Death Must Die – What to Avoid

What to Avoid in the Game

I am focusing not on what is too strong or overpowered and instead what just felt bad or miserable to experience.

Boons

• Lightning Bolt – I have tried really hard with very high movespeed, movement, range on lightning dash, etc and it has consistently been underwhelming damage.
• Sickles of Mort – I have stacked my attack damage extremely high on multiple characters and sickles of mort seems to not do great damage at all. In particularly it feels really lackluster in boss fights. Perhaps if they tracked enemies or duration went up with levels it might feel better. I haven’t tried a toooon of testing so maybe the high area or proc builds are better, but on their own they have been quite underwhelming.
• Deadly Strike – Curse statuses are rather quick and it doesn’t feel very advantageous to end them quicker. If it did more damage, or increased other status chances or something maybe it’d be better, but of all the strikes it feels much weaker than the rest.
• Time Field (Merris) – Time field slowing Merris’ autos is a bit annoying albeit it funny to have a massive amount stacked in a small space. A bit more niche, but upgrading rarity of scaling stats feels bad to find later game as it doesn’t have retroactive change, but probably just on the player to ignore it.

Shrines

• Force Option Choices – In general not having the ability to back out of some shrines or check stats/boons feels a bit frustrating at times. This is most notably the case with shrines that have consequences or temporary buffs.
• Shrine of Autumn – In many context can just feel bad to have any of those options.
• Troll – No reward for -30 evasion just feels bad and you’re limited to basically one option.
• Grave Curse – Occasionally getting cursed for looting the graves feels kinda annoying. The game heavily encourages looking for better gear and having moments characters get penalized stats doesn’t feel good. I would suggest spawn some enemies to attack you like the llama god being angered or something as a consequence for looting graves instead.

Signs

• Sign of the Grasshopper – The unlock conditions were frustrating and this being my last achievement I just had to spam resets because finding fate legendary and rabbit shrine didn’t feel very viable even when master/legend stacking (I got it one time ever on Skadi). I ended up just spamming a dozen or so 60s shop resets to find it. If any character getting 4 dashes unlocked I could see that condition more reasonable.
• Sign of the Disciple* – Just needs to be fixed probably.
• Sign of the Beast – I am pretty sure this one is not working properly. I got summoner with Skadi at lvl 2 a few seconds into the run getting 900% summon damage and having it unable to one shot even the blue skeletons late game just feels awful. It had laughable dps at the end even when I tried a few runs to push it best I could. The novice lvl 1 ravens from mort outperform it by a ton.

Other

• Ice Archers – The ice archers freeze you even when you evade attacks. This was frustrating mostly on ghost’s matter attempts, although it isn’t a huge deal.
• Red Crystal – I understand why there is a red crystal that stacks when there’s too many exp shards on the map, but having it stay on the map and not move makes it feel like you can’t go collect shrines anymore. Gem high builds aside, it feels like you’re stuck by it while it’s out, but often with builds that cause it you keep getting stuck collecting those not getting efficient experience. I understand wanting to discourage just ignoring xp and stockpiling, but it really feels bad to be stuck with it out. Maybe if it had a cap xp instead of infinite stacking and moved with new shards rather than stay as a marker on the map it would feel better.
• Unique Items – Class specific aside, having these bound despite so rare to find makes you feel like you’re not really able to try some of them across different characters. I’d be really interested in trying some of these, most notably the unique stats like attack range, on other characters but having it bound makes it feel stuck and possibly disappointing. What’s most annoying however, is how because of their rarity I want to keep them for collection purposes, but the stash cannot really keep up when you’re building other gear. It’s been voiced by the community a fair bit, but I think more stash room might just be a solution as long term you can find more copies at least, but currently am super full of stuff and end up having to give up builds stored for some characters.
• Necromancer – A few times necromancer has teleported inside of me and instantly attacked shotgunning me to death. If he has a slight delay (And maybe outline to see him better) after teleport this probably wouldn’t happen very much.