This update adds new permanent progression mechanics, new content, UI enhancements, and a whole lot of balance changes.
Flourishes
Flourishes are super-powered moves that you can trigger at-will, once you've filled your flourish meter. You fill the meter by playing cards and dealing/mitigating damage in both negotiations and battles. Each of the three player characters starts off with a single battle and negotiation flourish, but you can unlock more in-game by defeating bosses at higher prestige levels and selecting them in a mysterious in-game shop.
Mettle
Mettle is a new meta-currency that you gain in the game by completing quests, winning battles and negotiations, and through various opportunities as the story progresses. Once you've met a special shopkeeper in-game, you can permanently upgrade each character with it.
Achievements
You're going to need all of the advantages you can get to complete a new set of 11 achievements. These were designed to be challenging, and to make you think outside of the your usual grifiting box.
New people to meet (and to grift):
Fralx
Fralx is an alternate boss for Rook's first day. He's Rooks old protégé, and he has a score to settle.
Pearlies
Pearlies are the well-off residents of Pearl-on-Foam.
Lumin Turret
The Cult uses Lumin Turrets to enforce their will in the Pearl.
New Promotions
You'll find promoted Luminitiates and Wealthy Merchants in the world, starting at prestige level 1!
Tuning
Sal's campaign got a big tuning pass. Player reports and data were showing us that most of the bosses were too easy, except for Kashio, who was surprising a lot of players with a big difficulty jump. We've adjusted a lot of small things that should work together to smooth out the curve, training players to build better decks before getting to the end of the story:
Bosses:
Most Rook and Sal bosses got specific changes to make them more difficult - more health, more damage, different numbers. The exceptions where the Flead Queen, and Kashio. Kashio was left the same, and the Flead Queen's chitinous levels were dropped at lower prestiges. The goal is to provide a nice, smoothly escalating challenge, rather than a plateau with a brick wall at the end.
Sal's Story:
Sal was getting too many draft opportunities early in her runs, so we reduced the number of encounters on some of her early days. This should push your deck completion out a bit, and force you to make difficult decisions later in your run.
NPC Health / Party Composition:
Previously the game used a bit of auto-balancing to adjust enemy health values depending upon when in a run you meet them. This made reasoning about the difficulty of a given fight quite difficult, and frankly wasn't necessary any more, as we have added many new enemy types since that system was first implemented. NPCs now have consistent HP values, and we've gone through them all and re-assessed their combat strength as seen by the enemy encounter creator. TLDR; health should make more sense now, and you should see more appropriate enemy parties.
Sal Cards:
Finally, we revamped a bunch of Sal's cards, to make them more pickable. Here are some highlights - you can pore over the patch notes for full details.
In addition to all of these changes, there a loads of fixes, balance tweaks, UI improvements, and more. Full details are on the forum, or you can just jump in and play!
Happy Grifting, everyone! We're taking a short break for the holidays, and then our next update will be coming out on January 28. This update is scheduled to have the next day of Smith's story, and I'm sure some other fun stuff will make it in there, too. As always, you can follow along in real-time as we develop it in the Experimental build. We read and appreciate every piece of feedback that you F8 our way, so keep them coming!
