Talent Points | Patreon Weekly #86

Talent Points | Patreon Weekly #86

Hey Patrons!

You can find the VOD for the third Q&A livestream over here!

For the rest of this weekly, I’m going to go over some of the larger-scale design changes I’m making in v0.9.2.

T3 Talent Design Adjustments

As I’ve mentioned previously, the plan so far has been for there to be six T3 talents that take 2 points each.

For a few reasons, I’ve decided to change this to five talents that each take three points:

• 6 talents is a lot for a tier. It begins to look cramped in the UI and risks giving the player too many options at once.
• 5x3 talents means there are 15 slots for spending the 8 points you receive. 6x2 by contrast would be 12 slots, which is too few for the 8 points the player gets.
• By T3 I expect the player to have started working toward a build, and so I want to start encouraging more specialization. 3 points per talent gives players more opportunity to invest in specific things.

Major Class & Subclass Changes

I’ve also locked in some of those larger scale decisions I mentioned needing to make last week:

• The Rogue has been doing very well since his tier two talents were added in v0.9.1. Rather than heavily nerfing those talents, I’m instead taking the opportunity to reduce the cloak of shadows’ turns of invisibility per charge to 4 from 5. This should hopefully mean that the Rogue is forced to take more fights, but only enough to counteract his higher winrate. The Assassin’s preparation will charge faster to compensate for this.
• The Freerunner is currently much less popular than the Assassin, despite being a bit stronger. I’m going to try and migrate his power away from a passive effect, and instead give him an active ‘freerunning’ state that the player has to manually trigger after building momentum. Ideally this will give me more room to make him fun without making him any stronger.
• The Gladiator is finally getting the changes that he won back in Content Poll #7. I’m making combo easier to build and maintain by removing combo being reset by 2 misses, and making cleave into a talent, rather than a combo finisher. I’m also experimenting with letting the player choose any combo move they’ve unlocked, rather than being forced to use the strongest one. Naturally, the combo abilities themselves will be reworked/rebalanced around these changes.

With these changes now mostly decided, I’m free to move full steam ahead on implementing talents for 0.9.2. I’m hoping to have a good idea of when the update will be ready for beta by next week!