Besides the 50 Max HP penalty, pacts that Shopkeeper would give are added (any time they're used, not just her fight). You get one pact dependent on the spell used and another at random. The latter is suppressed if you have Dark Licence equipped.

I'm not sure what effect came up to destroy you in an instant like that. It seems extremely rare based on my playtesting. Sorry it happened.

Does this mod somehow affect the shopkeeper fight? I used Dark Anubis on her and was then given a ton of debuff stacks out of nowhere and she one shot me, from about 1.4K health. This has never happened before until i tried using dark spells on her, so I was wondering if this mod had anything to do with that. because that was the most cheated I have ever felt playing this game

i do like the concept of the rituals counter balancing most of the issues i have with them but even some of those are kinda ridiculous and using lets say 3 in one fight can mess your chracter up pretty bad. keep in mind the average character has only 650 hp max its very easy for things to get out of hand and insta die on the flip side certain spells are just ridiculous in the game innately im talking about you shield recycle (to many things give shields i swear to god some base game artifacts are ridiculous). ill play around with this more to find a good balance.

so i had removed both the health penalty and the ritual penalty to see what the spells are like and yes your correct they are crazy op.

so i tried putting the ritual mechanic back on then reduced all the rituals to one battle and for the most part that helped alot however some of the spells i started nerffing like the dark blade alone can oneshot most of the bosses and thats a bit much.

Sadly I don't know if I could incorporate the idea into this mod so easily, since it'd be an overhaul of sorts. The current idea is meant to work like in Battle Network 5, where putting the chip/spell in your folder/deck potentially gives you a powerful but dangerous last resort for the most dire of situations. They should only be used on rare occasions, though when you start using them it's easy to become dependant.

I kinda want to use this Karma mechanic idea as a custom spell brand, though sadly I have other mods in the works before I'm ready to do this. If you or anyone else want to use the idea then by all means do so!

@Mr Man Meat, This sounds like quite a nice idea, though it would need a lot of work properly balancing and making sure the downsides aren't too easy for the player to work around. I think your idea could go really well as a custom brand of spells, tied by a new type of spell jam that has major drawbacks but can still be bent into a positive by the player if they play right. Could be especially cool if it used some sort of Karma system, like what Battle Network 4 and 5 had.

here is how i would balance it i would force them to make spell jams, then force you to use the spell jams along with having cards that change what the spell jams do building the potential not only negate the effects of the dark cards late game but go as far to turn them into a positive. this way they have punishment early game but pay off late game and allow for a fully "dark" mage build along with allowing your cards to actually be playable.

@BiscuitSlash ok here is my problem with it there are 30 spells that are not only flashy amazing to look at but feel amazing to use, annnnd they are never to be used because the penalty is permanent. i literally didn't read what this mod did and tried to make a deck made from fully dark spells only to see that i killed myself in the second world confused about my max health disappearing. also even though they are powerful they aren't so powerful that i would literally give up max hp for them, a full slashfink deck can shrek 90% of the game or a trinity deck the dark spells are just to high of a liability.

I see your point, though through playtesting I found that the -50maxhp penalty alone isn't actually enough to stop them being overpowered. Excessive use with that HP penalty will make your character less durable but there are ways to get it back. Since the HP penalty alone can be easily worked around, the additional (yet notably shorter) penalty for that battle and the following battle is applied.

Basically, the spells are intentionally very overpowered, to be used as a last resort when you're in trouble (which is part of the inspiration for the Dark Soul artefact). This whole concept is directly inspired by Dark Chips from Megaman Battle Network, which were also highly powerful so that you could escape a bad situation, though you had to be careful not to be reliant on them, as doing so would consume you and screw you over during the battle or later down the line.

i think these are terrible, having a 50 max health deletion everytime they are used makes them not only useless but impossible to use effectively.

it would make sense if the -50 was temporary or they delt damage to the user but because they are irreversible they are useless.

LETSSS GOOOO

Long overdue but there's a new update that patches the issue with Dark Shattersaw. It can't spawn infinite saws now so it shouldn't crash the game. A few other spells got tweaked as well. Check the changelog for details.

Oh, wow, I've never seen that happen before! If I can figure out a potential fix then I'll be sure to patch it!

dark shattersaw is so powerful that it made my game crash lmao

Using a Dark Spell with your maxhp being less than 50 will put it into negative numbers, which happens when equipping flowers too. Having this negative amount of health will cause you to immediately perish.

what happens if you try to use one while at 1 maxhp?

You could modify the Spells.xml file using Virtual Studio Code, though Steam will occasionally replace it with the one I uploaded so it's best to keep backups.
The spells do have to be powerful to make up for that -50maxHP penalty, but you're welcome to tweak values on your end!

Thank you for much for this! Is there a way to modify these spells myself (I'm extremely new to modding) some of them are just too powerful

Idk why I believed you when you said "there are definitely no other setbacks" despite using a ton of Darkchips