Choose An Artifact Rework! | Patreon Poll #4

Hey Patrons!

As mentioned before, I’m making a bunch of balance changes and general improvements to items in 0.8.1. As with any update that focuses on item adjustments, I like to fit in a few additions or reworks for items or item categories that need it the most. This time around, I thought it would be fun to let you guys decide which items get more extensive changes!

The next three polls will each feature options within an item category, and the first one is artifacts! For each option I’ll share the artifact’s current state and some general ideas I have for improving it. The winning choice will have these ideas developed on and will be reworked in v0.8.1!

Talisman of Foresight

The talisman of foresight has a pretty potent passive effect, and a very lackluster active one. While exploring the dungeon the talisman helps you find traps in an interactive way, but scrying isn’t nearly as interactive or interesting as it could be.

I’d like to redesign the active ability of the talisman to make it more strategic and generally useful for finding secrets and revealing information about the current floor. Rather than just charging faster, the talisman might get access to more powerful abilities at it levels up. These abilities wouldn’t need to be strictly tied to secrets either, some could be useful in combat.

Master Thieves’ Armband

The Master Thieves’ armband is perhaps the strangest artifact in terms of balance at the moment. When the player is at a shop the artifact is incredibly powerful, and its a waste of an equip slot otherwise.

I’d like to improve the artifact by giving it some new abilities which give it more general power versus enemies or the dungeon environment. One promising idea is to have these abilities be fueled by the player’s gold supply. This way the artifact would simultaneously help you retain the gold you find, and then also give it new uses outside of shops.

Horn of Plenty

The horn of plenty is a much beloved artifact by new players but falls short for experienced ones. It has no real use in combat and is costly to upgrade, which means the moment the player is on top of the hunger system the value of the horn starts dropping harshly.

There is already a mechanic which can give the horn some value though: hero on-eat effects. I’d like for the horn to better explore this design space, by giving hero-dependent bonus effects when food is eaten from it. These effects might scale up in power based on the horn’s level and would be separate (but likely similar to) the current food effects for the warrior and mage.

Footwear of Nature

Similar to the talisman, the footwear of nature suffers from a good passive and a poor active. Generating more seeds and dew is quite useful, but the current active is just earthroot… that’s it.

I’d like to improve the footwear of nature by giving them an active ability that’s more than just an afterthought. I’m currently considering options that tie into feeding seeds to the footwear; perhaps the footwear will have an ability that’s based on the most recently fed seed. semi-random seed effects are also a possibility.

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Please vote for as many options as you like, you don't need to vote for just one! I allow multiple votes as it means that a higher proportion of people will end up voting for the winning choice. It also lets me gauge interest and lets polls be a bit more flexible, I might choose to implement the top 2 choices in some polls for example.

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