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Jedit posted:That's funny, because reading about it here has convinced me that it's a masterclass in bad design and not to touch it with a ten foot pole. Hundreds of different spells! (Just upgrade the one you start with.) Millions of potential combos! (But you'll use the same one every time.) 25 levels of increasing difficulty! (That you'll either steamroller or be hard countered by.) Yes? There's a lot of elements coming together to make there be a lot of decision making in a single run, and a lot of that is balancing between being able to clear the first half of a run and being able to clear the second half of the run. Like you aren't gonna lose (barring massive user error) if you get Death Bolt + Death Cleave + Twilight Gaze fully operational but like half the game counters you in some way so you need to be incredibly careful about which portals you choose to go through or you'll end up spending the skill points you're saving for Death Bolt upgrades on other poo poo. I think you're just failing to see how the hard and soft counters from enemies feed in to the design of the game, like say you come across three portals that counter your death bolt build early on, before you get your soul harvest upgrade: First one has a bunch of undead enemies. You'll have to choose between spending a skill point or two on a stopgap spell that can deal with them, or spending a shitload of points on an early Twilight Gaze which will delay that upgrade you need significantly more but is something you'll need eventually anyway. Second one has a bunch of boggarts, which soft-counter you by having a shield that absorbs one hit. There's a lot of options here, including a brute-force strategy of upgrading the max charges on your death bolt and trying to kill all the boggarts with Death Bolt if you have an excess of mana potions in your inventory. Third one has a bunch of bags of bugs. lmao spend some skill points on chain-lightning or you die. Other builds will mostly have a more expensive skill that fits in to their build better, but you desperately need those skill points on a death bolt build. Or you can just go through one of the other two portals. If you're always going for maximized win rate you could pick the same combos as the core of your build every time but it's very much a game about adapting and tinkering and if you try to stick to a rigid character build instead of adapting and tinkering your win rate is gonna plummet anyway. Might as well take some joy in the tinkering from there and try to get the spell that summons dozens of frogs and flies to work as the focus of your build 
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May 29, 2021 11:40
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My problem with Rift Wizard is that the spellbook has a bunch of staples that are easily the core of a run and a whooole lot of chaff that is too fair and undertuned to be viable and reading a cool spell that has all its numbers and restrictions tuned juuust so that it can never get powerful enough to be on par with the good ones feels bad. It is a well made game in many respects but having to eat your vegetables in character building just isn't fun.
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May 29, 2021 12:11
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That reminds of Dominions ,another magic -centric game with many spells where most veterans agree that 20-30% of spells need a buff (and some of them are directly traps).
Turin Turambar fucked around with this message at 13:25 on May 29, 2021 |
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May 29, 2021 12:17
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Jedit posted:That's funny, because reading about it here has convinced me that it's a masterclass in bad design and not to touch it with a ten foot pole. Hundreds of different spells! (Just upgrade the one you start with.) Millions of potential combos! (But you'll use the same one every time.) 25 levels of increasing difficulty! (That you'll either steamroller or be hard countered by.) Yes. It's really good. Sidenote: if I hadn't know which game you were talking about, I'd have assumed Tales of Maj Eyal. (Which I really like as well.)
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May 29, 2021 12:28
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Jedit posted:Am I missing something here? 
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May 29, 2021 12:40
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jedit'd again
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May 29, 2021 12:47
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Jedit posted:That's funny, because reading about it here has convinced me that it's a masterclass in bad design and not to touch it with a ten foot pole. Hundreds of different spells! (Just upgrade the one you start with.) Millions of potential combos! (But you'll use the same one every time.) 25 levels of increasing difficulty! (That you'll either steamroller or be hard countered by.) the best way to win Rift Wizard is to go all in on a Level 1 spell and just pick floors that don't have enemies which are immune to whatever bullshit that spell has attached to it. the main obstacle preventing you from completing a run is whether or not you run into a floor where all the choices send you to enemies you can't kill, at which point you probably just die because the game forces you to kill all enemies to proceed for example: Death Bolt, a level 1 spell, and Cleave, which I want to say is like 4, together can delete an entire floor's worth of enemies in one cast while simultaneously producing an army of skeletons. You can have this combo online by floor 4 and it does scaling damage that never falls off. The problem is that it only deals Dark damage, and the skeletons only deal physical damage and only spawn from living units. So, on most floors you will cast 1 spell and watch everything on the level explode. On floors with enemies immune to Darkness and without living units to spawn skeletons off of, you are completely helpless. Your spell does nothing, you literally cannot complete the level(unless you have a dragon horn to burn). Your options are: spend skill points on something else or just avoid floors that have those enemies. Pick the first option and you will be significantly weaker because you spent points on something other than your main combo spells and utility spells, and you might find that your combo fails to keep up with late game enemies because it isn't developed enough. The alternative spell you get will be completely useless outside of picking off lone enemies because you won't have enough points to build a combo off of it, and you'll still have to avoid floors that have lots of Dark immune enemies because your backup spell won't be good enough to deal with more than a couple. Pick the second option and you will effortlessly cakewalk through the game until you get unlucky and are presented with a floor that has no good options: all of the exits lead to floors with Dark immune enemies. You will then die and there really won't be anything you can do about it. There are only 5 offensive consumables in the game as far as I know. The Death Dice deals Dark damage so that's useless(and it's weak and unreliable anyway for other builds). Earthquake doesn't deal enough damage to kill anything after the first couple of levels. The Stopwatch only stuns and does no damage. The Chaos Bell will berserk everything but enemies that are immune to Dark tend to only deal Dark damage, so all that'll do is make them stand around doing nothing. The Dragon Horn can help, and is really the only thing that can, but after mid game it won't be enough. If you have a Portal Disruptor or Key you can try rolling for a better floor, but all those do is give you one more chance. Get unlucky again and you'll be stuck in the same situation: enemies that you cannot harm at all. That's how most runs end. unless you do the Lightning Bolt run, since that does Lightning and Holy and it turns out literally nothing in the game is immune to both of those, and it inflicts Berserk and as far as I can tell pretty much nothing is immune to that either
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May 29, 2021 12:58
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DrManiac posted:Anyone try vivid knight yet? I'm enjoying it a lot. It could use some QoL, but if you like autobattlers at all I think it's worth giving it a shot.
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May 29, 2021 16:33
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Tonfa posted:My problem with Rift Wizard is that the spellbook has a bunch of staples that are easily the core of a run and a whooole lot of chaff that is too fair and undertuned to be viable and reading a cool spell that has all its numbers and restrictions tuned juuust so that it can never get powerful enough to be on par with the good ones feels bad. It is a well made game in many respects but having to eat your vegetables in character building just isn't fun. I felt this way at first, but the more I've played the more I've been seeing the value of all of the 'chaff spells' I'd normally ignore - if a spell seems useless, you're just not connecting the dots with the ways it can synergize with other things (which is an easy predicament to be in in Rift Wizard, and also what I love about it). Now that I got my first win they're much more appealing to me because the meat of the game is finding ways to beat it with new builds rather than playing with the same build every time. Like yeah Lightning Bolt is extremely strong and you can beat the game with it, which is sort of like playing the game on an easier difficulty. I almost won as a bear summoner earlier, and again as a poisoner who would posion entire maps then cause all the poison to explode. Lately I am building entirely around the Shrines I find which is hella fun. If your goal is just to beat the game and be done with it, you'll probably be finished with Rift Wizard within 5-20 hours and not enjoy it all that much - but if you enjoy the process of theorizing, creating, and deploying character builds with a million different viable options, it's an addictive mess. At the end of the day you don't have to take the 'staples' unless you want to. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 18:43 on May 29, 2021 |
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May 29, 2021 18:40
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deep dish peat moss posted:I felt this way at first, but the more I've played the more I've been seeing the value of all of the 'chaff spells' I'd normally ignore - if a spell seems useless, you're just not connecting the dots with the ways it can synergize with other things (which is an easy predicament to be in in Rift Wizard, and also what I love about it). Now that I got my first win they're much more appealing to me because the meat of the game is finding ways to beat it with new builds rather than playing with the same build every time. Like yeah Lightning Bolt is extremely strong and you can beat the game with it, which is sort of like playing the game on an easier difficulty. I almost won as a bear summoner earlier, and again as a poisoner who would posion entire maps then cause all the poison to explode. Lately I am building entirely around the Shrines I find which is hella fun. What the heck, I honestly thought bears were completely useless and that too many enemies resisted poison for a poison build to be viable.
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May 29, 2021 19:03
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deep dish peat moss posted:I felt this way at first, but the more I've played the more I've been seeing the value of all of the 'chaff spells' I'd normally ignore - if a spell seems useless, you're just not connecting the dots with the ways it can synergize with other things (which is an easy predicament to be in in Rift Wizard, and also what I love about it). Now that I got my first win they're much more appealing to me because the meat of the game is finding ways to beat it with new builds rather than playing with the same build every time. Like yeah Lightning Bolt is extremely strong and you can beat the game with it, which is sort of like playing the game on an easier difficulty. I almost won as a bear summoner earlier, and again as a poisoner who would posion entire maps then cause all the poison to explode. Lately I am building entirely around the Shrines I find which is hella fun. i think the main problem is that the game almost forces you to pick a Level 1 spell to carry you through the first couple of levels and also makes the Level 1 spells all viable components of murder combos. Sunk Cost encourages the player to stick with their Level 1 spell, since building that up gives the same or better results than taking high tier spells and doesn't involve wasting a few SP clearing the first floors. I think the game would be improved starting the player with like, 10 SP (on a special starting floor that has all of the circles to avoid driving certain players insane) and upping the difficulty of the first floors to compensate.
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May 29, 2021 19:24
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I do think the criticism that many of the spells to be overpriced to be spot on though. Blue Lion and Flock of Eagles definitely don't feel like they should be Level 5 spells, and Plague of Filth does very little for a level 3 spell.
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May 29, 2021 19:28
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I love wizard-y games of most stripes, and in theory I like having this idea of builds, skills and stuff to experiment with, without also having RPG character stats & gear (which I find dull); Rift Wizard seemed/seems like a great fit when it comes time to actually put something together, though, I've noticed I often overthink it, get overwhelmed by choice and start winging it within a short time 
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May 29, 2021 19:43
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SKULL.GIF posted:I do think the criticism that many of the spells to be overpriced to be spot on though. Blue Lion and Flock of Eagles definitely don't feel like they should be Level 5 spells, and Plague of Filth does very little for a level 3 spell. Blue Lion is really strong though? Summon a few and your summon army is way more durable. Plague of Filth is a decent setup for death gaze/invoke savagery. Never tried flock of eagles...
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May 29, 2021 19:51
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Walh Hara posted:What the heck, I honestly thought bears were completely useless and that too many enemies resisted poison for a poison build to be viable. Poison definitely requires scouting maps out first to avoid poison immune enemies and having a backup element to nuke the ones you can't avoid - but every build should have backup elements and Poison has an easy synergy with Lightning spells if you get the Lightning/Poison shrine, and Collected Agony gives you a dark damage channel but it's kind of unreliable. Bears are mostly useless but I got a shrine to give them extra regen early on, then went with blood bears, minion regen (both the spell and the skill) and extra minion attacks, picked up blue lions to give them shields and blood boil to make them do more damage and hung back with magic missiles myself. SKULL.GIF posted:I do think the criticism that many of the spells to be overpriced to be spot on though. Blue Lion and Flock of Eagles definitely don't feel like they should be Level 5 spells, and Plague of Filth does very little for a level 3 spell. Yeah, definitely. The skills are also overpriced and it does make getting a real build up and running too expensive to do early on - early game enemies also die too fast to take advantage of synergies that involve hitting the enemy multiple times. So I do generally carry myself ~10 floors in using primarily cantrips and a low level spell or two. You're guaranteed 72 skill points by the time you face the final boss and you can pick up more during the fight. Assuming you don't get any relevant discount circles, 18SP will get you: Lightning Bolt + Extra Charges + Judgment Bolt Fireball + Extra Charges Magic Missile + Extra Charges + Range This leaves you with 54 SP to work with for a final build (up to 58 if you discount circle the cantrips) and a solid, high ammo count barrage of 5 different elements to pick things apart while your main build comes online. Your main build can be either launching one of those cantrips into the stratosphere or literally anything else you want because 54 SP is enough to buy everything you need. It would probably make sense to distribute the SP from floors 20-25 into floors 1-10 instead so that you can get your build defining spells/skills earlier on, without piling even more on you in the long run. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 20:09 on May 29, 2021 |
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May 29, 2021 20:07
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deep dish peat moss posted:If your goal is just to beat the game and be done with it, you'll probably be finished with Rift Wizard within 5-20 hours and not enjoy it all that much - but if you enjoy the process of theorizing, creating, and deploying character builds with a million different viable options, it's an addictive mess. I do have a clear under my belt. I guess what you are saying is true, but I still have that nagging feeling if I take something that is junky that I'm just lowering my win% for no reason and will fizzle out getting overwhelmed by late spawners or something equally ignoble. Game's not really one for blaze of glory scenarios.
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May 29, 2021 20:10
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like most bad genetic algorithms, it's very easy to find a solution that's kind of acceptable and group around it. it would be impossible to even kind of 'solve' rift wizard but there's a way through. definitely is more about the exploration
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May 29, 2021 20:52
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I haven't played Rift Wizard yet, but it sounds like it could really use a daily run feature that forces you to sink a significant number of points into a randomly-chosen spell or group of spells to force you out of your comfort zone. Is it moddable?
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May 29, 2021 20:57
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iirc there's a daily run feature and also with the newest update adding challenge modes there's literally ones that straight up remove a random 70% or so of the options to force you to work with those if someone is critically incapable of picking anything except like 2 builds then i can imagine they will never get the achievements for those even though pretty much everything is usable if you actually build around it and use strategy
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May 29, 2021 21:02
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I hope no one posted this yet but I've really been enjoying "Fights in Tight Spaces". It's a deck builder rogue like that has you fighting groups of badguys small contained rooms. You deck of cards represents your various moves which have different attack patterns, damages, costs, etc. Some allow you to move enemies around so you can push enemies into the attacks of other enemies. Some require you to build up combo before you can use them. Others require the presence of a wall of another enemy in a certain location to use. I haven't managed a successful run yet, but it's really satisfying when you pull off just the right moves to side step a punch, spin-kick one goon into the path of another then shove the last down a flight of stairs. Every level gives you the option of watching a replay which tends to make the whole fight look fairly smooth and cinematic. Between fights, you can buy/upgrade cards, and there's various other random events that can happen. Trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFvirN-0ync Gameplay of a single fight: https://streamable.com/irn1br
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May 29, 2021 21:09
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Picked up Rift Wizard because of the thread. Quite fun even though I suck at it. Managed to find a game crasher on my first run past Realm 5 because I'm cursed with bad luck though:  I saw a shrine that gave +1 reincarnations on a conjuration spell and decided to go for fun with Ice Phoenix + Improved Reincarnation for shoring up my offense vs lightning resistant foes. However, every time it dies now it hard crashes to desktop and I can't beat the stage I'm on without it. 
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May 29, 2021 21:43
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Floodkiller posted:Picked up Rift Wizard because of the thread. Quite fun even though I suck at it. Reincarnation was just patched yesterday, depending on the timing of your game you might have either started the run prepatch and finished after, or just found a glitch with the change.
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May 29, 2021 21:50
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Johnny Joestar posted:iirc there's a daily run feature and also with the newest update adding challenge modes there's literally ones that straight up remove a random 70% or so of the options to force you to work with those For example, one of the challenge runs removes all spells except the one that summons wolves. I just made it to the final boss with it, and probably could have won if I'd been saving up the right consumables instead of blowing them in the early game.  
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May 29, 2021 21:54
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Walh Hara posted:What the heck, I honestly thought bears were completely useless and that too many enemies resisted poison for a poison build to be viable. lmao that's baffling to me because a nearly pure bear build was the first thing I reached floor 24 with. deep dish peat moss posted:Poison definitely requires scouting maps out first to avoid poison immune enemies and having a backup element to nuke the ones you can't avoid - but every build should have backup elements and Poison has an easy synergy with Lightning spells if you get the Lightning/Poison shrine, and Collected Agony gives you a dark damage channel but it's kind of unreliable. It's a bit esoteric but Earthen Totem + stinging totem upgrade + acidity upgrade on your poison cantrip gives you a super tanky minion that will strip all poison res from one random enemy per turn. Earthen Totem isn't a bad early buy without the upgrades since it can go toe-to-toe with just about any individual enemy. Since the totem can't move it's very weak to corridor maps though.
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May 29, 2021 22:48
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Dr_Amazing posted:I hope no one posted this yet but I've really been enjoying "Fights in Tight Spaces".
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May 29, 2021 22:55
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Mithross posted:Reincarnation was just patched yesterday, depending on the timing of your game you might have either started the run prepatch and finished after, or just found a glitch with the change. It would be the latter, started today and I see the update downloaded from yesterday in the Downloads.
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May 29, 2021 23:41
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And got it:
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May 30, 2021 01:17
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Seems like Fire Claw did a ton of work there. Did you have an alternate plan in mind if you couldn't get FC?
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May 30, 2021 02:31
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i assume clay hounds are probably the way to go out of the 3 options. haven't used it as of yet but given that the cost of it was recently bumped up i can only assume it's good and probably the best for the wolf challenge.
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May 30, 2021 02:43
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Johnny Joestar posted:i assume clay hounds are probably the way to go out of the 3 options. haven't used it as of yet but given that the cost of it was recently bumped up i can only assume it's good and probably the best for the wolf challenge. Yeah Clay Hounds is easily the choice here, it makes them extremely durable.
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May 30, 2021 03:20
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DrManiac posted:Anyone try vivid knight yet? I really like it but the stage where you fight the evil queen at the end has been kicking my rear end. I had an amazing team, made it all the way to her, got her to phase 2 and then died instantly because I didn't know it was mandatory to stack magic resistance or something cuz her orbs killed me outright. Was pretty deflating.
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May 30, 2021 04:53
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Look Sharp! posted:I'm enjoying it a lot. It could use some QoL, but if you like autobattlers at all I think it's worth giving it a shot. It looks pretty fun, but I'd be concerned about longevity. Could you see yourself putting more than a handful of hours into it?
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May 30, 2021 05:06
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SKULL.GIF posted:Seems like Fire Claw did a ton of work there. Did you have an alternate plan in mind if you couldn't get FC? Not really, just would have grabbed some other damage-boosting shrine and I'd have been even more reliant on items to kill Mordred. In practice you're almost always going to find at least one shrine of the type you're looking for if you route for it aggressively. Johnny Joestar posted:i assume clay hounds are probably the way to go out of the 3 options. haven't used it as of yet but given that the cost of it was recently bumped up i can only assume it's good and probably the best for the wolf challenge. Yeah, resists are the only thing that really lets dogs keep up with enemy scaling, plus "ice damage only, vulnerable to fire" is much worse than only being able to deal physical. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 05:43 on May 30, 2021 |
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May 30, 2021 05:40
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girl dick energy posted:$25 is a lot, but this game looks so drat cool... I played the pre-release demo and it was nifty. But yes, I'm waiting for a sale because it's too expensive.
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May 30, 2021 08:52
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If you don't mind epic, it's on their store, so 10$/€ off with the coupon.
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May 30, 2021 09:34
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Burning Rain posted:If you don't mind epic, it's on their store, so 10$/€ off with the coupon. I do mind Epic, but it's OK - I'm patient. Has anyone tried SNKRX? It's a take on Snake, except your snake is a party of adventurers who you can upgrade and add to between each of 25 waves. It's cheap and crude, but the idea interests me and I was wondering if anyone knew more.
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May 30, 2021 10:39
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I have no idea how you're supposed to kill the boss of Rift Wizard with a summoning build. He deletes all of them every 10 or so turns, teleports away from them if they near him, and if one actually manages to reach melee range he instakills it. It's miserable.
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May 30, 2021 11:40
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Golden Krone Hotel is only 2 bucks right now on Steam. (I think for about another day.) It's good, and fairly simple.
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May 30, 2021 12:26
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Yeah, resists are the only thing that really lets dogs keep up with enemy scaling, plus "ice damage only, vulnerable to fire" is much worse than only being able to deal physical. yeah i think my problem is i worked off the idea that having ice coverage would help out the limited toolkit, but ultimately there's other ways to shore that up and i probably need to focus more on keeping them as beefy as possible in the meanwhile
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May 30, 2021 13:26
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:In practice you're almost always going to find at least one shrine of the type you're looking for if you route for it aggressively. Does realm choice affect what shrines spawn? I'd assumed it was random.
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May 30, 2021 15:28
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