Ascension | Patreon Weekly #156

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, there’s an audio Q&A attached to this weekly! There were 12 questions asked by 7 different patrons. You can find question timestamps at the end of this weekly.

In this weekly I’m going to go over balance changes and the new ascension route coming in v1.3!

Ascension Route Changes

I’ve been going over concepts for a better ascension route for a little while now, and finally I think I’ve settled on a good plan. I want to ramp up ascension difficulty, make it impossible to just run away back to floor 1, but also not make the player feel like they’re just forced into fighting waves of enemies arbitrarily.

To accomplish this, I’m adding a few limitations to the game when the player starts their ascent. They won’t be able to teleport back up a bunch of floors to quickly escape, and there will be a steadily increasing debuff that can only be lessened by defeating enemies. Existing adjustments like higher enemy spawns and enemies being auto-aggroed will still be in place.

The enemies themselves are also getting tougher. Each enemy will get a multiplier to their effective health, armor, accuracy, evasion, and damage. This multiplier is on a per-enemy basis, ranging from no changes for scorpios and eyes, to 2x for gnoll brutes, to a whopping 12x for rats. The goal in terms of enemy strength is to keep difficulty relatively consistent during the ascent, with it eventually falling off a bit as they player gets close to floor 1.

Ideally this will turn the ascent into a proper gauntlet that feels like it encourages the player to keep moving and picking their fights. It will only outright force combat if the player is very consistently trying to avoid enemies.

Naturally I’ll be tuning this based on feedback from alpha/beta players. Speaking of which, Golden+ patrons should look out for an alpha announcement soon™.

v1.3.0 Item and Ability Balance

I spent a fair bit of time this week evaluating item and armor ability balance as well. This felt like a good time to make some lategame ability changes given that the new ascension route will give a lot more opportunity to use them.

Here’s a quick summary of the changes I’m making to abilities. The two nerfs are both to reduce the uptime of abilities that easily let you escape from bad situations:

• Endure is getting a 50% increase to the amount of damage it builds
• Heroic leap is getting its charge cost increased to 35 from 25, with some buffs to its talents to compensate.
• Wild magic is getting a substantial boost to its core functionality, and to its talents.
• Elemental blast is getting boosts via the elemental power and reactive barrier talents.
• Shadow clone is getting its charge cost reduced to 35 from 50, with a few very mild nerfs to compensate.
• Smoke bomb is getting its charge cost increased to 50 from 35, with a range buff to slightly compensate.
• Spirit hawk is getting a moderate boost to all of its talents.

I’m also making a few tweaks to the least used alchemy recipes:

• Woolly bomb is getting a BIG increase to sheep duration outside of boss fights, which should give it some new passage-blocking uses.
• Holy, adrenaline, and cleansing darts are all getting new effects that let them be used on enemies as well as allies.

Audio Timestamps

• 00:30 "What are the next planned huntress buffs?" - Zrp200
• 01:23 "What is your favorite pixel dungeon (vanilla) enemy?" - Zrp200
• 03:14 "Do you ever play Shattered (or any other pixel dungeon) for fun, or is it work at this point?" - PunStar
• 05:23 "We're 5 months into 2022 and v1.3 is coming out soon; how do you fell about the current pace of content updates this year so far?" - Kamil
• 07:38 "The game has changed a lot in the past years, but when you think about how much things have changed since you started, what comes to mind as one of the biggest changes in your life?" – Cake
• 09:30 Brief intermission
• 10:10 "who's your favorite pokémon" - Depresbian
• 10:57 "Favorite planet/moon/asteroid of Solar system?" - Allperino
• 12:08 "Do you still eventually plan a full challenge system rework?" - Fcelon
• 13:40 "Followup question: If not, is there any chance you will further soften up some vanilla challenges? I especially consider problematic Pharma (it feels just too harsh, especially when combined with Barren Lands), FIMA (makes many builds not viable) and Barren Lands (renders Warden almost obsolete)." - Fcelon
• 15:40 "I remember you mentioning green masked gnoll shaman variant when working on 0.8. One which was supposed to interact with brutes. How were they supposed to work and do you plan eventually adding them?" - Fcelon
• 17:50 "what's the troll blacksmith working on, on his anvil? (i had a smithing class earlier so it got me wondering)" - Depresbian
• 18:48 "how was your day?" - Depresbian