Ankh Improvements | Patreon Poll #18

Hey Patrons!

As mentioned before, v0.9.4 is going to focus on a variety of small to medium changes, some of which are concerning items. While another major item rework is a bit much given what I’m already planning for v0.9.4, some changes to a less complex item would fit in quite nicely.

I’ve wanted to make some improvements to ankhs for a little while now, and so I’ve put together two proposals for each ankh variety for you guys to vote on!

The results from this poll will determine what changes I make to Ankhs in v0.9.4!

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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. For this poll, one choice will be picked for regular ankhs, and one for blessed ankhs.

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!

Unblessed Ankhs

Firstly, here’s the current behavior of regular ankhs, essentially unchanged from vanilla:

• Instead of dying, the hero is teleported to the level entrance with full HP and no debuffs
• Enemies are cleared and new ones are spawned
• The hero loses all items except specific unique ones (e.g. bags, hero starting items), and items they have equipped.

Losing all items is an extremely harsh trade-off, and so players generally only use regular ankhs if they can exploit them by dropping their items first. I’d like to buff ankhs and close up some loopholes in their functionality. I’ve got two proposals here, that both let the player keep their items, but with some strings attached.

The first proposal is:

• Ankhs no longer remove items from the player
• Ankhs have a chance to fail (perhaps 33%), causing the player to die. Multiple ankhs can be stacked to increase this chance.

This change is a pretty straightforward one, but I’m unsure how well a chance-based mechanic would work. On one hand I think the tension of waiting to see if you get revived would be really cool, but it also means success for some players will come down to luck. This does nicely remove the current exploits involving ankhs though.

The second proposal is:

• Ankhs now teleport the player to a random location, instead of level start
• The player’s backpack is dropped where they die, making everything but their weapon/armor inaccessible until they retrieve it.

This is a more complex change, allowing the player to keep their inventory if they’re willing to fight their way back to it! This change is obviously inspired by similar mechanics in games like dark souls or hollow knight. My main worry with this approach is in specific unlucky cases not having inventory access may be essentially a death-sentence. That may be a fair tradeoff though, and this mechanic nicely closes ankh loopholes without relying on chance.

Blessed Ankhs

Blessed ankhs are in a much better place, but there are still some things that could be done to improve them a little. Firstly, as a recap, when the hero hits 0 hp a blessed ankh does the following:

• The hero is healed to 1/4HP and cleansed of all debuffs
• The hero is given acting priority, so they should be able to do something before enemies can.

The 1/4 HP heal is an old compromise I made to prevent players using blessed ankhs like extra healing potions. Because of this, blessed ankhs feeling a little lackluster. I’d like to try and give them a little more oomph while also removing the unintuitive ‘acting priority’ behaviour.

The first proposal is:

• Instead of acting priority, the hero is given 2/4 of their HP in shielding.

Since the original blessed ankh change was made, shielding was added as a mechanic in Shattered, and it seems like a perfect fit for this! This change would give the hero more survivability without making stacking blessed ankhs for healing an effective strategy.

The second proposal is:

• Instead of acting priority, the hero is given 4 turns of invulnerability.

This one gives a similar effect to proposal 1, but has a bit more short-term power, and is arguably more thematically appropriate for an ankh. I’d be interested to see what strategies the player might come up with using this short term invincibility. Note that this wouldn’t work in conjunction with berserk or endure.