Duelist Balancing | Patreon Weekly #194

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to talk a bit about the balance patch I released last week and give a few more concrete details on Monk talents!

Also, there’s a new Shattered Secrets this week. In it I talk about the current state of upcoming quest designs in Shattered, and some changes I’m making.

Also, next week’s weekly will have an audio Q&A segment! Feel free to ask questions either here or on the Patreon discord.

Duelist Balancing

Getting balance feedback on new features is always tricky, especially early on. Two different people can claim the same thing is either entirely too weak or overpowered, and there isn’t enough analytics data to make any sort of decision. As times goes on though, the numbers get more stable and people’s opinions begin to converge a bit, and around the middle of last week it became clear that the Duelist was underpowered.

There’s a lot of minutiae here, but the key point is that the Duelist’s overall winrate from Feb 10th-16th was about 1/3 of the average from the other heroes. A good amount of that difference is due to her being new, but clearly she also needed to be tuned up. While I would have preferred to spend more time last week on the Monk, this needed to be addressed.

One of the big points I’ve heard about the Duelist is that she’s very RNG reliant, so I put most of my effort into buffing weaker talents and weapon abilities to try and boost her consistency. I also expect that releasing her second subclass will help a bunch, as builds that might not work best with the Champion are currently railroaded into it.

More Monk Details

Thanks to further bugfixes and the balance patch, I’m not as close to releasing the Duelist’s second subclass as I would like, but I can share some more concrete talent concepts!

• I’m definitely adding a talent that rewards using weapon abilities and Monk abilities in quick succession. I’ve yet to decide what the reward will be, but things like partial charge refunding or temporarily resilience are obvious choices.
• I’ve decided to go ahead with just one talent that rewards Monk players for using lighter gear. I’m considering giving this talent a charge bonus cap that gets increasingly generous as it gets tiered up. This way most Monk players can benefit from getting the talent to +1, but dedicated light equipment builds will definitely want it at +3. I’m also considered giving this talent bonus melee damage (without RoF), to boost the viability of a true unarmed combat build.
• I’m still mulling over the best type of talent to interact with Monk abilities. I’m now considering locking just one ability behind this talent, and boosting its power the more the talent is tiered up. A mediate ability would probably work best for this, as it stands out as the only current Monk ability that isn’t useful in direct combat.