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After I had posted this to the workshop, a lot of testing has come and gone since. People on the discord did a lot of testing and helped me figure out numbers, and I was testing a lot with my own friend group as well, and while the discord helped me figure out the numbers problem, the actual *feel* problem was only apparent as of late, when I noticed a lot of upgrades were--as you pointed out--not getting much attention or love. In particular, one thing I noticed is that once you picked up a certain loot item that gave you a debuff, you typically wanted to try and pick up a Special upgrade that synergized with it... and then locked yourself out of other Special upgrades as a result. Special's unique debuff interaction is the most stifling part of Florist's design as one of my friends put it and it's something I've been thinking of a lot.
In terms of other upgrades, Secondary was definitely the hardest to figure out. Prior to release, what Florist was, was that she had a Special with a debuff that interacted with a specific other debuff, and that debuff was on a Secondary upgrade of the same gem. This "marriage" of upgrades made runs feel VERY stifling because you resisted picking up an upgrade and losing damage unless the paired upgrades showed up together. When I took the debuff off the Secondary upgrade entirely, it became very hard to figure how to give the Secondary upgrades an identity when it's notable use came from another ability's upgrade. I still think some of the upgrades, like Emerald's or Ruby's, are worth consideration regardless of your Special--Ruby's in particular scales VERY well with Secondary damage increases and changes your rotation in fun ways--but some are definitely phoned in as just "slightly different ways to apply your Secondary." Similarly, I did phone in a lot of Defensive's upgrades too and I'd been meaning to rebalance that again in the future.
That said, this class still does what I set out to do--make debuff granting loot items not an instant rejection. As a long time casual player, it didn't matter if it was modded or not--debuff items just did not feel attractive. Even if, on paper, they added a fair amount of damage, if the debuff was not Curse or Burn, you typically avoided taking it. Even Bleed needed specific abilities or builds to make the most of it. When playing Florist, the most positive feedback I got was "debuff loot items feel good to pick up" which was the priority intention of the class. I still need to address the cases where it doesn't... such as wanting Special upgrades that synergize with the loot you pick up or visa versa. However, I think the class, Secondary upgrades aside, is still in a really good spot now.
My next plan is to introduce palette-specific status effects across the board, make the class more multiplayer viable. I've been stalling on it because frankly, it's a LOT of busywork, lol. It's something I need a large amount of time to dedicate to and haven't found that yet. Along side that, I was going to rework base Secondary, Opal Secondary, Garnet Secondary, and Sapphire Secondary to all have a different 'vibe' so to speak. My initial direction with the Secondary was to make it challenging to actually apply the debuff your Special inflicts and testing has proven that I only succeeded in making it less satisfying to do. I need to give another identity to the Secondary to make it feel a lot better to upgrade. After that, some better identity to the Defensive upgrades and and some retooling of Special's unique debuffs. If you want some peeks into ideas, I was going to change Choking Scent to deal damage on all debuff applications and fades, and Rancid Scent's DoT to scale with every debuff, and Depressing Scent's damage amp to go up based on total debuffs... basically make every unique debuff scale with everything apart from Smouldering, because Burn is powerful enough as it is and I like the current unique interaction, and Noxious, because it's the base ability. Those are my plans for the future and I'll likely dedicate my time to that update once I release a couple more item mods I'd been cooking up!