this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Hey Dungeoneers, Shattered v2.4.0 has been released!

v2.4.0 features a new category of item: trinkets! They are more about tweaking gameplay variables than giving direct power or utility. There are also a bunch of smaller additions and tweaks, most notably to the Duelist and to Alchemy. Be sure to check the changes screen for full details.

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[–] chonglibloodsport 5 points 7 months ago (7 children)

A ton of stuff!

  • Potion of cleansing (exotic purity) removes all debuffs including hunger/starvation. This means potions of purity become a major food source when On Diet is turned on.
  • Elixir of aquatic rejuvenation gives more healing than a regular healing potion and allows you to control when and how much healing to apply (by standing in water) to let you avoid wasting healing at full health. This is crucial with On Diet + Barren Land because food is a scarce and precious form of healing, dew drops and sungrass are out of the picture, so you don’t want to be sitting at full health unless you’re starving.
  • Elixir of honeyed healing is another source of nutrition.
  • Elixir of dragon’s breath makes you immune to fire and imbues your attacks with fire. This is extremely useful against the fire hand and the grass hand in the final boss fight.
  • Elixir of toxic essence makes you immune to poison gas and causes you to constantly emit toxic gas. This protects you against the toxic gas hand and also gives you more damage against some of the other hands.
  • Transforming unidentified scrolls into runestones in order to identify the scrolls. Once you have scrolls of upgrade and remove curse safely identified it’s generally a good idea to turn all unidentified scrolls into runestones. Many of the scrolls are actually more useful in runestone form (especially rage and teleport) and getting all scrolls identified quickly gives you more options.
  • Upgrading unidentified potions into their exotic form. Once you have potions of healing identified (which you can do by observing flies/necromancers/vampire bats drop them) you are safe to turn all unidentified potions into their exotic form. This allows you to identify potions by drinking them in exotic form which is much safer to do. The only dangerous exotic potion is corrosive gas which you can mitigate by standing diagonal to a door and running out of the room to escape the gas (which will stop spreading when the door closes). If you wait until you’re starving and moderately low health to identify your unknown exotic potions then you won’t waste a potion of cleansing should you happen to have one.
  • Aqua blast spell (crafted starting with a potion of levitation) gives you 8 charges of a spell that lets you create pools of water anywhere. This is extremely useful for getting rid of traps. 2 casts will clear the toxic gas vents in the treasure room, letting you loot a bunch of gold without spending your potion of purity (which is much more valuable as a food source). Aqua blast is also great against blazing champions, fire elementals, and the fire hand.
  • Feather fall spell (also from levitation) gives you 2 charges that let you loot the drop-down rooms without spending any healing or food resources.
  • Beacons of returning (crafted from scrolls of teleport). You get 5 of these which are basically get out of jail free cards that will save your life. They are also great for backtracking to a shop without spending tons of food running there. Even more powerful is to combine one of these with a scroll of passage (exotic teleport). First you save the current location (using the beacon), then scroll of passage to get back to the shop, then use the beacon to return to where you started. An expensive use of scrolls but saves a ton of food. Very powerful use for the Unstable Spellbook (which can basically give you a free scroll of passage) but you need to be prepared for it.
  • Potion of Divine Inspiration (exotic experience) gives you 2 bonus talent points in a tier of your choice. Extremely good! From T2 onward you generally want as many talents as you can get!
  • Scroll of Metamorphosis (exotic transmutation) lets you swap out any talent for a random talent of the same tier for another class. Very good for swapping out situational or obsolete talents (extra food or identify faster T1 talents) for something more useful!

There’s far more stuff than all this. Pretty much everything in alchemy is useful if you’re creative enough about it. This is really important as you add more and more challenges because resources become scarce, damage you take increases (a lot), and a lot of easy strategies are disabled.

[–] Audalin 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (6 children)

Oh! I didn't remember anything about cleansing taking care of hunger. Now I can see the food challenge being feasible.

Identifying things via alchemy is a nice trick! (if the game actually identifies them and it's not you writing the result down on paper or something)

I thought most traps could either be used against enemies or triggered by throwing some item. Perhaps aqua blast is somewhat useful against the first phase of Tengu if you can't afford the HP to take a longer walk around the traps? If it works there at all. Otherwise idk. Well, poisoned treasure rooms, but they're few.

Other than death prevention, why would you teleport to a previous shop instead of carrying the things to the next one? I can see the act of going downstairs through the cleared levels taking a toll on HP if there're challenges enabled. If you're out of slots, you can drop things near stairs while you finish the level.

[–] chonglibloodsport 3 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Oh I forgot to mention: the poison gas rooms aren’t the only rooms where you can use aqua blast to get loot! You can also use aqua blast to clear traps in those rooms that are completely full of traps instead of using a potion of levitation (which you could make into another aqua blast)! If you aim it correctly you can usually clear a path to the treasure with only one charge of aqua blast!

[–] Audalin 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Great! I'll try these things with some challenge once I get the update. The trickiest one is to figure out how/when/how often to use darts to make them something better than dead burden when all is fine and an underwhelming response when you're in a pickle. E.g. is it worth upgrading them, or letting them break and buying replacements, or melting other thrown weapons to repair them (as opposed to, well, throwing), or sometimes using them without tips for damage rather than special effects? And sometimes you aren't confident you'll be able to pick a thrown weapon up after using it with the pressure you're facing in some places (especially during ascension, but also in the open areas of demon levels when an eye pops out every now and again).

[–] chonglibloodsport 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Darts never break. They have infinite durability. Only the tips wear out, which can be easily replaced by using another seed. Darts with no tips can be thrown an infinite number of times but the damage is low with T1 scaling.

If you wield a crossbow then darts you throw use the crossbow’s damage instead of the dart damage. A highly upgraded crossbow can do a ton of damage with plain (untipped) darts, and tipped darts do the crossbow damage plus the effect of the tip.

Each of the 4 shops in the game always sells one pair of darts for a total of 8 darts in the game. If you buy all 4 pairs then you’ll have 8 darts for the rest of the game and can throw them as much as you want. If you use a ring of sharpshooting or play as a huntress (especially warden) then you can increase the durability of the dart tips so that you get more throws out of each tip, helping you conserve seeds.

[–] Audalin 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I knew all that except the "darts never break" part and T1 damage (which I also knew once, but the last time I used darts was somewhere pre-1.0 and I forgot the details). But thanks anyway.

[–] chonglibloodsport 1 points 7 months ago

Other people reading might not have known.

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