Wait, temporary? I don't think that's properly communicated in the game, unless I overlooked something. I was under the impression that it was permanent, which probably doesn't help with people being reluctant to make the trade. I'm also unclear on what the "loaning" refers to. She mentioned at one point that she'd give it back, but I haven't seen any indication of that happening. Is that something I missed, something that hasn't been implemented yet, or a sort of "meta" reference where she's hinting at your next incarnation?
The Witch shop is another one of those things that were not tutorialized as well as they should be, but when she says she'll give it back to you, she does mean it. Loaning her mana removes that amount from your current maximum mana. You can only loan her mana that you don't already have assigned to spells, so if for example you have 10 max mana and have 8 already put into active spells, you can only give her up to 2, which is still 20 points worth of value for a deal. Then the max mana is returned to you the next time you enter a Witch's Den.
I'm not just talking about having high corruption, though. I'm talking about having other negative stats at a high enough level that it's simply impossible to accomplish anything due to the penalties, but then still taking forever to actually "die". When you get stuck in a cascade of certain types of issues, your characters will suffer corruption breaks every few turns but not actually gain much (if any) permanent corruption because you haven't been gaining any temporary corruption. If I try to "suicide" on an enemy or trap at this point, my characters will flail at it and do absolutely nothing, but still barely inch towards death even as I mash the "end turn" button.
I've found this to be particularly problematic when my characters have the "Idle Hands" curse, where spending time resting to recover their negative stats will leave them permanently more prone to rendering themselves completely incapacitated and keeping their lust at absurdly high levels, while also having high exhaustion and injury due to masturbating in the middle of a fight and not being able to properly recover. And all of this happens while still at low corruption levels, without increasing them by nearly as much as you'd expect from that kind of clusterfuck. As a result, that particular curse feels like it has a significantly higher impact on the run than the others, which are more focused on giving you little bits of temporary corruption, which is why a previous post of mine focused on ideas to turn it into something more manageable and fun.
I've had other people point out that there needs to be more methods of lust mitigation. Injury mitigation effects are more common in skills, but lust is a more common damage type even though there's no good way of healing it. This makes lust effects like aphrodisiac, and indeed, masturbation overpowered, so Idle hands constantly forcing masturbation to occur... Yeah. It could probably use a balance pass already, though the underlying issue also needs addressed. Either way it's a fair point.
Hmm... And while checking the game to verify things, I also ran into two more bugs. One was another "this pangram" bug when Lucette got sprayed by pollen,
Yup, looks like there's another formatting error in the high lust variant of the aphrodisiac pollen script (dammit)
and another was something I didn't quite catch until after it had been happening for a while. Elli was stuck masturbating but not gaining any lust (which meant no corruption break and no getting out of it without an ally's assistance). Her most recent action had been disarming a binding rope trap, so I'm not sure if that had something to do with what triggered it.
This is probably something with the overlap of masturbation and captive both changing her ai behavior. I'll look into that case.
Edit: On the subject of being stuck on a trap or monster and doing nothing, what does the "Rage" effect do? I haven't seen any sort of description in the game and haven't been able to figure anything out through trial and error. I let one of my characters spend like 50 turns trying and failing to disarm a bestial pyre and getting a ton of rage triggers, and I still can't figure anything out. I assume it has something to do with why she failed to disarm the trap after 50 turns, but I can't figure out what.
So this is actually two things. There's the 'Fury' status and the 'Berserk' status.
Fury is a stacking buff/debuff that does nothing on its own, but most skills/effects that generate it will have a 'Rage Bonus' effect that only goes off if you trigger their effect while at 3 Fury (I basically just stole Trinity from One Step From Eden). So for example a skill that is in the game already and works, but doesn't have any way of actually learning it, Primally Primed:
And the idea is that some threats can also apply Fury to your allies and trigger their own Rage Effects that are much less bonus-y. The idea with the bestial pyre and the scout beast was that if either of them triggered a Rage Effect it would put the character in Berserk, buuuuuut...
Berserk just ended up missing the cut-off for getting added since it was going to require its own AI behaviors AND figuring out how ally vs ally combat should work. Would've been 'afflicted ally moves to nearest monster room or other ally and attacks them until berserk runs out'. Since that isn't a thing yet both threats should be inflicting Exposed as a Rage Effect instead.
i gotta say tho, it feels like this might turn into one of those games where the better i play the more 'fun' i end up avoiding?maybe make some kinda way to remove perma corruption at the cost of increasing dungeon stats so you can see more events without risking game over, or reduce a characters stats to remove said corruption?
I understand the concern here and it's something I'll need to watch (options for lewds even when playing to avoid corruption). Worth pointing out that, at least currently, there are no events that are gated by corruption. That'll probably change though.
Also, while Permanent Corruption is called "Permanent", don't be surprised at all if there ends up being a way to remove SOME of it... For a price, probably.
Like the camp actions I figured the current dungeon is incomplete and will see some more things populate it in future updates. Stuff like room features that are not traps you can disarm, wandering more dangerous monsters following a patrol path, doors to subsections needing you to find the key/lever to open it up, etc. Assessment on the current game loop is in context of it being a framework. I assume with this being a sorta roguelite run-based thing we will probably see a Slay the Spire style three act structure with gating mechanisms between them, and what we are looking at is roughly a quarter of the way into the dungeon in terms of depth.
Yeah, the dungeon needs spruced up with more room types and features etc, it's just lower priority than camp additions and some other stuff.
Other than that, it's a bit difficult to confirm how accurate your length estimates are. While you can definitely expect a run to be longer than it currently is, it's not like the current 10 floor length is quick, exactly. There are elements of snowball-yness with things like curses, corruption, diminishing returns on stat points, etc. that are likely to have bigger effects the longer a run gets, but I guess I'll have to figure those kinds of things out.
