Build 0.4.1 - Equipment & Balance Update.

Build 0.4.1

We have another update this week. It focuses on balance, UI and difficulty updates based on community feedback. And we've also made a targeted pass at equipment pieces to make them more unique and interesting.

We still have a long backlog of community feedback and ideas that we want to get in, and it should keep us busy for a while yet!

Here are the highlights of the new build:

• Ease of Mouse: Redoing the system to select overlapping tiles with the mouse. Should be a LOT more intuitive and easier to use!
• New Assets: New assets, including new sounds, portraits and spell shapes.
• Weapons: Staves will now grant +1 range to ranged spells.
• Weapons: Some rods will now grant a bonus damage to a specific element.
• Accessories: Adding Throwing Gloves crafted accessory. They grant +1 to item usage range.
• Equipment: Updated the stats of a lot of gear pieces.
• AI: Made the AI smarter and more efficient in many ways.

As always, full change log is at the end of the post.

Progress:

Our main focus currently is wrapping up the first version of all the dialogues in the game, then doing a big quality pass on them, and finally starting their localization.
We have a big localization team already booked to handle that part, so we have to get ready for it.

Otherwise, we've mostly been busy making various improvements across the board from community feedback, with a focus on adjusting the difficulty. Now that we have the Difficulty Settings, we want to make sure we start tuning things to ensure both new players and veterans alike have a space they can live in happily. There are many changes in this update that should help on that front.

On the art side, we have some new maps in the works, like this one:

And we're adding new portraits to the game. Perhaps in preparation for Halloween?

Change Log

Version 0.4.1

New Content and features:

• Spell Shapes: Adding a square shape to possible abilities shape. We'll need to do a pass to see what spells might make sense to change to this new shape.
• New Portraits: Adding new portraits for enemies and players.
• Added Cutscene:: Adding a small cutscene to the Ship battle so it's less abrupt.
• New Sounds:: Adding many more sounds, specifically for gadgets and more worm effects.
• Ease of Mouse: Redoing the system to select overlapping tiles with the mouse. Should be a LOT more intuitive and easier to use!

Balance:

• Difficulty Settings:
  • Updating difficulty presets names and changing the default one to "Easy". Changing Easy preset options a bit.
  • Reducing difficulty level in The Crossroads story battle by lowering the level of most enemies and removing Counterattack from the one enemy that has it.
  • Reducing difficulty in Timber Road story battle by lowering the level of 2 enemies.
  • Reducing difficulty in all the starter maps for "Equipment: Full" setting, but ignoring that setting on "starter maps".
  • Increasing difficulty in "Equipment: More" setting by having it try to spawn accessories in empty slots using the default "accessory chance" (roughly 75% per slot near the end of the game).
  • Changing the way the "max levels" are calculated so enemies are never above them (before they could still be randomly above that level by about 10%).
  • When playing with enemy stats scaling upwards, Guests will also have the same scaling applied to them so they are sturdier.

• Story:
  • Cleaning up the secret-kawa-questline significantly so the clues are easier to find and easier to follow.
  • Changing "escape from the cave" to spawn enemies that are not "neutral" and only hostile to the player. Reducing the amount spawn to 1 per 2 turns (from 1 per turn) to compensate and removing 1 enemy (unless More Enemies is selected).
  • Removing "slow" from the worm Quicksand spell. With the recent fixes to the turn order system, this looks too potent now.

• MP related Updates:
  • Changing Mana Font to 1 MP per step.
  • Economy will now reduce the MP cost of abilities by 1/3 (rather than 1/2).
  • Blood Magic will now use 1% HP per 1MP (rather than 2 HP per 1MP).
  • Boon no longer gives HP/MP on a kill, but instead will make your next action a guaranteed crit, even if it's an ability. It will dissipate at the end of the next turn, used or not.

• Various Classes/Mechanics Updates:
  • Adding MP cost to Focus of 6.
  • Focus will now wear off on the next turn, regardless of if it was used or not. This adds the risk that you might have wasted a turn putting it on if you don't get to use the buff.
  • MP damage will get a bonus from crits now.
  • Making small stats growth adjustments across most classes.
  • Slightly reducing damage to Whirling Blow (1 -> 0.95x).
  • Increasing MP cost of Sniper shot to 36 from 32.
  • Changing the bonus to the next turn start to 25% from 20% when not taking an action.
  • All "all enemies" spells will now have damage scaling from their proximity to the target (far away -> less damage, closer -> more damage). This should help adding a higher risk/higher reward scenario to them.
  • Accuracy can now be 100% if using the Concentration or Lucky passives.
  • Bzaro will now receive bonus AP after gaining Monster Essence for a class he's already unlocked (he will gain the bonus AP to that monster class), to compensate for the fact he can't benefit from Vicarious Learning.
  • Increasing the MP cost of many gadgets as the kit is probably too versatile otherwise.
  • Increasing the MP cost of Treatment and reducing the amount of status effects it handles.
  • Slightly reducing the Daodrenner's ATK/MND starting value.
  • Reducing potency of tier 1 potion to 45 from 50.
  • Increasing flat potency of healing magic a little bit and reducing its MND scaling a little bit. This should bring healers a little closer to pure casters for numbers and increase the healing at early levels a little bit.
  • Reducing healing from Lick Wounds a bit (0.9 to 0.8).

• Fellblade:
  • Abilities that don't do damage can't crit anymore from Versatile.
  • Adding Daggers to Fellblade weapons.
  • Changing most abilities of the Fellblade to skills to make things more consistent. They still have 1 spell (hp drain spell).
  • Updating tooltips to mention which abilities count as "regular attacks".

• Templar:
  • Changing ratios on Cleansing Blade so it does more damage per buff removed. Damage at 1 debuff remains unchanged.
  • Updating Siphon's damage to be Mixed Atk+Mnd. Also adding HP damage to it.
  • Increasing the healing done by Soothing Chant from 0.5 to 0.65.
  • Changing holy chant to a square shape (so it's bigger).

• Gear Changes:
  • Staves will now grant +1 range to ranged spells.
  • Some rods will now grant bonus damage to a specific element.
  • Reducing some of the bonuses to Blood Armor and Soul Eater. Adding a configurable cap as well.
  • Updating Status resistance Earrings to cover less statuses.
  • Adding Throwing Gloves crafted accessory. They grant +1 to item usage range.
  • Increasing speed bonus on all Daggers.
  • Increasing defense malus on all axes.
  • Updating inaccurate def/res values on a lot of gear (this was technically a bug), mostly accessories and some weapons..
  • Changing Auto Crossbow to work differently.
  • Increasing shields defense across the board.
  • Lowering random badges drop chance (with the fix to the wrong loot-table being used at times, it would have been too high).
  • Changing base chance of "no loot" from 65% to 70% (this applies to killing an enemy mainly).

• AI Updates:
  • Updating again how the AI prioritizes removing debuffs so it's less trigger happy on that.
  • Making the AI smarter about where it'll stand when trying to find a defensive position.
  • Updating the AI so healers are more efficient with healing themselves + allies when their HP is low.
  • Fixing an issue where enemies had a much lower chance than they should at having accessories equipped.
  • Updating AI so it won't try to remove Sleep from targets with Somniloquy (unless they are afflicted by enough other things).
  • Made the AI smarter with how it uses debuffs on enemies.

UI:

• Cleaning up visuals for classes that have "too many abilities" on one skilltree node.
• Adding an error popup when trying to reset a character to level 1 without having enough gold.
• Updating tooltips of Wild Cards to properly show they ignore evasion.
• Music won't stop playing anymore in the Options from the Titlescreen.
• Adding a tutorial popup reminding the player about the "details button" when escaping the cave.
• Cleaning up the Elemental Mastery description to better reflect how it works.
• Adding a tutorial about back and side attacks. This will be shown on the very first map on a new game, but existing save files will see it in their next battle.
• For abilities and passives that bring crit chance to 100%, the damage prediction will show the correct expected damage.
• When targeting, showing the red tiles that are "out of vertical range" as dimmed-out to better show what's in the vertical range or not.
• Making the fade in/out of the music smoother during various transitions.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixing a bug where the wrong loot tables where being used at times. This should result in more appropriate loot in general.
• Preventing errors due to the use of invalid data in modding files. Things should be more stable when working on mods.
• Updating the prefetch sound and image systems to be more efficient.
• Making some small adjustments to reduce "jumping frames" after loading data.
• Fixing the Bulldrake having 2x the same passive on its skilltree.
• Fixing the target damage information so absorbed damage doesn't show a negative number anymore.
• Fixing issue where sleeping enemies could sometimes select a different direction at the end of their turn.
• Fixing an issue where character could stop on top of another character while walking if they got interrupted by a trap. Now walking over a trap that's already "occupied" will not trigger it.
• Fixing issue with Bzils where they would lose their "natural weapon" after changing their passives.
• Fixing issue where unequipping a passive on a Bzil would prompt an automatic "equip optimize" that shouldn't have happened.
• Fixing some interactions between mirage, rebirth, cleansing blade and coalesce.
• Fixing a bug where placing a trap wouldn't cost any MP for the player.
• Fixing a bug where jumping over a tile wouldn't grant a step for Mana/Life Font.
• Fixing issues in various options where the mouse might not always have behaved as well as it should.
• Fixing a bug where Elemental Mastery would work on Dark and Holy damage. Also fixing bugs where the wrong amount of resistance would be ignored (usually more than it should have).
• Fixing a UI issue where all abilities would be described as a "small area" in their description, when some should be marked as "large area".
• Fixing a bug where Shakedown wouldn't show the component that was stolen (even though it would correctly steal it anyways).
• Correctly showing a "big crit number" when getting a crit of an ability with a push component.
• Fixing an issue where the AI wouldn't consider attacking from the position it started its turn on if it could move.
• Fixing a bug where the music could fail to start on the worldmap after skipping a cutscene.
• Fixing a wrong interaction between muti-target spells and some rare passives that could create inflated damage under certain circumstances.

Modding:

• Adding "armorstyle" and "helmetstyle" to list of creation options when spawning a character (values: cloth, light, heavy. Default is random), so they can focus on an armor style if they can equip many.

Edit:

Hotfixes:

• Updating Economy and Boon descriptions as they had missing/wrong information.
• Updating Dual Wielding description to make it clearer.

Balance:

• New Recruits: New recruits starting AP decreased a little bit (from 0.5 to 0.4).
• Templar: Capping Siphon's MP damage and absorb with the target's current MP to be consistent with other MP draining abilities.
• Healing Staff: Increasing Healing Staff ATK value a bit and giving it a little MND.
• ATK+MND Abilities: Many of those abilities were missing the flag that makes their damage non-directional. This has been added.

Bug Fixes:

• Descriptions: Fixing description weirdness for Drain Soul and Soul Suck.
• Descriptions: Clarifying description of Perfect Focus.
• Elemental Resist: Fixing a newly introduced issue where elemental resist >= 100 would still take 1 damage rather than nullify or absorb the damage.
• Healing Staff: Fixing issue where Healing Staff didn't heal on attack but dealt one damage.
• Fellblade Abilities: Fixing an issue where the weapon's element and status effects could be ignored by the Fellblade special skills that use the weapon's properties.