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 :)

I agree! I tried the new Ferret Tuft, it sounds good on paper, but often it benefits the dungeon enemies much more than the player. Dwarf King and Yog spams minions, and demon halls ripper summons + ascension are a nightmare. I think upgrading it should give the player/ally much more evasion than the enemy, it's a waste of energy and I often feel we need to throw it away later. And for the most part in the dungeon, my guaranteed-hit skills often run out, and I'd have to constantly wander around using doors etc which burns food. If there's player minions that use magic, that is guaranteed to be craftable in runs, it would make this trinket more pickable.

And yeah Trap Mech tends to create dangerous rooms that benefit enemy long range units, and Vial of Blood doesn't even work with pharma + barren. These are always recycled for 5 energy. And without challenges, Vial is never worth picking unless we somehow find good viscosity armor in the sewers, but even then the small extra heals are unnecessary. Censer used to be somewhat viable with Cleric's instant cleanse, but now I'm not sure.

Looks great! Huntress in particular always felt uncanny, her new look is far better. Not sure about rogue's changes though, he could use an eyepatch or scar to feel more roguish. Right now he feels generic?

Great to see trinket buffs as well, experienced players tend to avoid trinkets entirely to boost their winrate. There's only a few that they might use at +0 or +1 to be cost-effective. +3 trinkets are never used and there's not a lot of dungeon floors to justify the huge cost. Upgraded thrown weapons and darts are also worth looking into, a big chunk of them harms winrate when crafted, with only a few exceptions.

Love the update so far! Cleric's Trinity is well-designed and makes bad items like divination and darts useful. If I may, I'd like to give one suggestion for 3.1 warrior. He might feel better if he stays simple but also provides optional complexity. For example, his Hold Fast talent could simply give him extra armor that's unaffected by FIMA, but allies also get the armor with higher amount. This allows optional minion builds for warrior, preventing minions from getting instakilled as they're often frail. Cleric's other spells are also well-designed and have this trait of being useful for both solo-hero and minions, and it'd be great for summoner builds to have more skill support like this as they're just too weak. I'd rather not have Warlock Soul Siphon though, as this skill is strictly for minion builds and doesn't benefit solo heroes.

I'd also love for summoner builds to always be possible in runs, as dried rose and summon elemental aren't guaranteed craftables, not to mention they're too weak without investment! Finding dried rose too late is also a problem as you can't find the petals anymore. I think summon elemental should always be craftable in runs, and make it very cheap as the potion and transmutation imbue cost afterwards are expensive. I recommend one arcane stylus and 3 energy as the alchemy recipe for 5 summons! The elemental embers unique effect can instead be a weak reusable bomb, like rotberry seed throw.

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.

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.

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.

Probably since you can walk past it diagonally, it's not a bug, but the misclick will be a jumpscare!

This is a great addition! Finding upgraded/enchanted thrown stacks makes it enticing to invest SoUs further to make em unbreakable. I especially love those thrown weapons with unique effects and debuffs, instead of just pure damage weapons. A badge for +15 thrown weapon run would be great, a lot of new players don't know you can actually upgrade them, and it adds variety in runs to try out new things!

Can we also have buffs for darts in this update? We could make it viable to dump SoUs on them. A lot of them are not worth the seed+gold cost, save for a few notable ones. I think paralysis, incendiary, and mayyyybe displacing is already good (though the fact that they can miss makes them unreliable crowd control options). But it's often difficult to justify using the rest. The duration of chill/adrenaline dart is too short, and shocking dart deals tiny damage. In these cases, it's always better to save the seed and just get rid of the enemy with thrown/wand/ability/items/etc. Poison has many immunities, and rotberry/healing/holy dart consumes precious resources and they're not impactful enough in dungeon runs (when compared against their opportunity costs). Sungrass seed is always used as my featherfall + food + heal, and starflower is for blandfruit level ups. Cleansing dart has no uses, the single enemy who uses buffs like adrenaline necromancer will spam it so much that it's not worth the dart usage to clear their buffs.

If possible I'd love for additional roguelike ascension / fun challenges too that don't take away gameplay like barrenlands. The only challenges I activate nowadays are badder bosses + champions unfortunately. Sometimes new enemies, items and challenges like "+20 pick run" makes me and friends revisit the game every few months. Thank you so much for the updates Evan!

I'm hoping Summon Elemental can be tweaked this update so they don't rely on elemental ember alchemy recipe, and bring another throwing or passive use for the elemental embers. Summon Elemental is too expensive due to the wand and potion/transmute cost. And if it's a craft you can do on any run (maybe using arcane stylus) it'll make minion builds more reliable in this game I think. Putting skill points for minion builds, not knowing whether you'll even find a minion in this run, is too risky! Most hero minions are very endgame.

I'm loving these barrels etc, makes the world feel alive. Maybe they can be breakable or interactable, like torches turning on/off with flame/water on the city? They could have small advantages and loot.

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?

Yup, I agree it can be good! But I think its main problem is that it's only good in a vacuum, but when compared to other upgrade options or wands it's inferior. It needs tons of SoUs for reliable corruption, making it hard to use especially with forbidden runes, and spending one charge + turn to give one random debuff is generally not worth it, as you need luck to find the right debuffs for the current situation. Other wands like lightning can just simply kill things immediately instead of debuffing, personally I think wand of corruption needs to be a good debuffer in the first few hits before it corrupts?

As for my personal pick for worst wand it has to be transfusion, I mostly just use it to prevent eye beams, maybe some small shields. It has its uses but I prefer blastwave or fire!

Huntress is definitely nicer! By "generic", I meant rogue is starting to look more like a generic guy instead of rogue, the previous design felt more... criminal? A scar or eyepatch are some ideas that would exaggerate and show that the character is a rogue, but it's not an important issue I think.

Though there may be some confirmation bias, I've been noticing more player complaints regarding trinkets outside of cliques. Ultimately trinkets make the game harder, which I am personally in favor of, but making choice-traps might not be the best way to do so. Data often have skewed meaning: I still try to +3 all the trinkets to see what it does, but the fact that I'm often upgrading them doesn't mean that I think it's a viable choice.

I used to think stuff like Parchment, Newt Eye and Mimic Tooth are good, but it's very resource-extensive and often puts me in a much worse position. Other alternatives (like shop RC scroll, torch) are cheaper and better. Nowadays, for serious runs I mostly ignore trinkets completely to guarantee wins, but this is of course my personal opinion and other players can upgrade trinkets and do whatever they want to make their game fun.

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.

By the way, does anyone know if Trap Mechanism replaces naturally-occuring grassy floors? If so, I think it becomes D-tier as grassy floors give useful dew and seeds.

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.

Maybe it's just me but I personally think Censer is B-minus tier now, Cleric Cleanse can use Censer! Mnemonic Prayer still sucks though, dumping on Lance and Hallowed is way better. I'd personally vote for Vial, Mimic, Sundial, Parchment, Trap as the worst, the rewards are never worth the pain. Can't decide which is worst, but Vial has extremely niche uses. It's unnecessary on 0-chal and it's useless on high-chal since there's no dew, potion, etc. Salt Cube is better for diet. You somehow need to find good viscosity armor early in the sewers to actually pick Vial.

I'm more interested in the worst-craft section, cooking meat is obvious first place but I think the runner-ups are more important to tweak like unstable spell/brew, summon elemental, alchemize.

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.

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.

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.