Erofusion v0.3.1: Dark Depths + edition

Gave v0.2 a quick try. Was neat, but there's not enough substance here to entice me into a full playthrough yet. Don't know if/when mod dev will see this but here goes:

• New enemies are always great to see and high difficulty at the upper end is appreciated when playing with other mods as they usually have a higher power level than vanilla
• I lack in-depth knowledge of PvZ Fusion so if the designs and mechanics are directly inspired, my suggestions won't account for that
• My balance feedback might be a bit off, I don't have a save file that's really the right level for the new fights and I tried them out alongside my own experimental stuff
• Haven't seen the cannons in action yet, just the shades
• Wearable & enemy move names should be title case ("Shade Musket") to match the rest of the game -- right now it's "Shade musket"
• White smudges around the waist of the shade set are unfortunately rather distracting, you can even kinda see it in the itch page screenshot
• The vanilla Speed token never wears off, which makes the "Slow Speed" of the shades misleading, they actually all have over 100 speed for the entire fight unless you daze them or fully clear their positive tokens; you could replace it with a custom speed token that does wear off if you just wanted them to go first in the first round? Consider using a token with a damage penalty and forcing them to use specific moves in the first round, too, since it's basically free damage before the player can do anything
• Enemy moves need some adjustment, especially Dark Knight -- they love to spam their three non damaging moves, which makes fighting them inconsistent in terms of difficulty, and usually very easy. Will suggest fixes later
• The enemies currently seem manageable but shaderat_three is very hard for a fight that can show up in Adept dungeons. Mixing new enemies with vanilla enemies is a great idea, but 8 enemies is a bit extreme.
• Shade boots allow move slip away twice (doesn't do anything)
• Player move slip away is back 4 (effectively the same as back 3)
• Player move dark heal is swift and has super high base value so it gets ridiculous on pacifist healers... consider putting additive bonus healing on the move script, and lowering the base value to reduce the scaling, or just lowering it a bit in general. Also should probably be called gather shadows to match the enemy move
• Player move Shadow Fussilage should be spelled Fusillade.
• Shade items aren't assigned to a set (even if you don't want to add an armor set bonus I'd consider creating a set for inventory sorting, like the vanilla parasite set)

Specifically for enemy move changes I'd suggest some combination of the following, but you're free to ignore any of these:

• take slip away off melee shades entirely & make it only usable from positions 1 and 2; OR give it a cooldown and a low health requirement; OR depriority it in the enemy AI so it's only used as a fallback; OR give it a cooldown and put it as a priority so it acts as downtime between their more powerful moves
  • (any of these would prevent every shade type from spamming it uselessly from the back ranks)
• make gather shadows only usable below 75% health in addition to the cooldown, so shades don't waste half their turns spamming it at full health
• consider making rotting strike not able to hit the back row
• consider giving dark knights a nastier attack that's only usable from stealth so they can punish you for not de-stealthing them
• consider reducing base HP damage of some shade attacks significantly, to compensate for the more aggressive behavior. High durability damage can stay
• consider changing some of that up front damage out for vanilla status effects/dots (silence, punish, acid?)

Overall there's not a huge amount of stuff here and it could use some tweaking, but it's neat in concept. Have you thought about looking at how slime merging works and changing the shades to fuse or upgrade mid-combat, since enemy fusions seem to be a key part of the theme here? It'd probably be a ton of work to do more than a few combinations that way, and I don't know what it'd do to the balance, but it seems like an idea worth at least toying around with?