Allow me to preface myself with this foreword: I generally do not make it a habit to rely on Soma’s souls more than the bare minimum needed for the sake of progression and/or bestiary completion.

Now that that’s out of the way: I like the premise of these patches, but feel that some of the execution is… well, not as much as I would have imagined. To be more specific:

MP Regen: This is by far the best of the patches, and the one I personally feel needs the least tweaking, if any at all. Vanilla MP Regen was so slow that it basically behooved players to have the Mind Up/High Mind Up/Mana Prism restoratives at hand if they wanted to be a caster Soma. Keep in mind that the Rune Ring and Wooden Golem soul both can help with this (ignoring the Chaos Ring because it is an endgame reward for attaining 100% souls that makes MP, for the most part, a complete non-issue), but the former is a midgame item, and the soul must be farmed, although the Wooden Golem is found fairly early in the game. With this patch, players without the aforementioned ring or soul (although there is still benefit to be had from using them, fret not!) who want to be a caster Soma can spend more of their time actually being what they want to be: a caster. That being said…

INT fix: Eh… I like the idea behind this, I really do. But to be honest, due to Soma’s stat growth as he levels (interestingly, over the course of levels, Soma gets more STR than he does INT, even though the latter stat starts out slightly higher than the former), and the fact that there isn’t a whole lot of endgame equipment that adds INT without also adding STR, the overall effectiveness of Bullet Souls suffers as a whole compared to simply slapping on a good weapon in his hand. Outside of the usual overpowering Bullet Soul fare like Killer Mantle, Red Minotaur, and the like, more often than not, I find myself just playing more a physical Soma than a caster Soma. If Soma’s INT growth could be edited to at least be the same as his STR growth, or overall attack power rating of Bullet Souls in general were to be buffed, then I might be more supportive of the execution of this. But as is, this is the fix I’m the least likely to apply to an AoS rom personally.

LCK fix: This… isn’t exactly easy to explain, given the inherent RNG nature of LCK. But being honest? I didn’t exactly feel much difference between a completely vanilla AoS run, and an AoS run with this specific fix patched in. It certainly isn’t as big a difference as, say, doing a completely vanilla Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow playthrough, then doing a different playthrough with the LCK fix applied there. As far as I understand, that particular LCK fix was done via making each point of LCK give a +0.1% flat increase to the chances of an item and/or soul drop. Perhaps the same could be done for here? Keep in mind that LCK growth is very stunted compared to STR, CON, and INT, so barring outrageous editing, whether with the DSVania Editor (for items and souls) or otherwise, if LCK were to be buffed to give a +0.1% flat increase to droprates per point, a maxed out Soma, assuming vanilla LCK gear credentials, would have a +12.5% (approximately) chance of getting an item and/or a soul. Plentiful, perhaps, but not game-breaking.

Final thoughts: Like the premise and ideas behind these fixes, and the MP Regen fix is definitely the best of them all, but the other two fixes, I feel, could use a little bit of tweaking.