaster burn.
I saw the new curved arrow and am still unsure how to use it properly. I think a build with 4 electric arrows can do some pretty nice damage, if you manage to get the arrows. The usefulness of the short arrow is also questionable with the nerfed bow. Time for more exploration!
Made it to floor 25 but now soft locked by the only enemy which doesn't attack (no way around this time). Is there any way to reroll map layout?
1 cleansing rag used 3x/energy * 6 energy = -18 poison, so I would die before finishing about 167 turns of 3x vamp/energy, but there is no other reliable way of removing poison at this level that I can think of.
Only got weapon blacksmith so no +haste on shields and didn't find any mirror shields, but otherwise this build is near its apex. If the shield spirit works with arrows then maybe a crossbow and poison arrows instead of melee could work since it only takes away damage.
Unfortunately you need almost every rare item seen here to make it work...
-2x hercule pavese, potentially 3
-4x shields, two can be lil bucklers
-1x coral (believe you can only get 1 of each relic but idk)
-3x energy (windmill, token, crimson) for coral to work well
If you roll shield blacksmith then guarding band is unnecessary for boss fights, and the weaponry/shield spirit/cleansing flame are only for healing and surviving bee poison fights so they can be replaced with aloe and/or sufficient healing.
I had a build pretty close to this one, died to the same enemy, I was using pacifist rings for energy so I didn't have any weapon to deal damage at all, it probably could have been avoided by hovering over the enemies on the map and not taking the fight but this enemy seems to be built for ending the runs of builds that revolve around spikes sadly.
This game is probably one of the best free web games currently on the market, and one of the better ones released this year, and it's still almost a full year until it's steam release. However, the huge RNG aspect makes it so runs either go to floor 5 and get stomped 20 times in a row, or make it to floor 30+ easily. I'm not suggesting a change to it cause it's what makes the game fun and challenging, but I do want a way to see builds at their full potential.
Either a sandbox mode or some way to dictate what weapon(s) you want to find more often through some kind of random event on f1-3 would honestly make this game be really interesting, allowing builds that have never been seen before, and allowing floor maximums that have never been seen before.
The sandbox mode can obviously disregard any kind of leaderboard you may set up, and the random event idea would be like "Which offensive path do you find yourself going down, young one?" then the player picks one (melee, archery, magic), and then those weapons or items relating to them (ie shield for melee and arrows for archery) would show up 20% more often or however much.
Isn't it just supposed to pass on effects? The weapon doesn't give anything else an effect, it just can't be next to a weapon, which it's not. If I had to guess what was causing this bug, they probably use an invisible effect to track weapons being adjacent to others, and this invisible "technical" effect is being treated like a regular effect, despite not being listed in the stats at all.
I have discovered a glitch that i am not certain of the conditions of, but when I ended up killing both a cowardly enemy and a normal enemy with poison while there was another cowardly enemy left, the game softlocked me. It was the porcupine-rat-vole enemy lineup, with the rat and vole being the ones to die. i don't have a screenshot, sadly, since I just made my account to post this comment, but it is something tat needs to be fixed. If it helped at all, the highlight text box for the vole doing damage stayed everywhere my cursor was unless I was hovering over an item in my pack
edit: i meant muskrat, I thought the vole was the cowardly one and checked it just now
Coming back from doing another run after my last comment, I have a better perspective now on the issue with curses and poison. As far as poison goes, I see 3 possible solutions. Either allow it to hit remaining block at the start of a turn, have it apply at the start of the enemy's turn so that the player has a turn to respond, or cut the amount of poison the player receives substantially. As it is now, when the snake is paired with any other enemy that also poses a threat, it is near impossible to deal with it before it hits you with 11 poison. This means you are usually guaranteed 21 poison damage across 2 turns. If you let the snake live for 3 turns, it will apply poison again, and on that third turn, you will be hit for another 21 damage, meaning you have taken a total of 42 damage across 3 turns. Currently, the only means of dealing with this damage is to kill the monster that is creating the poison, which usually would mean dealing 120 damage across 2 turns, accounting for the snake's block. You have to do that while also putting up enough block to deal with whatever enemy the snake is paired with. One or more of the changes I listed above would fix this issue without nerfing the concept of the snake, that being an enemy that punishes you for not bursting it down immediately.
For curses, the only solution I can see to make curses less frustrating for the player without ruining their purpose in the game is to allow the player to move existing items to new slots in order to create space for the curse. In almost every case this is still going to result in the player sacrificing items, but it won't cause so many situations where you literally cannot fit a curse without destroying a part of your build.
The only reason I am adamant about these issues is that this game is great, but it feels really horrible when you have an incredible run going and you are easily defeating every enemy, just to be completely railroaded by enemies with a large health pool who poison or curse you. If there were permanent items or build options to deal with this, there would be less of an issue, but there aren't. Armor pieces or shields made specifically to counter curses or poison would be great and would also give more of a reason to carry more than one shield on any given run, rather than only when you get the legendary buckler.
Awesome game!! More reminder text on keywords would be great though, as not knowing what the status effects do until after they've been applied is rough b/c you don't know what it does if its the first time you're seeing it.
This game is great, but I feel like curses and poison should hit block, there should be more ways to increase maximum HP, or each level should increase your size by 1 more so you have more space for consumables. As it is now every time I get to Magma Core with full health, even as I am putting out 80 damage or more every turn and putting up more than enough block to cover incoming damage plus any damage from poison or block, I get outpaced by enemies with over 100 health spitting out curses or poison turn 1. If I only fought necessary enemies and didn't take side paths maybe I could avoid this, but I feel like it is wrong to discourage that when by all means my build is firing on all cylinders. I think more enemy variety that don't just curse or poison the player would also help solve this problem.
With that said, I still think this game is incredible, and this is only a demo. Seeing the quality of what the developer has already created tells me he is probably going to analyze the data he is getting from these demo playthroughs and balance new and existing content accordingly.
I miss when you could skip the tutorial and start with a rare item. It made it a whole lot easier to get invested in a run from the start, since instead of just going through the motions and waiting for something to replace your boring wooden sword and shield, you're already visualizing what kinds of builds you could do with your starting item.
First pickaxe run. Pretty fun. Strong when you lean into it but falls off immediately in endless if you don't switch out and pretty hard to switch out with the space/item investment, unless shops increase in amount of rares/legendaries in order to cash in and swap in mass.
The 'Scratch' attack option is clearly put there as a last resort when there's no better way to spend your Energy, but it's nigh useless as is. It would be more interesting if there were ways to ramp up its damage, for example a permanent +1 bonus everytime you increase your max HP by 5.
Magic in general is OP given how mana stones recover all charges at the end of combat. It would be more balanced if you only recovered a fixed amount of 1 or 2 charges, maybe more with the help of items or a relic.
Asides from these nitpicks, this game is looking really promising so far.
The randomness of receiving just the right item is what makes OP Runs. The whole point of playing is to hopefully get an OP run; 90% end in failure before Floor 11/Endless.
An OP run means winning all encounters by repeating the same combo over and over, like stacking Haste and block so you never take damage. There's no fun in OP builds.
Recovering all mana charges at the end of a fight means you can use wands carelessly. That's OP. Limiting the recovery to 1 or 2 charges would incentivize managing their use strategically.
Nice. Does Rage increase Scratch damage as well? I'm thinking of Endless runs where enemy HP gets so bloated you'd need a higher damage output. IMO it'd still be cool if scratch was also affected by your max HP.
okay. this game is borderline unplayable to me anymore. the fact that cleavers now take 2 energy and the amount of new enemies and difficulty spikes are so bad, i haven't gotten a run past magma core in 13 different runs.
they were nerfed for a reason, they were busted. archery is still pretty good despite also being nerfed, block/spike is still pretty good for getting past magma, and there's still plenty of synergies.
i have tried both archery and block/spike and nothing works for me. i even had the gold lil' buckler shield and knight's shields but i just die to poison.
Cleavers are still very usable, all you need is a shield and the shield spirit relic and they're effectively back to costing 1 energy! I have a run rn with a cleaver build at floor 41 and still going strong
The RNG on this game is nutty. I've been trying to get a cleaver build going to push past the first boss of Endless but haven't had any luck yet.
But then stuff like this happens, +5 energy per turn + pacifist ring on the 4th floor.
I feel like trying to force a build results in many losses, but going with the flow restricts access to the late game. Some game states feel like they can't be converted into anything good no matter how good you do but then again, idk all the builds and how to adapt wisely.
← Return to game
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
My turtle build seems to be working
now rid yourself of weapons and get the pacifist ring :P
poison kill me
Pretty standard mage/structure build. Archangel armor lets your shields scale over time (assuming you don't get flamed to death like I did on floor 16). Wizard cap + ancient tome + wizard's robe gives you 8 mana regen a turn. Gemstone heart + cleansing rag to help stay alive vs. poison and damage that overwhelms your shields on the first turn before scaling kicks in. Ring of doom to scale the wand damage, I had fun trying to figure out the optimal amount of buffing to do with the ring of doom (think it ended up being 11 times on turn 1). Poison snake + flame enemy was ultimately the builds undoing, as the flames scale out of control and poison is unblockable. Got to floor 16 though so still pretty happy with the build.
The update definitely made the game much harder. Haven't tried archer/cleaver builds yet since it dropped, this build was just what I ended up getting up and running today.
Challenging game but I enjoyed it. Will be back
A QoL idea could be to make a button that would simulate a turn with your current backpack set up sometimes its hard to grasp what would happen with the items
Whetstone is sick with 0 action points weapons like 1 slot Shiv or 3 slot Machete, with it player don't need to use main weapons, just only single use free Shivs.
I have 2 Shivs + 1 Machete (deal damage to All) and i have dealt
2 Enemy
(2+9)+(2+9)+2(3+9) = 22+24 = 46 Damage
In 1st round!
Whetstone upgrade every weapon damage +3 for entire Combat (not only turn, so it will stack) and bonus is applied to in Column and Row.
Wery sick COMBO. Use all Energy points on Stone and then attack with 0 Energy weapons. Also next turn they will be even stronger.
EVEN MORE DAMAGE!!!!!
pickaxe is OP. Free gems per kill AND stacking bonus damage for each adjacent gem. At this point thats 51 dmg per swing with the pickaxe. With the money axe i cant lose basically, its free money every merchant. Killed grandmaster in 1 turn.
Getting to max level ruined my build on this run:
The game forced me to unlock the last square that was holding the earthblade up and even though it was anchored to the top row with the tusk it still fell. If the devs read comments here maybe consider allowing skipping levels and making it so anchored items don't drop since they can't be moved any other way either.
if you anchor another item below it they will support a heavy item above them. I had the same build as you, but with shivs holding up the blade, worked a treat.
not even boss stage =((
Can you fire both arrows with one use of the bow?
It fires all 3 arrows, there is a small arrow in the same column as the bow but above it. This is a legendary bow that fires arrows above too.
What happened to Matthew? Miss that guy.
press M on the loading menu before starting or continuing any game
You are royalty.
Mouse wood is SEVERELY bugged.
The affect is applied in all arrows for every click in the bow.
the arrow is the weapon, not the bow so it makes sense, u need a special bow to make it work
Absolutely dirty run, each mana gives +2 to the spear, frog totem refills 3 mana per turn
had a similar run that let me give these arrows +2 and use them all at the same time with the bow, this screenshot is from earlier in the run but later on I got 5 arrows around the ring and was getting +10 from each use of the ring
there's also arrows that get more damage per manastone connected but I didn't find any this run but still my highest damage run yet.
yeah, this is fun. thank god for vampirism
Archer builds are so incredibly strong it is hard not to win with these and a few good pieces can let u scale really far into endless (such as bomb hourglass with the ethereal arrows wand and mana crystal stacking)
wow I didn't even think about bomb with ethereal weapons, I need to get something like that to work now thank you
king's spike stacking is a total dream crusher for cleaver builds oh my-
im just strolling along with shield hero, cleavers, and a once per turn 20 dmg weapon, i even have chain knives, and no matter what i do his spikes are just way too much for me, and if i just use the once a turn thing with my shields, his regen becomes too much to out-damage and is 100% game killing
figured id try another cleaver build since the nerf. unless you can pick up cleansing flame this boss is pretty much a guaranteed run ender.
an image taken moments before disaster:
??? mirror shield should've made that a cake walk, just alternate between shielding and hitting him with single cleavers and he gets no rage and no spikes
Minor bug? Used the racoon that trades an item for "same type, increased rarity". Gave him the roof structure and he returned a whetstone accessory. Maybe there is not Rare structure? Or do structures count as accessories?
balloon is a rare structure, but I think you confused the something else with the raccoon, there is an event that trades an item with another one of the same rarity, and maybe you confused these two idk if the raccoon event even exists bc I've never seen it
It may not have been a raccoon. It was traded for a more rare item, but it wasn't the same type.
ok I guess
Wow, Grandmaster boss is nuts. I had a pretty solid build I think, but I couldn't get him past 600 health. The only issues I see with my build is I had to fill up 6 inventory slots with keys to enable the key blade's damage, I went in with no consumables when my build relied on philosopher's stone to put out crazy damage turn 1, and my shield only had 12 block. That said, I was able to put out around 100-150 damage a turn if I didn't have to dedicate any energy to block. What really screwed me was the massive amount of burn he built up stopped me from being able to use the vampiric halberd to its fullest, thus nullifying my ability to heal throughout the fight.
I feel like if I dedicated any more space to armor, my build would be severely compromised and would limit my ability to put out massive damage turn 1 through philosopher's stone, and the payout for having armor instead would have been pretty small throughout the rest of my run, although it definitely would have helped with the burn.
I don't think the Grandmaster is unbalanced per say, but I don't see how a damage-focused run could ever beat him seeing how much damage he puts out every turn. The reason I built the way I did was to blast the curse and poison enemies turn 1, and I made it through basically the entire run without much issue, never really falling under 20 health. I think the key to beating the grandmaster is just to build something that can put up 20 block or more a turn without having to spend energy, and to come in to the fight with at least one of the potions that cleanses statuses, although 2-3 would be even better. From there you would just need reliable damage output of 40-50 a turn and you could eventually chip him down, although I am not sure if you would be able to get through his summons at that rate.
just play an archery build u can just kill every boss in 1-2 turns
grandmaster is the easier of the final bosses, your build was just a mid game build, not an endgame one
Fish, haste and dodge carried me all the way past the first boss on infinite, then died horribly to the inability to scale any further. But it was a fun ride while it lasted!
The "King" enemy needs severe rebalancing. The only build that stands a chance of beating him is an archery build due to his spikes and regen. Basically, if you get bad RNG and he's the boss and you're not a ranged build, you might as well restart.
He actually wiped my archer, because the spikes trigger per arrow. I got past him with block and whetstones without much trouble on the next run. I think he's well made for end game.
Arrows don't trigger damage on spikes, though. I was able to kill him with an archer build because of that, unless the most recent patch changed it of course.
It may be a recent change, I just found out about the game a few days ago.
Love the game, but I ran into a soft lock with the assassin's blade. Neither the enemy or I could do damage, our defense kept outscaling.
There is a "Scratch Feature". You could also re-organize and take off the armor.
The game allows for this, so if you don't do it, its not the software, but the player who is forcing the perpetuity.
Mario Bros. has a timer, for instance.
I think they mean that they can't do enough damage to break the block and the enemy blocks every turn. Why organize the armor and die when you can just close the tab.
Finally managed to get through normal mode after many tries and get a mana build running in endless. Sometimes your very first fight cannot even be blocked perfectly. In many cases, you have to take some beating in order to gain xp because of the new cowardly mechanics. There are many possible deadly combinations of mobs, like 2 sabers in a fight. But worst of all is how high the starting damage for the first few turns can be if you are unlucky.
I basically avoid the blessed swamp now since it is just difficult without much gain. The salamander with 100 hp is simply near impossible to immediately kill, yet it throws a curse at you every single turn.
With the ninja haste interaction gone, I thought of using weak to help myself survive. I also got 2 rags to handle potential poison matchups, which ended up not very useful since I always target them first anyways and it made the game even laggier. I failed to find a mirror shield which wasted a shield forge, and failed to get windmill & legendary hat so I had to keep the armor. With no haste and shield meaning no armor, I simply died to the grandmaster burn.
I saw the new curved arrow and am still unsure how to use it properly. I think a build with 4 electric arrows can do some pretty nice damage, if you manage to get the arrows. The usefulness of the short arrow is also questionable with the nerfed bow. Time for more exploration!
Made it to floor 25 but now soft locked by the only enemy which doesn't attack (no way around this time). Is there any way to reroll map layout?
1 cleansing rag used 3x/energy * 6 energy = -18 poison, so I would die before finishing about 167 turns of 3x vamp/energy, but there is no other reliable way of removing poison at this level that I can think of.
Only got weapon blacksmith so no +haste on shields and didn't find any mirror shields, but otherwise this build is near its apex. If the shield spirit works with arrows then maybe a crossbow and poison arrows instead of melee could work since it only takes away damage.
Unfortunately you need almost every rare item seen here to make it work...
-2x hercule pavese, potentially 3
-4x shields, two can be lil bucklers
-1x coral (believe you can only get 1 of each relic but idk)
-3x energy (windmill, token, crimson) for coral to work well
If you roll shield blacksmith then guarding band is unnecessary for boss fights, and the weaponry/shield spirit/cleansing flame are only for healing and surviving bee poison fights so they can be replaced with aloe and/or sufficient healing.
I had a build pretty close to this one, died to the same enemy, I was using pacifist rings for energy so I didn't have any weapon to deal damage at all, it probably could have been avoided by hovering over the enemies on the map and not taking the fight but this enemy seems to be built for ending the runs of builds that revolve around spikes sadly.
Yeah that's what I did for the two prior magma stages but this time they blocked my path completely
This game is probably one of the best free web games currently on the market, and one of the better ones released this year, and it's still almost a full year until it's steam release. However, the huge RNG aspect makes it so runs either go to floor 5 and get stomped 20 times in a row, or make it to floor 30+ easily.
I'm not suggesting a change to it cause it's what makes the game fun and challenging, but I do want a way to see builds at their full potential.
Either a sandbox mode or some way to dictate what weapon(s) you want to find more often through some kind of random event on f1-3 would honestly make this game be really interesting, allowing builds that have never been seen before, and allowing floor maximums that have never been seen before.
The sandbox mode can obviously disregard any kind of leaderboard you may set up, and the random event idea would be like "Which offensive path do you find yourself going down, young one?" then the player picks one (melee, archery, magic), and then those weapons or items relating to them (ie shield for melee and arrows for archery) would show up 20% more often or however much.
Glitch: ...What nearby weapon?
Move the Duct tape
The Double Halberd counts as being adjacent to itself because of the tape
Isn't it just supposed to pass on effects? The weapon doesn't give anything else an effect, it just can't be next to a weapon, which it's not. If I had to guess what was causing this bug, they probably use an invisible effect to track weapons being adjacent to others, and this invisible "technical" effect is being treated like a regular effect, despite not being listed in the stats at all.
Lol... Right there... The weapon is holding the back pack :D
ok, this sure is interesting
I have discovered a glitch that i am not certain of the conditions of, but when I ended up killing both a cowardly enemy and a normal enemy with poison while there was another cowardly enemy left, the game softlocked me. It was the porcupine-rat-vole enemy lineup, with the rat and vole being the ones to die. i don't have a screenshot, sadly, since I just made my account to post this comment, but it is something tat needs to be fixed. If it helped at all, the highlight text box for the vole doing damage stayed everywhere my cursor was unless I was hovering over an item in my pack
edit: i meant muskrat, I thought the vole was the cowardly one and checked it just now
Coming back from doing another run after my last comment, I have a better perspective now on the issue with curses and poison. As far as poison goes, I see 3 possible solutions. Either allow it to hit remaining block at the start of a turn, have it apply at the start of the enemy's turn so that the player has a turn to respond, or cut the amount of poison the player receives substantially. As it is now, when the snake is paired with any other enemy that also poses a threat, it is near impossible to deal with it before it hits you with 11 poison. This means you are usually guaranteed 21 poison damage across 2 turns. If you let the snake live for 3 turns, it will apply poison again, and on that third turn, you will be hit for another 21 damage, meaning you have taken a total of 42 damage across 3 turns. Currently, the only means of dealing with this damage is to kill the monster that is creating the poison, which usually would mean dealing 120 damage across 2 turns, accounting for the snake's block. You have to do that while also putting up enough block to deal with whatever enemy the snake is paired with. One or more of the changes I listed above would fix this issue without nerfing the concept of the snake, that being an enemy that punishes you for not bursting it down immediately.
For curses, the only solution I can see to make curses less frustrating for the player without ruining their purpose in the game is to allow the player to move existing items to new slots in order to create space for the curse. In almost every case this is still going to result in the player sacrificing items, but it won't cause so many situations where you literally cannot fit a curse without destroying a part of your build.
The only reason I am adamant about these issues is that this game is great, but it feels really horrible when you have an incredible run going and you are easily defeating every enemy, just to be completely railroaded by enemies with a large health pool who poison or curse you. If there were permanent items or build options to deal with this, there would be less of an issue, but there aren't. Armor pieces or shields made specifically to counter curses or poison would be great and would also give more of a reason to carry more than one shield on any given run, rather than only when you get the legendary buckler.
fun until the boss xd
Awesome game!! More reminder text on keywords would be great though, as not knowing what the status effects do until after they've been applied is rough b/c you don't know what it does if its the first time you're seeing it.
This is coming!
This game is great, but I feel like curses and poison should hit block, there should be more ways to increase maximum HP, or each level should increase your size by 1 more so you have more space for consumables. As it is now every time I get to Magma Core with full health, even as I am putting out 80 damage or more every turn and putting up more than enough block to cover incoming damage plus any damage from poison or block, I get outpaced by enemies with over 100 health spitting out curses or poison turn 1. If I only fought necessary enemies and didn't take side paths maybe I could avoid this, but I feel like it is wrong to discourage that when by all means my build is firing on all cylinders. I think more enemy variety that don't just curse or poison the player would also help solve this problem.
With that said, I still think this game is incredible, and this is only a demo. Seeing the quality of what the developer has already created tells me he is probably going to analyze the data he is getting from these demo playthroughs and balance new and existing content accordingly.
I miss when you could skip the tutorial and start with a rare item. It made it a whole lot easier to get invested in a run from the start, since instead of just going through the motions and waiting for something to replace your boring wooden sword and shield, you're already visualizing what kinds of builds you could do with your starting item.
Press M on the title screen!
Is there a way to use a save from one device on another device
First pickaxe run. Pretty fun. Strong when you lean into it but falls off immediately in endless if you don't switch out and pretty hard to switch out with the space/item investment, unless shops increase in amount of rares/legendaries in order to cash in and swap in mass.
dueling sword used once per combat but currently just has a 1 turn cool down
If you take damage it refreshes. There is a lot of info you need to read on every item.
The 'Scratch' attack option is clearly put there as a last resort when there's no better way to spend your Energy, but it's nigh useless as is. It would be more interesting if there were ways to ramp up its damage, for example a permanent +1 bonus everytime you increase your max HP by 5.
Magic in general is OP given how mana stones recover all charges at the end of combat. It would be more balanced if you only recovered a fixed amount of 1 or 2 charges, maybe more with the help of items or a relic.
Asides from these nitpicks, this game is looking really promising so far.
The randomness of receiving just the right item is what makes OP Runs. The whole point of playing is to hopefully get an OP run; 90% end in failure before Floor 11/Endless.
An OP run means winning all encounters by repeating the same combo over and over, like stacking Haste and block so you never take damage. There's no fun in OP builds.
Recovering all mana charges at the end of a fight means you can use wands carelessly. That's OP. Limiting the recovery to 1 or 2 charges would incentivize managing their use strategically.
The Scratch can be increased in damage with the glove of knives so it will deal an additional 2 damage to all enemies.
this is super helpful when building a pacifist ring because scratching is not a weapon so it won't break the ring.
Nice. Does Rage increase Scratch damage as well? I'm thinking of Endless runs where enemy HP gets so bloated you'd need a higher damage output. IMO it'd still be cool if scratch was also affected by your max HP.
Scratch is for when you have no weapon to prevent you being softlocked.
Wow. 2 health left. Idk how I won with this bad single damage. I just realized I underestimated structures so much.
https://imgur.com/a/lunzLHI.
okay. this game is borderline unplayable to me anymore. the fact that cleavers now take 2 energy and the amount of new enemies and difficulty spikes are so bad, i haven't gotten a run past magma core in 13 different runs.
idea: don't use cleavers.
they were nerfed for a reason, they were busted. archery is still pretty good despite also being nerfed, block/spike is still pretty good for getting past magma, and there's still plenty of synergies.
i have tried both archery and block/spike and nothing works for me. i even had the gold lil' buckler shield and knight's shields but i just die to poison.
We'll be buffing the base damage of cleavers soon! Hope you'll stick with us!
Cleavers are still very usable, all you need is a shield and the shield spirit relic and they're effectively back to costing 1 energy! I have a run rn with a cleaver build at floor 41 and still going strong
edit: floor 56 now and no signs of stopping
You can still win with cleavers, I just had a cleaver run that made it to floor 18 and only died to my internet cutting out and the page reloading
The RNG on this game is nutty. I've been trying to get a cleaver build going to push past the first boss of Endless but haven't had any luck yet.
But then stuff like this happens, +5 energy per turn + pacifist ring on the 4th floor.
I feel like trying to force a build results in many losses, but going with the flow restricts access to the late game. Some game states feel like they can't be converted into anything good no matter how good you do but then again, idk all the builds and how to adapt wisely.
I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole
Diggy diggy hole
♪ Diggy Diggy Hole
Yes