Patreon Weekly #35 - Feb 2nd, 2020
Added 2020-02-03 00:47:46 +0000 UTCHey Patrons!
I've made excellent progress on beta-4.0 this week. At the current pace I think there's a very good chance it will be coming out this coming week. Here are the major things to expect:
(also, make sure to take a look at Patreon Poll #3 if you haven't already. There's a few days left to vote, currently DM-201s are winning!)
-----
I've fully implemented the changes to ghouls mentioned in the last weekly. In exchange for 5 max HP (50 -> 45), they now return from the dead so long as other ghouls are nearby. While 'downed' they aren't considered an active enemy, so they can be stepped over and aren't targetable. If the space they are in is occupied when they revive they will automatically move to an adjacent free space.
I've tried to balance this mechanic so that it doesn't make them substantially stronger, but it should make ghouls a bit more mechanically interesting. Be careful for groups of more than 2 ghouls though, as you'll need to get them all downed at once to finish them off...
Here's a demonstration of how the mechanic works (with debug stats):
-----
As for Dwarf King, the fight is now almost fully designed and I'm in the thick of production.
I've decided to focus almost all of my improvements around how DK summons and interacts with his minions. Minions are now summoned passively, so DK doesn't need to waste turns moving toward summoning pedestals. The minions themselves are changing as well, I'm ditching the reskinned prison skeletons and instead DK will summon the same dwarven enemies you encounter in the city! Ghouls will be the most common summon, but in some cases monks and warlocks can show up too! Spawning takes a short time, and each minion has its own spawning particle effect, so you will have have time to react if a warlock or monk is about to show up.
The fight itself is split into three phases:
The first phase of the fight is focused around a mixture of fighting DK and his undead. In this stage DK will have at least two abilities in addition to the usual walking up and attacking and spawning minions. I've designed DK's abilities to encourage the player to split their focus between him and his summons, without outright forcing the player to attack his summons:
- DK can jump one or two tiles backward, and teleport a minion to the location he used to be at.
- DK can 'life link' himself and one of his minions. When to characters are life-linked, and damage they take is evenly split between the two.
In the second phase, DK teleports to his throne in the center of the arena and becomes invulnerable until the player defeats enough of his undead minions. As DK himself is totally out of the fight, the minion spawns will likely be a lot more aggressive here, and monks and warlocks will definitely be showing up. This is part of the reason why I'm placing those statues into the arena (shown off in the last weekly), as good positioning will be needed to avoid eating warlock bolts.
In his last phase DK gets back off his throne and charges at the player in desperation. DK will be on very low health here, but his summons will be very quick and aggressive, so the goal is to finish him off before becoming overwhelmed. In order to better balance the pace of this part of the fight between high and low burst damage builds, I may give DK some form of resistance or deferred damage effect.
-----
Once beta-4.0 is done I'm going to move forward with refinements to the demon halls and Yog, and then we can hopefully start looking to get this beta wrapped up! On one hand I'm very happy with most of the changes and feel this has become the biggest update Shattered has ever received, but on the other hand the time taken to actually implement 0.8.0 has dragged on for a good while. I'm hoping both 0.8.1 and 0.9.0 will be quicker, and if 0.9.0 in particular looks to be taking a while I may split it into multiple updates.
Comments
Thanks for the reply!!
s9menine
2020-02-03 11:41:18 +0000 UTCHehe, glad to hear you're excited! I'll go over your points in order: 1. It works exactly as you've described, and being able to deal a bit more damage if you target the minion over DK is very intentional. 2. The specific number of minions and their spawning pace is still up in the air. While I do want it to feel a bit like an endurance contest, I don't intend to balance it to exclude builds that can't tank, or builds that can't deal strong long-term damage. At the moment I'm leaning toward a 'wave-based' model, where spawning stops until you've cleared a wave, which gives lots of builds room to breath. 3. There are various environmental clues, as all of the dwarven enemy descriptions make reference to them being slaves to DK. Similar to your second point, I want to try and balance the pacing of undead summons so that AOE items and effects are definitely helpful, but not mandatory. Think like with the new DM-300 fight, where crippling items or speed enhancers can really help, but smart positioning works just as well.
Shattered Pixel
2020-02-03 08:31:51 +0000 UTCHyped! Excited to see in particular how DK's crowds of ghouls will work. I have a few questions: 1. How does Life Link take armour into account? If DK's armour is significantly higher than the mob he links to, would hitting the mob also be a good way to "bypass" some of DK's armour? 2. Phase two sounds like an endurance fight and not all builds seem to be suited to deal with it, would there be other ways to progress through the phase other than "kill x amount"? 3. Would there be anything before the fight to hint at the minion-master nature of DK and advise the player to bring or prepare AoE items? AoE consumables seem very strong in this fight and might be mandatory.
s9menine
2020-02-03 07:26:46 +0000 UTC
