Patreon Weekly #49 - May 11th, 2020

Hey Patrons!

As mentioned, I’m moving content polls to release at the same time as weeklies, and there’s one out right now! Content Poll #5 focuses on rings and wands, and will run right up until next week.

For this week I mainly focused on item concepting work for that content poll, and on various quality of life improvements. The most noticeable of which is a huge improvement to the way buff durations are communicated to the player.

Read on if you'd like more details...

Buff Indicator Quality of Life

Way back in 0.6.2 I added functionality to tint buff icons and used it to make some icons fade as the buff was expiring. I’ve overhauled that system now and buffs have a proper fading effect that much better communicates how much of their duration is left!

This new fading animation is also much more versatile, and so I’ve added it to a bunch of new buffs. Previously about 15 buffs had fading behaviour, now over 50 do! For example, below is a gif showing what you might now see if you step on a chilling trap and quickly run off it. The buff almost fills up, threatening to freeze you, before then fading away once you’ve escaped the chilled air:

I’ve also improved some of the shading logic too, which has let me recolor several icons that were previously duplicates. Here are the three buffs that use the healing icon as an example, previously they were all identical:

Lastly, as buff durations are now more visible, I decided to do a consistency pass on durations of the same buff from different sources. Only a few of these adjustments should significantly affect balance, but a lot of them remove unnecessary randomness or variance. Did you know there wasn’t a single consistent source of freezing? Every single effect had a randomized duration!

Ring of Tenacity/Protection?

I considered several rings while working on Poll #5 before eventually settling on wealth and might. I also had an idea for tenacity, but it wasn’t complex enough to be worth a poll choice. I might still do it separately though and was wondering what you guys think about it.

Currently the focus of tenacity is to amp up player survivability when at low health. This works really well for the berserker and is pretty hard to notice for everyone else. It’s not doing too poorly in the stats, but I often get complaints that the ring feels very weak. 

To change this up, my idea is to rework the ring of tenacity into the ring of protection. This ring will grant the player a regenerating shield instead of damage reduction. This would still help the berserker but is much more generally useful and much easier for the player to notice. You could think of it a bit like a version of the warrior’s seal that you can upgrade directly.

I’m very interested in feedback on this idea. The ring is still defensive, but the theme is otherwise totally changed. I do think it will still work in tenacity’s old niche, but it will be less specifically aimed at that, for better or worse. Let me know what you think in the comments or on the patreon discord!