Right so in an effort to communicate my intent better I have made some changes on the beta branch and they're starting to feel really good. Thus it is time to alert you all to some changes that are coming soon.
Slipstream
This buff has always felt wrong, it makes task speed buffs irrelivant and overall I never really had a solution until now.
Slipstream is now a game speed modifier, it still only lasts to a certain distance but that distance isn't affected by cauldron cards anymore. Instead they affect the amount speed increases.
Gear Rarities
It was never the intention that you could get vastium super early game within an hour. As such we have decided to remove the chance for cores to roll gear above the rarity of the core you are using.
This change makes gear feel far more rewarding for far longer and as a result I have been able to increase the caps on Damage, Armor, Health, Movespeed, and Regen
Tasks
Originally I tried changing tasks to be unlocked via milestones. This change felt good to me but would have required a rather big overhaul to the quest system. And ultimately it felt very overwhelming and had a huge chance of letting down people who love the existing questlines.
I reverted this change and instead I have added the weights and some toggles to the tasks tab in the statistics tab.
The way this works is that when you toggle the task to an on state its weight (A kind of chance mechanic) is adjusted to be double what it was. Along with this almost every task in the game has received new weightings as they used to all be 1.
A major impact of this is that later tier resources will now feel a lot more rare.
Along with the doubler I have added rewards to certain threhsolds of task completion
10% bonus base weight when the toggle is on per tier. starting at 10 completions and again at 100, 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000. For a total of 50%
Example
A task with 1000 weight and 0 completions would have 1,000 weight with the toggle off and 2,000 with it on.
That same task with 100k completions would have 1,000 weight with the toggle off and 3,000 with it on. 1000+50% bonus = 1,500 then doubled for the 3,000.
Leaderboards
Finally I am considering changing leaderboards to submit your time when completing the final quest in the game which I feel would be a far more accurate representation of someones skill. And actually represent a competitive edge to the game. Realistically the current rank system is a glorified stat tracker and I feel this could be a lot more fun for everyone involved.
Final Thoughts
I need a bit more time to test this so we're looking at at least another week before I release this update. I would love any feedback if you're willing to try out the beta branch. Beta has completely separate save files to live and your progress will not be at risk. It is also now available on all 3 platforms!
Thank you for taking the time to read this, and a huge thank you to everyone who has and will support this project by purchasing it. You've made it possible for me to keep doing what I love. Making games!