My Problem With Scrolls of Upgrade And Item Tiers

Disclaimer: Not a native English speaker. Forgive me for any weird phrasing or spelling mistake. TLDR at the bottom.

My problem with upgrades, and how it could be better.

There is this game called Shattered Pixel Dungeon. It is a mod from the original Pixel Dungeon, but at this point has become its own thing. You play as one of four characters that will have to go through 05 areas of a dungeon in order to reach the deepest level and acquire the Amulet of Yandor. To do so you will need to fight a boss located after every 5 levels, along with many enemies and traps located in the levels leading to the boss. Your weapons are armors, swords, wands, artifacts, rings, potions, scrolls, seeds, magical/regular stones and strategy. In SPD (Shattered Pixel Dungeon) all actions are turn based, so you can take as much time as you need to plan your actions before executing them. Every time you move or do an action your character will slowly get hungry until it starts starving. When starving your health won’t regenerate and you will continuously take damage. But fear not, because for every non-boss level a [food] will spawn. Even so, it will eventually end, which means that running up and down around the dungeon is only slightly viable.

To stop you from just blazing your way through it unimpeded the game has a tier system to the defense and attacking items. They range from tier-1 to tier-5 with different requirements of strength. Strength is a stat that defines which tier of equipment your character is able to equip without any downsides. The game won’t actually stop you from using high level items without having the strength to do it, but it will drastically reduce move speed, accuracy, evasion and defense along with taking more turns to equip/unequip. Every character has 10 base strength and to increase there are two Potions of Strength per biome, each increasing your strength by 01 point. The weapons and armor in turn have strength requirements that increase by two for every tier, so tier-1 items will require 10 strength points; tier-2 will require 12 strength points; tier-3 14 points and so on. This makes it so that even if you get lucky enough to drop a high tier weapon at the start biome, you won’t be able to use it without hindrance.

Since enemies’ health and damage scale along with how deep you go into the dungeon, being able to use a tier-5 weapon right at the start of the run would make things too easy. To make things fair, the tier of the items will also scale with the depth, so stronger enemies also means stronger items.

Along with it you have the Scrolls of Upgrade. You get three of these for every biome, making a total of 15 SoU (Scrolls of Upgrade). Using them on an item will increase its max attack/defense by (weapon tier + 1) and its minimum attack/defense by 01. This makes tier 5 weapons particularly strong since their damage increases by 6 while a level 3 weapon increases by 4. The item strength requirement will also be lowered by 01 after receiving 01, 03, 06, 10, 15 and 21 upgrades, allowing you to equip high level items a bit sooner. And this last one is what makes me annoyed.

Since high tier items have a higher increase in value, finding one in the first two biomes of the game will make your life much easier. All you have to do is dump all your Scrolls of Upgrade into it to be able to use a really powerful item much sooner than intended. This in itself is not a bad thing. SPD is not an easy or forgiving game. Enemies are tough and will keep spawning regardless of what you do (except on the boss stage). Resources are “finite”, so just walking around will easily end your run under unfortunate circumstances. Even having a powerful item doesn’t mean that you will have a super easy time, but it can certainly make the game much easier/viable. The problem is what I like to call “luck manipulation”.

To most roguelikes, the main core is luck. Yes, player skill does play a huge part in it, but regardless of how good you are, bad luck can end any run at any time. Whether it is by 03 specific enemies spawning at the right time and place, a hidden trap at the worst possible moment or just getting really bad RNG, at some point you will lose. To work with it you use static information to “manipulate luck.” If a Fly drops a potion, it is a potion of health. Piranhas are hard to kill but will always drop food. If a puzzle requires a potion of fire, said potion will be somewhere on the current level. All of these are set things that will allow you to manipulate luck in your favor. The bad luck of finding a Fly now turns into the chance of finding a Health Potion. This allows you to better prevail even if most odds are against you. The sad part is that this does not apply to armor or weapons. Finding a high tier weapon on the first two biomes is something born entirely of luck. Sometimes you can even get as far as the 04 biome without even seeing a single tier-4/5 item. It is frustrating, because your current weapons are too low tier to have a significant increase in damage after receiving the upgrades that you are saving to use, and even if you do so, the damage won’t be enough to deal with the enemies from the last biome or to ascend.

This problem could be dealt with by removing the tier system and replacing it with something that increases with your experience level. This way all weapons would have minor differences in damage, making the choice more of weapon type than weapon tier. Now finding a weapon at the start or end of the game makes virtually no difference, and using or not Scrolls of Upgrade are only a matter of personal weapon choice. But doing this would most likely be too much since this is one of the core gameplay mechanics. Changing it is not viable without also changing a huge amount of other gameplay mechanics, which in turn would also change others, and so on. To do it you would most likely end up redoing the entire game.

The problem here is that you need to rely too much on luck to give you a high tier weapon so that you can use the upgrades on it. But what if the upgrades are no longer bound to the weapon. What if you could transfer them from one weapon to another? This would have to be something that destroyed the item having the upgrades removed from, hard to obtain and considerably expensive to stop players from moving upgrades around too easily, after all, this is still SPD. Something that could be bought at shops or even as a reward for the cave quest would be enough. With this you could use the Scrolls of Upgrade in a lower tier item until you came across a better one later on.

Another one would be to create a static way of acquiring a high tier weapon. It would have to be something hard to do and that rewards ability/cleverness. Something like “Don’t get hit by the special attack of the [first boss] and you get a 100% drop chance to a tier 3 item. Don’t let it touch water and you get a 100% drop to a tier 4 item.” Or it could use sacrificial fires taking into account how many mobs you killed near it. Kill 10 mobs near it, tier 3 item. Kill 15 mobs near it, tier 4 item. 25 mobs, tier 5 item. Throw a weapon into it and it gets consumed to drop the new one related to how many kills you got. Same thing with the armor.

These are just ideas. Something that came out of someone that doesn’t have to do the code for the game, so telling me to f*** off is not something wrong to be done.

I have a deep love for roguelikes and their replayability. The world is so full of meaningful and important choices, so turning your brain off and doing something over and over again without the need to care for anything else is something that I cherish very much. Couple that with my love for pixelated games (all hail the almighty Stardew Valley) and you get a game that I already love, even though I only started playing it last year. Shattered Pixel Dungeon will always have a place in my heart regardless of anything. If the world lasts until there, I will teach my kids to play it. Of course they won’t like it because, well, teenagers. But that doesn’t mean that I will stop trying, over and over again.

TLDR: Game would be better with a way to acquire higher tier items sooner without having to rely on luck, or have some way to transfer upgrades from one item to another.