[Edit: Uploaded 2015.05.29b to fix a few bugs created by a file that was inadvertently reverted right before I updated. Sorry if you experienced anything bizarre over the hour it was live!]
Over the last few days, I've seen some very dedicated players achieve ridiculous scores by legacying in a huge dungeon with a lot of traps and actually having a very easy time of it. While it was challenging to reach that point, once you got there, it wasn't difficult to keep it going.
Traps are really only one part of the imbalance, but while I tweaked other things here, the trap changes will be most noticeable. Up until the last couple updates, there weren't really that many trap floors in the game, so testing on such a grand scale was difficult, and balancing even moreso. In this update, I have introduced defensive exceptions to traps; every trap can be ignored by heroes who have the right defense. For example, the recent Deadfall floor can be safely traversed by agility-based heroes. This means roughly one third of heroes are immune to any given trap.
Additionally, a couple of heroes (the Gnomish Engineer and one of the new ones below) will disable traps on floors that they pass through (this is a temporary effect; your traps are restored after these characters have passed.
Finally, all traps are now slightly more expensive (2 extra resources).
This update also reduces the maximum legacy caps for floors and champions to 10 apiece, so plan wisely. The maximum resource cap has been reduced to 50. The resource cap bonus for completing rituals has been reduced by 1, so it takes longer to increase caps across playthroughs. But on the plus side, I've reduced the cost of many floors that required 25 of a resource to 22 or 24.
All of this and a couple of other small balance tweaks and bug fixes. Please continue letting me know how it plays for you, because I need a wide range of opinions and experience levels to help me make the game feel better for everyone! Thank you :totbacon:.
Oh, and there's a newish hero pack: Hunters. The Human Archer has been rebranded as a Human Hunter, and he's joined by a Dwarven Trapper and a Faithful Hound. If you previously earned the Archer prophecy, you will have to re-earn this one; it is initiated by the Snarling Snare. The Archer was one of the early heroes, before I started introducing them in packs of three; there are a couple of other hero prophecies that may get some company in the near future, too.
One again, I invite you to please consider posting a screenshot of the game to help me update the storefront and increase the diversity of images presented there; I'm offering sponsorship credits!
Changelog
Additions:
- New Hero: Dwarven Trapper (can disable traps, also fatigues agile characters with his crossbow)
- New Hero: Faithful Hound (the first Beast hero)
- "Trapped" icon to trapped floor nameplates
- Traps can now be disabled by special heroes
- Each trap has a defensive exception that allows a hero with that type of defense to ignore the trap's effects
- Added option to disable the tutorial (disabling and re-enabling it will effectively restart the tutorial)
- Added failsafe loss condition: if the Sanctum reaches a maximum occupancy of 50 characters, the game will end (Fire Marshal ending)
Changes:
- Increased brightness of potential matches while sliding tiles, and made them flash a little
- Reduced resource cap to 50
- Reduced cap bonus for completing rituals by one point
- Reduced some floor prices that were over the default resource cap
- Limit of 10 legacy floor and 10 legacy champions
- Slightly increased cost of traps
- Rebalanced some banners (most were nerfed slightly; some effects were expanded to affect heroes as well as your minions)
- Difficulty ramp skips ahead a bit every 5 levels
- The Tyrant is now always included in a Sanctum fight (previously, you could throw all your champs down there and hope that the Tyrant was never "picked" to be in a fight)
Fixes:
- Fixed a few more legacy loading inconsistencies
- Corrected some formatting issues in the Codex
- Removed some test entries from the help topics glossary
- Addressed a cosmetic transition glitch in the lava layer of the background