The G-Meister
Giga Slime
A short while back when I decided to pick a spot to grind for my Spinsect card (still haven't got it 
) I decided to choose this spot right here:
The three monsters that spawn are Spinsects, Shroomies and Toxic Tulips. It just happens to be a coincidence that it's the only place to grind Toxic Tulips as well, but hey. The reason I picked this spot over any others is because all of the other spots which have Spinsects spawning also spawn Larvacids.
Maybe I'm playing wrong, but so far I've only found them counterintuitive and annoying on the harder difficulty. It's a combination of the three traits I've seen them have so far which gets on my nerves - they excrete acid everywhere, have a lot of health and move pretty quickly.
I assume their intention is to divide off areas of combat with their acid trail. Going by this judgement, one would assume they could provide an interesting challenge to players looking to enhance their combat skills or more experienced players wanting a masochistic clusterfuck on their hands (I'm definitely one of those people). While this does happen to an extent, when there is more than one of them, the situation starts to get a bit messy.
At this point, the majority of the screen is divided into pretty small sections by acid from about 4 of them. Now, say I'm in the top situation, and I wanna kill some stuff, including them so they stop reducing where I can walk. Here are my options:
Option 1: wait for the stuff to come to me. This works for the Spinsects just fine. However the Shroomie aggro radius is a bit small for them to come to you all the time, especially when there's a barrier in the way. The Larvacids don't even track you at all, so you've got to come they come in your general direction.
Option 2: wait for the acid to disperse. That would be a viable option if it didn't take about 15 seconds. C'mon, this is an RPG I'm playing here, I shouldn't have to wait!
While I've been making this decision, another Larvacid is coming my way. If I don't kill him in one barrage (which I can't unless I have all the +ATK gear and talents I can get, even with a gold charge Blade Flurry) then he's gonna cut up my area into even smaller divisions.
By this point, an enemy can easily push you into the acid as the area is so small, or it's so boring sitting there that you just walk over the acid anyway. This then defeats the purpose of the acid altogether.
If we take all this into account, it becomes rather pointless and annoying. However, the main point I should be getting at is that I have a choice over what debuff I have - I can either have half the screen filled with acid that I can't control (very well, at least) or half the screen filled with poison gas which I can control. When they both do pretty much the same damage (apart from the poison wears off quicker) I'm clearly going to choose the Tulips to fight.
So, tl:dr, here's some reasonable changes which I personally think might make them more fun to have around:
) I decided to choose this spot right here:The three monsters that spawn are Spinsects, Shroomies and Toxic Tulips. It just happens to be a coincidence that it's the only place to grind Toxic Tulips as well, but hey. The reason I picked this spot over any others is because all of the other spots which have Spinsects spawning also spawn Larvacids.
Maybe I'm playing wrong, but so far I've only found them counterintuitive and annoying on the harder difficulty. It's a combination of the three traits I've seen them have so far which gets on my nerves - they excrete acid everywhere, have a lot of health and move pretty quickly.
I assume their intention is to divide off areas of combat with their acid trail. Going by this judgement, one would assume they could provide an interesting challenge to players looking to enhance their combat skills or more experienced players wanting a masochistic clusterfuck on their hands (I'm definitely one of those people
). While this does happen to an extent, when there is more than one of them, the situation starts to get a bit messy.At this point, the majority of the screen is divided into pretty small sections by acid from about 4 of them. Now, say I'm in the top situation, and I wanna kill some stuff, including them so they stop reducing where I can walk. Here are my options:
Option 1: wait for the stuff to come to me. This works for the Spinsects just fine. However the Shroomie aggro radius is a bit small for them to come to you all the time, especially when there's a barrier in the way. The Larvacids don't even track you at all, so you've got to come they come in your general direction.
Option 2: wait for the acid to disperse. That would be a viable option if it didn't take about 15 seconds. C'mon, this is an RPG I'm playing here, I shouldn't have to wait!
While I've been making this decision, another Larvacid is coming my way. If I don't kill him in one barrage (which I can't unless I have all the +ATK gear and talents I can get, even with a gold charge Blade Flurry) then he's gonna cut up my area into even smaller divisions.
By this point, an enemy can easily push you into the acid as the area is so small, or it's so boring sitting there that you just walk over the acid anyway. This then defeats the purpose of the acid altogether.
If we take all this into account, it becomes rather pointless and annoying. However, the main point I should be getting at is that I have a choice over what debuff I have - I can either have half the screen filled with acid that I can't control (very well, at least) or half the screen filled with poison gas which I can control. When they both do pretty much the same damage (apart from the poison wears off quicker) I'm clearly going to choose the Tulips to fight.
So, tl:dr, here's some reasonable changes which I personally think might make them more fun to have around:
- Decrease the time it takes for acid to disappear a bit. When they move twice as fast as in Easy mode and have almost double the despawn time, it gets a bit over the top.
- Set a cap of 2 maximum. Then they become the Halloweed/Yeti of Mt. Bloom. Having said that, I think there might be a couple bugs/changes with the spawning system that I'm still investigating. This post may become irrelevant if it's just a bug.
- Make them cut off the player's movement actively by attempting to trap them in a set size of square. This means they're always around the player, making them less of a job to kill. Especially with the acid trail disappearing rapidly once they're dead, it means you have to kill them to escape without taking damage.
