How many times do you play a game and you get some powerup that's TOTALLY BROKEN because of how it synergizes with one other thing, or because it's just too strong?

Then when the devs "fix it" or nerf it, they just cut it in half and now it's OKISH If you abuse the one thing it synergizes with, and it TOTALLY SUCKS aside from that. I don't know why devs do this, all you have to do is do a check against the thing it's too strong with, and just adjust it proportionately to how much of that thing exists.

Like lets take lifetap for example. All your have to do to prevent lifetap from being overpowered with AOE attacks, is add a lerp on abilities that determines how much lifetap is applied to said attack. You can even do a check against the angle of attack and set this value as a default unless overridden by design. If attackangle > 90 lifetape = 30%, if attackangle > 180 lifetape = 10%...

I Keep coming up with mods that I think are going to be interesting for enhancing damage in ways that aren't simply DO X% MORE DAMAGE, which gets so damned boring. So I had this idea for a mod that will allow you to "wound" enemies for even more. Wound increases all damage dealt to a target, and when fully wounded they take 200% damage. If I allow the player to increase wound bonus by many factors, that can get REALLY overpowered very fast. But what if I simultaneously reduce the rate at which wounding is applied? What if I reduce that amount by more than a proportional amount? Now that new bonus for wounding is a lot more interesting, and it even allows for secondary bonuses that allow the player to wound more per hit! By balancing that ability, not only is wounding more interesting with a wide variety of states, but it now synergizes with an entire new set up potential upgrades. This gives rise to several scenarios: Default state where the player applies wounding pretty fast for decent damage amp, or players can apply wounding slowly, but can REALLY increase max damage done to enemies, etc, etc.

I'm so f-cking burned out. But motivated enough by results that I'm able to trudge on, TONS of progress being made, excited for how the game is coming together. Gamedev requires SO MUCH iteration, that often times we look back on a long day of work, and all we can remember is working on things we've worked on thousands of times before, and because of this, it can often feel like we're making no progress, AND SOMETIMES WE'RE NOT. BUT RIGHT NOW I AM GOD DAMN IT SO ONWARDS AND UPWARDS. FOR 2 YEARS I'VE BEEN SAYING I'M 2 WEEKS AWAY FROM PUTTING OUT A DAMNED DEMO. NOW FOR OVER 2 MONTHS IT'S BEEN "1 MORE DAY". THIS NEVER ENDS.