OCTOBER 11th EDIT
Copypasted from a recent post:
"I think one of the biggest, most important things you can do when trying to be productive is being able to admit when you're wrong. So, let's break this down:
What went right
-Most people who commented on it said RNG is frustrating. A linear way to improve would be good.
-CTR is way too pivotal on specific items and too pointless on others. Some items need their base charge times reduced, and CTR as a whole needs to be toned down a bit while still being more powerful than flat damage.
-Flat armor boosts and damage UVs are a little too weak.
-Damage UVs on enemies that resist the damage type need to go.
-Absolutely nothing should be done to ASI.
What was stupid
-Adding penalties. It was intended to make unique variants UNIQUE, but it'd just end up bottlenecking players into certain playstyles, or to keep rerolling until they got both the UV they wanted and the penalty they could deal with.
-Giving a way to linearly improve UVs and forcing UVs to only end up being certain things. One or the other might be fine, forcing certain UVs is kinda lame, and having both at the same time is stupid.
-Being insensitive to players who already have things instead of acknowledging them and thinking of ways they might be compensated.
I'm copy-pasting this into the main post. So, how might the "successful" ideas be put in the game while compensating the people who already have good variants? I'm currently thinking of a way myself, but it's tricky; you need to factor in what constitutes as a "strong" buff so people with Flourishes with Jelly Max don't get a truckload of free gear, what might be worth enough to compensate it with, and how do you know who's had more trouble with variants than others, if at all?"
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Oh, yes, I'm going there. Somebody had to.
Let's start with the UVs themselves. They're not balanced against eachother.
-Enemy-locked damage bonuses affect 1/6 of the enemies.
-ASI bonuses affect your performance against all 6 families of enemies.
-CTR is hit-or-miss depending on the weapon, but it also helps with every enemy. It's either totally useless (Flourish, BTB, Pulsar, etc.) or extremely useful (Brandish, Avenger, Autogun, every bomb that exists, etc.). Very rarely it ends up being "nice to have", not "pivotal" or "worthless".
For guns and swords, you always want ASI unless you already have it, then CTR if it matters and family-damage last. So, how would I fix this, you wonder?
-Enemy-locked damage bonuses are slightly more powerful. Remove bonuses to resistant enemies on weapons with specialized damage (no more Fiend/Undead on that Graviton Vortex).
-ASI stays the same.
-CTR is less effective across the board. Bombs have their base charge times reduced substantially.
Rationale: Damage bonuses are fairly weak unless they're totally capped and is arguably much less useful than ASI/CTR. ASI is relatively fine. CTR is way too important and sets a massive line between people who are lucky/grindy/rich and those who aren't. Bombs are far too reliant on it, so they get tweaked a bit to compensate for it.
Then there's armor UVs. Flat defense or status resistance are your only options.
-Flat defense boosts can make you very tanky against a certain damage type or give you more breathing room for mistakes when you're using a set where you're not supposed to (like using Mercurial Demo for the MSI in a Piercing level- a Pierce UV might let you make one more mistake than normal).
-Status resistances are as important as the status you're resisting. Unless you're stacking the hell out of Freeze resist for immunity, you might as well forego taking Freeze resist. Meanwhile, Fire and Shock resist are very nice to have, since you lose less health and are paralyzed for less time respectively. Status resists are only relevant around 1/5 of the time when you excluding boss stratums and the wintry smog plaguing the Arcade.
So, what would I do here?
-Do nothing in particular to flat defense.
-Make status resists more meaningful for the "lol who cares" statuses by redesigning the statuses themselves. Give Freeze a shield recharge rate debuff if you're dethawed prematurely, for example. Doesn't have to be that, just has to be something (hopefully a creative something).
Additionally, UVs are rarely "unique" because there's an ideal way to build your weapon. Adding some sort of minor drawback associated with the boosts will nerf UVs as a whole and give players a better sense of choice rather than "this is the best way". For instance, having Medium ASI might give you Low CTR Increase, or Very-High Damage might lead to Medium AS Decrease. It's a lot more straightforward for weapons, except the rare few that have no use for charges/CTR boosts (but that's more of a flaw with weapon design than this proposed system, imo). Armor is trickier to do reasonably. Losing a little of your gear's typical defenses in favor of your UV'd defense might work, or getting a minor status weakness if you've got a big resistance to something. The boosts must always outweigh the drawbacks, though. They need to truly be unique without making players feel like they got set back if they get a bad roll. Also, concerning damage-to-enemy boost/drawback combinations... they'd ideally be +Damage to Neutral Family and -Damage to Other Neutral Family, or +Weak and -Weak. I don't need to explain why.
And here's the fun part, the RNG. Randomly crafted UVs. Randomly picked UVs from Punch. Randomly picked strengths. All that needs to get a slap in its stupid face. RNG sucks, it's not fun, and I dare anyone who disagrees with me to find some positive that warrants Luigi getting Maximum ASI for his Rocket Hammer on his second roll and Samus getting Gremlin Low for the hundredth time on her Nova Driver.
Alright, Draycos, if this system sucks so much, what do you think should happen?
All of these, ideally.
A.) Allow items to "overheat" after getting enough heat when they're 5* and max level, letting you pay fire crystals to boost the strength of a UV. Better crystals are worth more. You need more crystals depending on what power the boost is at, and you can only boost the power of one at a time before you need to re-heat the item. This will kill two birds with one stone; making raw heat more important and making RNG less prevalent.
B.) Pay Punch extra to pick a specific boost/drawback combination. (45k/115k/300k for 1/2/3 variant tickets, respectively) Kills off some of the RNG without making it a cakewalk to get exactly what you want.
C.) Rework Punch so that he only rolls "medium" and "high". I don't think I should explain this one at all.
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Oh, and before I forget, someone's probably gonna say "this will #@$% off a lot of rich/lucky/grindy people, no way man". I don't care. Conquering a borked system doesn't mean that everyone else who isn't as rich/lucky/grindy as you should suffer.
Thoughts? Criticism? Death threats?
I approve. UV system is currently ass. Status UVs and ASI/CTR UVs are god, everything else is crap. I don't mind some good stats and some bad stats, but the difference is that anything not what you wanted is useless since you can't get more UVs than you rolled for with a ticket. It isn't like a game like Diablo 3 where you can roll extra stats beyond what you wanted and those extra stats can be good or not but they're free so it doesn't really matter, with UVs since you're generally only rolling one thing at a time you either get what you want or not.