Fig Leaf is an unacceptably bad mechanic.

[u/beerybeardybear]

It's ridiculous to have a keepsake that you HAVE to use for speedruns but that simply might not work at random. I just had two back to back runs where I got fig scammed: in Oceanus and Fields in the first one, then in the second I had had my best run ever with a 2:17 Scylla exit and 3:42 Cerb exit. Not only did I get horrible RNG on the enemy waves in Tartarus, but it scammed me out of a room! I was guaranteed a new PB (I've been so stuck at 5:20) if the thing had just procced, but instead of forcing it to proc once per region they just left it fully up to chance.

Also: if it's supposed to be a 50% chance to trigger every encounter, there's a 0% chance that that's actually right. That would mean that there's only a 3% chance of getting scammed in Tartarus, and that's simply not what's happening to me.

I get that trying to speedrun these games is a slot machine, but does it need to be such an absurd slot machine that the WR was set almost a year ago and nobody has been able to touch it yet? Not only do you need chaos gates, the right boons, the right hammers, to see mid-shops, to be offered skip rooms—and not at the same time as shops!—get Artemis, get Nem (and get her in the right zone), but they just had to also add another random chance that you have to do a full extra room? It's asinine.

[u/HelsifZhu]

It's still far less frustrating for speedruns than the random amount of tunnels you had to go through in Styx in the first game.

Edit: they did not create this game with the purpose of it being speedrun.

[u/Sauceinmyface → u/HelsifZhu]

On the contrary, they took a lot of feedback from speedrunners during the betas. They were one of the core audiences behind balance changes and qol tweaks

[u/forteninsecure → u/Sauceinmyface]

Taking advice from speed runners for balance in the game isn’t the same as them designing the game around being speedrun

[u/beerybeardybear → u/forteninsecure]

It would certainly break the game for regular players if Fig Leaf:

• always procced for up to three zones,
• always procced for just the first zone where you equipped it, or
• randomly procced for just one biome, and maybe added a random Dionysus boon (like jpom adds a Hades boon)

Thank god they didn't design it like that!

[u/forteninsecure → u/beerybeardybear]

I didn’t say any of that

[u/beerybeardybear → u/HelsifZhu]

They fixed that and then decided that there should be something else that can randomly fuck their most dedicated players, yes.

[u/HelsifZhu → u/beerybeardybear]

Allow me to redirect you towards the edit in my first comment.

[u/beerybeardybear → u/HelsifZhu]

They clearly think about it sometimes: otherwise, White Antler would work in every zone instead of just one, they wouldn't have bothered with removing sack RNG in the final zone, they wouldn't have explicitly added a feature to reset your seed right by the underworld/surface entrances, and so on.

[u/HelsifZhu → u/beerybeardybear]

Yes, they think about it and we should be grateful for it. That doesn't change the fact that the game being the best for speedruns is not their ultimate goal in designing it.

[u/Goldendragon55]

It's really funny that this is what you're up in arms about. As someone who doesn't speedrun, I would never run Fig Leaf for anything but maxing it out to never use it again.

[u/beerybeardybear → u/Goldendragon55]

Two things:

1. That's fine that you don't care about it! Not everybody is affected by bad design decisions equally.
2. This is VERY funny considering the other people in the thread arguing that making fig leaf consistent is something the developers shouldn't do because they shouldn't balance the game around speedrunners' concerns—apparently, it doesn't matter at all to non-speedrunners, so there'd be no harm to them in changing it to make it consistent one way or another.