Solomon Balance Rant

Peppermaster

Thoughts on items

gain more exp item

This option, in my opinion, is the most OP item in the game. In Solomon's Keep, there are limited amount of exp you can earn per run. Because of this, gaining more exp option(especially 100% more exp) basically gives more skill points than you normally would in each run. The powerful part of this item is that player keeps the free skill points earn from the item even after removing the item. This means that exp item basically gives player 1 to 3 item worth of advantage than other players who never got the exp items. If the new SK has an official exp farming method, on the other hand, it will be not as strong as it would because you don't need the exp item to get the exp that you would get from exp item.

pull orb item

This item option is the worthless option that frustrates players after a boss fight. Anything that relates to the orb is useless in the game because player generally does not rely on orbs at all (unless you are at the beginning). The worst part of this worthless item is that it appears too often that it makes players frustrate too much. Rather than being in the item pool and prevent players from getting any other useful item, this item option needs to be limited for player satisfaction.

Thoughts on spells

Fire

All fire related spell except the welded spells(except the worthless meteor swarm) tend to get weaker on late game due to inconsistent dps and lacking utility. To make sure the fire mages feels like what mage should(strong in late game), I have previously made suggestions of giving some utility to fire spells. After thinking about this for couple of months, I have realized that the answer to make fire better is not by giving utility but to give even more damage. Of all ideas to buff overall damage of fire spells, I have learned that buffing burn skill will solve the fire mage problem. Also, Firewalker is nearly unusable because it is difficult to hit enemy due to low duration. Of course, you can just double the duration to solve that problem. Here is my solution on how to change burn and some other skill:

Burn: damage (0,4,7,10,12,14,15,16,18); (1-1) stack; max level 3-> damage (0,2,3,5,8,10,12,14,16 + 2% of enemy max health); (1-5) stack; max level (5); burn applied by welding magic and leviathan deals 50% of the damage. 

Ring of Fire: now applies max stack of burn to enemies.

Firewalker: Increase duration by 100% (to make this spell useful)

Ether

Ether is in good shape but I think the potent missile is sort of underwhelming. Sure missile speed and re-target are good but it does not make player feel strong compared to any other upgrades. Considering violent blast of ether can debuff enemies, I think it would be good idea to ad.d a skill that apply debuff that distort enemies and make them receive more damage. Another concern I have with Ether is that Call Leviathan. Call Leviathan has decent early to mid game but it sort of falls off in late game because of lack of damage. To compensate that, there must be an upgrade skill like magic storm has to make it viable in late game. Here are my solution for Ether:

(new)Distortion: magic missile now apply defense down(5%-20%) debuff to enemies. This can stack up to (1-3)times 

Potent Missile: speed up(10,25,40,55,100,110,120,130,140,150); max level (5) -> speed up (25,50,75,100,150); max level (3)

(new)Elemental Adaptation: Leviathan now gain bonus damage based on your first primary spell and apply subskill related to that primary spell (works similar to ether+x welding spell)

Peppermaster

Water

After a much thought and research, I have realized that water magic(frost jet) is not as strong as it looks. Sure the utility is good but the damage is so low that it takes minutes to kill zombies in late game. Also, lightning mages are basically the counter of frost mage because they are tanky and their attacks are unavoidable. Because frost jet has the lowest dps of all primary magic, I think frost users should use secondary spells, like call leviathan, as their main damage source instead of relying solely on frost jet. In order for this to work, offensive secondary spells should get some buff for late game while reducing late game damage of frost jet. Other than that, I don't it is necessary to change anything in water class magic.

Air

Air is in a really good shape in Solomon Dark thanks to magic storm and prismatic shock. The only thing that sort of bothers me is disintegrate. I am not sure what is the point that makes players to pick that instead of hurricane(which is super good).I think it would be better to deal increased damage on same target over time instead of just a chance to instantly kill enemy with less than 20% hp. That sort of makes the difference between aoe specialist vs 1 vs 1 specialist.

Earth

Earth is a very complicated thing so I am not going to talk about that yet. But I must say that welding spells with Earth, especially Meteor Swarm(this fancy garbage needs a complete rework), needs buff. 

Peppermaster

Thoughts on Monsters

Solomon

I like solomon as a boss character except the barrier. In late game his barrier becomes so tanky that it takes several minutes just to break that thing. The worst part is the delay between breaking and recasting is pretty short that unless you have wizard chug, you will never be able to kill this dude for an hour. To solve this problem, you can put some pattern that temporary removes solomon's barrier or make solomon recast his barrier much slower or just make that damn barrier less tanky. I believe you do know this problem and probably have a solution but just in case.

Skullhead thingy(?)

This boss is another of my favorite boss except his ridiculous charge attack. It just feels so unfair because it deals tons of damage and cannot be dodged. I recommend to make this dodgeable or just simply delete it for less frustration from players.

Heartmonger

He is strong at close ranged and very weak at long ranged. I think this is way too simple and a boring concept. This guy deserves to be spiced up in SKUME.

Raptisoft

Noted and bookmarked to take into consideration for Keep.

Peppermaster

two more things that I have forgot to add:

1. It would be much better if resist poison nullify poison damage by chance per tick. It should work similar to how deflect works on poison in Solomon Dark. (I know you didn't intended that to happen but I think resist poison to do that would make it more useful.)

2. When I played boneyard with Call Comet, for some reason, battle mage did not worked on Call Comet. As a result, I started to pick mana up more often in order to use the Call Comet. Based on this experience, if we make Battle mage not work on secondary and possibly increase mana cost of some secondary spells like magic shield, players will be more willing to put points on Mana Up instead of just max battle mage and ignore mana bar.

Nightraven

Gonna add my thoughts:

Magic Missile
Yes, Potent Missiles should be reworked as a secondary. It's a skill that only ever needs 1 point and that's solely for the retarget function. I think retarget should be built into the skill and that a debuff should be applied instead. I think a better debuff rather than simply "defense down" (which doesn't make sense in the first place since the only character with damage reduction is you) make it "Target takes 1-2-3 damage for every magic missile that previously hit it."

This would grant it synergy with More Missiles while granting it a special utility versus bosses and make it weaker as an AOE ability.

For the purposes of Melded spells, it does the following:

Fire: 1 additional ember per missile that previously struck the target
Lightning: Chains also trigger the damage
Ice: Slow increased per stack (up to 90% movement speed reduction)

Peppermaster

@Nightraven

Well . . . the defense debuff is basically same thing as taking more damage cuz if you take -20% less damage then it means u take 20% more damage but yeah that is pretty much I was talkin' about. One thing you need to remember is that Solomon's Keep will have co-op mode. Because there will be other players who can also deal damage, having defense down debuff will be helpful in multiplayer sense also.

Adding additional ember is a risky move because it can literally cover the floor with ember and make player's eyes tire quickly. It can also cause lag due to high number of ember.

The slow. . . you need to be careful with the number because there is a skill called permafrost that doubles your slow which means it can either possibly crash the game(having more than 100% slow crashes Solomon Dark) or just completely stun the enemy indefinitely (that is how 100% slow works in Solomon game). Of course you can make sure slow cannot pass beyond 99% or something but it is still really powerful ability.

mylifeisfunny

I hope mr raptisoft add something similar to wabbajack from skyrim .D

Alnath

I want to add the ridiculous difference in dps between flame lash and blizzard beam. Flame lash has such a high dps I cannot understand why someone would go for any other option. I recently tried blizzard beam and it's dps is so underwhelming in comparison that I'm considerind dumping my hadrcore character I got to demigod difficulty with it and start all over aiming for flame lash from the beggining.

It would be awesome if blizzard beam had a higher dps, otherwise you can be literally minutes trying to kill a single flame demon, specially the bigger ones, or skeleton mages with shields, which take forever to break. It seems to me that demigod difficulty is designed to be played with a dps of 300+ or you're just wasting your time. Also, the ammount of damage done by enemies at this difficulty is so high that you need to have like 90% damage resist or you could die in an instant, even with a high level magic shield and specially from poison, as it ignores the shield and even with max poison resist drains your life at light speed.

The game is really cool, although I'd love more variety in levels and enemies, but please do something about the balance because it seems very off in many aspects.

Thank you!