Continuing with the theme of regutting, many of the things that were partially replaced in the last beta now have enough substance to truly be called a rework.
Weapon Power Displays
Firstly, attacks/weapons have a new metric overview. This also came with rebalancing on every weapon and attack. The extremely misleading Highest Damage, Average Damage, and Battlescore have been switched to Impact Chance, Highest Contribution, Average Damage, and Weighted Average Damage.
Highest Damage before was just the theoretical best attack's dps, times it's hit multiplier. This was misleading because that attack might be less common, it did not account for the effects of armor and dodging in practice (10x hit mult would count as 10x damage while 2x would count as 2x, despite doing the same thing).
Average Damage was the same metric, but averaged amongst all attacks.
Battlescore was an attempt to fix this by live-testing against imaginary people, and is the basis for the new system. Battlescore failed because it still showed the misleading stats, and labeled the misleading stats better. It also isn't perfect, but it was better.
One minor issue is that it is fairly difficult to gauge weapons against a wide spectrum of armors and loadouts. This new system, like battlescore, only considers the effects against opponents of the same level.
Impact chance is the % chance of all the simulated attacks had to both hit and penetrate armor.
Highest Contribution is the attack that had the highest Average Damage within it, so a higher Highest Contribution means that the weapon depends on one attack more than others. This isn't a good comparison number, because a weapon that has 3 attacks would be 33% when perfectly even, but a 100 attack weapon would be around 2% if one attack was twice as good as all the other attacks. Still, it's useful if you're really trying to understand it without using it.
Average Damage is what the old battlescore was. It's the average of all the attack's DPS's in a simulated environment.
Weighted Average damage is that, but more common attacks 'count' for more. So if there were two attacks, and one had a 66% chance to happen and the other had a 33% chance, the former would count for twice as much. Note that, in practice, you select the *best* attacks you're presented with- but the chance of you getting an attack that is good is still heavily tied into the chances any one attack will roll into a better attack.
You can use one of the testing screens under Play->Various Tests->Weapon Stat Query to call up the stats for a Weapon at level 1, 10, and 100. This can call any weapon material, and additionally itemizes the results per attack, which adds transparency in auditing the system. (Mostly for me, but anyone who has insights is welcome to use it.)
'Classless', but it's just multi-multi-multi-etc etc classing
The 'classless' system is now in enough to play and test. The flow is as follows:
1. When you use quickstart, your character randomly selects an Archetype presented to them on level up. If you do slowstart, you can select from any starting Archetype, so there is no need to startscum (like in some other roguelite/roguelike adjacent games) for better starting classless classes.
2. That Archetype unlocks Feats, which you select when you level up. This is similar to the ancient Skill system before exotic arts were implemented. Each level grants one Feat Pick and one Feat Point. The game attempts to make sure you have at least 2 Archetypes, but you only need 1 to start getting Feats instead, if you want. Archetypes have a list of 'Feat Types' (name very pending). For example, 'Armor Paragon' unlocks 'Battle' and 'Smiths' Feats due to the theme of 'Tending to Your Armor'; 'Virago' unlocks 'Mystic' 'Potions' 'Curses', etc etc.
3. Every Feat and Archetype, as well as Perks you can obtain by completing tasks in universe, gives you Skills, and optionally Attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Clarity for now). Skills don't stack with skills of the same name, but they have direct impacts on how the game is played. A lot of the old skills were used in the exotic arts system under the hood, repurposed from the even older skill system. Some of these were remade, others are original. Archetypes typically grant 1-2 skills, while Feats usually grant 2 and some Attributes on top.
More need to be created, the current selection is 5 Player-useable Archetypes, 8 Player-Usable Feats, and 7 Obtainable Perks.
Examples:
Archetypes
"Hedge Mage: A perpetual novice, hedge mages aren't content to restrict themselves to one school.", gives "Frugal Mage" that increases the aether to money conversion rate in Stores, and "Arcanist", a special skill that grants an attack that can be swapped out between any source of Arcanist you have. (Similar to the old Arcanist Exotic Art, but no longer an entire class that locks you into it.)
Feats
"Unbreakable: Nothing stops them." gives 4 strength, 'Tough as Nails', which gives you a flat % chance to negate wounds, and 'Armorheart', which heals you when your armor blocks an attack. Both of these were under the old Skill system and transferred over.
"Armor Painter: They paint their armor with magical dyes." gives 5 clarity, "Mesmer Armor", which uses clarity to attempt to confuse those who attack the skill user unsuccessfully, and "Armor Mage", which increases your armor slightly based on your Clarity. The former is new, the latter is still being converted from the old system.
Misc
There were also many changes to Nodes and other Features, such as Ports becoming a full Docks feature, Witch Huts getting expanded to sell ingredients and have quests to get them, and many small other changes.
For around half of the time spent on this update, Nodes were so broken that they would not run, because they were, as the sprint saying goes, 'gutted'. Almost all the old nodes made it back in, although some got merged, and many got added behavior.
The game also now has a system to add summons, which did not make it in, but the support is there. However, re-balancing has made a level 2 person no longer twice as good as a level 1 person in most things, so all the mass fights that aren't even are now somewhat problematic.
Wrapping Up
I am unsure if the pace of the sprints will maintain at such a high cadence- I had hoped to push updates more often, but there was just so much that needed to get fixed before it was playable again.
And that is good for motivating me to keep going, but not exactly the best for quality assurance and testing.
We'll see what the future has in store, though. It's been a long early access, and there's still a long way to go before I'm happy with Trawel.
MINOR UPDATE (as of the 13th of August): I was able to get a working linux version on the beta (at least on my linux computer, I doubt it runs on half of the devices, but hopefully it'll run on SteamOS, which I do not have installed unfortunately). I feel like I just endured a great ordeal on par with the "Labours of Hercules", so don't expect it to work *well*, but this should pave the way for updated legacy graphical support in full on these distributions.
