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[PTTG??]

I've yet to get past the ice caves because of the Toimari. In general I really hate the enemies with guns, since they have better accuracy, better numbers, better damage, and more health than me. Why don't these guys rule the world, again?

[Frumple]

Constant stream of crazy robed fuckers throwing around lightning bolts barreling through their homes, presumably. Like, maybe they kill you, but think for a moment about the next you, or the similar critter tripping in from some other dimension or wherever these robed buggers are getting pulled from. Some of them literally explode every few seconds, or throw mountains of fire all over the place, or drown their world in acid, or... whatever.

And then there's the neighbors. Gun dudes are a nuisance, but other than the fat ones generally not a super noticable threat if you have a wand that just sorta' erases them, of which there are many, many combinations of wands that will do so. It's much harder to functionally or explicitly one-shot a lot of the other fauna (or some of the flora, for that matter), some of which is actually hostile to those guys.

... and then there's the infinite OSHA violation that is their highly volatile and explosive homes. Half the time the things die before they can reach you because something decided to detonate one of the myriad explode-y things they have laying around. Nevermind ruling the world, it's a small miracle the places they're in aren't already a smoking ruin before you get to them.

Basically these guys aren't world rulers in Noitaland They're more like random vermin infesting the place. Them being more swole and accurate than you doesn't matter, because even if they're bigger rats than you, you're the rat carrying a man-portable nuclear gatling gun. Possibly literally since the bloody game has a straight up "nuke" spell component. Though yeah, scurry around a bit and get your wandcraft on, and you'll only lose on health to maybe the fat ones and damage to none of them. Accuracy and numbers you can't do much about, but overwhelming firepower you don't have to aim much is more on the table. Who cares if you hit the wall instead of the gundude if the wall explodes and everything dies anyway?

[Aoi]

Has anybody broken their way into

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 that weird metal thing that shows up, I believe, at the bottom of the ice/snow layer that looks like a rocket segment? I saw some kind of item in there, but none of my wands had the firepower to break it open (or dig around the open bottom) so I could get in.

[Kagus]

Oh goddammit... Had a ridiculously lucky run that I actually played somewhat cleverly, zipping through the first level and saving the health and spell regen for later... First holy mountain got me perk lottery, which immediately procced and let me pick up Edit Anywhere. Like, okay, I'll take two of the best perks in the game, no problem.

Went through the coal mines fairly quickly as well, but stopped to strip a few wands while I was there. Found an absolutely obscene wand that, while shuffle, had 3 spells/cast and "always casts: 3x multicast", loaded up with 15 giant firebolts (and a formation cast: pentagon that I very quickly removed). So, uh... Yeah. Complete murderstick.


Hit the snowy caves, tested out a new spell, health got a little low and I decided to make the trek up and around. Made it back to the mines, picked up the health regen I'd saved, and now had a reasonably solid 145 health. Headed down and nuked a little more of the coal mines, making sure to be careful (which was easy enough as I had a great cornering wand by that point), and was primed for round 2 of the snowy caves.

Got in, found a hilarious wand with a whole bunch of awesome stuff on it, played inventory tetris for a while to pack everything I wanted up, prepped myself, moved a little to the left...

...some jetpack douche in a ravine under where I was flying (just offscreen) fired off a random wand he'd found. The cluster of fireballs didn't actually hit me, but one of them impacted the ice sheet just close enough to where I was that it tagged me for a teensy bit of health and set me on fire... And since I was flying at the time, that meant complete stunlock.

I got blasted off into an unexplored narrow chute further ahead, where I slammed into a freezing skull, then fell a little further down into an Ukko's lightning blast, got stun-blasted back into the skull and was chain-headbutted to death before I could even move.



In unrelated news, the earth essence is remarkably annoying, but not as unavoidably deadly as, say, light. It also provides little to no positive value to offset this.

[Frumple]

Ooh, I haven't seen earth, yet. Is it more annoying than fire?

Possibly best essence I've found so far is spirit, tbh. Much more manageable, and actually sometimes sorta' useful. Also less directly deadly, though still super capable of setting you (and basically everything else) on fire.

[PTTG??]

Two big changes I'd make is just have edit wands everywhere by default, and then either make it so the PC and fliers get stunned by impacts, or neither.

[Frumple]

Fliers do get stunned by impacts, though? Tends to feel like not as long or as hard as you do, but you totally can swat stuff out of the sky. It's super evident if you fly up to the works and hit one of the floaty squishy things a bit.

Edit anywhere is... honestly kinda' powerful, and strips a lot of the decision making from the game. Maybe if it destroyed wands you drop by default or something, with a replacement perk changing that behavior? That'd be a decently hefty nerf. Alternatively, you can only move spell components a certain number of times between mountains or somethin', stuff like that. Edit anywhere lets you casually strip wands of spell components as you go, which cuts a fair amount of strategy et al from the game. If it was default it would probably need to be limited, somehow.

[Kagus]

So, I can sorta understand why wand editing is the way it is, because it forces certain tough decisions and a measure of forethought, as well as giving shuffle wands more of a place in the hierarchy and keeping limited spell charges relevant.

However, those are also all the things that get tossed out the window for easy mode if you're lucky enough to grab the perk. Also it leads to blasphemy and embarrassing deaths in close quarters because it forces the holy mountain to be your wand/spell testing range (like that time I misjudged the sheer magnitude of water produced by a triple multicast mist with water trail, and ended up flooding the temple to the point that I drowned before I could escape).

It also gets slightly ruined by the fact that just killing the lich and tunneling through the floor prevents the editing flag from being tripped, meaning you can return to that level to edit wands at your leisure provided you've got advanced tunneling capability and are good at stomping the lich (they can apparently get squished fairly reliably by a solid tablet smackdown), leading the "git gud" crowd to say that the perk's not even necessary.


As for flight stunning, that is an incredibly strange handicap and I don't even know if it's intended or just a bizarre bug. Jetpackers actually do something similar, but in an entirely half-assed fashion that leaves them nowhere near as vulnerable.

[Kagus]

Tablet is reusable and a guaranteed spawn though, polymorph potion is neither.

[Frumple]

Poly pots aren't far from it, though. Game seems to be lousy with the things, poly and chaotic poly always feels like they're one of, or the, most common flasks. Which is kinda' annoying, 'cause they're also probably the deadliest substances in the game.

E: Now, what there really needs to be is a perk that lets you stay poly'd indefinitely, probably let you kick your way out of it or something. Then you can play poly roulette until you hit the lich or somethin' and have some fun. _{actually, can you hit bosses with those things? Is there some small chance to turn into the dragon?}

E2: Also daily (or just random) form runs would probably be pretty great. Have your base form for that game be some random critter.

[Kagus]

Alright, just had a hilarious exploration run and snooped around a couple areas I hadn't been to before. So, basically, I spent an incredible amount of time accomplishing basically nothing!

Thanks to a lucky combination of getting Breathless as my second perk (and Personal Shield as the first, love that thing) and picking up a wand with lava to blood and another wand with rapid-fire magic bolts (the green unlimited ones with the +critchance), I managed to chew my way down through the lava in the volcano to grab the nuke orb. Still haven't used nuke, but I've sure picked it up a bunch of times!

Then once I'd basically emptied the caldera (an incredibly tedious process due to how lava to blood actually works in practice), I swung my way up around and, with just a teensy dash of stolen polymorph potion (there was a vat of it in the world, I just tapped a little bit into an empty flask by making a puddle and gently tossing the flask into it) made my way up and over the tree.

From there, I made the long and slow trek across the wastes and jumped into the lake, then tortured myself with swimming down the whole way to the essence chamber... Cracked open the essence chamber with the magic bolts (thank goodness those things can dig; wouldn't have been able to do any of this without that), and grabbed... Essence of Spirits.

Despite the descriptive text of "This was not a good idea", it's by far the most harmless of the essences I've seen thus far. It's actually even helpful, which can't be said of most of the others.

After grabbing that and making the equally dull slog up to the surface, I hopped back over the tree, inebriated and destroyed the welcoming committee that had spawned (screw those things, seriously. What's even the point?), then walked aaaaaaall the way back across the map to get to the pyramid. Nabbed the only interesting wand in there, got some corpseflies drunk, and then did the easter egg of summoning the secret spider boss. Tried shooting at it a few times, couldn't even seem to damage it, walked back and forth a little and the spider apparently disappeared into both the underground (I could hear things shooting at it) and the sky (I got a couple energy blasts fired at me from above after a while) simultaneously. Never saw it again though, so I guess it lost interest.

By this point I was a little low on health and decided to hop back down into the underground. Got as far as the snowy caves before things kinda went to shit, but they at least did so in a highly entertaining fashion...

Protip: Don't use whiskey against snipers. They become just as horribly inaccurate as everyone else (except the lobber jetpackers, who don't seem particularly bothered by the debuff) which, while immensely entertaining, also means they can inadvertently lead you by virtue of randomly shooting a little too high/low. Ended up getting pinged by a sniper shot that went through my shield while I was a good 20 degrees off from where the laser had been pointing.

E2: Also daily (or just random) form runs would probably be pretty great. Have your base form for that game be some random critter.

The problem with this is just how INCREDIBLY GODDAMN SLOW some of the mobs are, and also how many of them can't use their attacks properly when player controlled.

As far as perma-poly goes, yeah... I think we both know why that would be pretty broken.



In other news, I've got a hypothesis I want to test out... So, if you're holding an empty flask while standing in a mist spell, the bottle will fill up with the mist fluid, even though it doesn't collect on the ground. I've noticed that the circle of vigour spell seems to have the same colors and sound effects as the lively concoction, so I'm wondering if that's actually how it performs its task. LC is apparently stable when bottled, so if you could capture even just a little bit while standing in the field, you might be able to squeeze a few more drops of use out of the spell... If that's even what's happening, of course.

[Frumple]

Ooh, small tip that might be easy to miss: Wands with some knockback make traveling to places like the spirit essence much, much less tedious. Can speed you up pretty significantly, which is nice when places like the lake are so bloody deep.

[Kagus]

Ooh, small tip that might be easy to miss: Wands with some knockback make traveling to places like the spirit essence much, much less tedious. Can speed you up pretty significantly, which is nice when places like the lake are so bloody deep.

Yeah, was using the knockback on the rapid-fire magic bolt wand as much as its mana could handle, at least on the way down. Going back up it caused a little too much lag to actually be worth it, but that wand got a hell of a lot of (versatile!) usage in the short time I had it.


Anyways, on today's episode of Terrible Awful Things You Definitely, Absolutely, Positively Should Never Do...

So. Projectile Transmutation Field. Straight out the gate this spell's already kinda broken, as it's a huge field that will bite any projectile passing through it and turn it into a harmless animal, either a duck or some variant of flying sheep. And it doesn't wear out with repeated projectiles, it just takes EVERYTHING and neutralizes it, unlike a shield (and it's even bigger than the shield spell to boot)... It'll just sit there and rockblock everything for 2-3 minutes, I'm a little uncertain of how long specifically it takes.

Now, to "balance" this, it only comes with 4 charges and it neutralizes all projectiles, coming or going, including those fired by you.

Ah, but therein lies the first of the problems... Including those fired by you. Which means you can just pop a field and start spamming whatever cheapo projectiles you want into it to spawn a massive horde of animals. Animals that bleed. Quite a lot of blood, given a chainsaw and some time.


So obviously this thing is ridiculous for vampires, with a single casting and some creative wandwork being able to provide an entire level's worth of sweet, succulent blood... But it gets worse.

The field is, like most things, technically a projectile (static projectile, specifically). Which means it can take certain projectile modifiers.

Projectile modifiers like Fireball Thrower.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yeah. Fireball Thrower causes the projectile it's attached to to launch fireballs in random directions every, oh, 0.25 seconds or so. These fireballs are projectiles. The field transforms all projectiles that are not itself into animals. It lasts for a good couple of minutes.

Um. The game is not having a fun time trying to deal with my mess.

[IWishIWereSarah]

Is Fireball thrower one of the newer spells ?

I haven't seen it yet, and both of these look cool

[Kagus]

Is Fireball thrower one of the newer spells ?

I haven't seen it yet, and both of these look cool

Nah it's been around for a couple versions (at least the last version, when I started playing), it's just fairly rare. With good reason.

Good grief, the sheer bullshit you can throw together with that modifier... It's great. Almost entirely useless unless you have the specific tools to really make it work, but if you do... Yikes. 14 charges is more than enough to cause some serious damage.