QCF Design Community

The main reason why quicksilver potion sucks currently is because it has a 50% chance of doing absolutely nothing in its best-case scenario.

Let's presume you have a 10% chance to dodge (ie, you've already purchased the dodging boon). I'll model this with a random number generator that generates a number from 1 to 10, and you dodge when it comes up 10. If you drink a Quicksilver potion your chance to dodge increases to 20%, and you now dodge whenever the RNG comes up as a 9 or a 10, and the quicksilver potion is exhausted. Here's the rub; if you rolled a 10 you would have dodged anyways, but the quicksilver is still expended. The quicksilver potion effectively did nothing. So only on a roll of 9 would the quicksilver potion grant you a dodge that would not have otherwise occurred; a 50/50 shot of actually granting you an extra dodge.

This gets even worse as your natural chance to dodge increases, and because you have no fine control over dodging to begin with the quicksilver might not even kick in at the most opportune time. If the attack you dodge deals less than 50% of your total health or right before, then the dodge wasn't really significant at all. All this comes together to make Quicksilver a pretty horrible potion.

Assuming you have a 10% dodge rate, it's a 29.6% of doing nothing.
Assuming a 30% dodge rate, it's 61.9%

For 10%, it's
.1+.8(.1+.7(.1+.6(.1+.5(.1+.4(.1+.3(.1+.2(.1+.1(.1))))))))=0.29557952
10% that you would've dodged anyway on the first hit,
8% on the next (because there's only an 80% chance that you didn't dodge on the first hit)
5.6% on the third (70% chance out of the 80% that you didn't dodge yet) and so on.

For 30%, it's
.3+.6(.3+.5(.3+.4(.3+.3(.3+.2(.3+.1(.3))))))=0.619176
30% that you would've dodged anyway on the first hit,
18% on the next (because there's only an 60% chance that you didn't dodge on the first hit) and so on.

It's pretty crappy regardless of the math, usually not worth sacrificing the piety or potion for it. The 10 gold you get is actually worth more than the potion, only time I've ever got it was when I needed a bit of extra gold to afford a shop item and there were no other Tikki boons left.

I think the pot should be changed so the extra dodge remains for the whole fight, this would make it at least a useful buff to take before a difficult fight.

In a longer fight it gives you a guaranteed free hit for a mana potion. Unless you have 25 mana or more that's better than the death protection glyph (though you may need the glyph to use quicksilver safely). It is also useful for former taurog worshippers, melee characters, which benefit more from attacking than the potential spell or if the last 40% mana won't give you enough to use your glyph of choice.

It's only useful in such particular situations, which is ok. But even under such circumstances it requires a lot to work (taking several hits from a boss). I think this could be easily adjusted by increasing the dodge gain per unsuccessful dodge, though.
Another idea would be to initially increase dodge by let's say 30% and decrease it per successful dodge instead of the other way around.

We were talking about Quicksilver today, one of the major problems with it is actually that you're not getting access to it during the parts of the game that it was built to be useful for (because there's only one way to get it atmo and that's pretty late in the progression). So we're making the Witch a priority for the next content push. The Witch is awesome