PLEASE DON'T NERF!!!

In my experience I mostly dislike the changes they made to the dullahammer heads, both enemy and familiar. The former is simply more annoying now and the latter has gone from best familiar to pretty much useless in nightmare mode.

Besides that, I still find the change to craftwork bizarre.

Welcome company never mattered to me since it was way too annoying that I had to re-cast it when entering a new room so I wasn't using it before.
Don't really feel the changes to riga storaema / dohin.
In my current run I'm already past flying edge and rhava bural being useful anyway so can't tell if the effect on those is bad or meaningless.

That's the thing though - mostly these effects are either bad or meaningless. In either case there's no good reason to do it.

Goddamn nerf herders.

purifyweirdshard about craftwork, yeah I read that before. Could be the reason but to me as a player it was already not viable enough to use it casually for damage dealing and using it constantly during regular gameplay honestly seems very hard to do. There are already more buttons to press than the fingers I have available so this would be really hard to pull off effectively.

I'd really appreciate it if some of these nerfs would increase the cost to get somewhere rather than making that somewhere just kind of boring and useless. For instance, they could give craftwork an MP starting cost. Boom, problem solved.

Looking at the poll result, the nerf supporter is the minority.

So to start, I don't count you among those who are perenially upset about things, Ciel. At most, I think you've picked a couple of battles over the years, but not whatever the current one is until it's over, and your support ending anew each time etc. I've seen you engage thoughtfully and positively in many instances, while in other cases some guys (here and elsewhere, I'm being very general here) only have time for the opposite. That's where the main part of my frustration comes from, with a game that everyone seems to actually like and did quite well otherwise. After the fact, it's kind of like what's stuck around is residual flavor of the week discontent. Kind of like the old days, just without people on the positive side stopping by to say something because they're done with the game by now. That poll for/against the nerf or paid DLC isn't just myself on the "yes", but you don't see much of anyone besides myself engaging on it for that side because of how this conversation flows. I wasn't even at first staunchly on one side or the other with this case in particular, but I felt like there wasn't nearly enough going on with the "for" side for it to be fair and reflect a more complete picture of the issue.

The most you get otherwise is how allooutrick responded, which to me is sad to see
bloodstained.forums.net/post/71226/thread

"Maybe he's weird" for trusting the development and wanting to see where it goes? We've always given basically preferential treatment to criticism of the game here, but now it teeters on somewhat of a silly level to me, giving a false impression of the community and the game. I'm fine with all expressing their concerns here, but not to pass themselves off as a majority or half, and placing people who like things in a minority and not wanting to post anymore. These thoughts/posts aren't being ignored, obviously, they're running the conversation across multiple threads about the same things, and not much else is going on right now.

On to the argument itself - how is/was it determined that they failed doing what they were trying to accomplish? Without access to the data/testing and looking into it that they did (and I think it would be distasteful of us to automatically assume that they based their changes on no data or close observation), and doing said testing/perusal again post-patch, we won't know how the experience of first-time players is meaningfully affected by these changes. Many of these things didn't need hits that were too hard on them to dissuade the shards' use, quite the opposite actually, the idea is to keep them all viable and not to the detriment of trying any one of them. Keep Welcome Company et al strong, but not an obvious primary choice and something you're coming across by default without much effort or looking things up.

I've never been one of the people to bring up the multiplayer stuff in this conversation - as again like I've said before I don't think that was part of the consideration. A lot of people were talking about the multiplayer aspect in this thread, to which I specifically dis-included that from my part in the discussion (you may have missed this, the stuff is spread everywhere. My post that starts with "the problem" a few up from this is also good context, but I think you know/have read most of the crux of the single player reasoning side from the sound of it):
bloodstained.forums.net/post/71533/thread

So, to say there is "no reason" for these things is an unfair dismissal when I think I've put forth a legitimate reason - and the success of which we can't dismiss yet ourselves either. What is more readily apparent though is how it doesn't seem to affect the end or post-game player much at all because it wasn't directed at them, which is what many seemed to be worried about.

Hey, I already said so, but just as a reminder again, I'm not using multiplayer as a point here. That's something being thrown around on the other side to tear down, that I don't agree adds up either - or at least not significantly enough to be sincerely used. I think they're doing their best to finish putting together Zangetsu mode as far as the next content, with the time that's spare from Switch work, bugs, etc.

I think I'm pretty relaxed.

That's probably because I've felt like I'm playing the entire outfield myself against the opposing team, and doing that largely because it seemed like no one else was. Some past experience and state of things, how I feel them, spills over. Trust me, not really angry about it. I've been through much stickier situations with Bloodstained stuff and never got riled up about it, but I do have a long history too of taking up for it when I feel it's fair to.