Are you with or against the nerf?

Ciel Adjusting Welcome Company's portraits/damage does affect how the shard works, in conjunction with, assumedly, things like the dullahammer heads having more HP. I'm thinking those two changes are related - I can't imagine they're thrilled about everyone ignoring that those things were put in the levels. But again, we don't know the severity at which things were decreased/increased and this is all just a response at surface level to something that may mean very little change in the end, if just to encourage some more variety. Some of the earliest things also being some of the best isn't good, and certainly when those things allow you to press through the level design as if it wasn't there. If they're going through the trouble of making the adjustments to the shards and the enemy HP, it's unlikely that the only effect will be making players who use it "less powerful for no reason". A nerf to these things seemed to be aimed as a buff to the game's design and the spirit of trying more things. I'm always in the camp too of players adapting to the game rather than the game adapting to players. I can never presume to know more than the creators on how things should be. I'm not explicitly saying you're doing that as I assume not, since I think it's a matter of a philosophy difference rather than you're saying you do know how better to design it.

I can't speak to some of the other later game things like that sword, and I didn't mean my post to be "strictly true" or an absolute - Rhava Velar may be taking a hit, but I have no experience with that as I understood it to likely already still be a "weaker Crissaegrim" built into the standard progression path and not on the level of an endgame weapon or shard like Blue Rose, Eternal Blue, etc are. That's what I meant with "extremely powerful late game weapons" - the ones you're generally only getting either after the final boss clear or just before it. The shards/weapons listed all seem to fall into the game's standard progression before you get to that point, and that point being where just about anything goes. Again unfortunate that many and myself never really had much incentive to try those things because of some of those shards listed.

For Chaser Arrow vs True Arrow, you could make the former faster with more projectiles, and drive home the "tracking" aspect of it where it homes the target for quite a while if contact isn't made. It's up to them how they do that. I respect the idea of playstyles and things just being too boring, but I don't like the idea of the game's design being in a vacuum. They can perhaps make things un-boring and while we're at first resistant to change as always to how we play, may find new reason to revisit the things we dismissed as trash. If there's also seemingly a singular "main" playstyle that you see on every streamer's media, it's less about style and just wanting to be contrary/different to what's apparently objectively the easiest/best thing. Variety being more real than arbitrary is probably preferable while within the main story's initial progression.

I would rather feel like "x is very good and I already have it, but I feel like y could work as well and be very strong if I build it up some more" instead of "x is beating the game for me basically, so I think I need to limit myself more with this neat-looking thing that I know isn't good". This is a hard goal to hit in a game with so many things in it though, but I commend them and wish them the best on it.

Well, like I mentioned earlier, these games work with the player getting stronger the longer they play. The "when" you acquire a weapon isn't just where in the story's progression you are, but also how much time and effort was involved to grind the process of making it. If I'm not mistaken, crafting Eternal Blue takes a good bit more work than the Rhava Velar. You have to have the Dies Irae first, which takes (among a bunch of other things, like making the Durandal before it etc), Crimsonite like the Velar does, and after you've done that, two Orichalcum for the EB itself, which seems like the hardest non-boss material to get.

But isn't this just nitpicknig a very specific item on their list, though? lol I hope you guys get my point because even if this sword is a notable exception, I don't think it diminishes what I meant.

Explain the nerf to Rhava Velar, then. You could almost make a case for Rhava Búral, since you get it in the Cathedral, except that there's plenty of things that out-damage it, even at that point in the game. For it's upgraded form, though, there should be no excuse. You can't even get Rhava Velar until you beat Millionaire's Bane, which you can't do until you've gotten to the Den of Behemoths. It's an end-game weapon, considered to be in the same tier as Blue Rose and Eternal Blue, the absolute strongest weapons of their categories.


This argument feels disingenuous. We may not have exact numbers, but we can make an educated guess. The nerfs must be at the least substantial enough to make a noticeable impact on game difficulty when using those items. Otherwise they will have had no effect on the game at all. So we can reasonably assume that they  have each been adjusted, at bare minimum, to take a couple extra seconds to clear a room with. We might assume a more than that if the goal is to get people to see more of the boss patterns. That gives us a reasonable expectation for minimum to maximum adjustments. Assuming they didn't just make them garbage, each has been adjusted somewhere between taking a few extra seconds to clear a room on Hard, and being able to see all of a boss' attacks on Normal when using them at an appropriate level, around the point in the game when you first can get them. We can guess that Welcome Company has gotten nerfed worse than the rest, since it is the only one specifically said to be "nerfed significantly". Suggesting that we have no idea whatsoever how much these items will have changed just isn't true.


I can't speak for anyone else, but I had Dies Irae before I had Rhava Velar. It's what I used to get Rhava Velar...and, if I'm honest, what I used instead of Rhava Velar for everything but farming until I went back after beating the game and got some crazy shards to boost up Rhava to the point that having weapons with better damage didn't matter any more. I know at least two of the swords needed to craft Durandal, the game just gives to you, and the third isn't hard to make. Crimsonite I had extra of lying around, because a lot of recipes call for it. That just left Fiend Fang, and the enemies that drop that are on the way to the chest with the Millionaire's Key.

I've been hesitant to post here because while I'm an ardent (albeit non-vocal till now) supporter of the nerfs, I never really used any of the equipment that was nerfed. I know a lot of people did though and I feel as if I'm missing something that people who did use them get/feel because I decided not to use these in any of my playthroughs.

There are only 3 nerfs that actually confuse me here: Rhava Velar, Craftwork, and Chase Arrow. Rhava because it's an endgame weapon that should be at least a little ridiculous and tbh I thought it was a bit weak compared to the rest. Craftwork is a free DPS booster if you don't have anything else, but if you have the finger dexterity to actually use it effectively you deserve it or who knows maybe they nerfed it because they didn't want people to kill their fingers. Chase Arrow is out of place because you get it a full third of the game later than Straight Arrow, which is only really broken because you can rank 6 it out of the gate and rank 9 with elemental ammo. I'm not sure if Chase Arrow is as easy to upgrade but even if it is, it should be stronger as you are only supposed to get it post-Bathin (although it can be gotten post Andrealphus which might be why it was hit and summon chair was not).

As for the rest of the nerfs, I think they're fine. The way I see it is that people are attached to shards that helped carry them through the game and don't want to see them be brought in line with everything else, but I'm probably wrong somewhere there and as I said before I don't really use the nerfed shards or have any attachment to them so there is probably something I am missing. I understand where the devs are coming from in terms of preserving game flow and difficulty curve which some of the shards definitely break over their knee (bunny form, welcome company, dulla heads) and it is here where I support the nerfs. Personally, I'd rather have a game where I have to think for every step and action I take and ask "is this worth it" when I use a shard rather than just blowing through everything with the same stuff for the entire game.

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I can't speak for everyone but I definitely didn't get into IGA's Castlevanias because I wanted to be OP. If I did, I wouldn't have bothered beating all the bosses with a stripped down toolset.

Really wish they'd work on everything else

i'm already against nerfs but c'mon we are still missing content and dealing with things like bugs


i made an account to ask if Xbox has to deal with DRM preventing the ability to load saves offline but nerfs is another thing that just bugs me
Now for speedrunners it seems even more unfair with nerfs many players will be at a huge disadvantage in terms of records

with less than half of the player base defeated last boss and they still think nerf is a good idea. This is beyond me.

The promo video where they said they listen to fans is false advertisement. Apparently, they just pretend to listen to fans but the truth is they don't care at all.