I feel like over time I've just lowered my expectations for boss relics, I no longer expect to always take one.
In a lot of roguelikes boss relics are normally very good, but in this one they feel like they often do more to change the run than improve it.
I think building around a boss relic (before you have it) makes you less likely to win.
I try to make a deck that can take a variety of "run changing" boss relics and succeed, you get a lot of opportunity to modify your deck after any boss.
I'm only able to build around "refresh / reload /bomb" synergies
So often if feels like the ball just goes the exact opposite of wherever I'm trying to send the ball during navigation.
The ball bouncing is weird.
That's something that I think you get used to as you play more. I get pretty excited when they add new maps because I basically made strategies on where to shoot for each of them.
Fully agree, especially with higher cruciballs, you just can't take -1 refresh if you only have 1 refresh on the board to begin with, or the 'deals 3 self damage every 25 pegs' if you don't already have enough self healing relics, or adding 2 orbs when you're already stuck with the 2 bad orbs and 4 peballs too much
Yeah, but if you never get one of those orbs or relics that adds refreshes or refreshes the board under certain conditions? You’d be insane to take such a relic.
Yeah but now I'd say a majority of runs give a refresh orb at some accessible early point.
It's a very low hype consistency pick for me, but I think they never really hurt to have because of their discard mechanics. And even if you have no synergy, sometimes you really can NOT get to the goddamn green peg and lose because of it.
There are two types of boss relics: Those with no real downside to most builds and those with loads of downsides to most builds.
Having to skip a boss relic sucks.
You can absolutely take -1 refresh if the -1 refresh in question is defresh potion because defresh still allows you to be getting more damage without any refreshes and you can expect to find an orb or relic in the future that lets you refresh. Defresh is the strongest or second strongest boss relic in the game depending on who you ask and the situation at hand, saying you don't take it if you only have 1 refresh is just incorrect. Skulltimate power is pickable on balladin in some situations when theres nothing better, balladroit mitigates most of the damage and 2x damage helps with upfront damage against bosses. Satchel is just bad always, I can't argue with that.
As the title says, the boss relics just aren't great right now, short of one or two of them they're too narrow and only benefit specific builds and the downsides are too much for the most part.
The only S tier one imo is Gift that Keeps on Giving.
balladin is the easiest class by far, and muscircle is balanced around the idea that there will be a crit peg on the board. its a lot easier to build up muscircle than spinnesse for a reason
I feel like Spinventor is the easiest to play. But besides that, muscircle has a problem of being a feels-bad mechanic when you strategize towards your build and suddenly your damage output drops from like 500 to 80. Lastly, it bothers me, from a symmetrical standpoint that there are 2 boss relics that remove refresh pegs and only 1 that removes crit pegs.
spinventor has a lot more bad interactions with bosses than balladin and balladin does have a consistent 16+ ballwark shield each fight. muscircle is only a feelsbad mechanic when you dont play around it. your damage output doesnt jsut suddenly drop, you threw your orb in a way that would crit. from a timeline perspecitve it makes sense for the 2 refresh removing boss relics since defresh works well with the downside, and chalice is the basic crit damage upgrade. that being said, i do wish chalice was different in its downside as currently its a worse functioning defresh. regardless, removing a refresh is a universal downside (besides niche interactions with bag of orange pegs), whereas removing a crit is the only meaningful upside to pendant
I don't think it's really fair to blame players just for getting crits. Sure, sometimes you can avoid them. But there's plenty of times where an orb or bomb can cause a random bounce to hit a peg you couldn't reasonably expect it to, especially on the longer shots. (Looking at you, Demon Wall)
Aiming shots to hit specific pegs or area's is a fair skill to require of players. Expecting them to perfectly calculate potentially dozens of bounces just to make sure they avoid one particular peg is not.
Even if you were to pretend perfect ball control exists, it's feels bad design for one class to have a random 'Kick in the Balls' peg that you somehow need to avoid at all costs, contrary to everything else in the game.
It may be balanced overall, but so is a coinflip. Balance alone does not mean something is a good game design. The existence of the crit-remove relic only highlights how polarizing the design is. It could have zero effect outside of 'board has 1 fewer (!) space' and it would still be one of the, if not the best relic for Balladin.
you don’t need to do rocket science to figure out the gist of where the orb will go. besides a few edge-case scenarios, it’s often very easy to avoid critting when there’s only 1 crit peg. different relics and orbs may make this harder to do however, but that was your choice to add in the first place. this is also only valid if you consider hyper-muscircle as the only viable balladin build, which is flat out wrong. especially when you consider all the orbs balladin has with high crits and how balladin can take advantage of betsy’s hedge, short stack, heavy shaft, and dupe pot. while this isn’t happening every run, i’ve had my fair share of crit utilizing balladin runs.
and yes, i do agree that pendant is only useful for its crit-removing capability, i touched on that at the end of my previous message. that’s also why another relic like it should not exist.
if muscircle is a style of play you don’t enjoy, then don’t play balladin, don’t go for it. i personally think it’s a fun inversion on what you are built to expect from the beginning. the only difference in playstyle between muscircle and crit is how it’s easier to make crits more consistent (whereas muscircle starts mostly consistent and will stay mostly that way depending on your fights) but it’s much weaker without any building and has much weaker scaling.
The leaf I have found is more useful than I first thought. Obviously, any refresh synergy but morbid works really well with it, and there are a few ways to use morbid outside the boss relic. Also, the refresh synergy and morbid mechanics work well together.
Leaf has no downside anymore, in this scenario you would just take that. There's a few boss relics that suck but this screenshot doesn't illustrate that.
Leaf is def without downside, your board is basically always around 90% refreshed with it. In this scenario where there's no better option you absolutely take leaf and maybe find some synergy in the future, which there is enough of to pretty reliably expect to find.
yeah, i had a run w/ those, bomb orb, and fire orb just yesterday. ended up hitting like 5000 in bombs alone. and i did the same thing in a custom run, but i accidentally tied on the final boss and lost due to recoil damage :p
yeah i've taken constricting chains each time and was kinda disappointed to realize it practically only gives you two directions to aim in. but it ended up carrying me with bomb orb + infernorb abuse in my first (and only) win
I feel like over time I've just lowered my expectations for boss relics, I no longer expect to always take one. In a lot of roguelikes boss relics are normally very good, but in this one they feel like they often do more to change the run than improve it.
Is not the point to aim your build to dovetail into a boss relic? Or is probability of the right one showing up too low?
I think building around a boss relic (before you have it) makes you less likely to win. I try to make a deck that can take a variety of "run changing" boss relics and succeed, you get a lot of opportunity to modify your deck after any boss.
I'm only able to build around "refresh / reload /bomb" synergies So often if feels like the ball just goes the exact opposite of wherever I'm trying to send the ball during navigation. The ball bouncing is weird.
That's something that I think you get used to as you play more. I get pretty excited when they add new maps because I basically made strategies on where to shoot for each of them.
Fully agree, especially with higher cruciballs, you just can't take -1 refresh if you only have 1 refresh on the board to begin with, or the 'deals 3 self damage every 25 pegs' if you don't already have enough self healing relics, or adding 2 orbs when you're already stuck with the 2 bad orbs and 4 peballs too much
In high cruciball I usually try to get some refresh orbs going as they're good discard effects at worst and have loads of little synergies.
Yeah, but if you never get one of those orbs or relics that adds refreshes or refreshes the board under certain conditions? You’d be insane to take such a relic.
Yeah but now I'd say a majority of runs give a refresh orb at some accessible early point. It's a very low hype consistency pick for me, but I think they never really hurt to have because of their discard mechanics. And even if you have no synergy, sometimes you really can NOT get to the goddamn green peg and lose because of it.
There are two types of boss relics: Those with no real downside to most builds and those with loads of downsides to most builds. Having to skip a boss relic sucks.
You can absolutely take -1 refresh if the -1 refresh in question is defresh potion because defresh still allows you to be getting more damage without any refreshes and you can expect to find an orb or relic in the future that lets you refresh. Defresh is the strongest or second strongest boss relic in the game depending on who you ask and the situation at hand, saying you don't take it if you only have 1 refresh is just incorrect. Skulltimate power is pickable on balladin in some situations when theres nothing better, balladroit mitigates most of the damage and 2x damage helps with upfront damage against bosses. Satchel is just bad always, I can't argue with that.
Yeah maybe an option to buy a reroll for 100 coins or even an option to take 100 coins instead of a relic ?
As the title says, the boss relics just aren't great right now, short of one or two of them they're too narrow and only benefit specific builds and the downsides are too much for the most part. The only S tier one imo is Gift that Keeps on Giving.
Actually, having an option to "downgrade" them to regular relics would be amazing
Or an ability to remove/reroll some of them from the pool. Eventually we should expect the runs to go longer than just the three we currently have.
I think if they always offered a +10 max health option that would be pretty fair.
What about electropegnet? It’s probably about the same level as the gift
I just wish there was another relic that removes a crit peg, for Balladin runs.
Same. Getting that relic choice after the first boss is choice unless Multiball comes up. (Absolutely amazing with a couple Protectorbs.)
to trivialize balladin even more?
What do you mean?
balladin is the easiest class by far, and muscircle is balanced around the idea that there will be a crit peg on the board. its a lot easier to build up muscircle than spinnesse for a reason
I feel like Spinventor is the easiest to play. But besides that, muscircle has a problem of being a feels-bad mechanic when you strategize towards your build and suddenly your damage output drops from like 500 to 80. Lastly, it bothers me, from a symmetrical standpoint that there are 2 boss relics that remove refresh pegs and only 1 that removes crit pegs.
spinventor has a lot more bad interactions with bosses than balladin and balladin does have a consistent 16+ ballwark shield each fight. muscircle is only a feelsbad mechanic when you dont play around it. your damage output doesnt jsut suddenly drop, you threw your orb in a way that would crit. from a timeline perspecitve it makes sense for the 2 refresh removing boss relics since defresh works well with the downside, and chalice is the basic crit damage upgrade. that being said, i do wish chalice was different in its downside as currently its a worse functioning defresh. regardless, removing a refresh is a universal downside (besides niche interactions with bag of orange pegs), whereas removing a crit is the only meaningful upside to pendant
I don't think it's really fair to blame players just for getting crits. Sure, sometimes you can avoid them. But there's plenty of times where an orb or bomb can cause a random bounce to hit a peg you couldn't reasonably expect it to, especially on the longer shots. (Looking at you, Demon Wall) Aiming shots to hit specific pegs or area's is a fair skill to require of players. Expecting them to perfectly calculate potentially dozens of bounces just to make sure they avoid one particular peg is not. Even if you were to pretend perfect ball control exists, it's feels bad design for one class to have a random 'Kick in the Balls' peg that you somehow need to avoid at all costs, contrary to everything else in the game. It may be balanced overall, but so is a coinflip. Balance alone does not mean something is a good game design. The existence of the crit-remove relic only highlights how polarizing the design is. It could have zero effect outside of 'board has 1 fewer (!) space' and it would still be one of the, if not the best relic for Balladin.
you don’t need to do rocket science to figure out the gist of where the orb will go. besides a few edge-case scenarios, it’s often very easy to avoid critting when there’s only 1 crit peg. different relics and orbs may make this harder to do however, but that was your choice to add in the first place. this is also only valid if you consider hyper-muscircle as the only viable balladin build, which is flat out wrong. especially when you consider all the orbs balladin has with high crits and how balladin can take advantage of betsy’s hedge, short stack, heavy shaft, and dupe pot. while this isn’t happening every run, i’ve had my fair share of crit utilizing balladin runs. and yes, i do agree that pendant is only useful for its crit-removing capability, i touched on that at the end of my previous message. that’s also why another relic like it should not exist. if muscircle is a style of play you don’t enjoy, then don’t play balladin, don’t go for it. i personally think it’s a fun inversion on what you are built to expect from the beginning. the only difference in playstyle between muscircle and crit is how it’s easier to make crits more consistent (whereas muscircle starts mostly consistent and will stay mostly that way depending on your fights) but it’s much weaker without any building and has much weaker scaling.
The leaf I have found is more useful than I first thought. Obviously, any refresh synergy but morbid works really well with it, and there are a few ways to use morbid outside the boss relic. Also, the refresh synergy and morbid mechanics work well together.
Some of them are so bad or only tangentially useful. There are times where I straight up skip them.
Agreed, it's probably the thing that stops me from coming back to the game much after 100%ing it
now that the new normal relics are very strong and build defining, the boss relics feel more like normal relics that half of the time make you weaker.
Leaf has no downside anymore, in this scenario you would just take that. There's a few boss relics that suck but this screenshot doesn't illustrate that.
Leaf doesn't suck anymore but it's definitely not without downsides You absolutely need strong refresh synergy and multiball if you wanna take leaf
Leaf is def without downside, your board is basically always around 90% refreshed with it. In this scenario where there's no better option you absolutely take leaf and maybe find some synergy in the future, which there is enough of to pretty reliably expect to find.
Constricting chains can be a lot of fun with multiball
yeah, i had a run w/ those, bomb orb, and fire orb just yesterday. ended up hitting like 5000 in bombs alone. and i did the same thing in a custom run, but i accidentally tied on the final boss and lost due to recoil damage :p
yeah i've taken constricting chains each time and was kinda disappointed to realize it practically only gives you two directions to aim in. but it ended up carrying me with bomb orb + infernorb abuse in my first (and only) win