Early Duelist Implementation | Patreon Weekly #180

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, there’s a new Shattered Secrets, where I share the full splash art for the Duelist!

In this weekly I’m going to cover the results of the previous poll, and some technical work I’ve been doing on the duelist.

Poll Results

The poll gets its own section this time! Patreon Poll #35 was all about picking preferred subclasses, here are the results:

Warden:        75%
Warlock:       75%
Battlemage:  68%
Gladiator:     68%
Assassin:       54%
Sniper:          36%
Berserker:     11%
Freerunner:   0%

Thanks a bunch for voting! There’s quite a bit of info here, but I think one key takaway is that you guys don’t seem to like persistent gameplay requirements.

Several subclasses require the player to act in a certain way, but those requirements usually easily piggyback on regular combat and quickly get out of the way afterward. The requirements for Freerunner and Berserker are ever-present by comparison, so there’s probably a constant feeling of pressure to try and keep the effect going. I would like to be a little kind to berserker here though, as he was recently reworked and was not well likely by experienced players prior to that.

I’m not planning any subclass changes in v2.0.0, but will keep this in mind while considering duelist subclasses, and will probably look to make changes to the freerunner at some point in the future. The freerunner’s previous rework was effective at pulling in his winrate, but didn’t do too much for his popularity.

Also, in case anyone was curious, counting all votes equally in this poll does change the numbers around a little bit, but doesn’t change the order of the results at all.

Figuring Out Some Duelist Details

I spent a fair bit of time this week working on some baseline implementation for the Duelist. She’s now a selectable class in the game and is fully playable with lots of missing functionality and placeholder visuals (color inverted Warrior):

I’m now spending time getting the baseline of her class functionality working, including deciding exactly how charge mechanics work for her weapon abilities. I was originally considering giving each weapon its own separate charge meter, but I think it works better if the duelist herself builds charge, with a small penalty for weapon swapping. That better encourages the duelist to swap weapons and creates space for a talent that mitigates the charge penalty and increases weapon swap speed.

This also opens up one obvious benefit to the Champion subclass, as the Champion could have a separate charge for their off-hand weapon, allowing her to effectively have more uptime for her weapon abilities without needing to worry about swapping and charge penalties.