TVTropes Now available in the app store!
Open

Follow TV Tropes

Witchfire

Go To

  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
    • Thanks to the obscene amount of damage and crowd-control with very little mechanical execution needed, many Preyers swear by the Burning Stake Heavy Spell and the Stormball Light Spell. Simply activate the former, then throw out the latter, and watch as the repeated small tics of Shock damage charges Burning Stake and cause countless fiery explosions, taking out everything unfortunate enough to be in range.
    • Iron Cross is a dead-simple crowd control Heavy Spell that is useful for just about any piece of content. It summons a cross that tethers all nearby enemies to itself and charges them with lightning. If you ever see a bunch of enemies clustered together, lay down the cross and then fire off your Light Spell for insane damage, as the lightning arcs between each enemy and spreads the damage out. Combine it with the Conductor arcana (lightning kills refresh lightning spells) and you'll be able to deploy this at pretty much every encounter.
    • As of Early Access, the Rotweaver SMG is considered one of the best and most reliable weapons. Even with its tremendous damage falloff at range, it can cause the Decay status on distant enemies to gradually wear away chunks of their healthbars, so when they're finally close enough to be shot conventionally, they're much easier to kill.
    • The Hangfire is scarcely out of most Preyers' arsenals as a general-purpose weapon. It has great crowd control potential, is very forgiving with aiming (its Mysteriums even encouraging shooting near enemies, rather than at them), has a generous ammo pool compared to other precision weapons like the Hunger or the Hypnosis, and every reload causes massive explosions, which can stagger and heavily damage enemies so the Preyer is significantly less vulnerable while doing it.
  • Difficult, but Awesome:
    • The Hunger, by virtue of being a high-power, low-ammo, critical-hit based weapon. Should you have steady aim at mid-to-close range, consistently landing headshots one after the other, with only 1 free critical at Mysterium 3, you will absolutely devastate every enemy you come across, staggering, stunning, and freezing them to make it even easier to blast them where it hurts most. Miss any shots, and you are losing a massive amount of damage potential.
    • While not nearly as unforgiving as the sniper rifles, the Hypnosis requires a great sense of timing and the ability to shoot enemies consistently. Starting at Mysterium 1, you'll have to shoot when it's sufficiently charged, and at Mysterium 3, it gets a powerful Lightning buff at the cost of needing 3 perfect shots and losing it upon a miss. You have 10 shots in each clip, so you better make those 7 chances count.
    • The Hypnosis' sibling, the Frostbite, is much more forgiving with shooting, its issue is the Perfect Reload mechanic and counting your shots. With Mysterium upgrades, should you be able to press the Reload button at the right time, your next 3 shots will be boosted and gain the Freeze effect which can neutralize foes for easy follow-up shots or take them out of the fight while you deal with other threats. However, if you miss that perfect reload window, you are losing out on a huge chunk of potential damage and CC effects. The boosted effect is also reliant on how little ammo is left, with the highest damage potential being reloading an empty magazine. There is also its much smaller 6 shots total, so each bullet better count or else you might be shot or stabbed while the Preyer is chambering a new one.
    • While the Psychopomp is a terrible weapon for most player (as detailed below in Low-Tier Letdown), there is a niche playstyle that allows it to be incredibly devastating. This relies on the Firebreath spell which can instantly recharge the Heavy Melee plus all of the shotgun's Mysteriums. The Preyer runs up to enemies, takes out huge chunks of their healthbar with the Psychopomp, Heavy Melees them to finish them off and refill half the shotgun's magazine, and then use Firebreath to kill weakened enemies while Heavy Melee is on cooldown, making it available once more. Though this can delete huge swathes of enemies and even bosses, the Preyer needs exceptional situational awareness and reflexes to dodge out of the way of the attacks and not get swarmed and overwhelmed.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • An old bug gave the Hangfire a "secret" Mysterium that let it increase the amount of damage per explosion on the same target. This could lead to some absurd damage output, deleting huge sections of boss's healthbars after unloading the full cylinder into them, or generally running rampant and blowing up all of the enemies the Preyer comes across with little issue. This was later fixed, and the Hangfire now encourages spreading out shots and shooting the environment between enemies, than directly at them.
    • In another unintended synergy, the Burning Stake Heavy Spell could have its damaging charged-up effect triggered constantly by partially reloading a Mysterium 3 Midas, which causes extra damage to any Burned enemy. Since the Burning Stake causes constant Burn to any enemy in its radius, it would let players wipe out entire camps and rooms with only a handful of shots that might not even be aimed at the enemy. This was later removed.
    • The Striga is one of the only weapons in the entire game to have two elemental affinities at once. It fires out stakes that ignite mid-air if they have enough airtime, while also detonating in an electric shockwave if it was a critical hit. Since shockwave damage is based off of the initial hit that generated it, and each Striga stake has very high base damage, this can result in a single headshot clearing out an entire wave of enemies all by itself. The combination of high damage potential, strong clearing potential, high stopping power, and two elemental synergies makes it a best-of-both-worlds for both single-target damage and wave clearing. It works for just about every single build, too- spellcasters will constantly be recharging their best spells, gunslingers will be firing it off like crazy, and even Faith builds will appreciate its raw damage and incredible synergy with Blessed Shots. This is also to say nothing of the weapon's many broken synergies with Air and Fire arcana. Many lategame players swear by its exceptional damage potential and peerless crowd control capabilities... but in Early Access, you can get it as early as Gnosis II, which makes it by far the best weapon in the game.
    • The humble Hunger has a pretty unimpressive Mysterium at first. Compared to the explosion-setting Hangfire and the enemy-melting Duelist, Hunger increases the power of each bullet in your next magazine by the amount of critical hits you earned before reloading. Things change once you hit Mysterium 3, which makes it so the first shot is a crit no matter what, and adds a freeze effect to the first shot if all six prior shots were crits. The damage buff each bullet receives per crit is huge, with a full six allowing you to casually three-tap most major enemies. Hunger actually doesn't care how you earned a critical hit, just as long as you hit one, and there are a number of Arcana that let you force critical hits. As well, the Freeze hit allows you to farm up crits on a frozen enemy, and then unleash them again, potentially stunlocking enemies (and bosses) to death. Toss in a few Water arcana, and suddenly you're mass-freezing entire enemy waves while three-tapping just about anything you come across. Hunger is thus a gun that is both a powerful boss-killer and DPS gun rolled into one, allowing you to effortlessly stunlock most major enemies to death, especially if you bring in Freeze element spells.
  • Low-Tier Letdown: While all of the weapons are useable, some are simply worse in their roles than others.
    • The Psychopomp, the first shotgun, has utterly abysmal range. One player described needing to "shove it up your enemy's nostrils" for it to be effective. Its Mysteriums don't make it any better: you get a free half-clip reload if you kill an enemy with a Heavy Melee attack... but that Heavy Melee attack takes a while to charge up, requiring you to build your spells around it or have to suffer its slow reload if you're facing powerful enemies that can't be brought low enough to finish off with the melee. The stacking damage bonus on repeatedly-shot enemies is also not that useful because of the range issue; you could easily destroy melee-focused enemies like Swordsmen, but good luck getting close enough to obliterate anyone that shoots at you at a distance.
    • The All Seeing Eye is an interesting bolt-action rifle on paper, but mediocre in practice. The gun's gimmick is that enemies above 75% HP will take additional damage and spread an area-of-effect decay burst when shot. The burst can be a pretty effective crowd control shot, but for some reason the burst won't trigger if a shot kills an enemy. This means you're often hitting center-mass instead of aiming for the head, just to proc the burst and get some crowd control going. As well, bolt-action rifles are meant to be used long range, and thus have poor rate-of-fire and lengthy reload times. Compared to the many other crowd-control guns in the game (like the Hangfire, Echo, Rotweaver and Hypnosis), which all either have better rate of fire and reload times, and All Seeing Eye just can't keep up in terms of damage. All Seeing Eye is thus neither a strong single-target elimination gun, nor an effective crowd control gun, since it's own Mysteriums encourage you to try for the best of both worlds and ultimately satisfy neither.
    • Hailstorm is a standard sniper rifle with a fun-to-use critical hit gimmick. Its Mysteriums encourage consistent critical hits, with each crit increasing your ADS speed and cycling time, and every three crits partially reloading the gun and causing a Freeze shockwave. The gun's major problems come from the lack of synergy between the partial reload mechanic and the sniper weapon class- simply put, the sniper rifles have such little ammo that this mechanic is more of a downside than an upside. Ammo management is an important mechanic in this game, and the partial reload draws from your own ammo pool for the gun. This means the gun runs out of bullets faster than you can earn them back, making the Hailstorm possibly the least ammo-efficient gun in the entire game. As well, the aiming buff goes away if you reload, and even if you hit every single crit, you are forced to reload eventually. The result is a gun that doesn't have the insane bonuses of its peers, and lacks the ammo pool to take advantage of its unique mechanics.
    • The Midas is an auto-rifle with a very interesting heat management mechanic that seems at odds with both the weapon itself. Every time you pull the trigger on the Midas, it heats up. If you get it within the "warm" temperature, the bullets deal more damage, and at "high" temperature, the bullets do less damage, but light enemies on fire. This results in a paradoxical auto-rifle where you want to cautiously manage your heat instead of simply holding down the trigger. The advantage of the auto-rifle class is it's large magazine size, high rate of fire and huge ammo pool, so this mechanic forces you to micromanage your heat instead if spewing bullets down range. Spewing bullets down-range is pretty much the entire reason you bring an auto-rifle, leaving the gun redundant in it's own class especially when compared to the Rotweaver or Angelus. While the gun does do great damage if managed properly, it's such a burden to manage in combat that simpler weapons just get the job done better.
  • Nintendo Hard: The game goes pretty easy on you at first, but once you hit Gnosis II the game really starts to put the pressure on you. Even after you start unlocking useful research buffs and more powerful weaponry, the game remains incredibly unforgiving. As an indication, the Battle Focus mechanic means that any damage taken is punished twice over, first by lowering your health, and second by making it easier for enemies to overwhelm you. And any mistake you make can give you a curse mark; at five marks, a Calamity event can trigger, adding increasingly difficult objectives that can stack, even during boss fights.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The Webgrave update breathed new life into the Echo. Originally, the Echo was a highly stamina-inefficient gun that quickly drained both ammo and stamina to null. This required a level of intense micro-management, which often left you completely defenseless if you misjudged the situation even slightly. Reworks to the stat system allows for a much larger stamina pool than before, and a new Rosary bead called "Short Range Bead" found in Irongate removes the stamina penalty on hit. While it requires a hefty 30 Arsenal to use, said bead effectively removes the Echo's only downside, to the point that it's now both an extremely competent DPS and crowd-control weapon at the same time.
  • That One Boss: Well, mini-boss, but Sephulcer makes exploring southwest Velmorne a complete pain in the ass. He's an enormous Gravedigger with several times the health, who themselves are Demonic Spider enemies with fairly large health pools. Not only is his fighting arena pretty dense, making it difficult to move around, but he specializes in area of effect attacks via Decay clouds. Most annoying is the move where he sends player-seeking zombies after the player, which explode on impact. These things last forever, and it's incredibly difficult to deal with them and keep track of Sephulcer at the same time.

Top