The new fixes feel very playable. I ran through the majority of the level but took a break after finishing much of it. Here's a big pile of notes on my route.
I started with the KM stats which seemed like a normal start although I suspect not having the mistblade and scrap shield makes it a not so great start than the others even if it has slightly better stats and hp.
Stats at the moment (most rooms cleared, but haven't opened level boss, admittedly I'll probably need to scrounge some HP before I do that). I suspect this run could be piloted a bit better to win, especially if I routed in silver oar but the gap between an optimized run and this run will be enormous.
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ROUND 2 notes on v16:
took Kieran stats.
route is similar to earlier just bleeding less HP
1. take digs in 1E
2. 1E even with the bomb changes the room has some issues. I suspect it would be better with minor geometry changes to allow mirrors for yellow key to be an OK trade. As is I can't see any reason to not go south first then east and leave the room mostly untouched.
3. 1S1E: wall walk skeleton + 3khp
4. get +9 attack by fighting NE queen and fegundo. Use prot to save 60hp against skipper
5. buy bronze shield for a blue key
6. 2N1E use speed potion to rush spear. works out to be a decent choice before going S. Also saves a lot against slayers. use green to kill slayer it's a wash but seemed OK
7. took +3 attack from gel and then use might to save 400hp against roach for +20
8. frost 2N2E to get the keys and the dig cache. take 3k hp for digs
9. ideally we'd now use mistblade to kill adder to hit 320 attack for wubbas but can't do this with KM's start. I'll also note that if we treat this as a typical start I have to wait a lot longer to get the yellow oath online. Probably for the best but notable. That being said because yellow oath isn't metal ATM it's useful to bypass oremites so I bought it anyway
10: 3E it's now a very strong decision to cool scroll the firetrap here. I suspect it's too good compared to most other options but YMMV. Sadly if you do this you can basically ignore all the other decisions in the room and grab the gems immediately.
12: 4E take 3 beam hits destroy the raft man. Sacrifice 2nd raft man which wastes the green key at the end. Hitting 444 attack seemed hard so I suspect it was never worth killing them.
13: after this I went back west to clean up a bit and hit 17 yellow keys getting yellow oath online. Gain a little more attack so I can get the mirror shield from the wubbas
14: mirror shield makes it cheap to unlock the altar so I do that now too and take def
15: steal attack behind brain in 1S4E then kill iron brain for 3khp. 1 more attack to 1 shot aumtlich so I get that then go through 1N4E.
16: 1N5E take mobius token for blue key
17: I'm only now noticing that in 4E I could have stepped diagonally from 4,5. Don't think that changes much but interesting to notice
18: kill goblin shaman with goblin biter. Spend y+2khp for the 30 def
19: 7E take a bunch (7) of hits from ghost skippers and get +9def. There's not much way to deal with this room or get the blue key until very late but it's a room you can get around by just trading hp. We should probably reduce def on ghost skippers so the player could plausibly kill them just a little earlier.
20: go south into vaults. only 2300 gr so ignore this room for now. 6765 hp could trade well into essence guy so it's maybe for now but hard to use the oar after burning HP
21: clear 1S3E taking everything. New near term goal is to get two skeleton keys and 17k gr to use harvest on one of the lines in SW. This loses the VIP card but I don't really want to route it in. Annoyingly I left 1N3E in an non-traversable state because now you can pass through 1S3E and I used the raft. Not sure if it's a thing I'd actually fix though. Although since I don't have 400 attack I can't even get there unless I pass back through the north route. Expensive and wish I could have used a key to fix it instead
22: notably all the extra def we have means we can use adder in 1N3E as a greckly pinata quite effectively. This will be useful to keeping tempo up
23: spend many y and g to get aluminum shield puts me to 20 ykeys
24: use 1b to kill beaming brain in 1N7E and grab the stats
25: go to 2N6E by tanking damage disarmed and spend ykey. Then use mobius token to warp north in 2N6E to get through cheaply
26: 3N6E is free with aluminum shield
27: 3N5E: use frost capsule to skip forgotten experiment. Use essence drinker to kill contents of room gaining +40 attack +10 def. This feels reasonably strong, but it's a huge amount of stats for not too much damage taken. I would request some sort of tweak to the scripting to print the +50/+50 from unequipping separately from the stat gain from the kills because it's very confusing to see it happen. I thought the item was broken for a few minutes and I'm sure I won't be the only one.
Took a break here. I think my earlier feel that total number of greckles is a bit painful but I guess that's a reasonable contraint.
1S7E: putting strike in front on maid means that stepping on the swords to get around maids or dodge means getting hit twice. Hopefully not intended.
1N7E: perhaps make the ice into trapdoors and replace the black gates with red gates. This disarms the room after clearing the room.
1N6E: perhaps it shouldn't be allowed to use the greckle gate to doorwalk past the green gate. Admittedly it's probably not relevant.
nd stopped after getting the essence drinker and killed the contents of 3N5E. I gained a lot of stats even from that room, but after it triggers the stat gain is very confusing because you also gain +50 atk/+50 def to uncancel the stat drop from the item.
If you need to think outside of the box, then you didn't build a good enough box.
