YMMV / Shattered Pixel Dungeon

• Accidental Innuendo: Sometimes, an un(?)lucky player can find a "Friendly Whip", which releases charming magic that prevents combatants from fighting.
• Breather Episode: The Caves expedition logs — unlike their counterparts for the other four sections, they don't attempt to build tension or reveal anything that the preexisting flavour text didn't reveal already. The expedition came, accurately assessed the situation, and left.
• Disappointing Last Level: Before 0.8, the Demon Halls didn't offer enough incentives to keep exploring like the past 4 stages did, to the point where "jump off a cliff to get to Yog-Dzewa faster" used to be a common tip - especially after the alchemy update, which allows you to bypass it in both directions with no problems. ^note  Feather Fall on the way down, Scroll of Passage when returning with the Amulet 0.8 forces the player to clear the Halls by making the Final Boss more powerful if demon spawners are left alive.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • One of the possible challenge runs is "Hostile Champions", introducing special enemy variants that have a Battle Aura and powerful buffs, such as Anti-Magic Champions taking reduced damage and being immune to magical effects. Annoying as is, but the worst offenders are the Blazing Champions, which have boosted melee damage and set you on fire with melee attacks, dealing heavy damage and burning up valuable Scrolls if you don't have a Scroll Holder. Worse still, they burst into flames when killed, so the only real option to deal with them is at a distance. Projecting Champions also deserve a dishonorable mention, since they can hit you from anywhere as long as they can see you and have the same 25% boost to their melee attacks as Blazing Champions.
  • Gnoll Shamans have been reworked so that they not only spawn in the Caves, but also attack with spells that inflict debuffs depending on their mask color. These magical attacks pierce armor (unless you have the rare Anti-Magic glyph) and deal heavy damage. The worst offenders are the uncommon purple masked Shamans, which inflict a debuff that reduces both your accuracy and evasion.
  • The DM-100s serve the same function as Gnoll Shamans in the vanilla game, zapping you in the Prison for high damage and piercing your armor, thus also qualifying for this trope.
  • Prison Guards are enemies new to Shattered that are found in the Prison, serving to exacerbate that area's Early Game Hell. They use their Ethereal Chains to good use, preventing you from escaping and, if you're unlucky, pulling you into traps. They also have rather high stats (especially Armor) for that point in the game, making them hard to kill. Finally, they co-exist alongside Crazy Thieves and Bandits, and their habit of crippling you means that you'll often lose items to them.
  • Shattered also introduces the DM-200s, which can be annoying due to their solid stats and ability to shoot Weaponized Exhaust, but otherwise aren't too bad. However, also introduced in Shattered are their "mutant" counterparts, the DM-201s. These are totally stationary but have 120 HP (higher than Scorpios, which have the highest HP of all normal Demon Hall enemies) and deal higher damage. Don't even think about attacking them from a distance either, as they'll shoot corrosive gas at you for heavy damage. At the very least, defeating one will net you a Cursed Metal Shard, which can only otherwise be obtained from defeating the DM-300.
  • Already a Demonic Spider in base Pixel Dungeon, Succubi in Shattered manage to be even worse here. In addition to their usual charming abilities, they can also attack a charmed hero to gain shielding and reduce damage taken.
• Difficulty Spike: Prison is where the game stops playing around. Every enemy is either annoying, dangerous, or both. Thieves who steal your items, DM-100s which shoot lightning at you, Guards who drag you to them and make it harder to deal with the former two, Skeletons which explode on death, and Necromancers who summon the aforementioned Skeletons. And as cherry on top, Tengu awaits you at the end of it all.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Wand of Regrowth. It fires all its charges (or a fraction after 0.8.1), creating a patch of grass - and grass gives you seeds (and, via alchemy, potions) and dewdrops, meaning blessed ankhs and health gain to make the aggressive food clock a non-issue. After the 0.8.1 update made it spend only a fraction of charges on use, it's also useful for immobilizing grounded enemies and breaking line of sight with mobs with ranged attacks. Put a few Scrolls of Upgrade in it and the game might as well give you the Amulet of Yendor on a silver platter.
    • Want to further break the game with a Wand of Regrowth? Pair it with the Sandals of Nature. Not only does the Wand of Regrowth give you infinite seeds to feed into your plant-based shoes, but the Sandals also increase the number of seeds and dewdrops you get from grass. Unless you get some bad RNG, consider the game beaten if you get this combination.
  • A sufficiently upgraded Wand of Corruption can allow you to distract the enemies with meat shields that deal not-insignificant damage, especially when paired with the wraith-spawning corpse dust. It is/was so powerful that Evan ended up nerfing it three times as of 2.0.
  • The Wand of Fireblast seems like a high-risk high-reward wand at first, blasting out a decently ranged cone of fire that will burn anything in its path, including you. However, when it's sufficiently upgraded or imbued into the Mage's Staff, it turns into a nuke in a red-and-gold stick. Not only does the range of the blast reach absurd levels, being enough to clear a mid-sized room at +4, but it also deals immense damage on top of the lingering burn damage. What really shoves it into Game-Breaker territory however is the fact that it cripples, and later paralyzes, when it's upgraded. It also synergizes with the Battlemage stupidly well, as imbuing it into his staff will essentially give it the powerful Blazing enchantment, dealing extra damage to burning enemies. Even moreso if one happens to get the Brimstone glyph, which makes the user immune to fire, removing almost all risk from using the wand.
  • Another powerful high-risk high-reward wand is the Wand of Corrosion. Anything caught within this ashen wand's corrosive cloud will take increasing damage over time, piercing the enemy's armor. Additionally, barring the Giant Piranhas (who are immune to all area-based effects), no enemy is immune to the corrosion effect, meaning that even the most armored of Animated Statues will melt when caught in the cloud. The only catch is that the cloud is just as deadly to you as it is your enemies, and there's no way to permanently evade the consequences like with Wand of Fireblast.
  • On the artifacts side of things, we have the Ethereal Chains. These chains, provided they have enough charge, let you essentially teleport to anywhere next to a wall, pulling you through walls and enemies alike. This makes them extremely useful for escaping sticky situations or reaching trapped chests without using Potions of Levitation. They can also pull enemies towards you, which not only neuter most ranged enemies such as Gnoll Shamans and DM-100s, but can potentially pull enemies that don't float into Chasms, essentially One Hit Killing them. They're also baby easy to charge and upgrade, as they become stronger as you gain experience.
  • Timekeeper's Hourglass provides you with Time Stands Still power, and it's as gamebreaking as it sounds. Did you walk in view of a long-range enemy? No problem, freeze time, walk to right next to them, and smack them in the face. Is the entire room on fire or toxic gas due to your reckless wand use? Freeze yourself in time and watch the world burn, melt and die around you. Want to go to the other end of a trap room without a Potion of Levitation? Freeze time and just walk on the traps, they will activate only after you stop the time freeze.
  • On the topic of Rings, the Ring of Haste is widely considered to be the best ring one can get, and with good reason. It boosts your movement speed, allowing you to outrun most enemies (and even bats and crabs at +3), and since the food clock and durations of most buffs are measured in turns, you get more mileage out of potions, scrolls and foodstuffs.
  • The Warlock subclass, specifically after you upgrade its talents. Whenever he hits an enemy with a wand or staff blast, there's a chance the enemy will become soul-marked, meaning that whenever the Warlock hits that enemy with a physical attack, he recovers HP. Decent on its own, but there are two particular talents that throw this mechanic into Game-Breaker territory. The first is Soul Eater, which restores hunger whenever a soul-marked enemy is hit with a physical attack, making the aggressive hunger mechanic a non-issue. The second is Necromancer's Minions, which has a decently high chance to spawn a corrupted Wraith when a soul-marked enemy dies when fully upgraded. Remember how the Wand of Corruption had to be nerfed hard because of corrupted Wraiths? Well, this talent lets you abuse that once again. Additionally, the Wraith's physical attacks on soul-marked foes will restore HP and Hunger for you as well if you invest in Soul Siphon!
  • The 13th armor ability. If you're willing to make the journey all the way up to the fifth floor (which can be somewhat mitigated by using a Beacon of Returning) with the Dwarf King's Crown and give it to the Rat King, then he'll bless you with the ability to transform enemies into Marsupial Rats. While it sounds silly at first, this ability can be immensely useful to neuter some of the Demonic Spiders that are found in these halls, and, in the case of Evil Eyes, One-Hit Kill them if they're floating above a chasm. By upgrading certain armor talents, one can also permanently make Ratmorgified enemies into allies or summon a bunch of allied rats by using the ability on themselves. In both cases, these can serve as useful distractions, especially when there's lots of enemies around. Best of all, this ability is available to all heroes, so long as they're willing to undertake the journey to reach the Rat King.
  • Mage's Shield Battery talent is ridiculously powerful. For 2 talent points, you can consume a wand's charges to create a barrier worth 7.5% your max health per charge. It doesn't matter if the wands you find are all cursed or considered useless, that still means a minimum of 15% barrier with every use, and using multiple wands stack. The kicker is that this is only a tier 2 talent, so other classes can join in the fun with a Scroll of Metamorphosis. And heaven have mercy on your enemies if you manage to get a Glyph of Potential - every proc will recharge your wands, and it's not uncommon for an enemy to keep proccing it, resulting in the barrier being replenished faster than it can be depleted. Not shocking that 1.2.0 reduced the talent's effectiveness to 6% of HP per charge.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The thieves in Prison? One of Shattered's additions makes it so that you can't retrieve the item they stole from you if they run too far away. And if you're extra unlucky, you can encounter a Crazy Bandit, an Elite Mook version of them that blinds, cripples and poisons you after a successful theft. For extra salt in the wound, they operate on the same floor as the guards and run faster than a crippled PC. Have fun.
  • Hostile Champions adds uncommon enemies with special buffs to the dungeons. Aside from Blazing and Projecting champions, which are Demonic Spiders as detailed above, most other champions are this, as they can be annoying (usually in the form of being damage sponges thanks to buffed defenses and/or evasion) but nothing particularly deadly.
  • Ironically not the Bats, but the Cave Spinners in the Mines. These green spiders will launch sticky webs from range, which will block your shots, root anyone caught in it for a few turns, and requiring you to waste a turn throwing something to break it beforehand. And when they're close to death, they will drop another webbing and run away. Either way, the danger lies if you get caught in their web and can't hide from an Enraged Brute or Shaman.
• Low-Tier Letdown: The Warrior in general is considered by many to be the most underwhelming adventurer, as it has the weakest Talents and Subclasses. But while Gladiator can prove to be decently powerful (especially with a fast weapon and/or a Ring of Furor), the Berserker is arguably the worst subclass in the game. In theory, it's supposed to let the player punish enemies for damaging them, as the Berserker's damage increases with damage. However, the effect is difficult to build up and wears off quickly over time, meaning that the Berserker will rarely get to use his perks. As a result, the Berserker subclass has almost nothing going for it, and is only salvageable with a Ring of Haste, which lengthens the Berserking status effect. Even then, the Gladiator also benefits from the ring's effect-lengthening properties, so there's basically no reason to use the Berserker (unless you're trying to complete a run with every subclass). As of this writing, the upcoming 1.4.0 update is set to rework the Berserker class so that the effect can be more easily controlled like the Gladiator's or Freerunners, but time will tell if this will save the class from the bottom tier.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Once a Game-Breaker in the olden days, the Wand of Corruption is now considered to be the worst wand by many. The corruption takes many more wand zaps to set in than before, often exceeding the base number of zaps for stronger enemies. The weakening effects can be useful in a pinch, and raise a chance of the next zap working, but it doesn't make the wand any less situational. And while Mage's talents make it useful if invested in properly, Warlock can summon corrupted wraiths with his talents and with much less hassle, and the other four classes are out of luck.
  • The Wand of Transfusion is only marginally better than the Wand of Corruption. Its main use case is healing allies at the cost of player's health, but there's only a few allies available and each of them requires finding (and upgrading) a different item in the dungeon. Outside of that, the wand's a Master of None, doing weak damage to undead, shielding the player for so little that you might as well not bother, and charming non-undead enemies for a few turns. And should you accidentally zap an already-charmed enemy, the wand will damage you and heal them!
  • The Wand of Magic Missile's gains too little damage on upgrades in comparison to other available options. The Magic Charge gimmick (boosting the next zap of another wand to the WoMM's level) doesn't compensate enough for it, since you're limited by low capacity of unupgraded wands and having to alternate between them and the WoMM to get the most out of them. Once again, a Mage's talents allow you to get some use out of it,^note Battlemage's staff effect recharges the other wands, making their low capacity less of an issue, and Warlock's chance of applying the Soul Mark depends only on the wand level, so it doing less damage means you can do more physical damage for Soul Mark benefits but other classes are out of luck.
  • On a non-wand note, any weapon with the Lucky enchantment counted as this pre-0.8.1. A chance of doing double damage wasn't worth an equal (or near equal) chance of your guaranteed-to-hit attack doing no damage. It's telling that once 0.8.1 changed the Lucky enchantment to generate extra loot instead^note which, while considered by players to be one of the weaker enchantments, is still leagues better than its previous incarnation, its previous form was re-added as a curse.
  • Another shafted enchantment is Blocking. While it's supposed to make your weapon block damage similar to a Quarterstaff or a Rounded/Great Shield, in practice the damage it blocks is pitifully low. Additionally, you have to hit your enemy with your weapon in order to activate the enchantment, which isn't very useful against the ranged enemies that plague the mid-late game.
  • On the topic of weapons: The Runic Blade's gimmick is benefiting more from upgrades. The benefit^note +6 maximum damage per upgrade point as opposed to tier 4's standard +5 doesn't make it special enough to warrant use in the endgame like the assassin's blade or the crossbow, and since it scales exactly like standard tier-5 weapons, it will never surpass an equally-upgraded greatsword or war hammer, adding up to a lategame weapon that will be used only if the RNG is particularly unkind.