This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer.
Hey! More design stuff! Today, let’s keep it simple: Grails.
So, if you ever played The Hand of Merlin, one of the first choices you make in a run is to pick a Virtue, granting you the accompanying relic. Bravery, Honor, Piety, and Fortitude.
The Grail-picking process is an interesting thing to design for. In a lot of ways, it is part of your loadout for the run: Core with Spells, Heroes, and Grail, and as such, they have to offer gameplay modifiers, enough to spice up your strategies.
Now that we have learned more about the meta and the “fun” aspects of combat, we found the time to redesign the current four grails.
Bravery was the standard grail, giving you a once-per-fight free action point. Worked wonders as a good opener, and was pretty straightforward. Now, the bearer deals extra damage against enemies with larger pools of health/armor and those with more power. “Bravery” really only shines in the face of adversity! - This Grail now should be a good option for your weaker characters to bump up their damage per turn or to put on your glass cannon.
Honour granted a buff to the bearer whenever they missed an attack, sort of a “pick-me-up” mechanic. That felt a bit underwhelming, so we wanted to take the opportunity to introduce a new sphere of ability design. Now, it restores cooldowns and grants 1 AP if the bearer kills the “last hitter” - the unit that last attacked them. A powerful effect, but might take some setting up to do!
Piety was the strongest, by far! On use, it would reset cooldowns to the entire party, once per fight. A great “Win now” button, and a tad too powerful when compared to the others. Instead, we wanted to offer some incentives to accompany the new healing abilities and passives. The Bearer of Piety will have extra effects when healed (armor OR health, so ready up your combos!). We were interested in also reducing debuff stacks, but we want to see how powerful this current model is.
Last but not least, Fortitude is for your beefy characters. While before it would grant you a 2 point damage reduction IF the bearer was debuffed, we took a page out of what we learned from abilities to change its behavior. Now it is a dynamic damage reduction: Each time you take damage, it increases its effect by 1 but is reduced by 2 each turn. Wonderful if you are taking multiple attacks per turn, but a straight upgrade nevertheless!
If you were paying attention, you’ll note that all Grails are now passives, and that’s by design. Not only do we want the first relic a new player sees to be something that reflects the “loadout” purpose, but we are preparing to tie in the Grails with meta progression (making grails stronger over multiple runs) and with the events of the end of the game - no spoilers, but we got some feedback about the role of the grail that we want to address in the near future.
Be sure to play with these updated relics and offer us any feedback you have on them, as well as the other balancing changes in the following patch.
Thank you!
Mat