I don’t know if it’s a bug or a poor choice that was made, but the accumulation of echoes in the crucible is horrendous.
I realised it with some bonus/malus (plagued echoes) on my HP.
My base HP is 199. I took a malus of -50% Max HP then two bonuses, +25% and +15%.
The logical assumption would be that -50% +25% +15% = -10%, which would mean that the end result of my HP would be about 180. It was 140.
Which means that the game applied each bonus/malus on the spot and kept using the new value, ignoring the initial one and the previous bonuses applied:
199 -50% = 99
99 +25% = 123
123 +15% = 141
You’d think that if you only have bonuses then it can be sort of exponential, but the problem is how punitive it becomes as soon as you take bonuses and maluses.
If you have 100 HP and get two +10% max HP in a row, instead of them adding up and have a +20%, leading to 120 HP, you would have:
100 +10% = 110
110 + 10% = 121
Now, as soon as you introduce a malus, the order doesn’t even matter because of how strong they become.
Same base, 100 HP. Let’s say you found an insane +100% max HP bonus, but then you have a -50%. Again, you would think that normally they palliate each other, leading to +50%, so 150 HP. Nope.
100 +100% = 200
200 -50% = 100
/
100 -50% = 50
50 +100% = 100
Back to baseline.
Meaning that as soon as you introduce a malus, whether it is a the beginning or towards the end of your run, it’s ruined.
I really hope that it is a bug or an oversight; otherwise the plagued echoes have no value and the “add X random echoes” is not a gamble anymore but a simple run killer.