Hiii, I have another mysterious spike suggestion, yes.
A stated part of this event is the balancing idea of the player being able to deny the enemies access to the spikes, if you're quick enough to scoop them up before they do. In practice, however, this is often made impossible or impractically difficult due to circumstances out of the players' hands. For example, spikes will often spawn on top of enemies or immediately next to them, or inversely, enemies will spawn on top of spikes, leaving no way for the player to prevent their retrieval.
I think adding a few more steps to the process of an enemy picking up a spike will go a long way to improve the balance of this event, reward player initiative, and reduce frustration.
I propose the following:
1) Monsters must perform a manual action to pick up a spike. Not necessarily one with an animation attached, but in any case, an action instead of an automatic pickup on contact.
2) Before a monster can pick up a spike or start heading towards it, the following conditions must be true:
- X seconds must have passed since the monster spawned.
- X seconds must have passed since the spike spawned/dropped.
The amount of seconds in X does not have to be large. At higher difficulties, 2 may be long enough for the player to act on this period, whereas lower difficulties could give the player more time.
3) Less importantly, spikes should not spawn on top of monsters, but I think the previous 2 points will already be enough. I also do not see a problem with turret-type enemies being allowed to have spikes spawn on/next to them, as they couldn't get them otherwise.
This will make the encounters much more fair and prevent situations from escalating out of players' control. It will also prevent annoying repeating situations where spikes dropped by an enemy will instantly be picked up by another, something that can currently happen even if the player is standing directly on top of the spikes.
i don't agree that monsters should have a delay before picking up spikes, at least not naturally-spawned ones; if it's too easy to deny spikes to enemies then levels simply won't play out much different from normal. if it takes 2 seconds before monsters can pick up spikes, i dont think monsters will ever get spikes at all, and then the event isn't interesting anymore! you can already take risks rushing to deny some but not all spikes to enemies and i think that's the ideal dynamic.
i do think there's more of an issue with spikes dropped by killed enemies though. enemies tend to group together after they spawn, and faster ones (like ones with spikes.) group and chase spikes much more easily - and usually when a player and an enemy stand on top of a dropped spike at once, the enemy gets priority. often when you target and kill a 3- or 4-spiked enemy in a large arena, even if you tank damage standing on top of the body to camp the spikes, another enemy will still instantly pick up all of them and launch a bunch of them as projectiles and there's basically nothing you can do about it, so it's not really rewarding to take risks at all trying to deny the spikes nor to even target down the spiked enemies. and this is the main thing that makes spike-heavy arenas frustrating
so imo, naturally-spawned spikes are fine and should work exactly as they already do, but some of the suggestions should apply to spikes dropped from kills to be more forgiving to players. at the least players should have priority on simultaneous spike pickups
(also, this shouldn't depend on difficulty at all! players are already incentivized to play spike levels exclusively on normal and adding a long buffer period to only normal difficulty would only make that more true. not unless elite gains better spike payouts to compensate)