Wait a second, is 20% life leach even possible? I selected it twice, and my weapon only shows 15%. Wow, I'll feel cheated if I wasted two upgrades! Great update Fireflame, thx for the hard work!
Hate to complain, but I think the update may have improved the store too much. It now sometimes gives 2 or rarely 3 upgrades per item. Before you were often forced to take a sidegrade. Accordingly, its a LOT of extra upgrades. Add in the fact that you can now maintain life leach on your weapon, which is another big plus, and hard is a LOT easier. I'm level 40 hard and its feeling pretty easy. Good chance I can achieve infinite play. Makes me kind of sad because I really felt hard was so well balanced before. Sure the store was frustrating and needed to be fixed, but the extra upgrades probably need to go, or the difficulty curve needs tweaking.
Yeah, it sure is a fine line but I sadly have to agree it might be TOO easy to maintain all of your great Enchantments. But as I'm nowhere near ArtNJ's ability I have no fear of getting to any sort of infinite viability state!
I dont think its a problem to be able to maintain your enchantments per se -- I like that -- as I can chose my build, but I do think sometimes getting 2 or 3 upgrades out of 1 store trip is over-powered without a tweak to the difficulty curve. Before, by level 30 you had taken maybe 5 sidegrades. Now you have taken 0 sidegrades and gotten 2 or 3 upgrades out of a single store trip several times. So basically 10 extra upgrades by level 30. Thats a big change. Anyway, we'll see what happens once folks post high scores, we wont need to guess. My opinion would be that if we see a lot of scores over level 50 for hard, its too easy. ****Wow, was just offered an item with 5 upgrades on it, 3 defense points, .25 gold & .25 upgrade per shield. No downgrades on it, AND it came with a teleport scroll. (Didnt care.) Got to nerf this, the difficulty curve is blown****
More thoughts: I am not seeing the crazy upgrades in the store others are reporting. I am mostly just seeing my items with maybe a single upgrade or side grade. Vampire - brilliant! I love how I don't even notice him at first, like he blends in with the other skulls like a vampire might with humans. Store - Being able to get an upgrade along with a 1 time skill use greatly increases the value of some skills. Where I might never take something like treasure chamber in one of 4 slots, I am happy to get it along with an upgrade that I would like. When I have 2 close choices in the store, even a free fireball might tilt my decision.
I do appreciate the better quality of items at the store, perhaps the point is that when you have the base 5 weapon with 10% Leech, have you ever seen just a base 8 weapon (technically a step up if each enchantment counts as a +1)? Basically an upgrade but without any enchantments for an already existing enchanted item.
Game Center scores rock. I have a reason to play Normal and Hard now. So I can dominate all 3. Muahahahaha! Although that 16k score on normal by someone else is sick!
Forget Hard, I didnt work today and played most of the day -- I'm at level 90 now, and sure to get to 100 where I'll probably quit. Although it does seem to be getting a bit harder, so perhaps I'll try to go to 150. I have almost +3 experience per skull so it goes pretty quick.
Lvl 150 posted to openfeint on hard, 37,777 points. Stopped voluntarily, no end in sight. Sadly, the store fix went too far and its too easy now. This is partly because the store now gives more than one upgrade per item at times (I got up to 5 on a single item) and partly because it is now possible to stack life leach on your weapon, which is very powerful. Suggestions (not all are required, and doing all might would be too much): (1) store should give net of 1 upgrade and one only, not up to net 5 upgrades on a single item. In other words, store should only offer upgrade in two areas if there is a corresponding downgrade, so that each item is net of +1 (2) cap durability at 90% (3) cap life leach at 20 or 25%...potions become pretty irrelevant with more than that (4) cap exp per skull/up per shield/and % to coins at a value of 1 (i.e. 100%) per item or a total value of 2.5 (i.e. 250%). I had like +450% experience per skull by level 150, and similarly crazy numbers for upgrades per shield and to a lesser extent per coin. A cap per item would have kept this down to more reasonable levels. (5) up the difficulty curve, particularly at levels above 50, but to some extent even earlier. In general, on Hard, I think the high scores should be no higher than lvl 40-50's, and maybe not even that. Love the new bosses, and the fix to the store removes a frustration even if it went too far. So great update, lots of steps in the right direction. Thanks for the hard work.
Just wanted to chime in that I love the new update! The new monsters are brilliant and the store works much better now (really like the choice to use a one-shot spell). Perhaps the new store manager is making things a little unbalanced on the easy side, I went really far on my first normal game. I picked up Treasure Chest on a whim, it turns out that this spell is much more powerful with the new store mechanics! Had Disarm, Dazzle, Treasure Chest and Banish...it was a very well balanced pick IMHO.
Wow, I cannot express how impressed I am with this game. No reason for me to wait for a Puzzle Quest fix, this game is the way to go.
Just picked it up, and I have to say I am too. And this is coming from a huge PQ fan. I may have missed it but...is there a way to see Game Center leaderboards / achievements from within the app? I see an OpenFeint menu item, but not the other. And still hoping for a Universal version. Pretty please.
Hmm yeah, 5 upgrades should be very very rare, I think there's less than 1% chance, depending on the item, but still you're right and it should be capped, although I'd probably cap it at 2 with a low chance. Good suggestions on all points, and I definitely agree that Hard (or any difficulty really) shouldn't go to level 100+, I do wonder though if this is something you can do multiple times or whether it's one of those rare strokes of luck where everything goes right? Not at the moment, but can be added in pretty easily if there's any desire for this. The GC & OF leaderboards are the same though, do you just prefer the GC interface?
I think I could do it again, but I'm not motivated to try, harder is more fun at this point. Lets see what Ken and the others can do. Here is the game breakdown for analysis purposes: Life leech is definitely not overly common, and I was able to land 15% fairly early. I dont think that was all that important though -- there isnt really any difference between getting 15% life leech by level 20 or lvl 40, you have time. It actually seemed to take a while to get life leech to 25%, and I didnt get massive amounts of life leech until much later. Indeed, I think I actually may have accidentally downgraded life leech from 20 to 15, which explains a confused post I made yesterday. If I got a stroke of luck that mattered, its that I was offered a lot of +exp/skull early, I took it, was offered more, and took that. This gave me a lot of levels quickly, which is very useful, particularly early on. It actually took me a lot longer than usual to get my durability up, my luck in that regard was bad. My skill choices were not unusual - I took enchanting, disarm (which I essentially never used), dazzle (which I rarely used because I was ahead of the damage curve, not behind it) and magic sword. While these are fairly good choices, I hardly ever used any besides enchanting and magic sword, which came last, and isnt terribly useful until you lower the cooldown anyway. My take away from this game was that +exp per skull may be even better than +upgrade per shield or gold per coin, and to prioritize taking it. Perhaps its behind life leach and durability, but its ahead of weapon DPS and everything else. In the long haul the extra levels more than give you the lost dps. Other take aways: spikes and even blunting are just not necessary if you have a good set up with lots of dps + life leach + armor + durability. I traded away my spikes entirely and had like 2 blunting the entire game. Now that the store is fixed, the least valuable upgrade you should ever be taking is adding an armor point -- this means there will never be a need to take poison or armor piercing.
Great update but... The scores are double posted using both Openfeint and GC. I am number 1 and 2 on the normal high scores with the same game listed as freightweezul for the OF and werechihuahua for the GC. I can logout of OF to prevent it posting the high scores but then I have no access in game to anything since the GC requires leaving the game. It might be too easy now also... My room mate picked it up and played to a ridiculously high level and only dies after a couple of hours. Many, many items with stacked enchantments. Still a great game though. Not good. Great! And I tell everyone I meet with an iDevice to try it out.
Yeah, I love how cleanly they've implemented the Best of Day/Week/All-Time where you can instantly see your ranking in each category even if #1253rd whereas this same functionality seems so broken in OF.
I'd love to get my hands... fingers... on a lite version of this, so I can try before I buy. I think this would be up my alley (big original Puzzle Quest fan), but would like to be sure.
