Hello Talented Gamers!
Now the Alchemist Rework is live and our new Supporter Pack is available (including 6 Shiny Colour skins!), we can continue chatting about the upcoming Wave of Shadows DLC!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3423250/Talented__Wave_of_Shadows/
The second major feature added with the DLC is the brand new Waves Mode - this is intended to be a different way to play Talented with all of your favourite classes... Let's take a look...
Waves Mode
Rather than the purely random spawns you're used to in Talented's Standard Run, this mode faces you against a sequence of Enemy Packs that are hand designed to test your build as you play.
These waves can be anything from a Googly spawning from each direction to an entire forest of Tronks and Treedle Twins each with random Elite Traits ploughing through the lane.
Each Wave consists of 5 Enemy Packs - only when you've survived all 5 are you able to progress to the Talent Tree and spend your hard earned Talent Points. After that it's off to another Wave...
Fans of Talented's truly crazy builds will be happy to hear that Waves Mode is fully Endless from release, with difficulty scaling designed to test even maxed out builds. Additionally, whereas builds with an extremely high number of projectiles tend to shine in Standard Runs, many waves are designed to test other things such as damage with a single hit or even how much crowd control you have!
Special Enemy Packs
As you progress through Waves Mode you will start to see Rare, then Epic, then Legendary... and even more types of Enemy Pack.
Each increase in Rarity is not only a significant increase in raw difficulty, but also how specialised the challenge becomes. As the run heats up you'll start to see uniquely modified enemies and if you survive long enough you might even recieve and unwanted visit from a Boss Enemy!
Hexes
In addition to the scaling difficulty of Enemy Packs, each run will apply up to 5 Hexes...
These are permanent modifiers that will apply to all future encounters. As they appear less often than Curses in Standard runs they can afford to be far more impactful, they might even force you to adapt your build.
...And don't be caught off guard by that simple example... As the run progresses, later Hexes will be much more devilish.
Experience and Combo
Particularly insightful gamers may have already identified that Experience and Combo cannot work in quite the same way in Waves Mode due to the varying number of enemies per Wave.
We're currently experimenting with solutions, but the one that appears to be coming out on top is giving each Enemy Pack a budget of Experience and Combo Points that is split evenly between each enemy in that Pack.
This means you'll get a consistent amount of experience whether you're fighting a horde of 100 Lil' Blobs or a giant boss.
Note: All Experience Bonuses will apply to the Experience Budget, so they'll definitely still be worth picking up!
Hopefully you like the direction we're moving in! There's still lots of surprises in store as we continue to expand both Ninja and Waves Mode so we may drop a few hints in future devlogs...
Next time I'll be showing an early version of the heavily requested Key Rebinding feature and we'll be dipping our toe into lava pool that is Mastery 30!
Stay tuned and...
Stay Talented