KoboldLord wrote:It's a joke weapon that has a random chance to get you killed, usually indirectly but sometimes flat-out instant death. You should virtually never choose to use a chaos weapon, and you should avoid melee contact at all costs with threats that may have chaos weapons. It also has kind of terrible flavor, since it literally does nothing but pick a random result off a huge table of unthemed and unrelated effects. Most of the other joke items at least offer a trade that is aesthetically interesting, even if there is basically no reason you should ever choose to risk the use of a shield that makes the loudest noise in the game or an axe that mesmerizes you whenever there's a monster anywhere on the screen.
The big old list of effects has a lot of good ones, but you swing your melee weapon thousands of times even in a 3-Rune game. You will roll some of the bad effects sooner or later, and some of these effects are very dangerous if they trigger in the wrong situation.
I think the flavor is fine. It chooses its attack brand with each new attack. If the huge table of effects were related or themed then it wouldn't be chaotic after all, right?
Naturally, the RNG is not always in your favor. Eventually I do end up berserking Antaeus or something. But then, is that not similar to the situation with the other joke items? I end up getting mesmerized to Polyphemus, or wake up all of Elf:3. Taking up the chaos brand just means you'll accept a challenge, the possibility that you'll end up in a bad, unsurvivable situation. If you make that choice early game, hats off to you. Late game, you can take that on too. The tradeoff, for having an awesome list of possibilities for good effects, is awesome possibilities for bad effects.
Certainly, with the Shield and the Axe, you're guaranteed your damage and other useful stats, and Chaos makes no guarantee that you don't clone a hydra four times in a row. Does it need that guarantee of some useful effect to make it interesting?
Just letting it randomly occur on weapons wouldn't be disastrous, I think. After all, we still have d:1 distortion daggers, and that's a lot worse than accidentally wielding a chaos branded weapon, which don't occur randomly on the ground or in non-unique non-vault monster's hands.
Monsters hitting you with chaos weapons will at worse banish you, which already happens regularly with another brand. Given that, if implemented, it would have an extremely low weight in brand selection, an encounter with a weapon of chaos would be an interesting surprise.
114491 | Pan | Entered the realm of Gloorx Vloq.
114491 | Pan | Noticed Gloorx Vloq
114492 | Pan | Killed Gloorx Vloq
true lords of shadow NEVER sleep