I am not talking about those boons i am talking about boons that do literally nothing.
Some examples:
bloodfletcher when you use moonbow;
Experimental Steam Capacitors when you are using Superior gaskets;
literally all ammo pickup boons when you are using weapons that have infinite ammo like moonbow, flame staff or drakegun;
these boons do literally nothing. they don’t cripple you they don’t give you anything.
You just waste 200 coins on random boons for nothing.
If I run the danger of getting something that does literally nothing why not just save my coins for every harmony/fortune/strife shrine? But then what is the point of the random boon shrines?
EDIT: Replying to @Fenrok sorry was on mobile.
For the CHANCE to get something good. You figure, i dont trust this boon shrine to give me a good talent right now by spending my 200 coins. Ill wait until we get to a map shrine and check the wider selection. If you do this, congratulations you’re a smart player. But that’s just how I play since saving coins for shrines is a good way to at least build towards talents that will benefit you defensively/offensively.
Its roguelike. Youre not always gonna get something useful or even usable until you meet some requirements (like switching weps). Hell check Risk of Rain. The deathmark is bloody useless until you proc 4 seperate debuffs with unique character abilities or random items, onto your enemy and then you get your 50% damage boost.
As for getting a talent with 0 synergy meaning you literally cant make use of it (i know this is what you mean), congrats you found the downside to taking an infinite ammo weapon to the CW switch now if you want to get the benefits. As for if Fatshark should fix that, not really sure on this one, it’s really up to them to decide if they want to gimp players with bad rolls or not.
That is the how they’re supposed to work though, the random boon shrines are a gamble. Maybe you get something good, maybe you get something bad, maybe you get nothing. Just like the random weapon shrines.
Point of the random boon shrines is that they all cost 200, where as some boons in the shrines where you can choose cost 250/300.
At the moment most of the time I save coins for the shrines where you can choose. Same with weapons, most of the time I upgrade instead of get a different weapon.
Tbh the rng of the random shrines is less enjoyable on the higher difficulties since you can wipe just from one person having the wrong weapon.
1 Like
I think an important question to ask is:
Is getting a bad boon or a non-applicable boon fun?
In my view, no not really. So how do you fix that without messing up the progression system?
1 Like
You can’t, just like you can’t fix someone randomly getting a weapon they don’t want. I’m not sure if the random weapon shrines shouldn’t give the same weapon either, as then you can reroll your weapon traits and properties.
There’s always been a design choice to make game elements rng to mimic the tabletop, if you want boons that are always relevant then just wait for the harmony, strife or fortune shrines.
You can, it’s just a question of how. I’ve done game design off and on long enough to recognize an un-solvable problem and this ain’t one of them.
Lets look at weapon shrines, for example. They’re actually in a decent spot, at least a little more than boons. Random ranged and random melee are both a lot cheaper than straight upgrades, you are trading certainty for expense. You obviously have the persistent issue of temp HP talents just not working well with particular weapons but we’ll set that aside. You have a progression of greens early on to blues, yellows, and then reds at the end. You can upgrade sooner which will help you win but will be less resource efficient. You can scrounge until the end and hope to upgrade your preferred weapon or take a larger risk and save some dosh on a red roll.
So there are very predictable tradeoffs between time, money, power, and certainty. You can be strategic about it.
Now what makes boons work less well? Well Let’s point out the differences:
-
Random boons all the time. There is no tradeoff or bias for uniques near the end vs the beginning
-
Random options even at the shrines. You get to pick from 3 but there’s no guarantee any of them will be even remotely useful
-
No guaranteed return. With weapons you KNOW your weapon power will go up, and your props will be rolled. That power bump is the guarantee. No matter what you get that bump. With boons it’s a bit of an unknown.
-
High variability. Weapons are much more constrained in their fundamentals than boons. It’s either ranged or melee. It does damage when you click. Boons can be anything from crit lighting to grenade boom radius to health ammo.
-
RNG ever present. You can basically guarantee you will hit one red temper before the endgame but you can’t guarantee you’ll find any useful boon. Even at shrines your selection is very limited, making saving difficult to justify.
Considering this: proposals.
-
Give players more expensive ways to reduce risk. Rather than just completely random boon shrines, have career talent boon things, consumable boon things, and (other) boon things that guarantee a category of what you roll. Maybe even give them rarity colors and put more uniques near the end. Completely random boons can still be a cheaper option.
-
Limit the number of total boons and allow more predictable upgrades or hot swapping. Then people can make decent builds safely but might need to risk a decent boon to roll an exceptionally rare one.
-
Make shrines more thematic. Put healing boons on harmony, damage boons on strife, other boons on fortune. This is how people think it works anyway.
-
Make some boons more competitive. 25 percent chance of not using an item is so unreliable as to be useless. Put it on a cooldown or something like that instead. Ammo boons should work like heat boons for heat weapons. Twinned arrow could be made to work with beams (1.5x damage?). Etc. Etc.
Not all of that is ironclad or necessary but you can see how a solution space is there to explore.
1 Like
You can get the same weapons for both ranged and melee
Yeah I meant I don’t know if I have a problem with that since it’d reroll your trait and properties
Apologies for using an absolute generalisation.
Great suggestions, personally I like how chaotically random boons are at the moment. The bad boon runs make the good runs all the sweeter.
Have had games where I got the op boons and where I didn’t and games where teammate had the op boon and we win but also quite a few where we lost when teammate had the boons, also had terrible rng for weapon props and boons and struggled hard, this is with unchained and I can use all of her weapons well.
I like that you are super op sometimes and sometimes not. Have ran white weapons only, only did random boons, changed weaps every chance, only tempered, and only bought known boons from shrines/boss chest.
My take is do everything randomly and it all evens out, id rather have an op teammate get all the green circles than not finish the expedition.
If I were to agree I’d say a way they could adjust It would be randomly change the trigger to be crit, hits per second, stagger amount, enemies cleaved through, armor value pierced, dot dmg amount, health regenerated per sec but I think that ends with many more lackluster and struggling runs than op runs because you likely won’t have “the build” to support the boon, crits are a safe bet, some get crit dmg but attacks per second also reaches the threshold, that’s most chars.
Also the boons that don’t match your weapon is to encourage changing weapons to be more effective. Imagine if you could only get boons that applied to your current weapon, then you changed to the other type-same issue
I think also getting “nonoptimal” boons forces you to other playstyles. One run everything I had was based around blocking, push arcs, parry, etc If I didn’t become much more defensive I was much less effective- this is the opposite of my normal playstyle
3 Likes
Yeah. Some could maybe use an internal cooldown like maybe lightning but at the same time, it’s Chaos Wastes, a huge part of the fun is not knowing what build you’ll get this time - terrible, overpowered, or something situational or inbetween.
3 Likes