I’m not asking for the kind of progression that give permanent upgrades or starting gold to heroes. The thing is, we are already unlocking tons of “game changing” options by doing things in Shattered. We unlock characters, alchemy recipes, challenges, seeded runs. The final boss unlock might as well be another 10th challenge.

Longevity and replayability are key aspects of roguelikes and roguelites, and superbosses create a new goal for players who finished the game once. More importantly, these will create online guides, discussions, gameplay videos and reactions. This is the key for growth and momentum, and it’s one of the reasons why some roguelikes and roguelites are so successful, they have this recipe jotted down.

While I prefer a token gambling collosseum, or something like the caves quest, it’s up to you on how to proceed with the city quest!

Though I’m not sure how to balance that vault idea other than completely eliminating challenges during the quest. On diet, swarm, champions, pharma, and barren lands are lethal, but FIMA will be the worst offender as it eliminates most of the gear progression in that vault microcosm, making all melee weapons + armor useless. That “starting point” is always the most lethal in high challenges, but by the time players reach the city it’s usually a winning run already and they have the correct builds to proceed. If the city quest can even cause 20% death at this stage in the game… my biggest worry will be not experiencing the imp update entirely because skipping it becomes the optimum play on high challenges. Hope that’s not the case!

Players can prepare against tengu or caves quest to boost the winrate, but this vault quest is something that they cannot prepare against, and that constant death rate might be too unappealing as it goes against the core gameplay of “preparing for the next fight”. It might act as a fun minigame if done well, but it seems hard to execute well.

I’m glad to see Shattered sales doing well~ Updates really help keep Shattered alive, players can also spread the word to keep the momentum going

I’m eager for city and halls quest, but I’m very concerned with that dwarven vault idea. If none of the player’s items can go with them, it’ll be extremely difficult to balance this quest with high challenges. Sewer and prisons have the highest death rate due to players having no options in their bag yet, and that city quest will end up as another sewer. Builds also become unusable, and some players don’t like this quest idea.

There’s some great suggestions for city quest: What if the devil imp takes the player to an arena in the dwarven kingdom? That’s often the most fun event in RPGs, where you have the choice to fight a few enemies for small rewards, or risk it all for better loot. The imp could set up a fight against weak enemies at first, eventually leading to a boss fight with corrupted Thymor from those lore pages. Dwarf tokens drop from enemies, which can be exchanged with the imp for rewards such as the +2 ring.

This suggestion will solve several problems. Arena fights will allow newbies to get used to slugfests prevalent in Dwarf King’s fight. But more importantly, Thymor will allow useless items in this game to shine. This warlock should use ice spells, as there are almost no ice enemies in this game to justify using Icy Touch’s ice immunity. He could also buff at the start of the battle, since no enemies use buffs in this game for cleansing dart to remove. Of course, players can choose to brute-force this fight with healing potions instead, or escape the arena before Thymor appears, as you will have enough tokens for the +2 ring without Thymor. But defeating Thymor could drop an additional Devil Fruit that fills satiety and adds +6 Max HP. This boss reward should be useful but not game-breaking, as the final boss is already easy without challenges.

Challenge tweaks and new challenges that buffs enemies are also nice. Slay the Spire encourages players to clear the game multiple times using most characters, which unlocks a hidden act 4 final boss as a final goal. Shattered needs that replayability incentive, as right now when new players clear the game once, they get bombarded with challenges that they usually find unappealing, which leads to them quitting without trying most of the game characters, killing the momentum of players sharing the game.

It’s not S-tier but personally I have a good time with Warding specifically because they provide vision and burst damage. The sentry minions suck though and they die too quickly, it’s mostly used for the damage. Warding’s battlemage and elemental burst is also 100% useless and it’s never worth imbuing. Maybe this wand is A-minus tier.

As for darts I recommend incendiary at least, it’s the most cost effective option, but yeah darts are generally awful and not worth the expensive gold + seed.

At 6 challenge it’s possible to have very high winrate without haste ring! Just don’t take barren lands, pharma, and no-armor, as these challenges eliminate most options in the game. If you google “Shattered PD Challenges”, the first result says that they suck :/ Other roguelikes such as Slay the Spire have challenges that mostly buff enemies and nerf specific things without removing them, but on this game they just remove most of your cards entirely…

With barren lands off, you can plant seeds against champion crabs in the sewers. Dews provide extra heals against bad luck, and it prevents Warden, Blandfruit room and Wand of Regrowth from being “dead cards”. With pharma off, you can use potions as food. Flies are now worth fighting, and the shop has heal potions instead of selling useless drinks, and there’s more fun alchemy options like aquatic regen, shielding and regrowth. With no-armor off, close-range weapons become usable, most weapons are close-ranged. This challenge eliminates more cards than you think, as without armor you are forced to find rare ranged weapons like glaive, whip, wands. No-armor also strips away minions like living earth and prismatic image.

I’ve won several 9 challenge runs, but it’s not fun. You do need RNG to find either haste ring or flow glyph, and other movement options like chains, because no-armor removes all the close-range cards except vampiric. Without seed planting, you don’t have any cards if you meet early blazing crabs. Some classes have extra cards like invisibility and ranged, but for characters like warrior you just… die.

I feel these challenges need rework… Barren lands could instead have rot lashers in grass tiles, to make seed and dew gathering costly. Do you burn grass tiles, or use your resources to find seeds and dew? Pharma could instead cut potion heals by half, but also poison the hero for a long duration, so you gain no healing from them. But you can use mageroyal or purity potion to get rid of the poison, making healing costly. No-armor could instead halve your armor effectiveness, so it’s still possible to use close-ranged weapons and warrior’s armor seal. Adding a 10th challenge afterwards that buffs enemy movesets/stats would be more fun, and this gives 9 challenge players like myself something new to do :)

Prismatic is one of my favorites! Though I think the damage is too low compared to Warding which has similar vision uses. Prismatic’s battlemage and element burst effect is also terrible, but it does have an edge in preventing ranged attacks with blind and having a torch + examine effect, I think this wand in particular is between B and A tier.

Evan please read this, I enjoy representation with the duelist and all, but saying that a game with only white men and girl is “clearly bad” is very off-putting, even if you didn’t mean it that way. This game has a lot of russian and asian players, which tends to avoid LGBT pronouns, and I’ve seen people start to correct them online to use they/them on cleric. This starts to cause drama on group chats. I am personally fine with cleric, but I think it’s best not to go too far like Sony’s Concord, as this issue tends to kill games.

I’ve noticed it too. Most trinkets are definitely a beginner trap as you’ve said, they need to spend energy on alchemy recipes instead of using all their energy on “just for fun” trinkets. For advanced players, energy economy becomes very important with challenges, I squeeze every energy I get from profitless items like stone of intuition’s second use, detect magic, certain seeds. There’s no room for +3 trinket energy, I often keep them at +0 and energize it later, or immediately throw it away if it’s harmful.

So the tome is an artifact, and you use talent points to learn new spells for it? That’s very RPG-like and I love it, seems like it’s going to be a fun and creative class like duelist collecting weapons and switching abilities.

I never said that “changes are not deliberate”. I’m only saying that, in my opinion, the original clover’s high rolls to the hero probably shouldn’t happen again.

If we think about it, during early floors where parchment is most helpful, it’s very difficult to immediately pay the 51 energy cost unless you throw all your useful scrolls and potions immediately, which is too dangerous especially when playing with challenges. But if you keep it at +0 you’ll end up encountering more curses, which also makes things difficult. By the time you reach the prison’s alchemy room, you could pay the 51 cost, but by then you already have plenty of remove curse scrolls from drops and shops (which guarantee RC scrolls), and you might’ve encountered anti-curse wells too. By the caves, I have my final gear already, so parchment became useless starting from here. So for me personally, the 51 energy is terrible and could be used for many other important things, curses are never an issue in my games but that’s just my personal thinking.

I agree, I suppose this trinket’s very low regen at +3 is supposed to help with that, and you’re supposed to take damage inbetween, but it’s too much of a downside in both energy and gameplay for a mere extra 50% heal. Blood vial is not necessary on normal gameplay as well as challenges that remove waterskin and potion usage.

I know and I’m on the latest version, it’s why I said that it’s probably best for it to never happen again.

I look forward to it~~ The censer’s potential for death and item loss is terrifying, and I don’t know when it will explode. At least with resin trinket, I have full control of the decision to possibly set things on fire. Also, I’m unsure if rat skull itself is the reason for winning… If I can farm floors sustainably, rat skull is nice as I’ll eventually find those powerful rare mobs for the badge, but this only makes already-winning runs better. If I play normally, the 5% rare chance never triggers much to break-even on the 36 energy. I feel most of these trinkets have harmful tradeoffs, and the massive energy commitment could’ve been placed on actual win-conditions, especially when getting the 1M score badge. That would be my personal perspective I suppose…? I only take the C and D trinkets if I play casually, and I take them knowing full well that it will be a neutral-challenge rather than a benefit.

(But having said that, it’s still nice that trinkets are dungeon tools instead of obscure game settings. I feel shattered is lacking in the variety of items that can be dropped from mobs and chests, they’re always the same scrolls and potions. Dungeon runs are nice with more loot variety, maybe poison spells from cave spiders, or hidden shops with weird items, with the journal overhaul finding items becomes fun~)

The patches made them better, but maybe it can still be improved~ For this tierlist, it’s less about personal preferences, but whether the tradeoffs help or hinder the hero and comparing the costs against other things. Like… I prefer to use torches than newt eye, but I admit that it’s somewhat useful in certain playstyles, so I put it higher. Conversely, even though parchment is hyped up as a powerful anti-curse trinket, in practice it often hinders runs. Some trinkets like sundial will only make already-winning runs better, instead of giving win conditions. I suppose when we consider that obtaining these trinkets use up puzzle room items, food, and a lot of energy… it’s inevitable to think about these. They’re costly dungeon tools, instead of optional game settings, so I usually only take the beneficial trinkets and avoid the C and D trinkets which often hinders the hero, unless I want to have fun.

EDIT: Thinking about this, I think I’ll put mimic tooth at B-tier, it’s both a win condition and a lose condition and it feels situational.

I agree. Personally I can’t find a use for parchment even at low challenges, as arcane stylus enchanting feels better. Curse negation doesn’t seem like it’s worth 51 energy, RC scroll and wells are common enough to make curses trivial.

Hmm I think for Vial of Blood, it just needs a little bit more heals than +50%, and cheaper than 36 energy. It’s fine if the downside is severe, it creates an interesting new way to heal, but it just needs more bang for the buck. It sits in an awkward spot where it’s not worth taking with challenges like pharmacophobia, and also not worth it for normal gameplay.

By the way, does anyone know if Trap Mechanism replaces naturally-occuring grassy floors? If so, I think it becomes D-tier as grassy floors give useful dew and seeds.