Patreon Weekly #20 - Oct 18th, 2019

Hello Patrons!

Welcome to weekly number 20! Its crazy to me that we're already approaching half a year worth of weeklies! This Patreon only started really growing in earnest in the last two months though, since then we've gained ~$80/mo spread over ~25 patrons. At the current pace we should be hitting $200/mo around the end of the year, and I'm looking forward to getting that discord set up!

As mentioned in Weekly #17, during the development of 0.7.6 I'm going to go over my thoughts and rough plans for each region. We covered the caves in #17, now let's talk about enemies in the Dwarven City!

Ghouls are a brand new enemy that I'm planning to add to the dwarven halls. They help fill in a power and a lore gap in the game. Currently floors 16 and 17 are much more lethal than 18 and 19, and adding ghouls can help with this by diluting the quantity of elementals and warlocks. My intention with Ghouls is that they will be weak individually, but will travel in groups to compensate! I'm very interested to see if a sort of group enemy could work well in the constricted environment of the dungeon, and I'm planning on giving them some tricks to help with congestion. Ghouls also help with lore, as they explain what has happened to the dwarves which were not devoted to the current king...

Elementals work well as a basic enemy with a single debuff attached, but especially since Ghouls are being added, there's some space for elementals to be a bit more complex. Given the success of necromancers I'm looking for more opportunities to add 'pseudo-ranged' enemies, which don't just directly attack at a distance, but are capable of affecting the hero with abilities outside of melee. Elementals also have an easy avenue for more variety, as there could be different types based on different elements. Each element could have a slight ability/debuff variance while keeping the same base stats. I'm sure you'd all love a shocking elemental, for example 😈.

Warlocks are a real terror for most players currently, I'd like to scale them back a bit while still keeping them as the staple ranged threat of the dwarven halls. In particular, while their debuff is mechanically interesting, the end result is that it strongly discourages players from using higher-tier gear, which I think is a bad thing at such a late stage of the game. I don't have specific plans yet, but I'd like to scale back their melee damage slightly and give them a different debuff which is punishing in a new way.

I really like the overall counter-melee theme that Monks offer, but currently their specific mechanics are very annoying. Having to scramble for a dropped melee weapon just isn't fun, and they often encourage the player to just build even more damage so they can be killed before they get a disarm off. I'm considering tweaking Monks to have an ability that still counters melee attacks but does so in a way that's less frustrating. I'd also like this ability to be more front-loaded, which means it can't be countered by just dealing more damage.

Golems currently offer no flavor on top of a slow attack speed, I'd like to improve on that by doubling down on them being a big powerful enemy. Similar to DM-200s, I want Golems to be a large enemy that can't move through doors or tunnels, but they will have additional power to compensate! Similar to DM-200s, I'm not 100% on the details yet, but Golems may get access to some magical trickery to help compensate for their lack of regular mobility.

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My plan for 0.7.6 is to release an initial beta with all the enemy changes, and then consider the tweaks I'm going to make to bosses. As I mentioned before, I am likely not going to do full boss reworks in 0.7.6, but I do hope to make targeted changes that substantially improve them. I'm going to be working on pinning down details and implementing on the caves next week, to look forward to more specifics for that in the next weekly!