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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2642 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 3, 2025

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As you say, these actually mostly make the game harder, but they allow you to do content faster if you're good enough.

Well, Bloodboil Aromatic in particular does not allow you to do content faster: it's a huge pain in the ass to farm the recipe and materials! There is no world in which doing a boss 20 seconds faster is going to make up for 15 minutes of farming.

Bloodboil Aromatic, as far as I can divine, has exactly one use: doing nuke build tricks. If they'd make my adaptation and just get rid of the damage-taken penalty, it would have lots of uses! You'd have to do this arcane farming routine, but it would indeed give you a big boost that might help you beat a boss you were having trouble with.

Now, damage-gamble talismans (as opposed to consumables) like Fire Scorpion Charm do have a much more common use: they're good for level 1 challenge runs. If you're going to die in one hit anyway, then it makes no difference if you take more damage, so equipping something like the Fire Scorpion Charm is all buff and no downside. And unlike Bloodboil, skilled players do use it since, it's not a consumable so you don't have to farm it each time you want to use it--you just pick it up once and equip it.

Anyway, I do agree that having a variety of items with weird cost/benefit analyses can make the game more interesting. But even here, what you'd want is "complicated" items for skilled players to not require farming (as good players will just skip it if it does), and all-good-no-downside items for unskilled players to be the sort of thing you'd be able to craft from naturally exploring the world and having an inventory full of materials. Bloodboil is the exact opposite of this principle.

Finally, you have to compare these things not in a vacuum, but to other stuff that exists in the game: compare Bloodboil Aromatic to Flame, Grant Me Strength. The latter is a spell, meaning you pick it up once (right from the start of the game, if you know where it is) and use it as many times as you want, it grants +20% to both physical and fire damage, it occupies the same "internal" buff slot as Bloodboil Aromatic (meaning you can't use these two at the same time), and there's no damage taken penalty!

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