Aight, I think Vaults do not need much of an introduction, if you’ve played it, you know it’s a very painful level (unless you get lucky and get the first room to be with no/a small quantity of echo blocks), that it’s really not that rewarding.
So, since I think the Gray Havens should change these levels quite a bit so they are worth the trouble, I’m going to point out all the things that are not only annoying, but also could be considered as artificial difficulty.
#1: The echo blocks
Definitely a cool mechanic on paper, but it fails on execution very hard, and that’s because it denies crowd control on scenarios where it’s totally necessary (like the first room, that usually contains an arena full of Slime Drops), and it kind of makes it impossible to progress unless you aid yourself with a freeze bomb or just get lucky with the RNG when the game decides to give you a room with no echo blocks. I guess a way to fix it would be moving the echo blocks to either the center or the corner of the rooms where they are used, or change the hundreds of Drops for a small quantity of regular Jelly Cubes/Mimics, so crowd control is not as necessary, thus passively reducing the effectiveness of the echo cube itself.
#2: The mimic boss
Honestly I feel this is the worst thing designed on the entire level (and even in the entire game), due how it has a full-screen attack and almost no way to hurt it unless you wear something that pierces through enemies (it even destroys bombs, so good luck if you are a bomber), since not only has tentacles protecting it’s body, but it spawns even more if you try to attach through the gaps, so it’s almost impossible to damage it consistently if you are not using a Divine Avenger, Iron Slug or Winter Grave. But wait, if it wasn’t enough, there’s more, because if all of this wasn’t enough, the boss gets full invincibility after every charge of Iron Slug and Winter Grave for no reason what so ever, unless the devs just wanted to make this even more tedious, I guess.
And do you know what do you get by beating this guy which is technically a boss? Around 2-3 Slime coins, some crowns, fire, and three fire crystals at times, which is literally nothing compared to any other way of farming crowns (like Fire Storm Citadel, Dreams & Nightmares, or even doing arcade alone).
So basically, the changes it needs it’s just, make bombs be usable on the Mimic boss (like any other boss in the entire game), remove the tentacles and the whole pointless thing of getting invincibility at certain times, and instead make it so it attacks you with the tentacles themselves the same way as the “The Big Iron” on the Ghosts in the Machine mission. I would keep the close-range attack and the shock wave as long as it takes a bit more of time to execute it so we can actually react to it.
#3: The rewards for beating the Vault
Well, you can get incredibly rarely a trinket that’s quite useful on certain situations, but the chances for it to spawn are incredibly minimal, making it not worth to farm, and there’s not other point on trying to beat a vault apart from this, so… I think I would just increase the amount of slime coins you get from the boss, or make it so the boxes there only drop slime coins, making you get around 10 slime coins on tier 1, 20 on tier 2 and 30 on tier 3. This would make it worth it to go for some Vault hunting and would actually give to the players another way to get a good quantity of money consistently apart from FSC (Vanaduke’s mission), and no, this would make FSC obsolete since to spend the slime coins you would need to wait for the Slime Casino event to be open, and there’s no easy way to access the Vault the same way you can with FSC, since it only appears on the arcade and there’s no consistent way to always get a Treasure Vault. So the RNG will keep it away from not being a broken way to get money.
#4: Some of the obstacles on the pathway part it’s a bit too much
This one it’s not too big of a deal, but I just feel the number of saws and traps in total are just too complex to comprehend and makes it really tedious to understand where and when you have to be on a certain spot, I would just lower the complexity on the ones that got the must stuff on them, which are usually the ones that consist of a very big room filled with saws and elemental traps.
This one it’s not totally necessary though, I do not find it too stressful or unbeatable, but some of the paths are quite complicated and they just make me want to use my Seraphynx’s shield to go through them.
I know the Treasure Vaults are not the most necessary change on the game, but I still feel it could be an interesting and important change if done right.
1) git gud
2) yeah u need winter grave or blitz for boss
3) agreed, was really hoping for some secret interaction room on the far sides of the boss arena room, loot was very underwhelming
4) git gud