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Secrets of Grindea » Post-Release Recap #06: Designing New Game+
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While I love the idea of adding pins, what I'm much more eager to see are difficulty enhancers beyond just options to give enemies +DMG or +HP. These could influence what you unlock at the end of a run, or just be for fun.
Things like, off the top of my head:
Fungal Feet: Every 5-10 seconds a mushroom will spawn under your feet that will burst into a blinding spore cloud in 1 second.
Toxic Spores: For every 1 second spent in a spore cloud, accumulate a tick of poison damage.
Bombardment: All enemies now spawn bombs on death. Elites spawn even more.
Fragility: Any attack that isn't a perfect guard will instantly shatter your shield.
Blood Bandaging: Restoring your shield costs 5% of your max HP, activated by pressing the shield button while in the perma-shield broken state.
Bad Time: All enemies spawn as Elites.
Very Bad Time: All enemies spawn as Hype Elites.
Blank Deck: You start with a fully 'completed' Card Album, but all card effects are disabled this run. If you just want to skip card grinding and go straight to Z-Man at the end, here you go. (Unless previous 100% card albums count towards this, meaning no need to re-grind every playthrough...? Honestly anything that doesn't require re-grinding card albums again and again is ideal.)
Protection: All enemies are spawned with a special instance of Guardian's barrier. After taking a single instance of damage it will vanish after a second. Enemies that react to taking damage (Knights, Larvacids, etc) will still trigger their effects.
Resistant: All enemies gain 100% immunity to Flinch.
Adapt and Ovecome: For every non-boss battle spawned type of an enemy you kill, all future versions of that enemy gain +1% ATK, +1% HP and a tiny, cappable amount of ATK/movespeed.
Firewalk: Every step you take leaves a fire trail that ignites after a second, dispersing after a number of seconds. Hurts you and enemies.
Goop: All enemies leave a puddle of slowing goop on death.
Exhaustion: Energy no longer refills. If you want energy back, use talents or effects that add energy back.
Mono-Element: At the start of your run, all 1H skills, 2H skills and three random elements are locked. You're left with the last one to put points into for this run.
Surprise: Every second that passes, there's a 0.1% chance you may be surprised. (To have a 9,999 damage dealing Cursed Blade-esque Shadow of Madness take a swipe at you.)
Stale: Using the same skill twice in a row causes it to do dramatically less damage. For Shadowclone/Berserk, this kicks in for melee damage if that threshold is hit without using another skill in that timeframe.
(Not vouching for any of them being good, just random ideas.
)As for pins, I feel like having them drop from common enemies might... take away from the appeal of them? You transition them away from being a cool modifier for the run and more into another bit of gear to grind for. Incentivizing AFK grinds, both to get them from enemy drops and to get money to reroll them from the Pin Merchant. Both of which take away a significant amount of what makes pins enjoyable in Arcade Mode.
As for Story-unique pins:
Bow and Fairrow: Adds a fairy who fires an arrow in the direction you're facing every few seconds, similar to fireball fairy. (Assuming all the Arcade Mode archery pins are in, for synergy.)
Magic Missile: Your wand/staff missiles add a stacking bonus damage to your next non-summoned spell.
Poise Break: After dealing 10 critical hits with skills to an enemy their defense is reduced to 0 for the next few seconds, doesn't stack with multi-hit skills. 50 hits with melee attacks. Has a cooldown for triggering again. (Maybe a little too complex.)
Guardian: Landing a perfect guard triggers all enhancement spells on you for a number of seconds. Duration stacks.