Patreon Weekly #27 - Dec 7th, 2019

Hey Patrons! 

Firstly, I'd like to give a big welcome to our newcomers! A decent number of folks joined up after the recent blog post, and that now puts us at over 3/4 towards unlocking the community discord! Once we get a little closer I'll likely make a new post to ask for suggestions/feedback for future rewards, as we currently don't have anything specific at the higher tiers.

I'm currently working on getting beta-1.3 ready to release early next week. In addition to a bunch of bugfixes, beta-1.3 is going to add in the missing regular mobs. This should include mimics, DM-200s, golems, and rare variants of mimics and statues. I'm also starting to get some numbers in regarding difficult, and will likely be making a few tweaks as the state of the game's current difficulty becomes more clear. Currently the only clear issue is that there's still a spike in difficulty on floor 11, shamans have a 20% chance to pop up there and that might be a bit too harsh.

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Once beta-1.3 is out, I'm going to be free to start working on boss improvements! I don't currently have any final plans for boss changes, so all of this is still a bit up in the air, but I to feel confident enough to share some general details for DM-300 and the Dwarf King:

I'm hoping to make the DM-300 fight more interesting than just a straight gear check with passive abilities:
- Whereas Tengu is a fight where the player has to chase the boss down, I think it would be interesting if DM-300 is a fight where the player needs to evade the boss.
- DM-300 will likely be a large enemy, like DM-200s and golems, which gives the player opportunities to hide from it.
- I will probably take the current passive DM-300 abilities and turn them into more active abilities instead, such as shooting a jet of toxic exhaust instead of passively spreading it.
- Finally, to reinforce the theme of having to evade DM-300, I'm likely going to give the boss an invincibility phase or similar, which will force the player to retreat. Tunnels would be an obvious place of refuge, but DM-300 does have a big mining drill... 

I want to double down on the Dwarf King being a minion master, and make those minions a more significant part of the fight.
- DK will likely no longer need to walk up to pedestals to summon, which leaves him free to do other things.
- As minions are now spawned more passively, I will likely restrict them to summon one at a time, but each undead will also be individually stronger. There's an obvious opportunity to re-use the regular enemies from the dwarf halls here.
- There will be some mechanic to punish ignoring spawns, likely by making tougher undead show up based on how many are currently alive.
- As the fight progresses spawns will speed up. I'm considering having a later phase of the fight be DK shielding himself in desperation while you have to exclusively deal with summons.
- Damage rushing the undead spawns will likely be a strong strategy here, but I may put in some checks so that it's not too good. For example, undead might spawn slightly faster if they're killed very quickly.