Please don’t twist my words again by saying “basically”. I’m not forcing Evan to drop the concept entirely, I’m only highlighting possible problems with that idea as well as giving alternate solutions, before any significant effort is put into that concept. But ultimately I’ve mentioned it’s up to Evan to decide on which direction to go.

The thing is, by the time we’ve seen the quest, a significant amount of effort has been put on it already, making change difficult. Criticisms are much more helpful earlier in the development phase, where it’s still just ideas and concepts. By doing this, we can avoid the “sewer problem” preemptively before it happens.

That’s an exaggeration, but it’s not about what’s possible. The game is about tweaking the winrate in your favor with better options and decisions, using core gameplay elements from your bag, and having choices like these are essential to the game.

And that’s perfectly fine if you don’t care about my opinion! But I’d like to share my opinion to the dev and other people regardless, in hopes it will improve the game like warrior, and you cannot stifle these discussions just because you don’t care about it.

Challenges can be added + improved for those who play it, to be more fun. Imagine if the hard mode of RPGs simply remove your spells and gear. Sure, it’s more difficult, but it’s like installing a “negative update” that removes entire chunks of gameplay. Players criticize Shattered’s challenges because they care about Shattered, and telling them to just “take the difficulty level” is insensitive and improvements cannot be made like that.

Not true, only the boss needs to be pickaxed. Everything here can be prepared: sight options, cleansing potion for food, preparing huge damage + crowd control for the minions. Stamina potion can help chase and dodge against the boss, which essentially gives the player high pickaxe DPS. Without options, there is no adaptation, and that’s the “sewer problem” that’ll hopefully not exist in the vault.

And please stop twisting my words. I never said that challenges are bad because they make things harder. I’m saying that a game can be both difficult and fun, and if said difficulty strips away entire classes and core gameplay elements to remove player choices, then it’s bad game design, and we can learn from successful games on how to better create difficulty. If the google result to “Shattered PD challenges” is players complaining how poorly designed it is, then there’s a problem.

It can be higher if you think it’s too low, I just don’t want it to outclass elixir of might, which is 4HP + 5% increase. It could also be another reward entirely!

I’m not asking for the kind of progression that give permanent upgrades or starting gold to heroes. The thing is, we are already unlocking tons of “game changing” options by doing things in Shattered. We unlock characters, alchemy recipes, challenges, seeded runs. The final boss unlock might as well be another 10th challenge.

Longevity and replayability are key aspects of roguelikes and roguelites, and superbosses create a new goal for players who finished the game once. More importantly, these will create online guides, discussions, gameplay videos and reactions. This is the key for growth and momentum, and it’s one of the reasons why some roguelikes and roguelites are so successful, they have this recipe jotted down.

I also thought On Diet made the caves quest difficult, but I manage to adapt to it specifically because I can prepare for it. That’s the entire point of this message, every obstacle in this game can be adapted to because there is a way to prepare items. That’s what makes roguelikes fun, you see an impossible boss ahead, and on the next run, you bring solutions to counter that boss.

The vault quest however, has no possible way to prepare if you start at zero again. That’s the problem. The only way to adapt to vault quest is if players are allowed to pre-buff before the vault, but at that point it’s no longer worth getting the +2 ring as you need those buff items for dwarf king and yog in 9-chal. If the vault quest won’t be as RNG-hell as 9-chal sewers, then there is another way to adapt via skill and memory, but that’ll be difficult to balance with challenges.

While I prefer a token gambling collosseum, or something like the caves quest, it’s up to you on how to proceed with the city quest!

Though I’m not sure how to balance that vault idea other than completely eliminating challenges during the quest. On diet, swarm, champions, pharma, and barren lands are lethal, but FIMA will be the worst offender as it eliminates most of the gear progression in that vault microcosm, making all melee weapons + armor useless. That “starting point” is always the most lethal in high challenges, but by the time players reach the city it’s usually a winning run already and they have the correct builds to proceed. If the city quest can even cause 20% death at this stage in the game… my biggest worry will be not experiencing the imp update entirely because skipping it becomes the optimum play on high challenges. Hope that’s not the case!

Players can prepare against tengu or caves quest to boost the winrate, but this vault quest is something that they cannot prepare against, and that constant death rate might be too unappealing as it goes against the core gameplay of “preparing for the next fight”. It might act as a fun minigame if done well, but it seems hard to execute well.

Forgive me warrior for I have sinned :( The god of pixel dungeon rightfully deserves the SSS tier

I’m glad to see Shattered sales doing well~ Updates really help keep Shattered alive, players can also spread the word to keep the momentum going

I’m eager for city and halls quest, but I’m very concerned with that dwarven vault idea. If none of the player’s items can go with them, it’ll be extremely difficult to balance this quest with high challenges. Sewer and prisons have the highest death rate due to players having no options in their bag yet, and that city quest will end up as another sewer. Builds also become unusable, and some players don’t like this quest idea.

There’s some great suggestions for city quest: What if the devil imp takes the player to an arena in the dwarven kingdom? That’s often the most fun event in RPGs, where you have the choice to fight a few enemies for small rewards, or risk it all for better loot. The imp could set up a fight against weak enemies at first, eventually leading to a boss fight with corrupted Thymor from those lore pages. Dwarf tokens drop from enemies, which can be exchanged with the imp for rewards such as the +2 ring.

This suggestion will solve several problems. Arena fights will allow newbies to get used to slugfests prevalent in Dwarf King’s fight. But more importantly, Thymor will allow useless items in this game to shine. This warlock should use ice spells, as there are almost no ice enemies in this game to justify using Icy Touch’s ice immunity. He could also buff at the start of the battle, since no enemies use buffs in this game for cleansing dart to remove. Of course, players can choose to brute-force this fight with healing potions instead, or escape the arena before Thymor appears, as you will have enough tokens for the +2 ring without Thymor. But defeating Thymor could drop an additional Devil Fruit that fills satiety and adds +6 Max HP. This boss reward should be useful but not game-breaking, as the final boss is already easy without challenges.

Challenge tweaks and new challenges that buffs enemies are also nice. Slay the Spire encourages players to clear the game multiple times using most characters, which unlocks a hidden act 4 final boss as a final goal. Shattered needs that replayability incentive, as right now when new players clear the game once, they get bombarded with challenges that they usually find unappealing, which leads to them quitting without trying most of the game characters, killing the momentum of players sharing the game.

That’s because I need to explain why one hero is in S while another is in D. That’s not necessarily bias, it’s just to explain my personal opinion on why the character is there. You’re free to disagree of course, but when you inflate stats to say why warrior is good, that’s definitely bias. I just want warrior to be on par with the other heroes, if you actually like warrior then there’s no reason to argue against him getting more card options.

I never said that everyone has all of these, I’m saying that warrior doesn’t have any of it. If he just have one or two good cards such as heals, his tanking would be much more consistent. If we compare to someone who can consistently generate heals and shields, plus other cards like ranged, they can overall save a lot more HP compared to warrior. While monk needs to kill normal enemies, once that happens you have those cards forever until used, making it very consistent. With combo decaying it’s much more difficult as floors don’t have that many fights to maintain combo. You are very biased with warrior it seems?

Oh she’s definitely excellent with a dagger, the reposition + invis makes her a strong rogue! It’s just that we need a lot of luck to find her good cards, and we might not find them which makes the class inconsistent. Feint is not terrible in a vacuum, but when compared to challenge (and other good abilities from other heroes) I personally think it’s inferior, and the cost is too high. Challenge’s heals, cheaper cost, blink, and insane crowd control is hard to pass up especially for Yog doom slayer, I had the most success using this ability on high challenges.

And yeah I agree warrior is unloved :(

I think the biggest problem with warrior is that he has almost no good cards in his deck, even without FIMA/Pharma/Barren. No movement until leap, no heals, no dodge or invis, no good range like mage and huntress. Essentially, for the most part in the game you just… walk and hit things, and with him having the lowest effective HP in the game, he can’t survive well. If we compare monk with gladiator, we can see that monk can do chasm kills, can dash to reposition, can heal and parry reliably without maintaining combo.

Warrior damage might be decent, but ultimately if he waste turns to reposition manually, if he needs to run to recover health, his damage output is much lower than expected. Not to mention, a lot of his damage boosts require strict conditions like constantly getting hit, the 50% boost is not immediate and it has a cooldown. I find that the other classes don’t really need to invest in much damage, DoTs and bows scale, and they can do chasm kills among other things, but when they invest in damage such as fireblast mage, they can deal more damage-per-turn than warrior + they’re much tankier with shield and heal. Cleric also doesn’t need to invest as holy spells already kill lategame undead and demons.

It’s not that I have a bias against him, but I’ve played and compared the characters with and without challenges, and I just think warrior performs the worst. He really needs a buff, and if he’s your favorite character then that’s good isn’t it? I feel he needs more cards, and if you don’t like the cards you can avoid using them.

Exotic recharge scrolls will refill your tome!

It’s not S-tier but personally I have a good time with Warding specifically because they provide vision and burst damage. The sentry minions suck though and they die too quickly, it’s mostly used for the damage. Warding’s battlemage and elemental burst is also 100% useless and it’s never worth imbuing. Maybe this wand is A-minus tier.

As for darts I recommend incendiary at least, it’s the most cost effective option, but yeah darts are generally awful and not worth the expensive gold + seed.

At 6 challenge it’s possible to have very high winrate without haste ring! Just don’t take barren lands, pharma, and no-armor, as these challenges eliminate most options in the game. If you google “Shattered PD Challenges”, the first result says that they suck :/ Other roguelikes such as Slay the Spire have challenges that mostly buff enemies and nerf specific things without removing them, but on this game they just remove most of your cards entirely…

With barren lands off, you can plant seeds against champion crabs in the sewers. Dews provide extra heals against bad luck, and it prevents Warden, Blandfruit room and Wand of Regrowth from being “dead cards”. With pharma off, you can use potions as food. Flies are now worth fighting, and the shop has heal potions instead of selling useless drinks, and there’s more fun alchemy options like aquatic regen, shielding and regrowth. With no-armor off, close-range weapons become usable, most weapons are close-ranged. This challenge eliminates more cards than you think, as without armor you are forced to find rare ranged weapons like glaive, whip, wands. No-armor also strips away minions like living earth and prismatic image.

I’ve won several 9 challenge runs, but it’s not fun. You do need RNG to find either haste ring or flow glyph, and other movement options like chains, because no-armor removes all the close-range cards except vampiric. Without seed planting, you don’t have any cards if you meet early blazing crabs. Some classes have extra cards like invisibility and ranged, but for characters like warrior you just… die.

I feel these challenges need rework… Barren lands could instead have rot lashers in grass tiles, to make seed and dew gathering costly. Do you burn grass tiles, or use your resources to find seeds and dew? Pharma could instead cut potion heals by half, but also poison the hero for a long duration, so you gain no healing from them. But you can use mageroyal or purity potion to get rid of the poison, making healing costly. No-armor could instead halve your armor effectiveness, so it’s still possible to use close-ranged weapons and warrior’s armor seal. Adding a 10th challenge afterwards that buffs enemy movesets/stats would be more fun, and this gives 9 challenge players like myself something new to do :)

Prismatic is one of my favorites! Though I think the damage is too low compared to Warding which has similar vision uses. Prismatic’s battlemage and element burst effect is also terrible, but it does have an edge in preventing ranged attacks with blind and having a torch + examine effect, I think this wand in particular is between B and A tier.

Evan please read this, I enjoy representation with the duelist and all, but saying that a game with only white men and girl is “clearly bad” is very off-putting, even if you didn’t mean it that way. This game has a lot of russian and asian players, which tends to avoid LGBT pronouns, and I’ve seen people start to correct them online to use they/them on cleric. This starts to cause drama on group chats. I am personally fine with cleric, but I think it’s best not to go too far like Sony’s Concord, as this issue tends to kill games.

I’ve noticed it too. Most trinkets are definitely a beginner trap as you’ve said, they need to spend energy on alchemy recipes instead of using all their energy on “just for fun” trinkets. For advanced players, energy economy becomes very important with challenges, I squeeze every energy I get from profitless items like stone of intuition’s second use, detect magic, certain seeds. There’s no room for +3 trinket energy, I often keep them at +0 and energize it later, or immediately throw it away if it’s harmful.

So the tome is an artifact, and you use talent points to learn new spells for it? That’s very RPG-like and I love it, seems like it’s going to be a fun and creative class like duelist collecting weapons and switching abilities.