Champions and Crystal Paths | Patreon Weekly #215

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to talk about two feedback-driven changes I’m making in v2.2.0!

Firstly though, here are the results from Patreon Poll #43
The Cleric:                 62%
New Item Type:        44%
City Quest:                44%
Shop Overhaul:        32%
Hero-Focused Lore: 32%
It's not surprising at all to me that the cleric tops the list here. I don’t want to jump into a new hero right away, but it’s undeniable that’s where most player excitement lies. I am a little surprised to see a new item type doing so well though! I think these new items should be relatively easy to implement, so I’m going to more strongly consider adding them in the nearer future.

There’s also a new Shattered Secrets this week! In this Shattered Secrets I’m sharing a more concrete design for a new item type, after it did fairly well in the recent Patreon Poll!

Champion Changes

I’ve seen various complaints about the hostile champions challenge for a little while now, mostly focusing on the inconsistency of difficulty that it can generate. This is somewhat intentional, but I do agree that it might be a little too chaotic at the moment. In v2.2.0, I added some code that reports an analytics event to me whenever a player dies to a champion enemy.

Here’s how those numbers shook out, based on death rates compared to the strongest champion type: (It’s worth noting that deaths to blazing champions are estimated based on deaths to both blazing champs themselves and some of the deaths to the burning debuff.)

Projecting: 100%
Blazing:      81%
Growing:    56%
Blessed:     35%
Giant:         32%
Antimagic: 20%

These numbers aren’t entirely surprising to me, but it’s nice to finally have them instead of just working from intuition and player feedback. I’m not surprised at all that the damage-focused champions are killing players more often, but it would be nice to tighten this range a little bit. With that in mind, I’m giving out some nerfs to the top performers, and some buffs to the weakest performers:

• Projecting champions are getting a proper attack range boost (+3) instead of just hitting everything they see.
• Blazing champions are now going to actually be countered by water, as they’ll be unable to spread fire to anything in it.
• Growing champions are getting a slight reduction to their power scaling, going down to scaling up every 4 turns, from 3.
• Blessed champions now have 4x accuracy and evasion, instead of 3x.
• Giant champions are getting their damage reduction increased slightly, to 80% from 75% (That’s a 25% increase to effective HP)
• Antimagic champions are also getting a bigger boost to damage reduction, to 50% from 25% (That’s a 67% increase to effective HP)

Hopefully these changes will make certain champion types a bit less overly-lethal, without making the challenge feel too consistent.

New Crystal Path Rooms

I’m also making a big change to crystal path rooms, based on general feedback. I understand that lots of people would like to see equipment from these rooms, but that just isn’t in the cards, as special rooms already give enough equipment loot.

It is true though that the existing crystal path rooms are quite boring compared to other crystal key rooms, so I’ve opted to make them a bit more fascinating while still keeping the loot consumable-only: (old on left, new on right)

These new crystal path rooms now give the player much more choice over what consumable items they get, which should hopefully mean that they preserve some of the choice-based fun that crystal keys should have, albeit without equipment loot.

These rooms would still spawn with 3 keys, can’t contain duplicates, and the final two rooms have the best scroll/potion, with a significant chance to be experience or transmutation.