Pace and feel feedback and suggestions in dungeon

Wanted to have it as its own post so other players can comment specifically on the feel and balance of the game inside the dungeons and nothing else here.

What works

The general pace increase is a breath of fresh air. It feels much better.

Mobs are faster, we attack more often and we have to be more careful. We get punished for our mistakes and this is good!

The increased mobs life is also good, now most mobs take multiple hits and killing them is more rewarding.

The lower cooldown on most skills is good (in most cases) and the balance adjustments to the main weapons finally make the hammers fun to use.

Some skills that were mostly useless are now fun to use (bombs, pyro and chain lightning now feel good).

What could be better

1. Player speed

We are too slow and this feels like having a constant debuf when walking around in the dungeon (in the overworld too). It makes it tough to avoid big salvos from bots we saw coming but cannot escape due to being slow and this is adding frustration to the player experience.

Other rogue-likes / bullet-heavens all have a dash/dodge mechanism to add to the player mobility. I guess that for us it is impossible to implement due to browser limitations so I suggest having a base speed increased by 5-10% instead and the speed vials/potions/stims should be a 20% buff to compensate.

This alone would make a huge difference

2. Skills/Weapon balance

• Gleam-Twins: those have been nerfed too much. The duration is too short for the range it has and makes it go from a top tier skill for its high DPS + maneuverability to a useless one. I suggest slightly increasing their duration and their initial range for them to be viable again (not to the point they are OP but right now they are useless)

• Machine-gun: this is still okay but the fire-rate buffs that were already bad are even worst now. The fire-rate buffs decrease the (already short) firing duration to something that is way too short. I suggest changing the fire-rate mechanics so that the shooting time stays the same but you get more bullets in by firing at a higher rate

• Minigun: this was OP and nerfing them was needed. The issue now is the impredictability of the side it will fire as we start with only a half-circle. I suggest starting with a full circle, same as before, but slightly increasing the cooldown to balance it and reducing the damage modifier by 15-20% instead. It would feel better and still be a decent skill for its anti-swarm effect

• Ice-cube: the skill generally feels better but the reduced damage output makes it very dependant on RNG to be viable. I suggest slightly increasing the initial range and damage output to make it more reliable and less frustrating to use

• Chakram: the reduced cooldown is great but because of the fact that, at best, it hits only twice the same ennemy, it is inferior to the machine-gun and depends on RNG to be okay (broader range + size). So here I suggest increasing the base damage a bit

• Kusarigama: they are fun to use but with the increased pace and our slow speed, the pullback time upgrades are useless (it might be better if we have more speed but right now it does nothing). Same as Chakram, they only hit twice the same ennemy at best so I suggest either increasing the base damage or adding damage over time with poison stacks (similar to the burn stacks) to replace the pullback time buffs. Poison could also slow-down ennemies - that would be super fun

• Swords: the reduced cooldown does little to help them. While the rapier has the highest base damage (and sprite animation!), the very limited range and the fact that it doesn’t scale much make this category of weapon inferior to the greatswords wit hthe increased pace and the fact that we are often swarmed by big groups of mobs. The cooldown reaches a point where we are forced to use auto-fire instead of manual. I suggest adding better scaling mechanisms to make them viable and start seeing players use it more often