lemme start by pointing out a core concept that most rotmg gameplay revolves around: decision making between risk vs reward.
need a ring? do you use deca for the safety? or do you use lodestone for more damage but less room for error?
oh you’re flashing? but the boss is at 1k hp, do you nexus? or do you stay?
it’s quite a large part of the game, and a lot of mechanics come together to promote the idea of taking risks for better rewards.
but what is this?
more risk, less reward…
why bother indeed.
i suggest that the XP decrease be paired with an HP decrease on bosses, and loot decrease be paired with a damage decrease. the reverse can also be added in order to give players that take the risk a better reward
edit: was reminded of the wishing well in Heroes of Hammerwatch, where each modifier has a negative or positive value. if the modifiers you select ends up positive, it costs exponentially more to add more positive effects, but if it ends up negative, you get (linearly) more xp and loot. i think that is a good system for letting players add modifiers on keys. for dungeons not opened by players, make the system weighted close to zero so the positive and negative both balance out, and instead of “quality” of the dungeon, have a “chaos” value where higher chaos means more modifiers are added, resulting in wilder experience and gameplay but still a balanced risk/reward.
edit2: throwing around some random ideas for potential modifiers
- enemy hp
- enemy damage
- enemy def
- enemy ability cooldown
- enemy speed
- player hp
- player hp regen
- player mp
- player mp regen
- or just modifier to player stats in general
- player ability cooldown
- item proc cooldown
- player size (hitbox size)
- petless (how do you not think of this one deca)
- flooded (adds air bar and drowning in dungeons that normally don’t have water)
- constant status effects (no sicken/invis) (woul b cool if sicken decreased healing received instead)
- environmental damage (evil water/lava/stationary turrets/drowning)
in general, from a design perspective, conditional stuff is always more interesting than passive stuff
so a global constant % buff/debuff is a lot less interesting than say, modifiers from above but with these before it:
- when not moving
- when inflicted with positive effects
- when inflicted with negative effects
- when under/above 75% hp
- when using ability, for x seconds
- when standing in liquid
- when using a consumable, for x seconds
obviously there’s a lot more to be explored, but what was shown in the video was very underwhelming and disappointing. i hope deca has more creativity juice in their fridge.