Priest Progress | Patreon Weekly #286

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to go over progress I’ve made on the Cleric’s first subclass, and some exciting news about a v3.0 Alpha!

This weekly also includes an audio Q&A! You can find audio timestamps at the end of this weekly.

Innate Powers

Firstly, I’ve got a little progress to share on base Cleric talents, before we get to the Priest.

Recall Glyph is the Cleric’s ‘scroll used’ talent effect. Rather than triggering on scroll use, this spell instead lets the Cleric repeat the effect of their last used scroll or runestone. This creates a lot of interesting item interactions, as the Cleric essentially spends tome charges to get more uses out of their magical consumable items. Of course there are some limitations here, some items cost more charges than others, and you can’t recall upgrade scrolls.

Here’s a quick GIF of that spell in action, letting the cleric recall a stone of blast:

Also I have implemented one shared T3 talent, but it’s not too exciting in and of itself. Light Reading does for the Cleric what Light Cloak does for the Rogue. It’s a simple talent that’s more about opening up new build possibilities than anything else.

Priest Progress

As mentioned last week, I wanted to come up with a good structure that both subclasses use before then going on to implement the Priest. I’ve settled on this as the overall design for each subclass:

• Each subclass get buffs to innate Cleric spells: Priest boosts Guiding Light, and Paladin boosts Holy Weapon and Ward.

• They’ll each then get another innate spell as well: Radiance for the Priest and Smite for the Paladin.

• Lastly, they can choose up to three more unique spells that are unlocked and upgraded via talents.

• I also initially considered giving each subclass a passive effect that triggers on every spell cast. I’m shelving that for the moment, but may bring it back if buffs are needed.

So, how about some more Priest-specific details? For the Priest, Guiding light becomes free to cast once every 100 turns and the illuminated debuff can now be ‘triggered’ by wands and artifacts to deal bonus damage. This gives the Priest a dedicated ranged option that encourages the use of other magical items, without being spammable like the Huntress or just granting charges like the Monk.

The Priest’s Innate spell is Radiance, a sort of AOE version of Guiding Light. For the cost of 2 charges the spell dispels darkness, illuminates all visible enemies, and very briefly stuns them. Great for setting up a lot of illuminate procs.

I’m also pretty certain on one of the Priest’s talent spells, I’ve shared it before in fact: Holy Lance. This devastating spell has a cooldown and costs a whopping 4 charges, but at +3 it deals enough damage to always oneshot a scorpio! This spell serves as an excellent and reliable delete button, but with such a high cost there are definitely more efficient ways to dispatch foes.

The last two talent spells aren’t quite ready to show off yet. I have one promising idea for an AOE spell that both sprouts grass and heals allies, but it’s not pinned down yet, and I haven’t decided whether the obvious Huntress reference is a good or bad idea.

Alpha When?

With all this in mind, the Cleric is still missing a lot of pieces, but they’re starting to take a definite shape, so what about an Alpha? I can’t commit to an exact date yet, but I would like to try and release an Alpha for golden+ Patrons this week! The main goal of the Alpha will be to let people test things out, and to the Cleric will not be fully playable. Expect some missing talents and no armor abilities. To emphasize the unfinished nature of this Alpha, I might cap runs with the Cleric at floor 20 for the moment.

I’ll also be releasing a blog post tomorrow that catches everyone up on the Cleric’s development, and commits to a Beta next month.

Audio Timestamps

This month there were 18 questions from 8 different Patrons.

• 0:09 "How did you come around to re-conceptualization of Warrior's Broken Seal? As far as I can tell, this is an entirely unique idea, though I can see it being a nod to Beserker's Beserk state." - Raynuva

• 3:37 "Secondary related question, I know you had been broadly resistant to Broken Seal changes, suggestions, etc. so why the idea now? - Raynuva

• 5:13 "knight to h8! i accept your trade, will your move fulfill the other end of the bargain?" - radiantchaos

  

• 5:46 "What do you think of my bottle collection" - umbras

  

• 6:26 "How have you been" - Veek

• 8:40 "what's your best guess as to what percentage of the vanilla codebase you think you've rewritten for shattered?" - Depresbian

• 11:43 "what makes the skeletons explode so violently?" - radiantchaos

• 12:30 "just realized that the shopkeeper kinda looks like morshu, are they related? distant cousins, perhaps?" - radiantchaos

• 13:01 "In version 2.5, Tormented spirit rewards were improved. Could you elaborate on that?" - Veek

• 14:07 "How happy are you with the current trinket system? Do you agree with this statement and what are your thoughts on it: "With trinkets its is often optimal to upgrade it to max as soon as possible. The player has to choose between trinket value or Alchemie value. This limits the creative freedom for Alchemie one might experience if there would be no goto way to spend energy."" - Ehelos

• 16:07 "why do you think the "best" rogue subclass has shifted from freerunner to assassin? freerunner used to be the go-to subclass out of all 8 in the game for the most experienced players, but now assassin's unique skills seem to be more important" - Depresbian

• 17:36 "meat or candy?" - radiantchaos

• 17:48 "any favorite drugs or substances?" - ickfreak666

• 18:03 "Will there be a 3d subclass expansion for all the 4 original heroes? I see you have thoughts on a new one for the mage and warrior." - greenapathy630

• 18:55 "Are you still considering the idea of having the Cleric’s alpha being earlier in the development phase?" - Veek

• 19:29 "are you more of a minimalist or a not-minimalist? (idk what the other word is lmao)" - radiantchaos

• 22:00 "Opinion on Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss's depiction of hell?" - Umbra

• 22:53 "if you could go back and tell yourself something three years ago, what would it be? what about 5 years, or 10?" - Depresbian