Playtest Updates
As we said in our Discord server when we granted Playtest access to everyone, we want to make monthly updates in our road to Early Access.
This is our first monthly update (January edition), we added the new Influence system and did a major rebalance changing a lot of things. Thanks to all the testers that gave us their feedback!
Influence System
We knew from the start that we wanted to put a big focus on character traits, since that's a big part of the autobattler genre that we like, so players can get traits from characters, items and spells.
The Influence system gives everything a small chance of spawning with an additional trait, this has some big gameplay implications:
- Creates unexpected scenarios due to an Influence spawning (indicated by a clear visual indicator).
- Increases the opportunity cost of rewards, making choices more impactful.
- Increases the power ceiling of characters due to being able to have more traits at once.
- Accelerates the power curve of teams due to trait bonuses being more accessible.
Major Rebalance
We made a lot of balance changes with 2 main goals in mind, improving the difficulty curve and making caster characters more impactful.
Our intention with difficulty is that the early game is easier and the late game is harder, so that if you're losing life you can keep progressing to improve your team, but at some point your team will have to be good enough or fail. Here are the changes regarding difficulty:
- Harder enemies start appearing as the enemy quantity increases, instead of being able to spawn from the start.
- Less enemy experience and items in act 1.
- Boss level is now tied to the current act, instead of using the experience from their team.
- Enemies have a chance to spawn in more favorable positions, increasing with the current act.
- Level 3 enemies have a chance to spawn as a harder enemy, increasing with the current act.
- Level 3 enemies have a chance to spawn with better items, increasing with the current act.
- Enemies killed revive on combat failure in boss stages.
- Boss stages can have multiple combats, tied to current act.
- Life loss on combat failure only scales with current act, instead of remaining enemies as well.
- Life is fully recovered after completing an act.
The caster character archetype was struggling, our intention is that as soon as you pick a character you can feel its archetype, some casters didn't even use their skills in the first combat, and most did more attack damage by default as well. Here are are the changes regarding characters and their skills:
- Adjusted all characters stat blocks and skill power scaling,
- Adjusted some characters skill cost and effects.
- Adjusted most trait bonuses and their character requirements, some need more or less characters now.
- Changed some rare item stats to be more useful to their intended character archetypes.
- Reservation spells have different mana reservation cost and rarities, with the trait related ones being more accessible.
- Passive spells have different rarities, with the more focused ones being more rare.
Misc Changes
- Added the Trait Book, where you can see all traits at once.
- Trait icons are now shown in tooltips.
- Added a spell rarity color indicator, similar to items.
- Characters attack range is now shown on hover while out of combat.
- Added a text popup queue for characters, so that multiple popups don't appear on top of each other.
Fixes
- Enemies no longer spawn with unusable items.
- Instant attacks from counters can deal poise dmg and energy burn now.
- Poise now correctly resets after a poise break if no more poise dmg was received.
- Effects that trigger on skill end (skill combo and energy refill) now correctly trigger if a multi hit skill ends before all hits are performed.
- Skill projectiles now snapshots their character skill combo to correctly receive its multiplier on max skill combo instead of earlier.
- Overtime status effects that deal damage now snapshots their character damage reduction penetration to deal the correct amount of damage even if they die.
- Active reservation effects are now applied to new characters entering the board.
- Unusable reservation spells now turn usable if they would become usable after gaining reservation efficiency.
- Combat log scrollbar now is set to the top on combat start.
- Combat log now correctly registers values after a character dies, helpful for over time effects.