Tier Two and Beyond | Patreon Weekly #69

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, there’s a new content poll! This poll is about the direction of side content in v0.9.1. 

v0.9.0 released in the middle of last week and is doing pretty well in beta so far! I’ve already fixed up all the major bugs, and so am working on polish and final balance before release in the middle of this week.

For this weekly, I’m going to go over how tier one is doing in beta, and my rough designs for the remaining tiers going forward.

Tier One

I’ve already made a small round of balance adjustments after initial release and am planning to keep an eye on how the balance for the tier one talents develops. I suspect things will settle over time after people find their preferences, but as it is currently all of the talents look to be in a decent enough state to make it to release in terms of winrate and popularity. The one notable exception at the moment is tested hypothesis, which is doing far too well after its recent buff.

One bit of feedback several players have given is that some of the tier one talents do scale into the lategame. I am aware of this and accepted it so long as the scaling was minor, but I can appreciate that this makes the non-scaling T1 talents unappealing for experienced players. As I come up with more talents I may reposition a few things to ensure all T1 talents are strictly earlygame.

Tier Two

Tier two is currently planned to span levels 7 to 12, with 6 points to spend in total.

I’m expecting the talents available in tier two to be a bit similar to tier one, fairly generally useful abilities, but without so much emphasis on the early game. Tier two talents will be allowed to touch mechanics which are useful all game long, which means there’s a lot more room for them to have interesting gameplay interactions.

Tier Three

Tier three is currently planned to span levels 13 to 20, with 8 points to spend in total.

The most notable thing about this tier is that the talents available will be partially determined by your subclass! The talents at this tier will be a mixture of base class talents and talents that let you further specialize your chosen subclass.

This provides a lot of design opportunity for subclasses, which I hope to take advantage of. For instance, I’m planning for the gladiator’s rework treatment to involve the talent system.

Tier Four

Tier four is currently planned to span levels 21 to 30, with a max of 10 points to spend. Most runs make it to level 26-28, so this means 6-8 points to spend on average.

As you might have guessed based on the level ranges and tier three, this tier will feature some interaction with class armor abilities! This is a ways off, so my design here is really rough, but the current plan is to tie class armor abilities into the talent system, which will allow the armor abilities to be much more varied and interesting. More on that later…