Magic Additions and Changes
The basic abilities for the nine magic types are now divided as follows:
- Touch (melee single-target)
- Bolt (ranged single-target)
- Wave (melee AoE)
- Blast (ranged AoE)
Stats are modular. Touch is the most powerful, while range and AoE both reduce power somewhat. Cost follows the same pattern: touch is the cheapest, while range and AoE add cost.
Cost also has type: ambient mana vs internal mana. Ambient mana has cooldowns, which also obey the AoE and range expense pattern. Abilities that cost internal mana do not have cooldowns.
Each magic type now has its own bonuses:
- Fire has the most damage. It also gets a minor boost to condition damage and stack accrual. Its default damage condition is Burning, which does damage over time.
- Water has a minor pierce boost and a major boost to condition max duration and max stacks. Its default conditions are Frosted, which reduces evasion, agility, and water resistance, and Frostbite, a damage over time.
- Air gets minor damage, minor accuracy, and cheaper cost. It also gets Shocked, which reduces evasion, agility, and max encumbrance.
- Earth gets minor pierce, minor condition damage and accrual, and minor condition duration and stacks. It also gets Acid, which reduces physical resists and critical difficulty, and Corrosion, a damage over time. (I might switch those names.)
- Life gets minor condition damage and accrual, major duration and stacks, and Parasites, which reduces vitality and endurance.
- Death gets major condition damage and accrual, minor duration and stacks, and Decay, a damage over time.
- Light gets major accuracy, minor pierce, and cheaper cost. Light is split into two damage types, one for lasers that gets the Burning and Dazzled conditions, and one for radiation that gets damage over time and a debuff that reduces strength and constitution.
- Dark gets major steal, minor accuracy, and Shrouded, which reduces perception and dark resistance.
- Arcane gets major pierce, minor steal, and Disruption, which reduces all magic resists.
Ability Mechanics Additions and Changes
- Camouflage is now added to Evasion if defending against a ranged attack. Cover no longer provides this, but is still added to defense.
- Detection now pierces bonus evasion provided by Camouflage or Concealment.
- Added elemental attacks to the path of hammers: Fiery Smash, Frost Smash, Wind Smash, and Tectonic Smash.
- Condition resists now pull from the applying ability resist class. This let me remove the physical and tech condition resist stats (which I hadn’t used yet). The reason I did it differently at first was to allow an apply buff or debuff ability to be prismatic (apply both a fire and lightning debuff, for instance). Combo abilities now let me do that without issue.
- Buff and debuff power from apply abilities is now reduced by resists.
- Environments now pull resists from the environment resist class, and the power of afflicted conditions is reduced by those resists.
Path Additions and Changes
- Balanced the civilian and combat paths. A major difference is that at level 10, paths with multiple mana inputs now provide the mana levels needed to advance the path with any of the mana types. This is important for NPC leveling, since (right now) they don’t try to unlock new mana types, but stick to whatever they auto-unlock.
Character Additions and Changes
- NPCs now make auto-choices while leveling in world, for things like free stats and ability choices. (This was already working for initial levels.)
Other Additions and Changes
- Savegames now use a slot system.
- Added an option to convert saves between JSON (cleartext) and binary (faster) formats.
- Added an option to switch between serial and parallel processing. (Serial is faster for now; apparently I haven’t scaled up enough monsters yet for parallel to be more efficient.)
- Updated the new game interface to allow leveling the first path(s) using the standard leveling interface, which allows decisions like allocating free attributes.
- Changed starting profession skill choice to starting civilian path. For now, this means you can start the game at level 2 (one level from a combat path, one level from a civilian path).