Hello everyone. Today I released v0.63, the artifact rework. The reworks had the following goals:
Remove confusion regarding the take-home chest and equipped artifacts
Increase healing options in the dungeons
Empower player choice and build strategy
Improve skill information
Increase artifact mechanic variety
Create gold sinks and better balance game economy
Here is how each goal was addressed:
Remove confusion regarding the take-home chest and equipped artifacts:
The take-home chest has been entirely scrapped. Instead, all artifacts your team collects will be sold when you leave a dungeon.
You can no longer equip artifacts in the dungeon prep screen. Instead, you can equip "Equipment".
Equipment has strong non-stacking effects and can be purchased in the store instead of artifacts. To help further separate equipment and artifacts, it will be displayed separately in the dungeon
In the future I plan to have players find equipment in the dungeons or possibly craft them in town. For now, all the new equipment can be purchased and sold in the shop.
Increase healing options in the dungeon:
New players often complain there aren't enough ways to heal. To combat this I added healing consumables, artifacts, and equipment, in addition to the %health heal buff from last patch.
Introduced the firewood consumable: With this item you can turn ANY empty tile into a campsite. To compensate, I slightly nerfed camp activated abilities like the cyclops armor buff and bee healing buff.
The healing sword equipment improves all healing on the holder. It can be dropped from certain events in the RUINS.
The sleeping bag equipment makes campsites heal 100% energy and health for the holder. It is sold in the shop. Combine with firewood to keep your team healthy
If consumables aren't enough to keep your team healthy, I added a large variety of new healing artifacts.
The medkit artifact has been split into the blessed egg artifact and medkit consumable.Blessed egg acts exactly like the old medkit artifact. Medkit consumables are expensive, but heal 20% max hp outside of battle and remove half of all negative statuses
The trail mix artifact has been split into the pulse flower and the trail mix consumable. Trail mix is cheap, and heals for 10% max hp. Pulse flower acts like the old trail mix artifact.
Empower player choice and build strategy:
Before this patch, the strategy was to hit every battle and event and cross your fingers that you got what you needed to win. I want players to be constantly reevaluating their combat capabilities in the dungeon.
Now, when you win a battle you will be given a choice of up to 3 artifacts. The rarity of the available artifacts will depend on dungeon luck, which will be explained more below.
Removed the "leave artifact behind" option. This option had no strategic weight as there is no limit to the number of artifacts a girl could hold. With the introduction of CURSED artifacts, it made even less sense.
You can now trade artifacts between girls outside of battle. Click artifacts inside of a backpack to pick it up, and place it down by clicking inside another backpack.
Improve skill information:
Since launch, players have complained that the game doesn't provide enough information in combat. While I can't show damage ranges due to all the in game effects, I can show base numbers and damage types.
Hovering a skill will now display its base damage, base hit chance, and damage type.
When you hover an enemy when skill is not selected, it will now display its resistances and stats.
Increase artifact mechanic variety:
Added around 100 new artifacts
Added CURSED artifacts that have negative effects but are quite strong
Added artifacts that interact with floor number and stairs
Added artifacts that interact with the new statuses introduced in v0.56
Added artifacts that work with the consumables system
Added more artifacts that interact with the orb system
Added more artifacts that interact with critical hits
Removed artifacts with extreme edge case uses like Sudden Log and Butter
Removed artifact location weights. This reduces game loading times and dungeon creation times. Unfortunately this means modders will no longer be able to control which artifacts drop in which dungeon/tier.
Create gold sinks and better balance game economy:
Players have been complaining about having too much gold and nothing to buy.
As I have mentioned above, consumables will be a one time purchase at the start of a run.
Bosses, events, and battles drop significantly less gold.
Added a number of new equipment/artifacts that play off collected gold to help mitigate the loss of other revenue
Artifacts are sold based on their rarity when you leave a dungeon. Rather than 1000-4000 gold per artifact you can expect each artifact to sell for 50-200 gold depending on rarity
Misc Changes
Balance:
- Reduced Minotaur max health and strength
- Reduced Goblin Prince max strength
- Reduced mimic max health
- Reduced goblin max health
- Enemies that stack frenzy will now attack instead if they hit a certain number of frenzy stacks
- Reduced energy restored from skipping a turn.
- Blind, Slow, Broken, and Weak will no longer decay while travelling
- Increased the cost of the first girl capacity upgrade to 2000. This is to encourage solo dungeon exploration early game and allow players to grasp combat basics.
Bugs:
- Fixed an animation issue with Command
- Fixed the left arrow not making sound in the clothing menu
- Fixed heal numbers not appearing on enemies
- Fixed some hovered artifact text showing off screen.
- Fixed some dungeon prep text overflowing text boxes
QoL:
- Updated wording on a lot of artifacts
- Updated wording on Buffer to indicate it does block positive status as well.
- Updated and created more achievements
- The portrait in the dungeon prep screens will now display the dungeon outfit and hairstyle