The King announces a new Beta!
Hello heroes!
Part of the work we’ve been doing in the background between hero releases is reevaluating how the game evolved and where we want it to go. As of now, the game isn't as challenging as we want it, we think that the "normal" difficulty of the game should ask for more tactical choices, be it on party composition, items, or path choice in the combat map.
To reach our vision, we needed better tools to calibrate the game, stronger enemies to keep the challenge in the mid-late game, and a way to bring more agency to choose the best fights for each party beyond "Am I strong? Y: Elite - N: Normal".
In this beta we are only testing the first zone, with the 12 original heroes and with basic status items + healing/defensive items.
The difficulty is locked on "normal", this might be harder than the experience you are used to, but please try this out to see how the new systems interact. We will do our best to integrate feedback and make a cool "fun" difficulty and an absolute nightmare "wicked" difficulty.
We hope you like the changes, we have been having a blast internally!
Feedback
Feedback is crucial for this next step, we want to hear your thoughts after engaging with the new systems so we can adjust and polish the changes.
We’ve set up a Google Forms to get some structured data, but also feel free to jump on the Discord and speak your mind directly to us.
Combat
Scaling
Enemy nanas and heroes get stronger as layers go by, keep up the pace!
Common nanas starts with 25% less health, but ends with about 250% more.
Melee nanas start with 100% more damage and end up with 400% more.
Shadow heroes are even more powerful!
Elites
Elite nodes now show you beforehand what kind of enemy you will face, a node with an Archer will only contain Archer themed waves. The number of waves was also reduced from 3 to 2.
Elite node’s final wave will always have a level 3 shadow hero/miniboss that DOES have access to their level 3 abilities (or something equally as devilish), good luck and plan ahead!
Boss
The first boss received a few touch ups, nothing too drastic. He will be throwing more shrooms around in the second phase to make the fight more engaging.
Length
The map has been increased and split into two acts: The first act is easier and ends in a treasure chest; The second act has a lot more elites and ends with the boss.
The total number of nodes has roughly doubled, with this increase the need to save runs got even needier, this feature will come in the future and has been started.
Items
Damage and Heal Power items have been replaced by Strength and Intellect items, these will provide flat values (2/5…) instead of percentages (25%/50%...).
Strength increases the damage of physical attacks, from Knight’s cleaves to Archer’s arrows.
Intellect increases the effectiveness of magical magics, from Mage’s fireballs to Paladin’s heals
Heroes now will have scales on each skill so we can better fine tune each one. If a skill has a 120% strength scale on its damage and you have 10 strength, you will do 12 extra damage.
Item costs have changed as well to better match the extra income from additional waves and force more tactical choices, from 1/2/3/5 to 1/3/5/9.
Heroes
All heroes’ skills have been adapted with the new Strength-Intellect item system, the new calculation looks like this: (Base_Damage + (STR/INT * Scale)) * DMG_Multipliers
Hoplite
-At level 3, can hold up to two empowered spears
Other changes
-Lots of calibrations for the synergies, check the tooltips!
-Ranged enemies run away when near danger
-Pets will stay close to the party when there are no enemies around
-Buff icons have been remade for better readability
How to access the beta
- Right click Just King in your Steam Library
- Click on “Properties…”
- Select “Betas” on the sidebar
- Select the “beta” branch
- Close the window, Steam should download the beta branch