Patreon Weekly #47 - Apr 27th, 2020

Hey Patrons!

I’ve spent most of last week working on 0.8.0a, which should be releasing today! 0.8.0a is primarily bugfixes, but also includes some balance and QOL tweaks. On the balance front I’m buffing sniper shot and slightly scaling back DM-300, Yog, and ripper demons. For QOL I’m tweaking the new red flash effect to be much less likely to trigger when it’s not needed. 

This week I’m starting 0.8.1 in earnest. The update will be made of lots of smaller improvements and changes grouped together. I plan to share specifics on these changes as I finish concepting/implementing them. I’m also going to start up the content poll that I owe you guys from March this week.

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

Sniper Shot Changes

I’ve suspected that sniper shot was weak for a little while, but lacked detailed analytics tracking to be sure of just how much. I added some better tracking in 0.8.0, and here are the results:

The two charts above show the rates of weapon augmentation for each defeated boss starting from Tengu. For weapons overall damage starts out more popular but nicely equalizes with speed by the lategame.

For the spirit bow things are a different story. Augments in general are more popular, of course, but speed pulls ahead while damage fails to scale up as the game progresses. Sniper shot clearly needs a moderate buff so it can compete with snapshot and flurry. I’ve decided to increase both its base damage and distance scaling, it’ll deal ~20% more damage at short range, scaling up to ~40% more damage at a high distance.

Changes to Tengu

Here’s the first thing that I’m implementing for 0.8.1! Since 0.7.5 I’ve heard that the fading traps in the second phase of the Tengu fight are disliked by a significant number of players. What interests me about this feedback is the same mechanic is present in phase 1, but nobody has complained about it there. This leads me to believe that the primary dislike for phase 2 is that it feels more like the fight is being interrupted for a memory puzzle, and less like the puzzle is part of the fight itself.

The current phase 2 is mainly a holdover from the maze that was in the previous iteration of the Tengu fight. I wanted to preserve that maze while also making it shorter and more interactive, so I created short mazes of fading traps. That older maze was also unpopular though, and the main reason it existed was because I felt that the fight needed a breather in between phases 1 and 3.

However, 0.8.0 included three new bosses who each had multiple phases with no real breaks. Each of these fights have been received very positively, and so it’s become clear to me that Tengu probably doesn’t need a pause in the action at all. Because of that, I’m making the decision to cut phase 2 entirely, which means the Tengu fight will just have the current first and third phase.

In exchange for removing phase 2, I’m going to slightly amp up the fading traps that are still present in phase 1. Tengu will now be more willing to jump further away, and the path through his traps is more likely to be complex. This means that the overall use of the fading trap mechanic is similar, but it’s now much better integrated with the fight itself. I’m probably also going to slightly adjust Tengu to be weaker in melee range, so that this change doesn’t make Tengu harder for melee builds.

Here’s an example of the tweaked phase 1. In this case I got a bit unlucky on the third teleport, and a bit lucky on the fourth one: