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Dashing seems insanely risky to me. The best use I've had with Blink is like BKR mentioned, dashing away/through enemies.
The main purpose of Blink is to use in rooms. It is, even in the DLC, one of the strongest upgrades you can pick, because it gives you escape options you wouldn't normally have. It also has a few potential options in boss fights, but those are generally limited.
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This happens a lot with Charge, Thunderhead, Spear, Drill, Sword weapons and probably a bunch of other ones I can't remember. They need good keywords to be effective.
Sword is objectively better than the default weapon, regardless of keywords. Even with 0 keywords on them, Sword and Drill are still wildly more effective than the default weapon due to their inherent enemy pierce properties, Sword's ability to cancel bullets, their ability to hit full-screen with projectiles, etc. Thunderhead and Spear have issues, but mainly it's due to them sucking at group combat due to slow firing speeds and single target damage.
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I firmly believe the peashooter is better than most make it out to be.
I've done default weapon runs such as this
Sudden Death, no weapons, no upgrade terminal runs. I'm aware the default weapon is a decent weapon, but my complaint is that it simply isn't very fun to use. I'm a bit sick of doing Temple in particular, getting to the epic boss there, and seeing that once again I'm plinking at it with the default weapon because the game's forced me into it beating it down with the peashooter. Feels far less exciting than the original version where, with good dodging, I'm hanging onto a genuinely decent weapon for the final battle. This isn't something like Strania where your weapon gets a downgrade for a specific battle for cinematic reasons; it's just the game simply doesn't care to give you control over your weapon or ammo. If I'm going into an epic boss battle, having a visually satisfying weapon to fit the occasion is a major part of setting the mood. Would Dodonpachi's boss battles be as exciting with the peashooter instead of the intense laser? I don't think so.
The DLC's increased focus on +%damage items is actually a negative in my opinion, because it reflects the game's new focus on upgrading the default weapon for those lengthy, epic battles where you're almost inevitably going to run out of ammo and thus be forced to rely on it. Ditch the % damage items altogether and allow players to hang onto weakened, but more fun weapons longer.
In a good shmup, having fun and interesting shot types is an essential part of the experience. The devs teased on Twitter about tons of new artifact weapons for some time, but if you want to use one of them it's often difficult to hang onto for an extended period of time. Dragonbreath and Atomica are interesting for instance, but both are frankly impractical compared to standard keyword weapons you can obtain, and the new ammo system makes it harder to play with the weapons more freely. Despite the ammo rebalancing, the game actually encourages you to use the same weapon repeatedly with the add-a-keyword items, since you can repeatedly craft the same weapon over and over, multiple times in a run if need be by grabbing any base weapon with open slots. Very unusual.
What the DLC's rebalancing lost is some of the classic, essential shmup design choices. Its ammo being tied directly to player skill calls back to games like Gradius where your weapon was much more fun and interesting at max power, but player skill in not getting hit was tied directly to how long you could use it. Your skill in dodging affects your ability to retain your shot power. Also, no matter how powerful the weapons you have are, the weapon have to feel fun to use, and you can balance visually "cool" weapons not to be gamebreakers. The shot types in Batsugun, Armed Police Batrider, ChoRenSha68k all feel fun and satisfying as you power them up. In Monolith's DLC, instead of the availability of special weapons being tied to player skill, you're more at the mercy of RNG, with forced changes or loss of weapon being far more frequent, through no fault of the player. It's important I think when making a roguelike or any game with RNG elements to know when
not to make elements reliant on RNG.
Gungeon's default weapon might not be as effective, but Gungeon allows you to freely use whatever weapons you want, and it also lets you save interesting weapons for difficult battles rather than using what you have immediately. Ammo is plentiful, and you can save the cool weapons for serious fights if you're running low on ammo for some weapons. In the original Monolith, the balancing was fine, as ammo was finely tuned as such that you could realistically use a cool weapon as long as you wanted if you had the skill to keep its ammo topped up, but now it just feels like you're being punished repeatedly through no fault of your own because you can't hold onto ammo while using the default weapon, and your weapon outright
breaks if you run out of ammo instead of denying you the weapon until you get more ammo, meaning if you get something particularly cool, the DLC's limited guaranteed ammo and more RNG based ammo drops tend to cruelly yank weapons out of the player's grasp through no fault of their own now.