Just lost my perfect score warrior, AMA
True, I’m very much on board with balance changes that remove or rework content, but that is not everybody’s cup of tea. Maybe I’ll make a fork of Shattered on day to try out these things :)
I would think the mage would be, next to hunter, best suited for Fragile. Duelist tears.
I was thinking that it locks mage out of all non-staff weapons. Battlemage does not mind, but warlock loses a lot of options. They’re probably both overall fine though. And right, duelist would lose an entire talent and some of their class identity, that is non-ideal.
I don’t think it is quite the same, huntress is more defined by the bow, with the plant/dew interaction being more of a secondary mechanic. I actually think she is the easiest class to do 9 challenges with, as you get a scaling ranged option for free. Regrowing grass is still extremely useful, and even warden gets some relevant utility by seeing through tall grass for trickshots. To hinder the other classes similarly to warrior, I’d have to be more like
I don’t think it is the warrior that needs to be changed, I’d rather get the challenges reworked. Badder Bosses and Hostile Champions are designed really well by adding challenge to the environment, instead of removing options from the player. Barren Lands, and Faith Is My Armor completely remove options (planting seeds, putting upgrades into armor), so those I’d like to see reworked specifically. The other challenges seem fine to me. Some ideas for what could replace them:
I think I’ll switch to duelist for a breath of fresh air, weapon abilities might open up some other strategy than “pray for haste and a reach weapon”.
Warrior definitely is the least interesting to play, but aside from challenges I don’t think he is too weak. Being able to upgrade armor early and carry that +1 throughout the game always feels quite impactful.
Just lost my perfect score warrior, AMA
Perfect Score Run
After playing for maximum score on 6 challenges forever, I finally bit the bullet and went for a 9 challenge perfect score run. This general strategy got me there in surprisingly few tries: - Pick Huntress for the spirit bow. The combination of no armor and almost no healing means we can’t afford to melee past sewers. Later we pick Sniper for extra vision and armor piercing bow, Warden is sadly gutted due to the Barren Lands challenge. - Fish for a Ring of Haste as much as possible (always pick rings from crystal chest and pick the chest room behind crystal doors; transmute other rings). - All upgrade scrolls go into the Ring of Haste. - Once we’ve got haste up and running, kiting is the name of the game. Use vision (Rejuvenating Steps and Heightened Senses talents are amazing) and trick shots to deal with ranged threats. - All healing potions go into energy, we’ll use alchemy to get past Tengu, and the King of Dwarves. Keep an Elixir of Feather Fall around to safely do pit rooms. - Skip sacrificial altars for the ascent, and save 3-4 Scrolls of Magic Mapping for the ascent as well. We’ll turn them into Scrolls of Foresight and comb every regular floor for full exploration score. Potions of Shrouding Fog trivialize Tengu, who is otherwise a huge obstacle for a 9 challenge run. The new bombs also feel great, they do decent damage and have good utility. I used a couple of them to beat down the final phase of the dwarf king. Finally, once you make it all the way down to Yog he actually falls wuite easily to the bow 🙂 One thing I didn’t think of was to pick up the darts from the shops, and craft some blinding darts - they’d have saved me a lot of headache against scorpios and warlocks. I will say that 9 challenges is a lot less fun than 6 challenges, so I’ll probably go back to that. Barren Lands in particular feels like it makes the game less interesting, disabling plants entirely just removes so many tools from the player. Final inventory [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9e2cec66-b1d2-433c-8941-924607a2a980.png]