Not sure where else to post this, but I just finished my dark graceful/acorn grind, and I'd like to share some of my thoughts on the hallowed sepulchre.
Ports in general just feel bad. I generally avoid taking blues during arrow traps because the risk:reward ratio doesn't make sense. You can save like 2 ticks taking one, but if they make you run into an arrow then you lose 20-30. They also don't appear consistently enough or last long enough for you to develop a strategy around them. Some suggestions:
Blue ports persist for longer, or at least have some sort of visual indicator for when they're about to expire. Traps with rows of 3 blue (eg. sword + port traps) should always have 1 active port per row (right now there can be a 1? tick gap, kind of annoying).
Remove situations where blue ports put you directly onto a lightning square. I'm not sure if this was intentional to make it more difficult, but players can't realistically react to this in real-time and it just feels like an oversight.
The floor 4 long fire trap needs some love. The best way to do this trap is to just run in and pray that you're lucky enough to have the right cycle. It takes 3 cycles to run through the trap so if you start right before cycle 4, for example, you're going to make it almost all the way to the end only to be sent back. Two suggestions here:
Shorten the hallway by 1 statue so that it can be completed in 2 runs rather than 3, if tick-perfect. Right now there's barely any difference between someone who gets the full distance each cycle vs. someone who cuts their runs short by 1 or 2 ticks.
Either remove the full-hallway cleanse, or at least give us a visual indicator to let us know where we are in the cycle. Could colour the flames differently or something.
The arrow traps are really difficult, and while I don't think they should mechanically change, I think they could help the player out more visually. One example: after the statues shoot the arrows, there's a slight delay before they do a "post-shooting" animation. When you're focusing on other things such as portals on the ground, fire traps, whatever, it's easy to see this animation in your peripherals and mistake it for the "pre-shooting" one.
- Either remove the post-shooting animation, or make the pre-shooting animation more visually spectacular (glowing red eyes, beam of light from the ceiling, idk).
The last trap is just crazy. I know that it's supposed to be difficult, but I've done like 300 runs and I still fail it probably 25% of the time. The section right at the end where you have to mind the fire and react to the arrow traps with very little notice is really hard, especially when you have to click 2 ticks in advance since your "true" position being safe isn't enough to dodge the arrows.
- Push the statues back a few squares to give the player more time to react, or increase the delay between the pre-shooting animation and the arrow being fired by a tick.
Finally, it's extremely important for floors 4 and 5 to be the person that starts up the instance. There are some really good routes at the start of those floors that don't work if someone else is doing HS on the same world. It sucks, but right now the optimal way to play this minigame is to hop worlds until you find a "free" one.
Not sure if this is even possible, but the ideal solution would be for each player to have their own fires/swords etc. that start when you enter a new floor. This way, you don't have to be antisocial to get the optimal rates
If this isn't possible, a "peek" option wouldn't hurt (or even P R I V A T E I N S T A N C E S C A P E as a last resort)
For the most part though, really liking HS. Big thanks to husky for creating a piece of content that's been satisfying to master (even though it's extremely frustrating at the start :P).
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