Greetings Talented Gamers!
I just wanted to let you know that, as of today, we've openned up the Decked Out playtest - so everyone can try out a very early version of the game before the Demo drops! You can sign up on the Decked Out Steam Page:
Meanwhile, we're hard at work on Talented's next major update. We've had a lot of speculation and community ideas surrounding our plans to keep some of our oldest Common Talents relevant in the late game. I think it's time to let you know what's going on!
Dead Talents
When considering our options for how to handle Common Talents that are constrained by Combat Stat caps we wanted to land on a solution that would fulfil a few criteria:
We want the solution to feel "right" on all Classes that have the Talents - We don't want to fall back to something that would benefit one Class more than others, or even worse end up feeling like a useless stat on that Class.
We don't want to kick the can down the road - Some solutions we considered included giving other stats (which would themselves eventually max out) or even making the Talents cost 0 Talent Points (which would lead to endlessly navigating talent trees to find the 1-2 useful Talents)
We want to keep it simple - We're happy with where Talented has landed for players new to the roguelike genre, and (particularly with our first few Classes) we don't want to introduce more systems on top of what we already have. That's what our end game Classes are for!
Note: Simple =/= Easy! We'll be talking about how we're injecting a bit more challenge into the base game in the next devlog.
So with all of that put together we've decided to introduce new simple Combat Stats and have our Common Talents that are vurnerable to this problem reroll into them when the cap is reached.
In 1.4 we'll be introducing a batch of 3 of these Combat Stats to address the [Crit Up], [Attack Speed Up] and [Cooldown Reduction Up] Talents.
[Crit Up] > [Crit Damage Up]
Crit Damage is now becoming a core Combat Stat! We're expecting to see some huge Critical Strike numbers with this change.
Even better, Grindstone now doubles all Critical Strike Damage, so if someone finds it late into a run we might be getting a new record for largest damage number!
[Attack Speed Up] > [Multifire Up]
When you reach maximum Attack Speed, all [Attack Speed Up] Common Talents will instead increase your Multifire!
Multifire will give you a chance fire a quick barrage of attacks in between each Basic Attack, each 100% Multifire equates to a guarenteed extra attack (just like Bandit's Luck).
This mechanic might sound familiar to some of you as it was already part of Archer's Base Talent set with Spark Quiver - And as you'd expect we've updated the Tooltip to reflect that.
Finally we've reworked Vortech Timecracker to enhance Multifire Talents even further. Definitely be on the look out for this one if you want to push Multifire to its limit!
Note: We've also increased the cap on Attack Speed to 0.25s so your Multifire Talents should start appearing even earlier.
[Cooldown Reduction Up] > [Multicast Up]
Now for my personal favourite. Those with strong design instincts have probably already recognised the pattern - we'll be converting Cooldown Reduction Talents into a brand new Stat - Multicast.
Multicast is likely to be the most rule-bending of this set of three Combat Stats, allowing you to get more use our of your Abilities than ever before. As with Multifire, every 100% Multicast Chance equates to a guarenteed additional Ability Use.
Echomancy has been converted into a huge Multicast drop, and a reworked Time Dilation can give a huge amount of both Cooldown Reduction and Multicast. You'll be clearing the screen in no time!
So there we have it - there should be more Talents on the tree that you're happy to see in Endless Mode! Next time I'll be walking through some of the Quality of Life and a few other changes coming in 1.4. I'm saving the new Mythic Talents for the 100th Devlog!
Stay Talented