SO DURABLE
Hello again, my dearest puppers!~ I hope that this Pupdate finds you well, wherever you are! After some long considerations on it, this week has some small tweaks to the durability system to (hopefully) make it less annoying to players. As per usual, I'll go into the reasoning after the changelog. So let's get right into it, shall we?
Ephemeral Tale 1.33.4 Changelog
- Lowered HP pool of Dark World enemies by ~5-10%
- Fixed an issue where a randomly generated chest was unobtainable in the Royal Rosegarden
- Lowered the rate that rare enemies flee from combat
- Added a handful of pre-determined chests to each of the Realm of Shadow dungeons
- Fixed a crash that could occur when interacting w/ the skill tree or a shop
- The following changes to the durability system have been made:
- Common armors now have 60 base durability (up from 40)
- Uncommon armors now have 80 base durability (up from 75)
- Rare armors now have 110 base durability (up from 105)
- Damage is now done to all armor equally, as opposed to one piece at random
- Magical attacks now impact durability half as much as they did prior to this patch
To start off the back-half of this week's Pupdate, let's talk about the changes to durability listed above. The durability system has been one that has been a controversial one for some time, and for good reason. See, when Ephemeral Tale released into Early Access the gear system was very different to what it stands to be now. Rarities increased durability, but gear didn't really have levels. Instead, it scaled with you as you adventured through the various zones of the game. Inevitably, the durability alone wasn't a good enough system to encourage use of new gear as time went on. This lead to the system changing into the one that players are familiar with now: gear has levels, and drops near your level.
This has properly incentivized players to try out new stuff (yay!), but this begs the question: why keep durability if that's the case? Simply put, it also helps with that same goal. Since it puts an expiration date on gear, this means that players are more mindful of what they have in their inventory, and this brings value to items like repair kits since they then serve as preservatives of a sort! With that said, one of the major flaws of the current way durability is implemented is that it's unpredictable. This is really frowned upon in turn-based games, as you like to be able to get a feel for how long something is gonna last, whether that's a buff, a fight, whatever the case may be. To help combat that, damage will now be equally spread across your armor, as opposed to the damage being done to a singular piece at random. But like with all changes, there's a trade-off to that.
If all your gear is taking damage equally now, doesn't this mean there's a net increase in damage done to your gear? Yes, actually. That's exactly what it means. So how do we address that issue now? Well, we make magic damage (which currently does double damage to armors) and cut that in half. Additionally, I've gone ahead and upped the base durability of various rarities of armor to ensure they last longer as well. I may have to increase it again in the future, but we'll get there!
Next week, we'll be talking about the upcoming Major Update #6, and what to expect from it. Until next time, stay safe and have fun!
-- Ryan
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