I am someone who plays a lot of roguelikes (and Roguelites), and I am starting to get into Endless Dungeon and I want to suggest some things and discuss these suggestions:
The first thing I want to suggest is a change to the progression system, both in the saloon and during the runs: a lot of the upgrades you can give the heroes feel, to put it harshly, generic and monotone, including the ones that are meant to be specific to each hero. Most of them feel like all they do is increase some unimportant numbers, even if that isn't truly the case.
I would suggest upgrades that change the behaviour of a hero's ability and/or have a downside to counterbalance a relatively strong improvement.
For example, Blaze's hive mines could get an upgrade that makes Blaze throw them instead of being placed on the ground, exploding upon landing or hitting something, be it an enemy or the environment, with a guaranteed critical explosion when you directly hit an enemy. This upgrade drastically changes how one uses this ability, allowing you to use it more aggressively, but making it unusable as a mine. An upgrade that goes the opposite direction could instead make the hivemines no longer explode when an enemy gets near, instead detonating when an enemy inside the blast radius is hit. If you manage to put multiple ememies in the blast radius before hitting, you get a crit explosion. This also forces the player to be more active in how to use the mines and gives them a nice incentive for using the hive mines well, at the cost of having to actively trigger them.
These upgrades can also be combined, meaning that now the hive mine gets thrown and then sticks to an enemy or just explodes normally, and once attached hitting the target makes the mine go KABUMM!
I came up with bith of these ideas in the span of a couple minutes, so I am certain you can get some too. The difficult part would be the coding, especially when multiple of these upgrades affect the same ability. These could work both as unlockable upgrades to be applied before a run or as ones that you can level up your hero with during a run.
The second most important suggestion for me is all about the generators: I haven't played multiplayer yet, so I can't say for certain how it is there, but I found it difficult to defend any generator that isn't right next to the crystal bot, especially when you have multiple spread out around the map as well as traversal over large distances being generally tedious. I really like the ability to teleport to the crystal bot, so I personally would like to be able to teleport to generators as well, with those that are currently under attack being the highest priority.
These final suggestions of mine are just loose gameplay concepts for heroes of certain species I think might fit well to the game in no particular order:
A craver that puts the extra pair of arms to use by using the weapons in both slots at the same time. Otherwise I don't have much of an idea here.
A Hissho with a dash as an active ability and a melee attack with a blade replacing the shove. The passive ability works as follows: each kill grants a "blade charge", which stack up to 10 total. For each stack of "blade charge" melee damage is increased by +20% (to a maximum of +200%). Using the melee consumes half the charges (after the damage bonus is applied) and makes the passive ability go on cooldown, meaning the damage bonus and consumption don't apply for a short time (about 10-20 seconds), but it still gains charges. Killing an enemy with a charged melee attack instantly resets the cooldown, allowing you to use it again immediately. The ultimate completely removes the cooldowns and locks the charge amount at 10 for as long as the ultimate lasts.
A Broken Lord that knows how to fence. The shove is also a counterattack, so if you hit an enemy while it attempts to attack, you instead take no damage and counterattack.
A riftborn that uses time manipulation to effectively be in multiple places at once, meaning you effectively can place immovable clones of yourself that also serve as teleport beacons.
That's all I've got for now, would love to receive feedback.
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Right after finishing this I immediately remembered this: change the ai for the crystal bot for the shelldiver boss fight!
When it follows the character around it ends up in the aoe zones of the boss you barely managed to avoid. I can't focus on maneuvering both the crystal bot and fighting the boss at the same time, so it would be great if the crystal bot would avoid damage instead of following the hero. That needs to be done in my opinion.
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Thanks for your feedback! It is always appreciated!!
You are not the first one who feels that way about the upgrades (being generic or not "enough impactful"). Unfortunately, I am not sure how many capabilities we will have to do an entire rework of the system, because as you mentioned that will require quite a few time of gameplay programmers.
On regards to the generator, based on your feedback I can see the turrets are not enough powerful for you. Because that is the function of the turrets, defend or support a defense until you can arrive with a hero. My suggestion here is to spilt the heroes into different locations so you can be more agile of whats is happening.
AndreasArchibald wrote:
Right after finishing this I immediately remembered this: change the ai for the crystal bot for the shelldiver boss fight!
When it follows the character around it ends up in the aoe zones of the boss you barely managed to avoid. I can't focus on maneuvering both the crystal bot and fighting the boss at the same time, so it would be great if the crystal bot would avoid damage instead of following the hero. That needs to be done in my opinion.
Here I have to disagree with you. The point of the boss is to combine this "escorting mission". You should have time to dodge with the crystal bot the boss and then attack them in the back (but I agree this is easier to do in multiplayer).
On regards to the generator, based on your feedback I can see the turrets are not enough powerful for you. Because that is the function of the turrets, defend or support a defense until you can arrive with a hero. My suggestion here is to spilt the heroes into different locations so you can be more agile of whats is happening.
AndreasArchibald wrote:
Right after finishing this I immediately remembered this: change the ai for the crystal bot for the shelldiver boss fight!
When it follows the character around it ends up in the aoe zones of the boss you barely managed to avoid. I can't focus on maneuvering both the crystal bot and fighting the boss at the same time, so it would be great if the crystal bot would avoid damage instead of following the hero. That needs to be done in my opinion.
Here I have to disagree with you. The point of the boss is to combine this "escorting mission". You should have time to dodge with the crystal bot the boss and then attack them in the back (but I agree this is easier to do in multiplayer).
Thanks for your (much faster than expected) response!
When it comes to the generator the main difficulty comes from 2 scenarios: either a generator is out of the way from the place enemies spawn to the crystal bot (maybe even behind said crystal bot) and a single enemy somehow gets there instead of attacking the crystal bot and starts damaging it, or the generator is in the middle of that path, and I put a bunch of turrets down that end up getting destroyed by the enemies, so the generator is defenseless. And these two rarely happen in isolation, with no way for me to tell without looking at the map which generator I should prioritise. The first scenario is either a false assumption on my part (generator not on path of enemies to crystal bot means it's safe, therefore no need to place a turret) and/or weird enemy pathfinding. A great improvement for single player would be if you could order your heroes (maybe the crystal bot too) where to go via the map.
I get what you mean with the shelldiver now, but I gotta ask, if I am not supposed to directly fight the boss, why does it progress the fight? That's what caused me to think that focussing on directly attacking the boss whenever possible is the correct approach and the crystal bot following me is just an annoyance that causes me to lose. If the boss was offscreen more often and only was (for lack of a better term) "hurtable" right after attacking this false assumption would have never entered my mind in the first place.
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