lethal roost
encountering a woolly drek with the smackback charm is a run killer. the only counter is ink since it has snow protection. one shotting him isn't viable and tanking hits wont work cause he heals cause he eats his allies.
i would remove the possibility of him spawning with the smackback charm
mystic summit
I'm principally opposed to all of these "charm X shouldn't spawn on enemy Y" suggestions. You hit the bell. That's what the bell does. 🙂
robust pagoda
I'm principally opposed to all of these "charm X shouldn't spawn on enemy Y" sug...
yeah well the bell is stupid
but i want to fight the final boss
i'd just play with the second 2 bells if i could!
it's not fun to run into a run ending roadblock that you can't get past unless you've been gifted the best build ever.
the realistic thing is that the first bell just needs to be reworked alltogether, though... not all these specific exceptions
there's like a billion enemies that can get a specific charm and you basically lose now
god forbid you get a puffball with an acorn charm or something
(yes, i know you can snow it. this is just an example. it's ridiculously oppressive for the first bell!)
(i literally found it harder to unlock the second bell than the third just because having the starting crown was THAT much of a difference!)
main flame
I'm principally opposed to all of these "charm X shouldn't spawn on enemy Y" sug...
i disagree with this because having the bells enabled is necessary for ||true ending|| and the charm bell can just randomly end your run very unfairly. It's not a "fun optional difficulty increase" to have fights become ridiculously unbalanced because an unfortunate charm happened to spawn on an enemy.
mystic summit
I hate to keep using this as an example, but if you look at Retromation’s series, he shows every run he plays from a fresh save file and literally never loses to an unlucky enemy/charm combination, despite encountering a lot of unlucky ones. If a player is losing before the boss, it’s a skill issue not a luck issue. Which is fine if they hit a bell whose point is to make the game harder.
robust pagoda
Just because something is a skill issue doesn't mean it's good design
lol
if its a skill issue for a large amount of the playerbase then idk what to tell you
hollow knoll
Comes down to a matter of opinion on what makes a well designed roguelite. Personally I think having encounters “imbalanced” actually is good design, otherwise every run will feel the same and you’ll quickly get bored of the game if the runs don’t feel unique enough. A charm spawning on drek is already a 1/3 and then the smackback charm on top of that is like a 1/however many allowed charms for enemies there are. It is rare enough that having that memorable extra difficult run is something I want to see in a game. It’s only a problem if it makes an unbeatable scenario and smackback drek is far from unbeatable, and does not need ink I literally just handled him with a smackback charm with the shademancers in my last run just fine.
I’d rather see instances that more commonly occur be rebalanced rather than niche occurrences. For example drek itself shows in 50% of runs, and I do think given that he is snow resistant and has such high hp, essentially is a damage check and it is tough for some decks to deal 28 hp before he gets an attack off. I could see a reasonable nerf be nerfing his hp to 20 so that newer players dont just run into this overtuned brick wall half of every game, and have additional challenge bells one of which increases enemy difficulty which would restore drek to the oppressive 28 hp (but also bring other enemies in other encounters up in difficulty as well).
sly valley
If it's a skill issue for a large amount of the playerbase, then maybe the game should have a easier difficulty mode. Not just nerf properly balanced enemies en masse.