Light Dark Revamp Build Initial Feedback

[wizzzargh]

Blessed is now a more powerful modifier now that it’s not clogged with the self-buffs, but there’s not much variety. Maybe it’s more of an issue of buffs being easy to find and easy to use that makes me feel like they’re teetering close to ‘no brainer’ options… The main culprit being Might of course.



Maybe a RAD NEW REDESIGN of buffs is in order, like giving them Cantrip(Luck?) Cooldowns to prevent EZ buffing everyone as the enemy totters towards you from the edge of LoS, or linking them to harder conditions than ‘Spend SP’ and creating things more in the vein of Daring Cut.
BUT YOU DON’T WANT TO HEAR MORE WIZZ RAMBLING ABOUT BUFFS YET AGAIN YOU WANT HOT FEEDBACK ON LIGHT AND DARK ABILITIES

I did play and splat a coupla Faithful Hearts and the new Miens seem pretty nice, as do the new and improved smites. Easg Saints are less of a joke now, and Angel packs have the potential to go all Fotia on you if they decide to focus fire. Didn’t see much of the Sainted/Baleful tier stuff, probably because late Light has a lot of Physical overlap and not much of the mass AoE stuff, and the Baleful-style enemies tend to either be Oni support like Shikigami and Mananangal, or Vigor Siphoners.

Adria is still a terrible pushover. If she had some meatshields that would help her actually use her abilities and not just get stunlocked and generally bullied, maybe things could be different.. Maybe she could have Sainted Shikigami or something silly (don’t want to provide Soul/Flesheater fodder after all)


I like the damage adjustment for strength, but Vitality and Agility need something to compete if the strength change is going to stay.

Demon also seems to run a lot faster and smoother but I'm not sure if that's thanks to the build or my own software update.

[Ferret]

Buff/Debuff is next on the "revamp" list. It may not be next build, but it is coming at some point, it remains one of the few things I'm unhappy with in the current ability set, Buff more than Debuff.

Mid-late game Light and Dark probably do some new demons that focus more exclusively on them, rather than splitting them with support roles or physical roles. I didn't want to change the roles of existing demons very much, but by the time I realized I maybe need some new demons to show off later Light/Dark better, it was pretty late in the build cycle, so that's something I'll poke at laters.

Adria is... still Adria it seems. I knew I was likely wise not to promise much on her. I think the concept may just not work well for a Hero, for some reason I have yet to grasp. I'll take yet another swing at her next build though. I could give her minions, but generally heroes don't have demon pals. On the other hand, they don't have to be demons... hmm..

Agility needed help even before the Strength change, no argument there. Not yet convinced Vitality will need help yet, though I am keeping an eye on it. Oddly, the idea someone had for Agility of tying it to critical hits, which I originally rejected because it would make melee even more vulnerable, might be possible now... and maybe Vit can be crit defense? I'll do some thinking on it.

I can't absolutely super-positively say for sure it was 100% on my end that there was a serious performance increase, but thanks to Unity 5's tools, I was able to identify and fix some performance issues that, at least on my machine, improved performance by as much as a factor of 8 in some situations. Granted, we're talking "going from running at 40 FPS to running at 320 FPS" here, which isn't really noticeable in a game like Demon, but that's on my super machine. On an older computer, I could easily see the results being much more easily noticeable to humans. (This was a big part of why I wanted to upgrade to Unity 5 in the first place: Unity 5 Free, unlike Unity 4 Free, doesn't deny you access to profiling. I had long suspected I had some sneaky performance-impacting bugs, but I had been unsuccessful in tracking them down the old fashioned way.)

Thanks for the feedback.

[mbj]

Yea Demon runs super fast now. It could still be faster, if autoexplore wasn't animated I think. Will there be any option to not animate autoexplore coming up?

Also I didn't play very much but revelation on profane targets is confirmed bad, even though everything is super cheap now. I spammed reveal on my wisp to get something set up on my faithful heart but it definitely didn't work out. But I really didn't get too far because I stubbornly kept using revelation on wisps for reaper's mien. Not really a complaint about the changes though.

Also yes add crits so I can stack humble, +20% damage on dark weak, +20% damage on light weak, innocence, offense up, accuracy up, crit boost passives, +5 magic and instakill all of anomaly.

[Ferret]

Yeah, auto-explore is pretty much the only bottleneck. Not animating it ... hmm.. lemme see how tricky that'd be to setup. Though, to be honest, I suspect my issue is somewhere in pathfinding, not rendering at this point. My pathfinding code is fairly well tested for short work, but it may still be rough for longer distance checks.

If you really want to grab specific abilities, wait until 5th level (assuming a non-Orb start) and snag Transpose Soul for your upgrade. Revelation might give it to you too, but I've found that to usually be useful when you have a demon who is already a caster of a type matching his modifier and you want to make him more of one without too much fuss. The elemental low level guys (Echnesis, Huo Shu, Raicho) are all fairly good examples.

If I do add crits (which still may not work for other reasons, like promoting spikier damage than I might approve of ), I admit my default assumption was that they wouldn't work on attacks that don't use Agility in the first place. Agility doesn't really help you "critical" with something like divine retribution from Humble or a large explosion from Fireball. I kind of like the dividing line between characters who use Agility and those who don't, I just wish the two sides of that line were a bit more balanced is all.