Experimental Build 1 (5/11/2017)

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Experimental Build 1 (5/11/2017)

Postby Ferret » Thu May 11, 2017 8:53 pm

Here's the link! https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

And here's the change log:

Code: Select all
Relic Preservation (Experimental)
  - Summoner Relics can now undertake desperate measures to preserve a
    Summoner's life, dealing temporary MaxHP damage to prevent fatal HP
    damage.
  - This is a fairly wrenching process: it costs 2 MaxHP damage to prevent
    1 HP damage.
  - MaxHP lost in this way can be recovered by all the usual methods:
    defeating enemies, using Pure Stones/Gems, using MaxHP draining
    abilities.

Balance (Experimental)
  - Increased damage and healing by about 30% across the board.   
  - Increased the success rate of most status effects while also reducing
    their duration. Very few status effects last more than 5 turns now.
  - Infection now prevents all non-drain based HP and SP recovery, rather
    than reducing these by 50%.
  - Guilt now recovers significantly more HP when triggered.
  - Pariah now causes significantly more damage when triggered.
  - Regeneration now restores significantly more HP per turn.
  - Poison and Ignite now cause significantly more damage per turn.
  - Control loss enchantments (Panic, Charm, Sleep, Mute, Hex, Paralyze)
    no longer have randomized durations.
  - Basic movement, passing a turn, and the Dash ability now only take
    half a turn to execute, in effect allowing you to do two of these, or
    one twice, in the time it takes to do 1 other non-free action.
  - As a consequence of this, capture mechanics that utilize movement,
    such as 'chase' and 'defeat X enemies' have had their durations adjusted
    accordingly.
  - Doubled base HP regeneration rate, mostly so that resting does not seem
    to take twice as long with the new half turn cost of passing a turn.
  - Reduced the cap on how much energy Juggernaut can provide, since
    basic movement is cheaper now.

Balance
  - HP regeneration, Poison damage, and Ignite damage now use your base MaxHP
    for calculating their effect, rather than your current MaxHP.
  - Heroic characters no longer gain a bonus to status effect application
    rates.
  - Heroic characters now gain a larger bonus to damage and healing.
  - Heroic characters now gain a smaller bonus to defense and status effect
    resistance.
  - Chakra Stones and Chakra Gems now attempt to give an immediate extra turn
    to affected characters, provided they are not currently unable to take a
    turn.
  - Electricity abilities with a fixed chance to hit now have an increased
    chance to apply Shock, relative to other Electricity abilities. The SP
    cost for these abilities was slightly reduced as well.
  - Reduced the SP cost for very short-range 'smite' attacks, such as Ghost
    Bite. This also affected the various 'Spear' abilities.

UI
  - Resting with MaxHP damage will now trigger a reminder about how to recover
    lost MaxHP when resting concludes.


Please post any feedback, complaints, questions, etc. to this thread, rather than usual places on the forum, since this is a weirdo experimental build. Thanks, and good luck! :D
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Re: Experimental Build 1 (5/11/2017)

Postby wizzzargh » Fri May 12, 2017 12:55 am

First run with Vodun Mask+Weigh Sin+Ember Burst died on tower 4 when Vikhor showed up halfway through a Cursed Easg Saint link. It'll take some adjusting to get used to demons dying faster.

Overall I'd say it feels like a player nerf, since enemies close gaps fast while you're summoning and unsummoning. Raicho in particular go from 'on screen' to 'In your face' in an instant. I survived 2 fights I wouldn't have otherwise thanks to the maxHP drain thing, but it's still not very 'safe' as you can fall into the loop of 'unsummon a demon to save it, summon a new demon, new demon is beaten within an inch of its life the very turn you summon it, unsummon it,' and enemies move much closer in that timeframe. Might go Crown of Glory to give myself some breathing room.

I do like the speedier combat though.
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Re: Experimental Build 1 (5/11/2017)

Postby RolaRoul » Fri May 12, 2017 2:01 am

Just splatted my first character in this build. Orb of Power Dark/Ice, died to Ludoc's team in Anomaly:2.

One annoying thing about the movement buff is that I have to hit the Wait button a lot more when I run out of SP (which is a big problem for OoP starts). I feel like waiting a turn should actually wait a turn instead of waiting half a turn.
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Re: Experimental Build 1 (5/11/2017)

Postby wizzzargh » Fri May 12, 2017 2:46 am

RolaRoul wrote:One annoying thing about the movement buff is that I have to hit the Wait button a lot more when I run out of SP (which is a big problem for OoP starts). I feel like waiting a turn should actually wait a turn instead of waiting half a turn.


If we could have BOTH options that would be nice. The half-turn wait gives you a little more control in situations like when you have Vigorous or in the case of turn-acceleration effects and I think that's a potentially very useful tool to have.

Coincidentally I just killed Ludoc before posting this, but it was a fiercer fight than I was used to- enemy summoners being kept alive via maxHP damage by their relics makes them much harder to focus them down.

Guilt+Fiery Claw is working well for me in the healing department. But, guilt doesn't last as long, so it doesn't seem overpowered. Probably.
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Re: Experimental Build 1 (5/11/2017)

Postby mbj » Fri May 12, 2017 10:21 am

The relic preservation mechanic seems like an unnecessarily complex (well not really complex, but just awkward) way of giving summoners more effective health. With each 1 point of damage taken below 0 HP, you take 2 max HP damage, and you basically die when your max HP would hit 0; so your effective health is increased by 50%. It's not quite the same as higher base health, because there's some funky stuff you can do at low health and you get the max HP drain mini-game, but it'd sure be a heck of a lot more clear by just boosting summoner HP by whatever percentage.

Speaking of funky stuff, it's not clear how low HP abilities work (stuff like eternal glory, die hard, and whatever else). Last defense seems like it would get a huge buff from this, since if you're getting "preserved" you'll be sub-25% HP, and thus getting +100% defense on all incoming damage which will effectively drop the ratio of max HP lost to damage taken from 2:1 down to 1:1 :twisted: .

As for the rest of the build, the sped up combat seems like a nice change of pace, but early game as a max vitality veil tank seemed super dangerous for some reason, I felt like my base unpreserved HP was dropping crazy fast in only a turn or two. Once I hit critical mass of the three magic veils it didn't seem as bad though.
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Re: Experimental Build 1 (5/11/2017)

Postby Ferret » Fri May 12, 2017 3:15 pm

Life's definitely a bit more dangerous for your demons in this brave new world of ours. I've had a few ideas on that already, some or all of which I may do:

1) Remove Restore Demon from the game. Then, when a summoner's demon "dies", it is instead forcibly unsummoned and loses a large chunk of MaxHP (not necessarily related to the damage taken beyond 1 HP: it would probably be a significant amount even it only "died" by 1 HP) A summoner's demon only dies when MaxHP reaches 0. This idea has a couple of advantages: like the summoner MaxHP damage business, it provides a bit more fuzzier of a line that can catch occasional "unfair" situations without requiring me to prevent them from ever happening even once. It also gets rid of Restore Demon has a potential use of Credits, which has always problematic because it's currently the only non-progression use of Credits. Yet another advantage: you no longer end up killing any of a summoner's demons during a fight with them, opening up the recruitment "reward" a little bit more.

2) Strengthen healing abilities significantly.. probably +50% as an opening bid. The idea here is that healing your demons (either yourself, or having your allies do it) becomes preferable to unsummon/summoning them. Potential downside is healing becomes more "required" for success, but I may be kidding myself as this is likely already the case to such a degree that it doesn't matter Potential downside #2 is that shutting down enemy healers becomes a much more vital thing, even though abilities that can really do so (Infection, control status effects, possibly SP draining are rare-ish.

3) Make Summon and Dismiss "half turn" as well. This would take a bit of the pain out of process, and would also be a slight sideways nerf to Quick Summon and Quick Dismiss, which are arguably two of the far-stronger-than-the-rest upgrades.

I'm not sure which of these I'll actually try yet, but those're where my thoughts are at the moment. My current preference for them would fall in the order (from most to least): 1, 3, 2

The passing turns for SP bit is an interesting bit I admit I didn't catch, but it's a good point: I think my inclination here is to make the the default pass option the "full turn" one, but also have a "half turn" pass option with a modified keypress perhaps. Only problem is that Shift + . is > , which is a portal usage key... hmmm. I'll have to thinky on this one. It's a good point though, and I do need to address it.

The reason I went for MaxHP drain mechanic rather than just a blanket MaxHP increase is because, in *most* cases, if your HP (at the current level) hits 0, you did do something wrong, and there should be consequences for it. The trouble is that 0.1% of the time, it will be something like you walked around a corner into a group of modified demons who all blast you with 100 Power attacks on your weakness, manage to Stun or Shock you, and do it again the next turn. The MaxHP mechanic is basically my answer to wanting there to be consequences for the 99.9% of slips that are the player's doing while still allowing you to survive the 0.1% that are just plain bad luck. +50% maxHP flat would certainly let you survive the bad luck too, but it'd also mean you would be under very little threat most of the rest of time.

Most of the passives work fairly well with it: Diehard, probably as you'd want, kicks in before you start losing MaxHP, Last Defense does kick in and stay kicked in, but of course, you're still losing MaxHP when you do take damage, so it isn't without cost. Eternal Glory is the only semi-dubious case: like Diehard, it kicks in before you begin losing MaxHP, which may or may not be what people'd want from that.

It seems like so far most people like the change to combat pacing, which is good, since that was as much an experimental bit as the means I took to get there. :D Since nobody's yelling at me too much about massive problems, I'll probably "open up" the testing pool a bit by posting about this build being available on the blog / Twitter / etc. soon, which hopefully will get some more feedback coming in.

Thanks for trying this out so quickly, I appreciate the fast turnaround on feedback for this. :)
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Re: Experimental Build 1 (5/11/2017)

Postby oneeyedjoe » Fri May 12, 2017 5:40 pm

Ember burst is pretty awful now, isn't really worth it even if you have warmth because it lasts only 2 turns. Luckily I got Pyre Rite from random fiery echeneis so in tandem with it ember burst isn't useless. Also shortened duration makes Greek Fire more attractive, it basically prolongs ignite effect in 1.5 times.
That's the only thing that bothered me so far, I am currently on tower 5. Sped up basic movement seems ok. On paper it makes mobility and swiftness obsolete though, unless you use them for very niche build with ghost pierce.
Almost forgot - links where you have to keep the demon in sight for n turns now way more likely to walk you into a pack of enemies because of this :D .
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Re: Experimental Build 1 (5/11/2017)

Postby Ferret » Fri May 12, 2017 7:57 pm

Yeah, Ember Burst might be a reasonable candidate for upping the duration a bit on, or possibly just even adding a damage component too. AE Ignite for 2 turns, even at near-certainty and all the passives it can trigger, probably isn't enough.

Mobility/Swiftness still have a place, I think. :D That niche is a semi-popular one, for one thing. :D For another, they still give you an edge in "chase" captureables. :) I'm not sure I'm bothered by them feeling a bit less powerful though.. they were at risk of being at "melee tax" before as it was.
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Re: Experimental Build 1 (5/11/2017)

Postby greattuna » Fri May 12, 2017 8:48 pm

I'll have to admit I have to get used to the new, accelerated combat. I've lost an asrai because I thought she was safe with 50% of her HP.

I've also accidentally ran into a double encounter at anomaly (ruhin and co + bunch of gis), but titan's fist is stronk, plus I had Kitsune with me (do I love out-of-depth demons sometimes). Had to use some items though, but still haven't got to suffer from MaxHP drain.

I want to ask though about the difference between buffs that work "briefly" compared to buffs with regular duration. I feel like I need to constantly Daring Cut my way through to actually keep the buff on.

I also might want to ask about ability to save\load different games, because as it stands, now the only way to try another build for purposes of experiment is to either die or win.
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Re: Experimental Build 1 (5/11/2017)

Postby mbj » Fri May 12, 2017 9:45 pm

Definitely don't do #2. I ran into a lifebender bonnachon+hob pack with lucky aid and AoE soothe, I ended up trapped in a dead end, and they managed to stay perpetually at max health no matter what I tried and the battle went on long enough that all my own demons were about to die through attrition. The only thing I could do was negotiate with a couple of them to cut down on the raw healing power. Making healing even better would just be stupid. That's my single anecdotal evidence against #2

#1 would make minions have relic preservation too which just seems weird, and would probably make summoner fights even more of a slog than it already is. And how would recycle or consume work with that? If they kill the demon for real, consume would become utter trash at that point because you'll only get one single (1) decent sized heal after a HUGE investment of exp and a demon slot, instead of being able to repeatedly revive the dude (equivalent to buying a heal/chakra stone). And at least now you can keep an otherwise subpar demon with some skills or a modifier you might want for later in the graveyard, without having to waste a slot on it; 6 demon slots has never really felt like enough, but it's tolerable because of the pseudo-slots in the graveyard. No more restore demon means no more Well-fed Actaeon too :cry:
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