Feedback on the Empowered Enlightened Crown

[Maxil20]

I want to start this off with a quick disclaimer: while the crown seems fully functional, it's technically not entirely implemented, as the celestial jewel, a new item you slot into the crown to empower it, is not currently obtainable. I am going to heavily assume they are is obtained after the new lunar boss and will be basing my feedback with this in mind. I will also not be focusing on the oversights/bugs associated as I assume those will be ironed out. Updated Disclaimer: the crown is now Actually fully out (as celestial jewels are now gotten from the Celestial Scion, who drops 5), and they worked out most of the kinks it seems like.

The empowered crown is a "direct" upgrade to the normal crown, obtained by filling all 5 slots in its inventory with celestial jewels. In addition to it's usual effects, it gains the following new benefits:

-Sanity is entirely replaced with enlightenment regardless of wherever you go (because of this effect, this also means the crown will always regen a flat +10 sanity per minute regardless of location, because enlightenment doesn’t get the -5 sanity/min penalty of dusk/night and caves)
-The crown now behaves like an inverted nightmare amulet/bone helm; instead of making your sanity behave as if you had 0, the crown will instead behave as if your sanity is maxed, at all times. This means the light/gestalt perks will never fade, and you'll never need to worry about the sanity penalties of any item/staff as long as you keep it on (your internal sanity value is still tracked and will still be impacted by these events, though the crown will still naturally provide 10 sanity per minute to offset this)
-It visually gains a new fire based effect as opposed to the crown shards/prisms

Personally, this is obviously a very powerful reward. Having eternal full sanity wherever you go for a head slot item you are likely going to wear the most out of any item is an unbelievably powerful upside. Apart from the obvious negation of needing to worry about sanity in most cases, it also allows the crown to double as a powerful combat offset without needing to obtain a ton of sanity food (while also allowing things like the maul to be used without a care in the world!). I think this is a very fitting reward for the endgame lunar questline, especially with the effort you need to obtain it (you need 2 champ kills to be able to summon the boss, and 3 if you actually want to have a crown to reap the benefits of said kills, and then also kill the new boss).

While I do like it, there are some issues/drawbacks that I don't really like, that I hope can be addressed before the jewels become available to upgrade the crown. In a particular order:

-The enlightenment aura/ambience is really, really distracting. This is easily my biggest gripe with it. While I like the concept of enlightenment, and don't mind the switch, the visual/ambience effects would very, very quickly become annoying after even a few minutes of crown use. Combined with Bloom, the effect is even worse. Given the mentioned fact you will very likely wear this item near constantly, it isn't exactly ideal to do so when your screen will now pretty much Always look like this:

I know there's the obvious argument to simply install a mod to remove the filter/ambience, but I feel it's not a very good sign a mod is needed to make the world look Vibrant and actually good, and console players will not have this option whatsoever.

Another unfortunate thing is because of the high enlightenment effect, your character will now Always play the full enlightenment animations and never do any of their character specific/normal ones, which is a shame to me.
I personally would want it if wearing the empowered crown still swapped sanity with enlightenment, but prevented the player from experiencing the filter, ambience, and animation effects (or at least for the former two, make them heavily reduced). This would allow the crown to still have the unique dynamic of the enlightenment effect, without making the world look extremely unpleasant to look at.

Sidenote, I do think it would be more fitting if the gestalts from said enlightenment of the crown only spawned during the night phase, though that's more of a flavor thing since it's not like they can impact you anyway.

-Jewels should be adjusted to work like crown shards, where a spore could be added to tint the color, alongside adding a different item to prevent the flame effect altogether. I personally like the customization of tinting the crown a lot (even if I still use this mod to make the light radius work nice with color combos...), so it feels a bit backwards that the crown upgrade entirely forces you to go back to a default crown light. I personally think the jewels should simply behave like crown shards, where you can slot a spore in them to emit tinted light. In addition, you could also add a different item (I was thinking nightmare fuel, but anything would work) into said slot to instead prevent the flame-like effect from occurring once all 5 jewels are slotted while still retaining the upgraded perks, as while it does look very cool, it's also quite distracting and personally isn't my style compared to the crossover prism crown.

-Gestalts spawned from the crown should be upgraded, and their hits should deal planar damage. Very simple change, it simply means that fighting planar enemies feels a bit better and you also don't hear the Bonk! Bonk! Bonk! along with the visual SFX every time your gestalts hit a planar target (which, given the crown now has 100% upkeep, you will experience a lot more now). This was added in the recent beta update! Adding jewels now progressively adds more planar damage to the crown!

-The sanity/enlightenment icon constantly blinks with the crown equipped. Very minor thing all things considered, but still a bit bothering. Because 85%+ enlightenment is considered “bad” and the crown keeps your enlightenment maxed, you’ll always have a flashing icon for the stat wherever you go. It’s a bit distracting when the other stats don’t normally have this issue.

I think those are my general gripes. Overall, I really like the crown, and absolutely want to get my hands on it the moment the jewels are obtainable, but I hope some things can be adjusted before it's fully released, especially the first reason. I hope this can be considered!

One last thing I haven't seen mentioned, but the jewels emit a surprising amount of light for a dropped item, which seems like it would go nice in builds to "hide" lights. I admittedly want the tinted lights so you could further utilize these for build purposes.

Edited June 7, 2025 by Maxil20
Added a point and underlined things that were adjusted (can’t strikethrough when editing a post on mobile for some reason???)

[Swiyss]

7 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

I know there's the obvious argument to simply install a mod to remove the filter/ambience, but I feel it's not a very good sign a mod is needed to make the world look Vibrant and actually good, and console players will not have this option whatsoever.

I actually like the lunar filter, I just don't like the sounds tho, they irritate me more than the visual fx.

7 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

-Gestalts spawned from the crown should be upgraded, and their hits should deal planar damage.

I agree with this. But with the rest, I'm a bit unsure. I do like that it has the lunacy filter and gestalts spawning similar to the bone helm. I don't believe they need to make it perfectly normal, I like this drawback since it reminds me of the bone helm and it makes sense.

[Erathia]

I love this item  we deserve some eternal light in the late game. I hope it doesn’t get nerfed later in the beta, because I don’t want to keep losing full sanity, and it also brings a fresh approach to gear. Normally, we wear head items that give us damage resistance, but since the head slot will be taken here, we’ll have to rely more on armor at body.

[Dingle]

Do the jewels do anything outside of the crown?

What happens if you put them in a mushlamp, for example?

[viblym]

43 minutes ago, Dingle said:

Do the jewels do anything outside of the crown?

What happens if you put them in a mushlamp, for example?

You can't place them inside the Glowcap / Mushlamp

Dropping them on the ground produces light however

[Maxil20]

2 hours ago, astareus said:

But with the rest, I'm a bit unsure. I do like that it has the lunacy filter and gestalts spawning similar to the bone helm. I don't believe they need to make it perfectly normal, I like this drawback since it reminds me of the bone helm and it makes sense.

I think the problem for me is this does not feel like a good comparison. The bone helm is the endgame pre rift drop from the shadow side that you are usually not going to wear for extended periods of time (unless you are Maxwell, I suppose). The empowered crown by comparison is the endgame post rift lunar drop that requires several kills of the pre rift lunar one, and one you will be wearing much more often on average because of the mentioned light + sanity benefits. Having the environment be tinted a permanent blueish filter that you can in no way control feels very bad as a “downside” to an item you already have to go very far to get, much more than the bone helm. That’s why I personally feel it’s a bit silly to experience at all times.

[crushcircuit]

11 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

-The enlightenment aura/ambience is really, really distracting. This is easily my biggest gripe with it. While I like the concept of enlightenment, and don't mind the switch, the visual/ambience effects would very, very quickly become annoying after even a few minutes of crown use. Combined with Bloom, the effect is even worse. Given the mentioned fact you will very likely wear this item near constantly, it isn't exactly ideal to do so when your screen will now pretty much Always look like this:
I know there's the obvious argument to simply install a mod to remove the filter/ambience, but I feel it's not a very good sign a mod is needed to make the world look Vibrant and actually good, and console players will not have this option whatsoever.

Another unfortunate thing is because of the high enlightenment effect, your character will now Always play the full enlightenment animations and never do any of their character specific/normal ones, which is a shame to me.
I personally would want it if wearing the empowered crown still swapped sanity with enlightenment, but prevented the player from experiencing the filter, ambience, and animation effects (or at least for the former two, make them heavily reduced). This would allow the crown to still have the unique dynamic of the enlightenment effect, without making the world look extremely unpleasant to look at.

Sidenote, I do think it would be more fitting if the gestalts from said enlightenment of the crown only spawned during the night phase, though that's more of a flavor thing since it's not like they can impact you anyway.

i agree that they could be reduced since its much more of a "mainstay" item than the bone helm, but i LOVE the flavor of it giving max enlightenment instead of just sanity. i also think the best way to do this would be to remove the blue filter, reduce the volume of the ambiance, and make the idle animations occur less often.

i think it would be nice to still see other idles like character-specific ones, but the visuals of having your character always enlightened with such powerful moon energy is SO good. another good compromise would be to have these only affect you (or affect you More) at nighttime, i think that would still be cool as well.

[Maxil20]

Bumping this post up now that the crown is attainable. While it did get a buff in terms of the gestalts doing planar damage (very noticable IMO, shredded through crystal deerclops with a brightshade sword + enlightened crown), a lot of the quirks I mentioned still remain, that I do hope can get addressed before the beta concludes.

Sidenote that’s a bit unrelated, but I wish the empowered crown counted as a brightshade-like piece for set bonuses (along with the armor, which I’m surprised still isn’t). It is admittedly strange that there’s technically cases where the helm is better because the breakpoint advantage is more valuable than the gestalts, which I feel is a bit strange for a lategame item. I would personally be satisfied if the armor at least got the treatment, though.

Edited June 7, 2025 by Maxil20