Warrior Seal Concepting | Patreon Weekly #303

Hey Patrons! In this weekly I’m going to go into a little more detail about my plans for changes to the Warrior’s broken seal shielding.

Here are the poll results from Patreon Poll #63, which asked about potential side content in v3.1:
63%: New Rooms
59%: New Rare Enemies
48%: New Equipment
46%: New Trinkets
46%: More Badges / Challenges
26%: Hero Lore
The poll results pretty cleanly fit into three groups, so I’ll be putting most of my focus into new rooms and new rare enemies, and there might be space for a little bit in the way of new items and new badges. I do still want to do hero lore of course, but not this time.

There’s also a new Shattered Secrets this week! In this Shattered Secrets I’m going to go over my ideas for improving thrown weapons.

Finally, there’ll be an audio Q&A next week! You can ask questions here or in the Patreon discord.

A New Seal Shield Ability

As a quick recap, the Warrior currently has an ability that gives him one passive shielding every 30 turns, which is effectively +33% health regen that works even when hungry. This shield has an upper limit of (armor tier + armor level + points in iron will), but this limit only kicks in if the Warrior is out of combat for long enough, which gets increasingly unlikely after 5 or so max shield. This power is hard to notice (bad), impossible to interact with (bad), easy to use (good), and makes a big difference over the course of a run. The goal here is to make it easier to notice and interact with without making it too much harder for new players to use.

The rough plan is to swap to a bigger amount of shielding on a cooldown:

• When the Warrior is about to take damage that would reduce him to 50% health or lower, he instantly gains a shield equal to 2 + 2*armor tier. The shield scales based on tier only to make a bit more of the Warrior’s power independent of armor upgrades.

• The shield has a cooldown of 100 turns. It does not decay, but ends if the Warrior hasn’t taken damage for 10 turns. If some of the shielding is unused, up to 50% of the cooldown is refunded.

• This means that, in a perfect scenario, the Warrior effectively gets one shield every 25 turns with cloth, and once every 8.3 turns with plate. That sounds like a huge buff, but I expect the shield will be triggering for players a lot less than 100 turns on average, and not all of it will get used each time.

• This creates a nice little point of interaction for experienced players, as there’s an incentive to keep the warrior at around 60% health or lower to maximize the shield’s benefit. This ties very well into the Berserker subclass, and also encourages new players to keep their health a little on the lower side (something they should be doing already).

• The Warrior’s shield-focused talents would be adjusted with the above in mind. e.g. provoked anger might get a numbers buff. Subclasses might get targeted adjustments too, but the design for that will come a little later.

These numbers are subject to change of course. In particular I want to find a good balance between shield cooldown and power. For instance I might go with 5 + 5*tier max shielding, but with a 200 turn cooldown. That would make the shield feel really impactful, but I worry the uptime would be too low.