Hi everyone! And welcome to all the new players.
I've been working hard on the next update. The new hero design is looking promising and I'm sure you'll enjoy it. It still need a bit more work and balancing done but it should hopefully be ready in a week or so.
Next update will also contain a bunch of new challenges, each with a new unlockable relic. As always I try to make sure the relics have interesting design, don't hestiate to join the Discord if you want to make suggestions. It's always fun to see what ideas the community can come up with.
In the meantime:
I've also been fixing bugs and doing some small balance changes. I wasn't expecting to patch the game until the next update is ready, but I feel like the amount of changes made and their importance now justify a small weekly update.
This patch also include one new challenge to help you with the wait. I'm sure this challenges will be unpopular, but it was just too funny to watch a certain streamer having his ball go wild and bounce from one curse to an other against the Cursed One. Who needs maxHp anyway!
(The reward for the Hydra challenge has been changed, and its previous reward is now the reward for the new challenge, sorry for the inconsistent change but it just makes so much more chance thematically to have it that way.)
I wanted to talk a bit about the most important balance change of the update:
The Primal Essence fight got his brick layout slightly changed. With the addition of the Rocket Brick in the previous update the fight got indirectly harder, and it would more often result in an unccontrollable chain reaction.
To counteract this I added more bricks on the board and increased the overall hardness of the present bricks, the fight should now be a bit easier. It will get tweaked some more if needed.
For anyone curious I'll take this opportunity to talk about the Primal Essence and how the fight works, because I can't put so much info in the in-game fight description:
This Elite has a list of spells, and every time an upgraded brick is destroyed the Primal will use a spell that depends on the brick's upgrade.
So destroying a pyrobrick will always trigger the vertical fireballs attack, destroying a poison brick will always trigger a confusion, etc.
All the offensive spells of the Primal Essence are triggered by bricks that are upgraded to destroy other bricks (Pyro, Explo, Multi, Rocket) so watch out about those and try to slow down the fight so it doesn't start a chain reaction. Good Luck!
If you are interested in these kind of details, don't hesitate to come talk about it on the Discord. I love talking about the intricate parts of the game design but I always tend to cut it short to avoid getting too nerdy with explanations ^^
But I'm happy to talk about it and share any info you might be interested in.
Here's the complete list of changes:
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Tweaked the number of bricks and their hardness in the Primal Essence fight
New Achievement: Reach a combo of a 100 with the Shade
Challenges will now always give their relic reward on first time completion.
Changed the Hydra Challenge relic reward
Relics price range reduced from 90-120 to 85-110
Fixed the Watering Can displaying an incorrect value of 75 thorns (when unlocked)
Storm Level 5 Description changed to : "Fewer Chests on the map but more Elite Fights"
Fixed the chances of a chest event appearing
Added an "Experimental" disclaimer next to the mouse control options (it will receive more work in a future update)
Fixed the paladin blessings not triggering the pavise when collected by the nebula clouds
Fixed trebuchet tooltip to indicate the correct amount of damage dealt
Added a crash prevention to the Elementalist Earthquake spell. (If you ever experiment an earthquake not destroying any bricks, let me know the circumstances, it means the game was expected to crash but instead decided no to)
The goblins on the first world map are now twitching their ears from time to time