Patreon Weekly #22 - Nov 1st, 2019

Hey Patrons, hope you had a happy Halloween!

This week has mainly been spent implementing on caves enemies and finalizing the design for the dwarven halls enemies, so I've got a few things to show off!

Firstly, as mentioned last week there will be three types of gnoll shaman, with different debuffs each. I've spent a bit of time giving them some vfx that are a bit more shaman-y, and I think they're working quite well:

(direct video link)

Also, a slight tweak from what I said last week: I've decided for blue shamans to have a debuff that increases physical damage taken after armor, instead of reducing the effectiveness of armor directly. This has a similar overall result without countering armor quite as much. Seeing as magical attackers already counter armor in the first place I felt the extra armor countering was unnecessary.

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As for the Dwarven halls, I don't have any new visuals to show yet, but I have finalized the designs for the area's two most iconic enemies. My hope is that these enemies will be more of a build and gameplay consideration, instead of just being frustrating without much counterplay:

Dwarven Monks are losing their disarm ability entirely, in favor of a new self-buff called 'focus'. Monks become focused when they first enter combat, and also build focus faster if they're on the move instead of throwing punches. When they are focused, monks will parry the next physical attack directed at them. Parried attacks miss regardless of any other circumstances, even if they would normally be guaranteed to hit. Monks are meant to counter builds that deal damage in large single hits or who make frequent use of guaranteed hits, but there are ways to work around them. Any physical attack on the monk will cause them to spend their parry, so why not use something other than your primary damage dealer?

Dwarven Warlocks are getting a reduction to their melee damage stats, but are gaining a nasty new debuff to compensate. The WIP name for this debuff is degraded 😈. When affected with degradation, a player's equipment is temporarily considered to be at a lower level than it actually is. This reduction starts at +3 and gets gradually harsher the higher level a piece of gear is. I haven't finalized the balance for this yet, but degradation will likely not affect secondary statistics like wand charges and strength requirement, and also likely won't affect artifacts. I appreciate that degradation has the potential to be very un-fun if it is too harsh, so I don't intend to balance it to totally invalidate upgrade dumping. However, dumping is the simplest upgrade strategy and I'd love to give it a bit more to worry about.

The dwarven halls are already a reasonably difficult stage of the game, so I'm not looking to make them hugely harder with these two reworked enemies. I plan to keep a keen eye on balance once the beta starts, and will adjust accordingly if need be. Ideally I'd like for lategame enemies to feel a bit scarier than they actually are.

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Finally, I'm starting to consider the general design for the demon halls, and what I want to achieve there. I need to be really careful about enemies there, as they need to be sadistic but not unfun. I'm also aware the demon halls has various general design issues (such as being too rushable), and while 0.7.6 likely won't totally fix this I want to at least improve it. I want to better encourage exploring the demon halls, but don't want to also make them way harder in the process. I expect that I will have more to share on this front in the next week or two as we get closer to the first 0.7.6 beta.