Hello!
My name is Motas and I’ve become obsessed with Wicked ever since playing it during the Wicked Together free weekend. The game struck a chord in me I haven’t felt in a long time.
When such resonance occurs, I can’t help but binge the game incessantly. When that happens, I often turn to challenge runs to help me further understand a game’s systems and mechanics.
With that being said, the topic of discussion/feedback is Bombs; or more particularly “can you beat Wicked only using Throwing Consumables?”
This is a difficult challenge early on for Cerim who wish to play in this way.
Scrap Bombs, the first level Bomb available, are only found as random drops scattered around Sacra, generally found in chests.
As mentioned in a previous feedback section, Fillmore needs to be freed either spending precious Scrap Bombs to defeat his assailants, or kiting them south to have another enemy bomb them for you. The alternative is to skip Fillmore entirely using the method described in my previous feedback post.
Another requirement for the run (if you don’t hate yourself) is to assist Markos so they appear in Sacrament later. The alchemy table becomes necessary for the run, especially later.
By my estimate, in the normal difficulty, Warrick takes around 10 Scrap Bombs to defeat, assuming you don’t miss. Luckily the targeting for throwing consumables feels pretty good, so it’s hard to miss.
Once we enter Sacrament proper, we’ll need to address the first pain point.
Feedback Point #1 - Chipped Coal Acquisition
The recipe to craft Scrap Bombs and its higher level variants is quite generous. For 10 Chipped Coal and a paltry amount of Copper/Iron/Silver Ingots, you get 10 Bombs. The Ingots aren’t the problem here, the Chipped Coal becomes the issue.
Chipped Coal can be obtained from digging as a random chance, mining as a random chance, random drops in the world, fishing as a random chance, and sometimes from merchants, but never in any meaningful quantity. Without a consistent, deterministic method for obtaining Chipped Coal, this run becomes very RNG heavy with a lot of downtime between bosses. Regular enemies are avoided, as the acquisition of Chipped Coal is too scarce to justify the cost of using Bombs on any enemy that isn’t a boss.
As area levels increase, the drop pools of mining, digging, and fishing become diluted with additional, higher tiered resources, thus making it even harder to come by Chipped Coal as the game becomes progressively more difficult.
As far as scaling the damage of the Bombs is concerned, it appears there’s only a single source. That source is the Woven Ring. I attempted using enchantments that simply increased generic “Damage” and didn’t see any difference. If I am incorrect, then it would be nice if the game would tell the Cerim in some way that the damage can be scaled. This leads to the second pain point of the run.
Feedback Point #2 - Rings
The acquiring of the Woven Ring is another random-heavy part of the run. I understand that rings generally have powerful effects, but it would be nice to find a way to target farm them to some degree.
Luckily for my run Warrick dropped a near BiS ring with 47% increased Bomb Damage and 19% chance to not consume a Bomb. Without this ring I imagine the run would not likely have been possible.
Moving through the story, the power of the respective Bombs kept up with the story up until the boss of the Lowland Meadows. The boss took ~15 of the Concussive Bomb, ~17 of the Stormflask, ~12 of the Flameflask, and ~10 of the Corrosive Bomb to defeat. Perhaps this is intended. If not, then this brings me to the third pain point.
Feedback Point #3 - Scaling of Bombs
Unless additional tiers of Bombs are planned for 1.0, this build becomes unfun as the enemy health continues to scale with level with the story (as I imagine they should). the Bombs will simply be unable to keep up with the damage necessary to be victorious.
EDIT: I did some extensive testing after posting this. It appears that Bombs (vanilla) scale off of the increased Physical Damage enchantment as found on my helmet. The other elemental Bombs also scale off of their respective Increased X Damage enchantments.
Having additional types of Bombs in the form of the elemental Bombs is nice, but they suffer from the same problem as the Chipped Coal. Grimradish Root is just as hard to come by as Chipped Coal, if not harder. They come from digging and gathering herbs, but only as a random chance. Other merchants sell them as well, but never in any meaningful quantity.
Feedback Point #4 - Resource Conversion
I believe this has been stated in an interview, but I wanted to bring it up here as an additional point in favor of such a system. Later in the game the Cerim begins finding High-Density Coal. Being able to break down this Fuel into Chipped Coal would be appreciated, even if the conversion was 1:1. Another potential fix for this would be to allow High-Density Coal to be used in the recipe for crafting the various Bomb. Perhaps requiring 10 High-Density Coal and 10 Ingot (instead of the normal 5) to produce x20 of the Bomb.
Feedback Point #5 - Misc Text Issue
The Flameflask states that it deals “Heat Damage” and that is not a stat used anywhere in the game. It seems through text only that “Heat Enhancement” and “Fire Infusion” are two separate stats. If that’s intended, then perhaps additional clarity should be given to them to properly differentiate between the two.
The same issue applies to Stormflask and Frostflask. They state that they deal “Electric Damage” instead of “Lightning Damage” as stated by Lightning Infusion and “Cold Damage” instead of “Ice Damage” as stated by Ice Infusion respectively.
Plagueflask is fine in this regard.
The vanilla Bombs also simply state that they deal “X Damage” not specified as Physical. This led me to test the enchantment “Damage increased by X% for 10 seconds after Damage Dodged” for Bombs. After triggering the condition, the Bombs continued to deal the same amount of damage.
Thanks for making such a great game. If I’m feeling particularly masochistic, I’ll be back at a later date with some feedback in regard to a Parry-only run.
