Alternative scaling for a couple items (golden gun and some healing items)

The first item I'd personally like to see scale a little bit differently is the golden gun. Early on the scaling just reducing the amount of gold you need to hit max power is nice, but early on you're unlikely to get multiple golden guns, at least very unlikely to get more than two. And much later in the game, the difference between 350 gold and 700 gold, or any other amount less than that is completely negligible, when you tend to be getting several hundred gold per enemy.

Not to mention, especially late game, since having one is pretty much as good as any more than that, getting 70% extra damage on all your attacks from a single item is crazy, in my opinion.

A proposed specific change would be to have it start with something like 200 gold = 10% extra power, and then next level 400 gold = 20% power, and then 800 gold = 30% extra power, and so on (doubling the needed gold but increasing the power boost at a flat rate). Obviously the actual numbers could be tweaked, but that's just one example I came up with. I think it would lead to a much better scaling for the golden gun where getting one late game would still be something that I'd be happy about rather than a disappointingly useless extra item, and the doubling scaling on cost would make it so that it would still actually be something to work towards instead of just like "Oh, I need 700 gold for max power? Okay, let me kill two enemies." Of course the actual scaling of power would have to take this in to account, so that you'd always have 10% extra power (or whatever) at 200 gold, 20% extra at 400, etc, so that getting an extra wouldn't eventually become a downside as it would if the power scaling was linear.



The other big change I think would be beneficial is making infusions scale in a more useful way so they don't wind up useless end game too. My main idea on this is instead of boosting how much max hp you get per enemy (or in addition to, I'm not picky), they would boost how much they could bring your max hp up to at max. For example one infusion would cap off after giving you 500 max hp, two would cap off at 1000, three at 1500, etc. Tweak numbers to taste. The other thing I'd personally like to see with infusion is keeping track of the max hp from infusions and leveling separately, so that if you max out an infusion at any point you wind up with the same max hp that you would at, say, level 1. Right now once you cap it off, you can still gain max hp by leveling, which makes it kind of suck to get later on, since you won't wind up with the same amount of benefit. Also, just as a sort of nice way to display it, you could color part of the health bar differently to show how much of it is from infusions and how much of it is from leveling. Just a minor idea, feel free to ignore that part.



Aside from that, I'd just like to express a general interest in seeing most healing items that heal flat amounts be potentially switched to percentages or just scale multiplicatively instead of linearly. Not things like leeching seed or harvesters scythe, since those already get powered up by things like soldier's syringe, just things like mysterious vile and sprouting egg and maybe monsters tooth which, while kind of nice early on, wind up feeling totally useless later in the game. Of course the argument could be made that they are tier 1 items and therefore it's reasonable for them to kind of suck, but all the other tier 1's still feel awesome throughout the game, even if they aren't QUITE as awesome as higher tier items. Of special note is that bustling fungus continues to be useful throughout the game (obviously limited by the need to stay totally stationary) since it provides heals based off of your max hp, and when stacked, can heal you insanely quickly, making it great, at the very least, for HP sacrificing shrines. On the other hand, mysterious vial and sprouting egg, and to a somewhat lesser extent, monster tooth, wind up feeling fairly useless later on, since 1.2 or 2.4 hp per second winds up not amounting to a whole lot, and staying out of combat winds up being all but impossible eventually.

Not really sure what I'd suggest to remedy this for those items though honestly, and maybe it's not as big of an issue as it feels like, it could be the case that they're actually extremely useful and I just don't really notice them later in the game despite them saving my life all the time, I dunno. They just feel very weak, is all.

 

I second the idea of giving sprouting egg and monsters tooth percentage based effects. Monsters tooth could give a heal as small as 1%, at that rate it won't stack to something crazy to heal off hordes from. (Although hordes themselves don't seem that lethal).

The benefit for multiple infusions does make it more useful, but then it makes it a tad too good and required to succeed. Infusions become the name of the game compared to other items if they are increasing what might as well be your most precious resource.There was another post elsewhere in the forums (I believe in the thread about suggestions for HC) that talked about some of the underlying issues with health scaling AND hopoo responded saying that it did need some tweaking and perhaps a slightly altered approach on the whole.

 

What about a hardcoded limit?
For one, after you get N Infusions, they are dropped from the RNG pool, no longer appearing in shops or dropping from bosses.

 

This sounds favourable, since the Infusion Item already has a cap on how much HP it can give, so collecting more than a few quickly becomes useless.

 

Additional idea - although this doesn't substantially raise the power of infusion how about once an infusion is capped out it provides healing every time you kill an enemy equal to the amount of hp it would raise (so 2)? This gives infusion some minor additional benefit after the fact.

 

This would make it identical to Leeching Seed after a certain point. Duplicating items is undesired.

 

You mean monster tooth? (sorry for the short post)

 

Yeah, right... Monster Tooth. Totally what I meant. Thanks.

EDIT: then again, 2 hp for every killed monster? Does that make any difference at all after 30 minutes?

 

Say you have 8 Infusions, which is why your HP capped out so quickly, which is why you'd rather have had 3 Infusions then 5 other Items, because now your Item is useless.
But then 16 HP / kill isn't great either. Maybe it would multiply. Or maybe we need to make it cause some other buff after it maxes out. Or raise the cap. Something's got to change, though, I think, because otherwise the Item is great for only a short timespan.

 

The only problem with a solution like having infusion stop dropping once you hit the cap is what about co-op? If one of you gets an infusion and hits the cap, but no one else has even had a single infusion yet, how do you handle that? The first person could still accidentally pick up the infusion. Then again I guess that's sort of a non-issue, they should just avoid picking up the infusion and let someone else grab it... Still, something to consider, so you don't just check if at least one player has capped out or something.

 

I think that these changes will fix quite a few issues. Though I still see one major issue.

I think that the only item that I would also change is the life savings. In its current state, over a 60 minute game, it will give the player 1200 gold. Which is relatively useless if you ask me, especially if you consider that a player that picks it up 10 minutes into a game will get very little from the additional gold. This whole issue is caused by the fact that gold is valuable in the beginning, but loses value extremely quickly. Increasing prices could fix gold's value, but at the same time it wouldn't fix this item.

I'm not sure what I would do to the item to fix it. If it scaled based off of the player's level, it might still be helpful. I think an alternate way to approach it is to scale off of time spent in a level, up to about 10 minutes or so at which point maybe the item could stop increasing in gold rate, or possibly stop giving gold entirely.

 

Exactly. Double the cap for co-op and let the players figure it out themselves.
I mean, if they can't work it out between the two of them that's not much of a cooperative gameplay.