Risk of Rain Spite Huntress

Spite's description is highly misleading. It says enemies 'explode' on death, and what they actually do is release a number of Spite Bombs determined by what kind of enemy they are. These bombs work much like the Engineer's Tri-nades; they bounce a certain number of times and then detonate the final time they impact ground. Unlike Tri-nades, they don't detonate on touching hostiles. (ie you) This means it's a really good idea to jump a lot when Spite Bombs are flying about, as Spite Bombs can't actually detonate mid-air. (Unless we count colliding with walls and detonating)

I sort of like the idea behind Spite, but its actual execution isn't very interesting, and like many of the Artifacts it's fairly poorly tuned. Spite Bomb count doesn't really correlate to threat level except at the broadest of levels, and it doesn't even correlate all that well to 'cost'.

By 'cost' I mean that the game's approach to enemy generation is based around a points-buy system. As time passes, the game's 'director' accrues points, and at semi-random intervals attempts to spend them by randomly choosing an enemy type. Different enemy types have different costs, with elite versions adding a multiplier to the cost and bosses generally being much more expensive than regular enemies and enemies you only fight later in the game more expensive than enemies you can encounter right from the beginning. (And Blighted enemies being more than twice as expensive as elites) Generally speaking, an enemy's cost correlates to its threat level; the more dangerous the enemy is meant to be, the more expensive it is.

You can quite readily see a lot of the implications in regular play, and get a feel for relative costs based on how much, on average, a given enemy type tends to show up, and especially based on how early you start seeing elite versions. (With the caveat that elite access is not universal: no regular flying enemy can come in elite form, and I personally have almost never seen an elite boss without either having Honor on or being on a looped level. Many of the special enemies like Direseeker can't come in elite form either) Claymen show up as elites with tremendous frequency while still swarming you; they're one of the cheapest enemies in the game. Elite Greater Wisps, on the other hand, will almost never be seen if you're not looping, because they only show up in the first couple of levels and Greater Wisps are pricey for an early regular enemy.

But Spite Bombs, like I said, are not anything like 'x number of Spite Bomb per points cost'. It's true that for example Claymen don't drop any Spite Bombs, but on the other hand Parents are an enemy that's surprisingly cheap and yet sprays huge numbers of Spite Bombs on death. Put another way, enemy size seems to be the main metric for deciding Spite Bomb count, and enemy size has only a very loose correlation to their points cost and base danger level.

And of course Spite is an Artifact that can readily induce lag. Even if the enemies are dying substantially off-screen!

But even aside these issues, Spite does surprisingly little to change your playstyle. Jumping a lot is already a good way to reduce damage from living enemies and allows you to fight on the move quite effectively even if you're not the Huntress. All Spite really does, by itself, is make it so that killing large numbers of enemies close together can get you killed with little warning. Not interesting.