Cleric Early Polish | Patreon Weekly #285

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’ll be going over some balance and polishing work I’ve done for the Cleric’s earlygame.

There’s also a new Shattered Secrets this week! This secrets covers two concepts I have for potential 3rd subclasses for the Warrior and Mage.

Next, here are the results from Patron Poll #59, which asked for votes on which subclass for the Cleric should be implemented first:
60%: The Priest
40%: The Paladin
I’m happy that this poll ended up being a little close, as early on the voting was looking like a blowout for the Priest. Still, the results here make sense as I did introduce the Priest as the likely favourite for more experienced, dedicated players. Based on these results I’m going to try and mostly concept out both subclasses in tandem, but the Priest will be the first one actually implemented.

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

Overview

To be honest, I have not made a huge amount of development progress in the last 10 days or so. Recent world events have made it quite difficult to focus on work. Nonetheless some things have been done, and my ability to work seems to be recovering in the last few days.

Firstly, I’ve been doing some playtesting and identifying potential issues with the Cleric’s design and balance. Some of these I’ve solved right away, and others I’m keeping a list of to evaluate after early player testing. Most notably I’ve about doubled the base recharging speed for the holy tome.

I’ve always concepted the holy tome as charging based on exp gain and not time, as this allows for spells that do things like heal the Cleric or identify/duplicate items. I do worry that this will feel too limiting, but for the moment I’ve kept this mechanic as-is, but made the rate of tome recharge much more generous.

The Duelist ended up releasing very weak, and I’ve had to buff her several times at this point. While I don’t want the Cleric to have the opposite problem, I am trying to favour them being on the stronger side starting out.

I’ve also made some adjustments to the Cleric’s beta sprite. I initially wanted to keep their hair the same as the original v0.1 Pixel Dungeon sprite for a little while in the beta as a nod to their early origins. Unfortunately, since those world events I mentioned earlier I’ve become very uncomfortable with the beta Cleric’s resemblance to a certain US political figure, and so have opted to make some hair changes earlier. This isn’t the final sprite, but is much closer to what the sprite will end up as.

I’ve also added some proper VFX to the Cleric’s T1 spells. While these also aren’t all final, things are looking much less bare. Here's how guiding light currently looks:

And holy weapon and ward: