The dev has been on point for years but I’m definitely not a fan of repurposing the Stone of Disarming to help ID items.
The exploding trap item ID “exploit” is way overblown IMHO. It came at the cost of losing and not using or selling non-upgraded items in shops. It was also plausible that higher quality upgraded items are built better to withstand the explosion.
I’ve never had to rely on it as there’s lots of ways to ID items and don’t care if others use the trap as the game is all about having multiple ways to accomplish goals. If it bugs most players then ok fine… nerf it… but not at the cost of other very useful items. It’s not like the trap is that common where it’s game breaking though. You might not even encounter one before slotting the items you want to use for the rest of the game.
The change came at the cost of providing much fewer ways… and in some case the only way… to deal with traps. The biggest one is being forced to duke it out in summon trap rooms if you don’t have a potion of levitation which mainly only drops to fly over other trap rooms. Another is running from a mob on low health and being stopped by a nasty undiscovered trap in a hallway with no other item or skill to leap over it. It also uses up items that players use to do and craft other things.
Also, I saw that bombs don’t work on wood walls in the stone of enchantment room anymore? Items that make fire are easier to get but it’s annoying when you don’t have something earlier in the game so you have to keep going until you find one then trudge back at the cost of satiety… and it may have dropped for a wood walled up door so you have to repeat the process.
Anyway, no complaints to add a new stone of detection rather than replacing a useful one which reduces the interesting and plausible ways to do things.
Bomb ID was never intended behavior, so the dev removed it. That’s all there is to it.
You have so many low cost ways to dodge or disable traps. Levitation, any teleporting item (fadeleaf, blink stone, etc.), aqua blast, trap reclamation, chain. Even blast wave over traps is possible at +1 or above. Losing one way to help identify equipment really isn’t a big deal. Stone of Disarming is arguably the least creative and interesting way to play around traps. Also, the main draw of the monster house secret room isn’t the meager skeleton drop.
Bombs not working on barricades is a bug, which is fixed in the non-beta 2.5.3 release.
It may not have been intended but it’s pretty interesting that it worked code-wise. The idea that a better made item can survive a physics test is also a plausible mechanic if you’ve ever watched Forged in Fire where blacksmith’s make blades and subject them to brutal tests to find a champion.
The rest is as you say… arguable… and think I’ve made a reasonable argument that the ‘fix’ altered balance more than the effect. It’s funny how the players who made it a ‘big deal’ to affect a reductive unintuitive change now call it ‘not a big deal’ after they got their way.
There’s simply other opinions that aren’t fully represented in the smaller sample size of vocal Lemmy users which is why I alluded it to being a bubble, statistically speaking.