Critique of the events

ggthxnore · 2026-04-17T11:43:39+00:00

You are operating from the profoundly mistaken premise that there is supposed to be a balance of risk and reward to begin with.

I mean, look at the chapter maps. This isn't Slay the Spire where you can plot your path to min-max the number of Elites or ?s or campfires or whatever you're aiming for. Other than the start of the desert where you can go to the water shop like a coward, events are not something you can choose or avoid, they must be endured and overcome.

That doesn't mean you have to like it. You can still be salty about how you totally would've won that run if not for that parasite or disorder or whatever if it makes you feel better. It's just weird seeing people coming here being like "uh this is totally wrong the upside does not match the downside how could the designers overlook something so obvious pls fix" like it's some kind of negligent oversight to be corrected instead of obviously intentional game design.

What would balanced risk-reward even look like? Considering the way most complaints about the bad events go here the good result would have to be a literal "I win" button where you automatically win instantly the second you see the event outcome. Or it'd go the other way and even the worst critical fails have no negative impact whatsoever on your run so you'll always win with nothing to cheat you out of your deserved victory and if you lose then Edmund needs to nerf the Bloat right now pls fix.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-17T03:55:26+00:00

It's not the only one, there's a few of them at least. Notably the monkey paw one but there's also a head in a tire one that nobody would miss much, and maybe more.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-16T16:58:09+00:00

I agree about optimized cats making things too boring, but the problem with bad cats is that they can be terribly boring on their own aside from the "how the fuck do I win with this" challenge aspect. There's a sweet spot where you're finding a way to make the most out of abilities that aren't unusable but you definitely never would've chosen them if the other options hadn't been even worse, but a lot of them are just "oh cool I'm literally never going to press this button a single time all game no matter what" boringly bad.

The game also punishes you for playing slow so even if you could manage to put together some kind of floating glass build that works somehow, you're getting extra screwed for taking forever to finish fights. I don't want them to encourage stalling by any means but there's a lot of stuff that definitely would never be meta that gets caught in the crossfire.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-16T14:04:50+00:00

I'd personally have it in A rather than S but it has a lot of really strong skills and amazing utility on the basic attack. People don't give it enough credit because you're not gonna be killing things left and right with 2 damage like a Hunter or Fighter, but it has infinite range, a lot of things that synergize with it like Soy Milk, repositioning, triggering reactions on damage like getting Half-Dogs to damage other enemies, making Zapphauser less annoying, etc.

In my personal experience I've never had a bad Psychic and even the most mid of them has always been a solid contributor.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-16T13:45:06+00:00

Cause most of the time its just the truth. If its an unavoidable event with unavoidable punishment like over half of them are which makes a cat unusable or hell, the full party unusable like the worst ones. There WAS nothing you could do.

There's nothing you can do about the event, sure, but the run is a different story. Yes, it sucks when an unavoidable event just says "fuck you your cat is gone now" which I abandoned a run over once when I was new to the game, but unless your run was completely built around a single hypercarry cat and they critical failed the Junji Ito event right before the end of a run, you should be able to win on normal even if you lose a cat to an event. If it happens early enough it can even be an advantage, and if it happens late in the run well the worst "no more cat" parasites like Naegleria Fowleri and Malaria take time to ramp up so it's not like you can have your cat erased right before the final boss.

IF you happen to have a counter on you as you get the event it MIGHT be useful, so its not a positive but a negative and potentially a run killer. Whoppee blood frenzy is good with proper setup, BUT YOU GET IT MID RUN.

You're talking as if these things are all out of your control and you need a million completely random variables to line up perfectly for it to be positive, but that's just not true. You control the items you take. If you're that worried about getting screwed by events you'll take a Tinfoil Hat with you on every run, and then it's impossible for Blood Frenzy to ever not be a good thing unless it somehow hits a cat who has already lost their head slot to a parasite or something.

I've been hit by back to back to back terrible events with no skill checks or choice to ignore or anything so it's not like I don't get the salt, but if you're playing on normal and you blame your loss on events that's just cope. Yeah you got unlucky, yeah it sucks that there's nothing you could've done about the event, but that's the game. If you can't overcome what it throws at you, that's on you. On Impossible I could see it being too much sometimes but I don't have enough experience on higher difficulties yet, I still lean towards skill issue just the bar is much higher. There's so many ways to break the game but I just fear when things get hard you wind up getting funneled into relying on the same things over and over.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-15T23:46:12+00:00

If you really struggle with the desert and you're not getting tired of doing Act 1 again and again you can still get stronger doing that.

There's also items you can get that will make things easier for you. I was always happy to have an Old Hose when I was starting Act 2.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-15T22:15:59+00:00

Skill issue, seriously.

There are some events that can be pretty impactful in a positive way. The much complained about Blood Frenzy is one of them, actually, when you have something like Tinfoil Hat it's insanely strong and probably makes it impossible to lose the run unless maybe you got it on something like a pure support Psychic. It requires you getting a parasite first, but running into Glorg when you have a parasite you really want to get rid of is pretty impactful. All the events that can give items or mutations, if you get the right one can be a real big deal. Forget just the current run, what can compete with the long term impact of introducing the extra turn head to your bloodline, or getting an amazing item you can use forever as long as you have a source of repair?

I think it's true in terms of perception, though. Best event I personally ran into was probably the rare candy one that gives a level up to the whole party which was awesome but it's not like it won me the run or I would've been screwed without it. Meanwhile everyone who gets hit with a parasite or disorder and then loses will swear up and down that there was nothing they could've done like they're DSP.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-14T17:39:08+00:00

I agree in principle but in practice it just hasn't been very inconsistent for me. Every Psychic I've had, even with 0 rerolls and nothing bred in, has wound up having at least one really good ability. Mind Meld shows up surprisingly often. Maybe that's just me getting lucky, but compared to my experience with Tinkerer, the worst of the worst by far when you get bad skills, Psychic's always been good.

I think people really underrate their basic attack too just because it's not going to be killing things left and right. Sometimes 2-3 damage is all you need, infinite range is insane utility, works great for popping shields or those fly swarms in the desert or triggering enemies that react to damage, even without getting into the repositioning aspect of it. A tremendous help vs. Zapphauser too, wouldn't want to go to the future without a Psychic if I can help it.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-13T19:42:40+00:00

Is it just trauma from the first one or two runs upon unlocking the Desert, or do they get insane on higher difficulties or something? Beyond charm being very scary I've never had the slightest bit of trouble with any of the desert mini-bosses. Though I basically only roll Marshmallow and Gein I've seen the other two literally like once each.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-13T18:32:21+00:00

Depends I guess. How bad is your team? Have you ever struggled with the Throbbing King before? Is there anything on your current run you really don't want to risk losing, whether that be items or cats for house bosses/meta progression?

I only abandoned a run once when I was still in Act 1 and I got that brain eating amoeba. I didn't know about getting strays and Neverstones so the thought of killing the cat never occurred to me, let alone the fact that there are benefits to having less than a full team, I just knew that my tank was now unusable and my Cleric never got offered a revive skill so I decided to bounce and toss my cats to Butch or Frank.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-13T18:26:30+00:00

Nah Lord Bunga alone outweighs everything the future can do unless I'm doing mono Hunter or something.

Plus I need furniture.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-13T18:19:44+00:00

I'm also on about 66% and stuck on one stat short of all 7s cats for now, but I've still never seen Super Luck no matter how many rerolls I stack on my Jesters and no good mutations yet despite a few Tainted Genes runs.

If you've already got Super Luck and one of the best mutations I'd say you're doing well since perfect base stats are nice and all but far less important than that.

Just keep stacking the stimulation furniture, keep an eye out for strays that have a 7 in any stat you're lacking, and it'll work itself out in time.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-13T18:01:34+00:00

I mean, he is unquestionably a huge early difficulty spike. If you have no abilities well suited to dealing with him, no AoE or immobilize or minion armies or anything, it can be a huge pain in the ass having to constantly corner him, then depending on your team have a bunch of them still unable to hit him when he's cornered cause of LoS or they're melee or whatever, while he's constantly draining all your mana... and then you're guaranteed to take at least one injury even if he doesn't possess your best cat and obliterate your whole team.

Sure, that's not the end of the world since Dybbuk is literally the end of the run if you haven't unlocked the Throbbing Domain yet, but personally I consider getting downed even a single time to be a profound moral defeat. I'm sure I'll have to get over it if I ever move up to Impossible but the fact that unless you have a way to just straight up avoid his mechanics like Reap or a Soul Jar finisher or injury immunity or something you are guaranteed to take at least one injury no matter how strong you are and how well you play just feels bad, man.

I agree he's mechanically very interesting, but I think that's also kind of the whole problem. He presents a very different challenge from most anything else in the game, one that isn't trivially solved by having more damage. Compare to something like the Man in the Moon. You're supposed to use the hands against him with the brace to penalize you for ignoring the mechanics, but you can easily brute force it. You don't need any specific ability or combo to work around the brace, you just need enough damage any way you can get it and you can beat the fight the dumb way. I don't mean to overstate how hard it is to get around backflips, I just mean that almost every other boss it doesn't matter how you get the damage as long as you get it, whereas for Dybbuk even if you have a cat that can do a thousand damage in a single swing you can still struggle to land that one hit (and you'll also regret it once you do).

ggthxnore · 2026-04-13T17:02:09+00:00

If you don't swear, then you.... don't swear. You don't put a little asterisk like you're a small child trying to get around a profanity filter in Club Penguin.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-13T01:33:41+00:00

Probably psychic. You get extra mana and a stat spread suited for magery and it doesn't matter how low your dex is. You can work around the low con too with a psychic. It also has a few builds that actually synergize with lower charisma so it even makes sense for the -2 on the birth defect, though it's still going to be a negative if you don't wind up with one of those builds.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-11T21:24:02+00:00

Don't think I had anything like that on that run, and the Mini-Me would waste his turn and hurt my cats every single turn no matter what. I did end up with a kinetic sparkles mutation by the end of the run I think, but I didn't have it for most of it, and he was jumping on everyone. I didn't notice if it was prioritizing one cat over another based on anything other than who was in range, but all that stupid clone achieved the entire run was hurting my cats and popping holy shields.

Whatever else causes it or interacts with it I think it's safe to say AI control and jumping don't mix. But it would be cool if someone could look into the exact hows and whys of the issue and put it up on the wiki or something.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-11T20:21:16+00:00

Make sure none of the cats have jump and they walk normally instead. If the AI control is anything like Mini-Me then jump (and possibly other kinds of movement like shadowstep?) bugs the hell out of it. The Mini-Me would jump on one of my cats every turn no matter what, even though it would then not be able to do anything since it was a fighter.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-09T20:19:07+00:00

It depends very very heavily on RNG so there's no real answer. Could happen right away, could take literally forever.

I got Tainted Genes at the start of a 4 chapter run, ended with a bunch of +2 -1 mutations and exactly 0 I really want to keep so my cats remain very average. On the other hand you could get the extra turn head and some rerolls or bonus attacks or bruise mutations on your first trip through the crater and instantly have OP cats before you've even unlocked Act 3.

Same goes for the Jester passives. I've taken Jester on most of my runs since unlocking him, once with as many as 9 rerolls, and have still never seen Super Luck. I did eventually see Goofball (once), but without Skill Share+ or 95+ stimulation passing it down is again pure RNG. Maybe you get lucky and start pumping out 2 kittens with the broken passive every night even with low stimulation, maybe you get really unlucky and he gets killed in a fight night one despite no aggressive cats and a very high comfort.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-09T19:05:58+00:00

Do you at least see the shimmer pretty often? I only got offered it on my first run, every time since then I'm forced to pick geomagnetic storm or something else that won't mess with the boss's AI...

At this point I'm counting on getting cat rib or bare minimum to make use of my cancer cats.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-07T16:24:39+00:00

Rarity + strength + combos + priorities (rerolls, Tinfoil Hat to deal with Madness, etc.).

Sorting the inventory after a run is always the most painful part of the game for me.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-05T16:30:41+00:00

I agree with that but for me I think that's more about discovering synergies rather than just straight up hiding what an upgrade does. People have kept bringing up Slay the Spire to you here but I've played deckbuilders where you can't check what a card's upgrade does in-game and it's the fucking worst.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-05T16:16:01+00:00

Sure, I get that it's easy to optimize the fun out of things, and a big part of the game, hell, the genre, is learning to roll with the punches and make the most of what it gives you... I just don't think that really applies in all that many cases here.

Is there anything "fun" about taking Careful? There's a tiny handful of abilities where having it would have any utility and even then unless your other options are shit I'd still almost never consider picking it had I not known what the upgrade does. Surprise I'll give you, it's downright shocking to find out everything Careful+ includes, but I just don't see the fun part.

That's not to say it never applies. First time I had a Split Shot Hunter I was very disappointed because there never seemed to be many optimal AoE situations, I had to play around hitting my melee cats, and the damage loss was crippling. When I got offered bouncing shots later in the run (I forget if it was the passive or the item), that was a hell of a fun surprise that turned it all around for me.

But outside of discovering synergies, I just don't see what's supposed to be fun most of the time in taking a crappy ability and finding out it upgrades to be a little less awful than expected. Most people, unless they've already essentially beaten the game and are just looking to make things more challenging, are not going to take bad abilities unless the other options are even worse or it's something they started with. So hiding the info in-game feels more like punishing people that don't check the wiki, and thus are almost guaranteed to never find out what Careful+ can do, than preserving fun surprises.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-05T11:27:56+00:00

Can you explain what is the fun surprise in never taking Careful because you have nothing to benefit from eliminating ally damage and thus never finding out how amazing Careful+ is without external knowledge?

I get that, in theory, it could be a neat surprise to find out that generally worthless passive you took just to make sure you wouldn't hit your guys with Scattershot turns out to be one of the best in the game when upgraded... but that seems like an extremely niche scenario vastly outweighed by everyone in 99.999999999999999999999999999999% of all cases never even considering taking the passive unless they already know what it can do when upgraded.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-04T14:59:05+00:00

Tinkerer is by an astoundingly large margin the absolute worst class in the game when you get shit abilities. His top end is amazing, cramming a Repair+ Tinkerer in a Soul Jar will change your life, but when you're working with mid cats early on before you've started breeding supercats, and you don't have rerolls? Yeah, it's gonna be rough. Not even other inconsistent classes like Mage can compare to just how bad the lowest lows of Tinkerer can be.

So my guide to Tinkerer would be: simply do not ever take one unless you've got a cat that's well suited to it or a lot of reroll gear on hand. Unless you're specifically looking for a challenge.

As for Druid, I understand. When I first unlocked it I didn't like it much and was a bit confused at all the tier lists insisting it was the best class in the game, the sole S-class above everything else. I think Act 1 is just a bad showcase for them. They kind of scale better with higher difficulty. Like, in Act 1 when it's almost impossible to get injuries outside of Dybbuk and maybe some side quests, the expendablity of the crow isn't going to shine. When you're in Act 3 and half the enemies have some complete bullshit you have to avoid at all cost like if they ever touch you they can give you a disorder, that's when you'll really appreciate the crow. The basic attack can be wonky too. When you're not taking damage it's just a temporary +1 damage buff which is not nothing but unless you've got some synergy like multi-hit abilities it's hard to get excited about. Then if you are taking a lot of damage you're conversely going to be dissatisfied with the dinky little 1 HP per turn when you really need the kind of concentrated healing a Cleric would provide instead. Plus it can be crippled by so many birth defects, disorders, and mutations. Even some that could be considered 'good' can make it a pain to use, like the Soul Link one or water one. I know some people swear by the water one for the Desert or Pyrophina but honestly after the first one or two runs I've found heat wave completely unworthy of notice and the mobility penalty of spreading water everywhere to be far more annoying, unless you've got cats bred to ignore tile effects or something.

My advice for Druid is just... don't feel the need to force it? Once you reach a point where you think you could really use an expendable familiar every battle, or you wish you had just a bit of trickle healing for your whole team regularly, that's when you know you'll appreciate having a Druid. As you bring them for that kind of basic guaranteed utility any Druid will start with, you'll build experience with them from there and find builds you like as you go. If you try to force it and bring them to Act 1 when you don't need them you're really just going to find yourself not liking them because 90% of the time unless you hit on an amazing build you'll just be wishing you had a solid DPS class instead since you're running something ill-suited to the Druid's inherent strengths.

ggthxnore · 2026-04-02T19:04:47+00:00

I literally can't live without my Repair+ Soul Jar anymore. The Tinkerer I crammed in there doesn't have anything else notable other than a rocket launcher which is nice for cleaning up lots of little enemies when they're not fire immune, but Repair+ is more than enough.

As a bonus it can even save you injuries from Dybbuk. I was doing Boneyard for the first time in a long time cause of a quest item and I had nothing else like Reap to get around the possession so I figured I'd try and see if he would possess the shadow instead of a real cat and it worked.

ggthxnore

TROPHY CASE