Hello everyone! The whole family got sick last week so didn't get much work done but here's a small update of odds and ends. We're all better now so will be getting back into things this week and should have the next regular update done in 2 weeks as usual.
The plan is to get back to adding sub-zones with a new sub-zone coming every 2 weeks and at the same time continue to add new talent upgrades as they occur to me or as they are suggested. I'll also be buffing and tweaking the existing upgrades but really the focus for the next few months is going to be to just keep throwing different upgrades on the pile and after a couple of months we can take a few weeks to narrow down the list to what actually seems valuable and interesting.
If you'd like to help with this just try to keep in mind which upgrades you find yourself consistently avoiding or note the upgrades that you took and just couldn't get work, found underwhelming, or just didn't seem at all interesting. I think we'll all have a much clearer picture of things in a few months time and it will be really obvious what's working and what isn't. I'm also very open to any suggestions for new upgrades, even really wacky stuff. As mentioned above I'm just sort of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks right now.
UPDATE 1.10
TALENT UPGRADES:
Many of these were suggested by members of the community. Thanks everyone!
- Power-Strike (Heavy) merged old Damage and Knock-Back upgrades. This is the most basic upgrade: +1KB and +2DMG
- Power-Strike (Stunning): no knock-back but stuns enemies for 2 turns
- Weapons-Mastery (Damage Shield): avoids the effects of damage shields (I feel like this could use an additional bonus to not make it quite so specific).
- Range-Mastery (Damage): +2 Range damage and Crit hits when making ranged attacks in melee range.
- Lunge (Base): Reduced the base CD 3 => 2 (Kill-Reset takes it to 3CD)
- Lunge (Extended): +1 range
- Athletics (regen) +1SP every 5T (breaks even with +2SP in fights lasting more than 10T)
- Stealth-Mastery (Slippery): 50% unagro time, the time it takes enemies to forget about you (could use a better name)
- Mental-Clarity (regen) +2MP every 5T (breaks even with +6MP in fights lasting more than 15T, should this be +3 to match athletics? Seems kind of crazy)
- Staff-Attunement (Mana Tap): +3MP on kills with staff
- Discord (Order): target cannot use any special abilities or spells
- Discord (Point-Blank): effects all enemies in melee range but has no damage.
- Confusion: (Point-Blank): effects all enemies in melee range and has no duration reduction
- Dominate (Upgrade) 15CD => 10CD and 3Range => 5Range
- Dominate (Swarm) 1 => 2 Max summons
- Shield-of-Ice (Frost-Bite): gain a cold damage shield equal to the Shield-of-Ice value.
- Shield-of-Ice (Reflective) gain 10% reflection when the shield is active.
- Shield-of-Flames (Resistance): added immune to lava. The Damage shield version is going to need a big buff to come close to matching this.
BALANCE:
- Gold drops are now scaled by game difficulty to add another layer of difficulty balancing. Base game has roughly x2, bronze/silver rank is roughly x1.5 and the higher ranks remain unchanged. Along with the huge amount of talent/attribute/enchantment items now dropping in the base game I think this is an interesting way to balance challenge since we're handing newer players a ton more resources to play/experiment with as they learn the game and expecting experienced players to be able to optimize with much less.
- Mummy/Vampire talent level requirements 1,5,8,12 => 1,4,7,10 to better match new level curve.
- Changed the totems dropped by Upper-Dungeon bosses back to attributes. I'm much less concerned with attribute items now since we capped the enchantments on items lower. Will likely start working more of them back into the early game since an early attribute item can be a neat game changer at the start.
- Arcane-Armor: removed the protection but moved reflection from 5% => 10%. I really don't like tiny incremental bonuses and I'd rather have items that are stronger but more specialized.
- Adjusted the drop tables to begin dropping Tier-3 items earlier (basically just adjusting to match the new level curve).
- Food starvation damage will now increase each time it ticks by 5%. This is simply to stop characters (especially trolls) from being able to endlessly run around while starving.
- Allies will now avoid beneficial shrooms when not in combat.
- Tomes (those bought in stores / found as items) now open a menu when used and you pick 1 of the 2 talents. It is immediately learned (you gain a talent point). This makes what was previously a fairly niche item much more useful.
- More of a bug: Shroom HP/MP restored is based on the character actually stepping on it (was previously based on players max hp/mp even for monsters)
- All monster charges and lunges cannot be dodged, blocked or parried.
USER INTERFACE:
- Added a Random char select button to select random class/race (RIP Esty8nines dice rolling bot)
- Added copy/paste seed buttons.
BUGS AND CRASHES:
- Weapon-Mastery: removed the extra +2 melee damage from the STR upgrade.
- Fixed: Passive talents were not listing the new stats they upgraded to when mouse over.
- Closed off treasure rooms in boss levels so that mushrooms don't spawn there.
- Mino-King Fast charge: fixed the NaN damage
- Precision 2 armor penetration now works with ranged attacks.
- Fixed the LoS lines from the Click-Clock sentry from showing on the main menu screen.
- Fixed duelist abilities with split ATR requirements not working with level based races.
- Fixed PB-Burst-of-Wind crash
- Fixed Super-Jump not working over characters
- Phantom Bow w/ storm shot should now hit tiles correctly (there's still a bunch of other phantom bow issues I'm aware of).
That's it for now! Next update should be much more substantial!