I think that one of the reasons the modding system is a relatively dull system is because Parched and BONA mods are essentially required items to beat a variety of challengers. There are multiple high-end challengers that essentially require 100% up time of Parched or BONA to stand a chance. And since these challengers mostly require different high-end weapons to beat them, you are essentially stuck modding out all of your high-end weapons with Parched or BONA.

There are a few weapons that give these effects, (I think OHS and Ostaff, maybe a few others) but the chance of activation is so low, and the up time is so low that it is impractical to rely on.

We need a couple weapons that can take the place of Parched mods so that the modification system can be interesting again. I would offer up the following 2 designs as possibilities:

Shield Grenade 50mil MC Tier 5 Once Per Battle 100% all icon block Activate Blessing 100%: No freezing. Lasts 20 turns

Shield Generator 50mil MC Tier 5 Multiple use 10% Heal Activate Blessing 100%: No freezing. No Stealing. Lasts 10 turns

Arguably, Parched is better than either of these, but these would be great items to keep in a battle quest set or for doing a couple quick battles that you don't want to change your mods around for just a hand full of battles., and they would be viable options for battles for sure. Numbers could definitely be tweaked on them, but I think both concepts would help increase the diversity of sets instantaneously even if they didn't have the tear effect or the heal.

This is an interesting idea, but I am skeptical of how to make it work without undoing that which makes these Challengers interesting to fight.

My t13 pets totally wale, and those who are now challenged by many of these Challengers would totally blow the fuck away almost all of those Challengers if I didn't have to chock in BONA and Parched everywhere all the time.

Would I buy these? You betcha! In a hot second.

Would they unbalance things? Yep.

More options for steal and freeze protection would be nice.

Is the Shield Generator supposed to be multiple use or OPB? Multiple use is sort of overpowered.

I haven't come to any conclusions yet because of balancing considerations, but I agree some of the harder opponents do freeze and steal fairly often.

I believe stealing has a bigger impact over freezing, as it could mess your strategy up. Besides the first turn, it only takes one lucky steal and unlucky blessing gap to alter things especially if you don't have an item generating weapon.

I have 3 BONA mods on my syringe, and it's still not really adequate against stealing. It doesn't always hold up, and activation feels very inconsistent.

There are blessings by the challengers which reduce freezing chance, most notably by the Friday 13th Careaper and Maleria's Familiar. Maybe these type of blessings could be considered as well?

I'd like to see more future weapons implement anti-steal/freeze blessings, that's a given. Or maybe make higher-tiered crystals of Parched or BONA...and while we're on the subject of crystals, how about releasing those higher-tiered stealing and healing crystals? Have those been held back for further testing?

A weapon that you shouldn't use every turn, that you use every 10 turns to set up BONA, and doesn't give you access to anything you don't already have access to by throwing 8x BONA mods on 2 god weapons.

I was pretty sure that both of these are probably actually worse than BONA/Parched. BONA/Parched give something like 98%+ up time. The Grenade gives a 100% uptime for short battles and the generator gives a 100% uptime with a TON of upkeep. Using the shield generator over Parched would require more in battle decision making than any other weapon on the site hands down.

I don't think these would unbalance anything. They are just an alternate route to give access to a function we already have.

How would they unbalance things.

Neither weapon would give access to something that Parched/BONA mods don't give us access to as is and the Battle mods always have the option of creating a challenger that blocks blessings and has freezing/stealing capability. The 1 dimensional aspect of battling right now is the only way to interact with those challengers is with a full set of parched/BONA

Yes please, I feel like I worked on my t13 a lot but with challengers that steals and/or freeze like crazy, it's just luck and all my work went to waste.

If the Parched and BONA mods are required to beat a variety of challengers, this could be a symptom that the challengers went though freeze and steal happy inflation, or that the battles feel like beating the odds over the long run.

Part of what I like about new weapons is the ability to give more flexibility in your strategy, but if the weapons unintentionally becomes a recommended workaround for the challengers shortcomings, the worst case could be that you'll have to sacrifice a slot and repetitively use this to beat the new challengers.

I think that's my main concern.

Also just wondering, we have the Intricate Energized Helmet. I'm curious to know why there isn't a more powerful weapon with more than 2 turn antifreeze blessing that activates 100 percent.

Maybe take all the Forj weapons and genetech combo them into a better weapon? Naturally has the Parched blessing in it. If the machete just had a heal and better defense, it'd be a nice choice to have. Easily one of my favorite weapons, but it loses its usefulness at some point.

Maybe distribute the BONA blessing to some existing weapons? I'd throw it on the PBB personally, or any light-based weapons. It's not perfect, but it's one way to get either blessing distributed more outside of mod crystals.

I'm not saying that all the high end challengers require Parched/BONA, but what I was saying is that the 5 or 6 challengers that do require Parched/BONA all do different icon types. If all the challengers that steal also happened to do a ton of water icons to the point that I could throw BONA on my SOSS/MW, and I would be free to customize the rest of my weapons as I saw fit that wouldn't be a bad thing. I think it becomes a problem when I essentially need a parched/BONA set up for every icon type.

I think the thing that is limiting design/decisions is the fact that I need to maintain multiple Parched/BONA weapons over several challengers.

New Parched/BONA options don't even need to be strictly on new weapons. I would even take new varieties of parched mods so that you could at least customize the weapons a little more. I die a little every time I need to throw Parched on Tainted Keeper Skull Staff, which does 0 fire or water icons, which are going to be soaked up into the net of wide shields from opponents, and provide no benefit. Vs if we had something like:

Swamp Parched 2 Earth 2 Dark 10% activate: Swamp Parched - No freezing.

Then at least it would feel like more of a decision tree.

Or throw Parched/BONA onto the super mediocre defense mods (which could probably get their own thread on how terrible they are.)

I could write a book on the issues with battling. But it seems to me that the staff have decided that battling should be as boring as possible and that anything that would introduce interest in the form of strategy would "make things too easy."

They want you to be forced to use different weapons for each opponent, and if a weapon works for more than one opponent, then the mod setup can't also work for both. You're talking about circumventing that issue. But its not an accidental flaw, its a deliberate design. So yeah, your solution would unbalance the current system.

I agree with the lack of variety of Parched/BONA, and that the defense mods could have a boost of something even if it's a Parched/BONA type blessing.

I was thinking about how we can possibly get a 100 percent activation of antifreeze or antisteal and being able to do it multiple times. Just the reliability 100 percent rate alone is pretty powerful compared to even a high random chance, and that's why the Intricate Energized Helmet isn't a rare weapon in many armories. I noticed during battles that if you steal a duplicate of OPB weapon and use it, all instances of that OPB weapon will be used. It seems like a glitch, but it could be turned into a feature. It shows that it's possible to have a "Limit one equipped" weapon being generated. Maybe being able to generate those shields as OPB weapons is a viable option. (Or we can simply have code to prevent generating another one if it already exists, but it usually takes forever to add new code into battling)

Strong support for a balanced solution that makes modding more interesting beyond two mods that you always need to use.

I think you overestimate how good these would be. Parched Nona would still be the gold standard if these were sold 100% as is.

The grenade would only be good for opponents that are relatively easy.

Generator would be a pain to use for a super long battle.

If you make things too complex they become too weak. Look at the panzer weapon people didn’t bother finishing testing

Having a continuous wall of blessing on demand is indeed nice for us, but I believe there has to be reasons why the system made it difficult even to roughly achieve that. Maybe because originally it was designed for possible PvP? I dunno. I think I'll come back to the shields later.

Since our weapons are usually clogged with Parched and BONA, what should we do about it? Should we leave it as is, or come up with new ideas?

1. Just use the mod with the highest blessing or curse chance, but make those chances higher. The attack and defense still stacks over multiple mods. Edit: The OP also proposed blessings on other plain attack and defense mods, but the other completely exclusive option is a have a mod that's main job is to have a high blessing or curse chance.

2. Something with a chance to generate a "Limit 1 equipped" OPB shield weapon Include this generation ability into some weapons, scroll, or through a mod.

3. Come up with a blessing that lasts long but doesn't always work (like Friday 13 Careaper's antifreeze)

4. More mod slots This isn't really my most favorite idea, because it could just get clogged with more of the same.

FYI there are more god weapons than O-staff that block freezing +/- stealing. Because of them I only have one parched or BoNA per weapon=two out of eight slots on most of my weapons. With high speed triggering god blessing and those two mods, I have freeze protection almost all the time.

either way overpowered or way too cheap