Tier Two Talents | Patreon Weekly #77

Hey Patrons!

I (finally) made a bunch of progress on tier two talents last week! I’ve got some new stuff to share below and am hoping to release a full blog on talents and get v0.9.1 to beta late this week.

On-Eat Talents

As mentioned before, I’m adding a food-basted talent for each hero in T2. The bonuses for the Mage and Huntress are basically direct conversions of their old T1 food talents. I have decided to throw in faster eating as a benefit to all of the T2 food talents though.

The Rogue is getting an artifact counterpart to the mage’s wand charge when eating. He can use food to recharge his cloak or any other artifact he has equipped, except that the horn of plenty can’t be used to recharge itself.

I’ve decided to ditch the temporary strength on-eat I mentioned previously for the Warrior and am instead giving him brief massive damage resistance when eating. This means that a well-timed snack can let the warrior resist or even entirely block a nasty hit from an enemy!

Item Use Talents

I’ve also decided to add a talent that triggers on item use for each hero. The Warrior and Huntress get a trigger on healing potions, and the Mage and Rogue get a trigger on scrolls of upgrade.

For the Mage this is just a conversion of his T1 Energizing Upgrade talent, but with a bit more flexibility (the SoU can now be used on any item). The Rogue gets a similar talent that affects his cloak of shadows. This provides a nice dynamic with the on-eat talents: the food talent is more accessible and general, the upgrade talent is more specifically powerful.

The Warrior and Huntress get a slightly weaker effect, as healing potions are more common. The Warrior instantly recharges his seal shielding, and the Huntress sprouts grass around herself that blocks vision and briefly root enemies. Both of these should give potions of healing a little more defensive power when the heroes need it.

These talents also trigger from alchemy produce that is made using their respective items.

Talents Replacing Innates

Lastly, just like with tier 1 talents, I’m looking to use the talent system to shift around a few innate hero abilities. I want each hero to start with a signature item and one major innate power. The Warrior and Mage can use their items to transfer upgrades, the Rogue will have his increased search radius, and the Huntress will have the ability to furrow grass. So, this time around the Rogue and Huntress are getting some innate powers moved into talents.

For the Rogue, I’m removing his passive increase to the number of secret rooms in the dungeon. This is getting replaced with a talent that gives a 50%/75% chance to detect when a floor has a secret, and by slightly boosting the number of secret rooms for all heroes. While giving the Rogue more secrets fit his theme well, it was a very passive bonus and meant that the same dungeon RNG seed could give the rogue very different level layouts.

For the Huntress, this means her innate mind vision and bonus thrown weapon durability are being moved to T2 talents. I appreciate that this cuts down on her starting abilities, so I’m trying to be a bit generous with the talent scaling. Just one point will get you to the level of the old innate effect, the second point increases the bonuses further to 3 tiles of innate mind vision and +75% durability.

Of course, I will keep an eye on how this affects the early game of the Rogue and Huntress and will adjust as needed.