Feedback and suggestions about Deep Dungeons

[Sticky-Soup]

Greetings! This post is meant to provide feedback and ideas to improve Deep dungeon system from a perspective of someone who put over 800 hours into Deep dungeon. I finished both PotD and HoH solo runs, and am looking forward to next Deep dungeon with great excitement!

I have a lot of ideas, that I would like to share. I will split this into several posts, one about new ideas, and the other about Pomanders feedback. Lets get started.
Fresh ideas for Deep dungeons
Two big things in my opinion that Deep dungeons currently struggles with, is more risk/reward type decisions, and room variety inside the floor. And I don't mean that rooms don't look different enough, I mean about what is inside those rooms. So here are some ideas I came up with, that I think would improve on this side of content:
Optional mini-boss room: a room that is always a dead end (you don't have to go through it to get to the next floor), with no traps in it, inside of which is a single difficult mini boss. Upon entering the room, the door behind player closes, and will open only if mini boss is killed, or every player inside the room has died. After killing mini boss, it drops a significant reward. For example: 3 gold chests that are guaranteed to not be mimics. An item that allows player to pick 1 pomander of their choice, or 3 accursed hoards.
Room with a merchant: a safe room without any traps, with a merchant inside it. Merchant sells 3 random pomanders, and the player can buy them using accursed hoards.
Room with optional mini game: room without enemies or traps, inside of which you can try to solve a puzzle (can be a logic puzzle, jumping puzzle or something else) or complete a mini game (for example: dodging aoe's like in gold saucer's: The slice is right). Mini game takes time, that players spends without killing monsters to open the way to the next floor, and the reward for completing it can be either treasure chest, accursed hoards, or something specific to this floor, like removing all negative floor enchantments.
Quest room: a room with an npc inside, that gives a randomly generated quest (for example, kill 5 patrolling monsters, activate 8 traps, kill 5 mimics, and so on). The quest must be completed during the current set of floors, and can be potentially failed. This is the risk/reward type situation. Accepting the quest will guarantee the quest room will be generated on the last floor before boss fight (like 39/179 and so on). Completed quest gives a significant reward, that can be something like: 5 accursed hoards, +10 minutes of time on the current set of floors, random positive floor enchantment that will be active during bossfight and so on. Failing a quest, however (by not turning it before going to the last floor where boss battle happens) will result in a penalty that can be something like: -5 minutes from the timer, random negative floor enchantment that will be active during bossfight and so on.

[Sticky-Soup]

Pomanders: the good, the bad, and the fortune
Here I will go through all the pomanders, and will explain my feedback and suggestions about all of them. I will start with neutral pomanders, and end with dungeon specific ones.
Safety & Sight: these two I think are perfectly fine, and do not need any changes.
Strength & Steel: these two I think are perfectly fine as well, and do not need any changes.
Affluence: the RNG element of this one doesn't feel very reliable, and can sometimes leave you questioning "did something even changed?". I would suggest reworking it in a way that the pomander guarantees a certain amount of chests (2 is probably a reasonable amount) in the starting room of the next floor. These chests preferably would have to be all gold chests.
Flight: this one works perfectly fine, and does not need any changes.
Alteration: a gamble in the case of this pomander is very polarizing. Mimics work slightly differently in PotD and HoH (specifically their aggro range, in PotD mimics aggro from a huge distance, whether in HoH their aggro range is much smaller). I would say that alteration works much better in HoH, because of the aggro range on mimics, and I would suggest keeping aggro range on mimics the way it is in HoH.
Pomander of purity: this one does require a slight change in my opinion. Because currently it only interacts with Pox mechanic, it makes both Pox and Purity pomander feel like parasitic design. Also because of access of certain classes to Interrupt ability (being able to stop the casting) it makes purity almost useless when doing Physical ranged or Tank run. The change I would suggest is very simple: make it so purity pomander clears all negative status effect (except floor enchantments). This way the pomander will be much more interactive, and will add new strategies (access to certain enemies with crippling DoT effects or debuffs).
Fortune: I think the deep dungeon community universally agrees that this one is the single most useless pomander in most cases. Very inconsistent RNG in it can create situations when not a single chest drops after its use, which is very frustrating. There are two different reworks of it I can suggest:
1) Make it so pomander of fortune guarantees a chest drop from the next enemy killed on current floor.
2) Make it so pomander of fortune transforms all mimics within certain distance into normal chests.
Witching: to the most part it works just fine, but I would recommend slightly reducing the damage of the Imp, as sometimes in cases of monsters that rely on spells that can be dodged, it makes monster more threatening than it was before.
Serenity: this one works perfectly fine, and does not need any changes.
Intuition: this one works perfectly fine, and does not need any changes.
Raising: this one also works perfectly fine, and does not need any changes.

[Sticky-Soup]

Now we get to dungeon specific pomanders. I understand that rework on them probably will not happen, and therefore I will focus my feedback on the design elements that should or should not be kept in future pomander design in my opinion. So lets start with PotD:
Rage: I like the idea of this pomander, because it makes the process of floor wiping interactive, and can lead to a lot of strategies regarding the use of it. However the transformation's interactions with chests is inconsistent, as you can, for example, pick up bronze chests and accursed hoards while being transformed, but cannot pick up gold chests. It should work in the same way for all chests in all transformations.
Lust: while it does play technically similar to Rage pomander, the usefulness of it is far less outside of boss battles, and I think pomander of frailty, implemented in HoH is a better version of pomander of lust.
Resolution: I personally like the idea of a monster type interactivity of this pomander, but I think if we are to keep monster type interactions in the future, their type should be telegraphed in a better way (for example, bhoots are considered ashfolk, but its not very obvious, when most ashfolk are clearly undead creatures, and bhoots look much more like voidsent).
Overall the idea of transformations presented in PotD is, in my opinion, a good idea, and I would like to see its return in some form in future Deep dungeons. Now lets get to HoH pomanders:
Frailty: as I mentioned earlier in pomander of lust section, I think this is a good design change, and I generally like how this pomander works.
Concealment: this I think is a greatly designed pomander, but I think it shouldn't make you go out of stealth when taking damage from monsters that make roomwide AoE's like elephants or sasquatches from HoH.
Petrification: I personally don't really like this pomander, as its a floorwipe, that does not leave much room for strategy or failure like Pomander of rage.
Magicites: the same that I said about petrification.

These are both my ideas and pomander feedback. Let me know what you think about all this!

[Asuka-Hykiri]

I just want 3 lives for solo runs

[hynaku]

Let you run them with trusts and squadron.

[ICountFrom0]

How about Vagrant Story as a theme for a deep dungeon?

[ServerCollaps]

why would any of this "need" any changes? You basically want all rng elemements removed, which make every run different and interesting imo.