Hello everyone!
It's finally summer here, and although some days are a little hot, we're happy to say we're moving forward with the next Major Update!
And today: time for a new OPEN BETA!
Despite the huge evolution that has already been performed since the EA release, we still felt like some parts of the combat were not fulfilling their role quite as intended, subsequently hindering the achievement of our vision for The Last Spell - be it in its current state or when planning some new content/features.
This beta has a strong focus towards shifting/tweaking some underlying elements of the combat system, trying to improve it without distorting its primitive essence (because there’s already a lot that works well!).
But since we like you a lot, and in an attempt to demonstrate that a successful rework can actually help us add content, we’re also happy to throw in 2 new production buildings made possible by the recent “Items production rework”!
Damage Rework
Since early stages of the development, we wanted The Last Spell to be a “classless” game, where players could build very diverse characters, combining any type of weapon. However, until now, and with a few exceptions, combining weapons of different damage types has always been pretty inefficient.
With the following changes, we are trying to make hybrid weapon combinations more viable for characters, without nerfing the character’s overall power level throughout runs. Feel free to try out those kinds of builds, and tell us if they feel viable or not.
Primary vs Secondary Attributes
The gist of it is that the Physical, Magic and Ranged Damage attributes have been shifted to secondary attributes, while Damage, Resistance Reduction and Accuracy have become primary attributes.
The formatting of their value has been tweaked a bit too - Damage is now displayed as a modifier (default +0%) and Phys/Mag/Rang+ as multipliers (default 100%), and their min/max boundaries have been updated accordingly - but this is purely cosmetics/UX, their behavior remains unchanged: they still affect affect each other and the base damage multiplicatively.
From a systemic point of view, this almost exclusively affects where you can get them during level ups, and thus changes the character build dynamic since the various options in competition for your attention have changed.
These stats have also been rebalanced wherever they may appear: probability of appearing and values have been tweaked for level ups, equipment, traits and some perks. The entire list of changes is a bit too long, but as a rule of thumb, Damage appears more frequently and has higher values, while Physical/Magic/Ranged Damage appears less frequently and with lower values than before.
What this means is that, whilst still theoretically as strong as before to focus on a single damage type, it’s much less frequent to be able to specifically target one and rely on it as the main source of a hero’s potency ; meanwhile, it’s much easier to increase your overall damage, reducing a lot of the friction when switching damage type mid run - or even better, constantly during the battle! This hopefully will enable more variety in combat builds.
Gear Affixes Balancing
Additionally, we’ve rebalanced many aspects of the affixes (the additional bonuses you get on uncommon+ equipment), which we hadn’t done globally for a loooooong time - most likely the EA release - and weren’t fitting the current balance and design intentions.
- Values, in relation to each other but also level ups (which are meant to be more important).
- Drop rates, according to the current state of the game and the current damage rework.
- Drop incompatibilities: some affixes can’t drop on some pieces of gear. This is still true, but since the game has changed a lot, some updated intentions have been reasserted (e.g. it was not possible to get +Propagation Bounces on a melee/ranged weapon, which was a bit sad for the 2H Hammer or Hand Crossbow builds… don’t ask!).
Weapons Base Damage
The maximum base damage of all weapons has been increased a bit. This has been done to:
- Better fit the new Damage & Phys/Mag/Rang Damage scale.
- Reduce the reliance on those attributes upon generation, regarding the early stages of the run (before one has a chance to build their Hero).
- Increase the impact of the Reliability attribute.
Enemies Damage Scaling
We also fixed something that had been bugging us for some time: behind the scenes, enemies were using the Damage attribute to become stronger as the run went on. Since attributes are additive in The Last Spell, this effectively made Damage buffs or debuffs way weaker than they seemed to be: with a -33% Damage debuff, you were reducing enemy damage from 100% => 67% at Night 1 (expected result), but then it could be something like 250% => 222% at night 12, which is very underwhelming to say the least.
This will not be the case anymore, and Damage buffs/debuffs on enemies should always reduce damage by the expected value - unless they have some buffs, but this is intended (and visible to the player)!
Enemies’ Accuracy
The impact of Accuracy on enemies - mostly, using Accuracy Debuffs - has always been pretty underwhelming. Also, with Accuracy now being labeled a Primary Attribute, we wanted to improve upon that.
The first thing we did is really a detail, but at the same time is altering the perception of the whole Dodge mechanic in a subtle way that enables us to perform the rest: we re-labeled the little “Dodged!” pop-up over the units’ heads to “Missed!”.
Same thing, right?
Wrong! It allowed us to justify a brand new addition: attacks can now miss buildings!
This way, lowering the enemies’ Accuracy becomes much more interesting, as a defensive mechanism. All buildings have 0 Dodge, but when an enemy has <0% Accuracy, they can still occasionally miss their attacks.
This effectively increases the attractiveness of Accuracy Debuffs.
In addition to that, enemies also have an Accuracy value, which scales over the duration of the run.
Most enemies start with negative Accuracy, which effectively gives more leeway to players in the beginning of the run: Heroes need less Dodge to have a chance at evading attacks, as well as buildings having a small chance of being missed as well.
It also allows us to increase the disparity between enemies: basic Tier1 enemies will never rise over 0% Accuracy so it’s only beneficial to the player, but on the other hand a few, stronger, enemies will have a positive Accuracy meaning that it will actually be harder to Dodge their attacks.
Skill Progression
While some skill effects are naturally effective at all stages of the game, others tend to be either too strong early on or too feeble in the late game, and the correct balance is nearly impossible to find for some buffs or debuffs.
Up until now, only skills inflicting poison and skills granted by Body Armor had higher values with higher level gear, but we decided to extend this to a few select weapon and enemy skills as well, mainly for buffs and debuffs on attributes like Block or Armor.
New Buildings
We have added two new productions building :
- The Alchemist : Produces potions and scrolls, costs 100 gold.
- The Jeweler : Produces trinkets, costs 100 gold. As you can guess, other production buildings won’t produce trinkets anymore.
The Alchemist was something very popular in your feedback and it was in our backlog for a long time. But we've waited for our rework of building upgrades to add new buildings, since the economy of the game was a bit too tight a few patches ago.
Other
Hero Portrait + Infopanel QoLs
The little infopanel displayed when hovering over a hero had to be updated to match the attribute switch. We took this opportunity to give it a small makeover and add a neat little feature: the currently selected weapons of the Hero are now displayed as well!
Additionally, we’ve added the mana gauge under the portrait of your Heroes in the top right corner, as well as displaying the actual corresponding values when hovering a given portrait.
Enemies Crit
Enemies now have 0% chance of inflicting a Critical hit. We heard your feedback that it wasn’t that fun, and since it wasn’t a prevalent mechanic on enemies anyways, we scrapped it.
Oraculum
You can now access the oraculum from the worldmap so that you don’t need to start a new run to buy or reclaim some favors.
Production Buildings
With the recent changes to production buildings, players that invest a lot in mines and production buildings often have too much gold in the last nights of a run. We still want the economy to be fairly permissive, but it seemed a bit easy to place down all production buildings, so they now cost a bit more.
Armor Maker: price from 60 to 80 gold
Blacksmith: price from 60 to 90 gold
Bowyer: price from 60 to 90 gold
Magic Shop: price from 60 to 90 gold
Perks
Tier 4 Perk “Versatility” has been removed.
Tier 2 Perk “Flexibility” has been moved to Tier 4 and rebalanced according to its new position and the damage rework.
Added a new Tier 2 Perk, “Crippling Punch”.
Bodybuilder and Head On have been slightly tweaked to better fit the new values of damage attributes.
Optimization
Again with this open beta we’ve done a lot of optimization. The game should run more smoothly on idle. Don’t hesitate to tell us if you notice a change in your fps count or not.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a softlock when Spiky Counter killed enemies with caster effect skills (for examples : Hunter, Harpy).
- Fixed the health number display that was remaining for no reason on enemies sometimes.
- Fixed some enemies having the poison/panic feedback displayed right after leaving the fog.
- Fixed the isolation bonus in damage calculation not being displayed (but still applied).
- Undoing a move while hovering the “Jump Over” skill lead to some UI problems.
- Fixed some weird camera movements when using the perk Human Ballista to kill the Harpy
Please let us know if you manage to make some hybrid builds work (and what they are), and if it feels more viable than before to go for a specific mechanic-oriented build.
As usual, we'll be very happy to hear about what how you feel after experiencing those changes.
So, don't hesitate to try all of this in the Beta Branch of the game and join our Discord server to give us all your feedback!