This update adds the start of the Journey system, what I consider to be an inversion of the typical leveling based roguelite perk system. I’ve been happy with the decision to make beacons activated in mission team based, since it provides team decision making, a sense of cohesion and also helps late-joiners/spectators not feel so underpowered. However, this was only ever meant to be half of your in-mission progression. Your Journey represents your personal progression as a Knight Errant, where the general direction and goals of your Journey are known, but the details can surprise you. Instead of the typical large pool of perks that you banish/re-roll to downselect for the build you are trying to achieve, this system allows you to control which perks are within the pool from the start.
This is only the start of the system and will change and evolve over time with lots of balancing/tweaking/polish as we go along (the goal is for all of these perks to have vfx and/or hud icons, I haven’t gotten to that yet). I also have more paths in work to be added to the game and unlocked in more fun ways in the world ;) I still hope you find this update enjoyable, I’m excited to keep expanding the system.
New
- Journey System
- Instead of activating random beacons when leveling up your Path in mission, you now gain a choice of skills from your Journey
- Your Journey is made up of skills from the Paths that you have equipped (and hopefully levelled up)
- Paths will be unlocked in a variety of ways, including leveling (most of the current ones), finding them, accomplishing legends or solving mini-puzzles in the world
- Paths are equipped from the new Journey menu in the Keep
- Once initially unlocked, Paths are levelled up to uncover more skills within
- Damage types
- Rending, Concussive, Voltaic and Molten damage types have been added.
- For now, damage types don’t do anything inherently on their own, they simply enable various perks. Every attack has a default damage type, and a single attack is capable of having multiple damage types. This wasn’t the focus of this update and is therefore barebones for now, expect much more integration of damage types in the future.
- New Interactable: Path doorway
- New Interactable: Path Teachings
- New HUD popup specifically for unlocks to make them more noticeable and separated from combat information
Updates
- Armor Path Mods
- Renamed to System mods
- Now have 2 stats that increase with every path level, with % gains diminishing every 10 path levels.
- While the previous system of alternating stats was interesting, It wasn’t intuitive to know what stats you had at what time. This new method means you always know what stats you have and they all slowly improve over time.
- Beacons
- Bleed on hit now requires rending damage
- Stun on hit now requires concussive damage
- Chain on hit now requires voltaic damage
- Debuff on hit requires molten damage (replaces existing chain on shock beacon)
- Gear
- Spin barrel now adds Molten damage while at the maximum fire rate
- Power mags reduced to 15% damage (was 25%) but also adds Voltaic damage
- Pulse barrel now additionally deals 50 base concussive damage
- Lightning blade now does Voltaic damage
- Shockwave blade now does Concussive damage
- (Keep) both History screens have been combined into one
- (Keep) Quest board has been moved
- (Keep) Practice range has been moved
- Gear & cosmetic unlock level requirements have been adjusted to accommodate the new path mods
- Cel Depots add time to the enemy presence timer instead of outright adding a mutation
- Small increase to enemy health scaling per difficulty
- Most damage reduction is now multiplicative (players and enemies). This was a necessary change due to the ever increasing amount of DR perks in the game.
- Post process optimization improvement
- Healing Efficiency now also affects passive health regeneration