#Ascending Heights

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

lost vine
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I've had AH for a bit now (81 clears) and I can say in confidence I hate it, I dread doing the minigame but I have to because my dagger sucks rn. I think I am midgame (94USP) so forgive me if these are solved/mitigated later game. My main issues are:

  1. The rewards are terrible, the minigame gives next to no souls or cps regardless of any multipliers or even how many pickups I get, I am in the low hundred trillions for SP right now and the frozen souls can give as low as like 50k souls, I probably make 10x that from a single small enemy. Additionally the frozen shard drops are outclassed by grapple run now, the frozen souls/coins barely drop them and when they do it's a single one, compared to grapple run having 10-20 guaranteed for doing a much less painful, faster minigame.

  2. The minigame is way too long, especially with the hardmode DD, sucks even more to spend a good couple minutes reaching 1.5k+ and then failing and getting nothing, which is amplified further by having very rng heavy gameplay where sometimes you will take a booster thing and it will spit you out in a spot where you basically can't reach a platform without superhuman reaction speed

  3. The armoury chance sucks, even with the hardmode DD (atleast for the time it takes for a clear), 45% chance after doing like a 3 minute minigame is crazy when GR is 40% for a minute clear - sometimes less - and significantly easier minigame

Here are my proposed solutions:

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  • Make the "Golden Spirit Platform" DD change EVERY boost platform to the gold one, this would make clears significantly faster. This would also have the tradeoff of giving you less resources assuming the pickups were buffed to actually give a decent amount of rewards so I would consider it balanced.

If the previous change was applied higher altitudes could maybe be ok honestly idk how that would go but alternatively you could.

  • Instead of changing the distance at all just make every platform breakable

  • have the 'difficult' platform spawning with breakable, moving and fake platforms start from 0m instead of 500m

  • Increasing the difficulty as opposed to the duration is a much better solution to this because not only does it reduce tedium but it rewards the player for being better at the minigame as opposed to punishing them by making them do double the work, this is in line with how silver death, bs hard mode, grapple run sprint and giving guaranteed exc for sub 60/50s on bosses works which are all much better forms of increasing risk/reward for minigames than just making it longer.

  • If these changes were applied I would argue the armoury chance would also be solved and honestly I would be ok with lowering it to 40% to be in line with GR for the sake of consistency

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  • For rewards you could just increase the numbers for the end of stage reward and from the enemy drops

  • Alternatively I would say increase the enemy spawnrates and weight the rewards from the minigame more to enemies and less to the end reward so 1. The frozen shard drops could be comparable or potentially better than from GR to give the minigame a niche with whetstones if for some reason you need a lot of frozen shards 2. So the golden spirit platforms change does have a tangible downside as opposed to just being a faster clear

  • Idk how viable this one would be but I like the idea, make the AH enemies scale much more with frozen souls to where frozen soul boosts affect them some multiplier more. So for example they get 5x the benefit from ice type souls. Idk how broken this would be but the souls are so bad from them rn and so are ice type souls I think it would be alright. Giving ice souls some niche use in AH lineups (that actually does something) could be nice and give a little more variety (idk maybe protection spellbooks could have the tiniest use case)

  • another more out there idea but I also think frozen random boxes could be cool as to have another downside of the golden spirit platforms, they could be rare only having like 0-2 a stage and just give a random box rewards, they would make sense to be an upgrade ( and there could be a further one to make them silver) this would atleast give the minigame some benefit if the coins still suck, the still souls suck and you don't get an armoury chest.

lunar sinew
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Holy yap

lost vine
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I hate AH I don't want to play ts 💔

lunar sinew
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valid but holy yap still lol

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i agree

lost vine
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If I complain I am going to propose my own solution instead of just baselessly whine

lunar sinew
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you werent a doodle jump legend like me

lost vine
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I was nasty at doodle jump

lunar sinew
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we yap while we whine

pastel grail
zealous ridge
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ice-type souls applying to AH enemies:
wanna note that until recently they were the only ice-types in the game
so uh... yep. minigame has needed help since day 1 (march 2024 iirc)
It's been made shorter a couple of times and the golden platforms were a nice touch but it still has a ways to go

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iirc the enemies would need to be multiplied by 1,000x to be close to the clear reward with a crit and the clear reward would also have to be 1,000x to be on par with a Rage.
to say it's underwhelming is an understatement
(but this was a while ago, I can check again in a bit)

lunar sinew
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new key armory item with minigame buffs

zealous ridge
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they need some internal help, seeing any visible buff with "+100,000% souls" is too much no matter the context 😂

lunar sinew
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will skull ring buff when

zealous ridge
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😩
buff to every rage souls upgrade when
(except that one +50x upgrade, that's fine how it is lol)

lunar sinew
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ring needs to multiply rage souls

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+1 level is 5% rage souls

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and increase the amounts for dark and wd souls

zealous ridge
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eh, dark is already the one good thing that ring has
bit high for it to be 5% rage per level (assuming that's Excellent, 4% without)
because you can level rings a lot higher, that'd be almost triple rage souls on just my ring
which is a good amount for Rage to get, it could definitely have that and way more but not just on a single armory item imo
let's spread it out a little 😅
-# I was thinking closer to +1.6x per level / +2x w excellent if it functioned as is
edit: after toying with that in the calcualator that's still not much. I'm gonna go with +4x per level. If it's gonna have one function and the prior ring has multiple it may as well actually be better at the one thing it does.

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but uh... I guess I should stop because it's a bit off topic for ascending heights

true mist
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I agree with pretty much everything

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It’s so tedious and gives such low rewards that the only reason I have to play AH is to get gear

lunar sinew
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That's the case for literally every mini game except ch in very specific situations

zealous ridge
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Bonus Stage does deserve some credit
It may not be the leading source of souls but it has some other uses

lost vine
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AH is just all of the issues I've described above

zealous ridge
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GR has a lower chance than AH
... but takes 1/3 of the time

lunar sinew
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I wasnt disagreeing with anything, its still literally the case

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i was moreso looking at all the minigames in the lategame portion of the game. Since i assumed thats what we were referring to cause i thought you were late game

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once you get far enough, they all devolve into the same thing

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good chunk of the game obviously, but that doesnt change the fact that all it contributes after the chunk is the same

lost vine
lunar sinew
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Yeah my bad

lost vine
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I think AH just sucks notably more than the other ones

lunar sinew
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its long and tedious for sure

lost vine
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GR rewards are buns but the minigame is fast and I enjoy it atleast

lunar sinew
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if AH just took half as long

lost vine
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if only

low marsh
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Silver boxes at the end would make it a little bit better or have the chest give like 100x souls cause o m g, every day I hope and get the result of a joke

lost vine
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Did 2000m for nothing award

Screenshot_20260430-224026.png
zealous ridge
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yes, we're well aware

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that's why this is at least the fifth thread on it

glossy frost
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I actually like the game and am a fan of the better harder than longer trope ..