Patreon Weekly #17 - Sept 27th, 2019

Hey Patrons!

I'm spending some time working on polish this week, but also some time on concepting for 0.7.6! In 0.7.6 I'm planning on improving enemies and bosses in the later three chapters of the game. There likely won't be any Tengu-scale boss reworks (there just isn't enough time to squeeze all of that into one update), but I do intend to fix most of the major enemies issues in these later chapters while improving variety.

These regions are interesting as they are largely untouched from Vanilla. Because of this I hope to make a bunch of smaller tweaks to regular enemies in addition to adding new ones. The design is still a bit general at this stage, but I thought it would be fun to go over my thoughts and rough plans for each enemy one region at a time.

Let's start with the caves!:

Bats are designed decently, and serve as an excellent basic enemy with the added twist of sapping your health. Their main issue is that they are a very strong gear check as the player can't escape from them, and without either strong armor or strong damage their healing will make them extremely dangerous. Infact floors 11 and 12 are notably deadlier than 13 and 14 solely because of the high presence of bats. I haven't decided specifically how yet, but I'd like to tone down how oppressive bats are to runs which are a little undergeared.

Brutes are another decent straightforward enemy, but I think their rage mechanic needs some work. Currently it doesn't really factor much into player decision-making, and often doesn't do anything beyond let you get a free killing blow on them. Conveniently, a lot of new mechanics have been added to the game since brutes were included, and I think they could make use of shielding quite nicely! The plan currently is to have them enrage and gain significant shielding when they reach 0 HP (a-la berserker), and then they can either bleed out over a short period of time or the player can finish them off directly. This means that the ideal way to fight brutes will be to have an escape route planned to back up into while they die, or you risk getting smacked with a nasty enrage hit.

Shamen are going to get some changes to differentiate them from DM-100s, and I'd like them to fill on the gap the caves currently has for a consistent ranged threat. They will likely be getting a new magic bolt that's more fitting for their sort of tribal theme, and this bolt will likely have a debuff attached (though it won't be as nasty as with warlocks). I'm also toying with the idea of letting shamen and brutes buddy up, but I'm currently unsure how to best make that work, or if its a good idea at all.

Spinners fit into a lovely archetype as a sort of trapper/runner enemy, but I think their mechanics could be more interesting. This will take some experimenting with, but I love the idea of having them laying traps for you, or just generally doing more with their spider silk than using it to cover their retreat.

Lastly, I do intend to add a new enemy to the caves, but I'm going to keep that one close to my chest for the moment. I will say that I'm experimenting with the concept of an enemy with limited mobility options. I need to think of a way to make this work without having them be too easy to beat with ranged attacks though.