Tome Charging | Patreon Weekly #287

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to go over a design change I’m making to the Cleric based on early Alpha feedback.

There’ll also be a Patreon poll tomorrow! I was initially planning on releasing it today, but need a little more time to do design work on the poll choices.

Exp-Based Charging?

I released the Alpha for Shattered v3.0.0 a few days ago, thanks for all your feedback!

Aside from bug reports, the most consistent bit of feedback I've heard is that the holy tome's charging mechanic doesn't feel great. I originally concepted it as charging based on exp gain to accommodate some of my early spell designs that involved self-healing.

However, once I got into more specific designs I ended up not making these sorts of spells anyway, as while healing is obviously part of the divine caster archetype, it’s also really powerful and boring. A ‘heal yourself’ spell with no additional guard rails would need to give a disappointing amount of healing or it would out-compete other spells regardless of how the tome recharges.

So at this point it’s become pretty clear to me that the existing tome recharge mechanic is a holdover from earlier design iterations, and I’m trying out scrapping it entirely. ALPHA-3 (which should release in another hour or two) swaps the tome to recharge based on time, roughly 33% slower than the Rogue’s Cloak of Shadows, and we’ll refine things from there. This should be a buff to recharging speed overall, although it may not feel that way after floor 10 as I’m also fixing a bug that caused Holy Lance to not consume charges.

This doesn’t mean there won’t be spells which use designs that need limitations on top of time-based recharging, but I’m going to solve those issue via additional requirements (such as lance’s cooldown) instead of limiting everything with an exp-based charge system.

I expect this will change the Cleric’s feel quite a lot, and might make some spells pretty overpowered for the moment, so please let me know what you think once you play ALPHA-3!