Curse Improvements | Patreon Poll #29

Hey Patrons!

Based on the results of last month’s Patreon Poll, I’m going to making a few curse changes in v1.3. I’d like a little help determining which curses are the most deserving of changes though. I have my own preferences, and gameplay stats about which curses are stronger, but generally don’t have a strong idea of which curses players dislike the most.

As a reminder, curses should have generally negative effects that add gameplay variety, give the player some room to play around them, and can even be turned to the player’s advantage in very specific situations. For this poll I’ve included four curse enchants and three curse glyphs, as well as some brief thoughts I have on each one. Please let me know which ones you’d most like to see changed!

The strength of support for each option will determine what curse changes I work on in v1.3!

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Please vote for all the options that you like, not just for your one favourite! I allow multiple votes as it means that a higher proportion of people will end up voting for the winning choice.

All patrons are encouraged to share their opinion by commenting and voting, but currently only the votes from Golden+ Supporters are counted when determining a poll winner. Votes from Shattered Supporters are worth double!

Fragile

This is the only curse that I’m pretty much totally sure I want to rework. Fragile is hard for the player to keep track of, very harmful overall, and the only counterplay is removing the curse. I have a fairly solid concept for a rework to this one too. Fragile would become ‘explosive’, a weapon that steadily gets more unstable before it causes an explosion that damages the player and enemy. This would be easier to track and offer some counterplay as the player can keep their HP high before the explosion hits and use it to damage enemies.

Sacrificial

Similar to fragile, this curse is mostly just harmful to the player. It has the slight quirk of bleeding the player more when they’re on high HP, but that’s not really enough on its own. It might work better if it was more harmful at high HP, but eased up faster at low HP, or even provided a mild benefit when the player is very hurt.

Exhausting

This curse was a bit more interesting before weakened was reworked, as the -2 STR penalty could be mitigated in some cases. Nowadays it just is an overall DPS reduction. It might be interesting to experiment with making its effect more pronounced but also shorter-term. That might encourage more counterplay.

Wayward

Making the player use doors against enemies is an interesting gameplay-alteration, but one that’s also too harsh when you consider that most boss fights have no doors. This makes wayward a direct and harsh damage penalty against bosses. The general theme of messing with the player’s accuracy works well I think, but the specifics could be improved.

Anti-Entropy

Moving onto curse glyphs, Anti-Entropy is the most dangerous to the player by a fair margin (hilariously, it’s also pretty much totally unchanged from vanilla). I think the general theme is interesting here, but the upside needs to be stronger, or at least more varied. It also doesn’t help that it occupies a similar niche to the corrosion curse (stand on water to mitigate)

Bulk

Bulk has an interesting positioning-focused downside, but it’s currently very harsh, and often impossible to avoid against things like ranged enemies. The game supports the idea of ‘enclosed’ spaces now, so it might be interesting to rework how bulk is harmful while keeping the general theme.

Corrosion

Similar to Anti-Entropy, I like the positioning theme here, but corrosion is a bit too mild against enemies and harsh against the player. It also ends up overlapping quite a bit with anti-entropy in terms of how it should be mitigated.

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If there’s a curse I didn’t list here that you’d really like to see changed, please let me know in the comments! I’m aware there are a bunch of curses I didn’t list, but I didn’t want to have too many choices in the poll.