This week will be a short continuation of last week's update, as I quickly go over some other class changes we're making. We focused on the Lumimancer class last time, but today I'm looking at Thief. It might not be surprising to see that the most notable adjustments are for our oldest classes, with newer designs like Enchanter and Berserker seeing minimal tweaks.

So, to go back a bit, after AVCon we determined that Thief was in need of some gameplay updates. When the class was first designed, we wanted to focus on having a class that built up to dealing massive burst damage, stacking boosts over multiple turns and striking from weak points. To this end, the class was designed to function without a Move skill, having both Fade Out and Sharpen be standard skills.

In a vacuum, this didn't feel too bad, but when compared to other classes like Knight, Archer and Enchanter, not having a Move skill that tied into the class' rotation made it feel a lot slower, considering it's big damage attack only happened once every three turns. While we did discuss having a Move skill before AVCon, we were concerned about how strong it could be on a class with extremely high speed and decided to leave it until after testing.

Some of our discussions immediately following public playtests led us to the idea of adding in a Move skill that required certain conditions to use, but would allow Thief to reapply one of it's buffs. In a weekly update back in July, we mentioned how we were looking as allowing them to reapply Elusive, the critical damage multiplier and evasion buff, after landing a critical hit with a Dirty Fighting skill. After more iteration, here's what we're looking at now:

Two new skills have been added to the Thief's kit; the Move skill Tumble and the passive skill Unseen Strike. Tumble costs 20 FP, but allows the Thief to roll up to two tiles in any direction, even through enemies, but with a vertical movement of 0.5 tiles. Essentially, this means they can roll up and down slopes but can't jump within the movement. Using Tumble will apply Elusive for two turns, as opposed to the four granted by using Fade Out, but will allow the class to maintain a strong flow in battle.

Unseen Strike is a passive skill that grants the Unseen status to the Thief upon successfully hitting a Dirty Fighting skill from the correct positional. This status allows the Thief to use Tumble for 0 FP, essentially making it a free Move action. With this combination of skills, the class should be able to set up with Fade Out before getting within range of an enemy, then build FP with enhanced basic attacks, spend FP on Dirty Fighting skills, and roll to reapply Elusive for the enhanced critical damage and evasion. Tumble will be available on the class' base kit, while Unseen Strike will be unlocked at Rank 4.

There's been some other small changes to the kit in response to these additions, which we'll be watching carefully, and hopefully be able to show off in-game sooner rather than later. These last two updates have been walls of text, but next week I'll be sure to get some screenshots of some of the other things we've been working on in-engine. It's not ideal, but when we need an update every week, some of them have to be a bit less full than others. Still, I hope you're looking forward to trying out the updated classes, especially if you've played before! Thanks for tuning in!