6 replies to this topic

[Matthew]

In my opinion, the boomerang is one of the most broken items in ZC. It has a high uptime, no mana cost, and can stun most enemies, making combat a joke. Is there any good way I can nerf the boomerang in my quest so it doesn't trivialize almost every general enemy encounter? 

[Deedee]

The way we did it in Hyrule Fantasy was that enemiesblocked the boomerang for the duration of their stun, as well as the boomerang having a slight delay in the form of a throwing animation (AKA how Z3 handled it).

[Orithan]

As powerful as it might seem on paper, in practice it is really not that powerful past the early stages in the game; that is once Darknuts and Wizzrobes start appearing. Stunning is really useful for singling out specific targets and killing them one by one or for keeping your distance from specific enemies, but it begins to falter when you have to fight off multiple powerful enemies at once. The Hookshot generally ends up being a much more useful stunning weapon due to default ability to stun Darknuts and Wizzrobes, Hookshot dodging and is useful for getting across rooms with Hookshot grab combos despite being noticeably slower.

 

Boomerang's drawbacks:

Is slow at being thrown repeatedly, making it harder to stun multiple enemies at once and missing a throw means you can end up waiting a long time before you can throw it again in combat.

Lacks both a capacity to damage and utility outside of stunning.

Generally outclassed by the Hookshot.

 

That said, the Fire Boomerang is stupidly overpowered for being a boomerang that both deals damage and stuns nearly all enemies.

[KingPridenia]

I don't know how this would work out, but I noticed in some quests like Lost Isle, some enemies are only damaged by the boomerang but not stunned. This is achieved by setting the enemy flag "Is damaged by 0 power weapons", which means the item's level is used to determine damage inflicted. The only downside is that would screw up the Hookshot's stunning (unless sitting it to pure Stun defense works?). Otherwise, I would think the only other way would be to have some kind of scripted effect in place that prevents stun-locking and potentially giving an enemy a temporary immunity to being stunned after recovery. Although to be fair, Orithan has some pretty valid points, not to mention the Hookshot also makes you invulnerable while being fired. On the other hand, the boomerang is more flexible, although its long range can bite you if you miss, especially against faster enemies.

 

The only other thing I could think of without using a "damaged by 0 power item" flag or getting into scripting is simply making the boomerang much more difficult to get. Or, in extreme cases, exclude it all together.

[coolgamer012345]

This would require scripting, but you could make the boomerang veer off in a direction when you throw it, so it's not very accurate.

[Mitsukara]

Devil's advocate: a huge pile of overpowered options for dealing with general situations can be fun, especially if they don't immediately resolve critical situations like boss fights.

...says the person who thought the regular Z1 boomerang was not cool enough, and gave it adjustable throwing range and multi-boomerang throwing upgrades. Including a triple Fire Boomerang. And then it seemed like nobody found it useful (or remembered the darn thing) anyway because of the context. And then the lategame had a thing with bombs that shot out 8 boomerangs like shrapnel, which still had limited utility even with absurdly high bomb counts.

 

Basically, it's all about the context of what problems you're up against (puzzles it can't solve, bosses it can't help with, etc) as to how 'useful' it really is. Simply decreasing it's power in general is valid, but it's not necessarily requisite, unless you're going for that kind of tightly-machined difficulty level where the player has only a narrow set of valid options for dealing with extremely restricted difficult situations and has to get the timing just right (a la Castlevania 1 or Castlevania III, and perhaps Super Castlevania IV, as opposed to, say, Simon's Quest or Symphony of the Night-type games).

 

You can also change enemy defenses against it to make them block or ignore it. As Orithan pointed out, Darknuts and Wizzrobes already do this, making it not so useful in lategame Zelda 1 scenarios. I believe A Link to the Past did a lot of this too, with it not working on certain Dark World/lategame dungeon enemies. For extra fun, have it be helpful with a few- I believe you could stun Hinoxes (or was that just with the hookshot?) and those "Mr. Hoppity" tentacle guys- but not some of the others they're paired with. That gives it partial utility.

Edited by Mitsukara, 23 December 2017 - 04:08 AM.

[Timelord]

I don't find it to be overpowered, but if you think that it makes npcs too easy to stun, you can shorten its range.