Upcoming Feature: Relics

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Upcoming Feature: Relics

Postby Ferret » Fri Aug 07, 2015 2:29 am

Hey. :) Figured I'd start a thread for feedback and questions about the new relics that will be available for selection during character creation starting with the new build. :)

Here's the posts I've made so far about relics:

Overview and Introduction: http://demon.ferretdev.org/up-next-relic-selection/

First Peek and Titan's Fist Details: http://demon.ferretdev.org/first-peek-at-relics/


Hoping to get the build with these out relatively quickly, but it's a fair big one and still has a little ways to go. I'll keep everyone posted on its progress. Cheers!
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Re: Upcoming Feature: Relics

Postby Xavier » Sun Aug 09, 2015 12:21 am

I'm really looking forward to the relic system! As it stands, games all started to feel pretty similar, since I only had significant success with the same handful of elements and teams; just based on the screenshots, it looks like there's at least going to be a lot of strategic diversity in the early game, which seems like it should carry on as the game progresses. Can't wait for the new build.
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Re: Upcoming Feature: Relics

Postby Ferret » Sun Aug 09, 2015 1:39 pm

I think relics will help out considerably for melee in particular: melee can actually work pretty well, but it had a very hard time getting off the ground with the original starter abilities. To put it bluntly, the starter Slash/Impact/Pierce abilities currently do a better job of showing off melee's weaknesses than it's strengths. :P

I'd be curious to know, what sort of elements and teams were working best for you? Maybe more importantly, were there things you felt just don't work out at the moment? You've probably logged as many hours as anyone else at this point, I'd be very interested to hear as much as you're willing to type on this topic. :D
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Re: Upcoming Feature: Relics

Postby Ferret » Sun Aug 09, 2015 5:41 pm

As a small tease, I've finished designing all the new abilities needed to create the remaining relics. I won't be able to show previews of the remaining relics like I did for Titan's Fist until the ability art is in, so as a teaser until I finish the ability icons, here's the names and elements of the new abilities. :D

Of course, these abilities will also be added to the "modifier" lists used to give modified demons their bonus abilities, so the new relics won't be the only place these show up. :D

-Slash-
Restoring Cut
Cleansing Cut
Heat Wave

-Impact-
Avalanche

-Pierce-
Piercing Bolt

-Fire-
Ignite

-Ice-
Cyropulse
Frost Ring

-Body-
Arresting Gaze
Nauseate
Numbing Touch

-Mind-
Mind Blank
Mind Reader
Fearsome Cry

-Light-
Lighttouch

-Dark-
Darktouch
Oppressor

-Debuff-
Rattling Cry
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Re: Upcoming Feature: Relics

Postby Xavier » Mon Aug 10, 2015 3:01 am

Well, as for what DIDN'T work out, melee elements were the only ones that really felt almost completely inviable: they force you to spread your stats out too much (strength for damage, vitality for survivability, agility for hit and dodging) and don't have any very good early game options for learnable skills or many monsters with elemental weaknesses to take advantage of. Other than that, I had pretty reasonable successes with just about everything except Light; despite the fact that Exorcism and Weigh Sin are both great skills, they don't really work well as primaries because of how situational Exorcism is and how reliant Weigh Sin is on already having good damage output. All of my BEST runs, though, were some combination of Healing, Mind, and Debuff. My winning run, if I recall, was Mind primary and Debuff secondary; with a raicho as your starting companion, you can handle most early threats easily while you build a good party. Ego Theft is cheap and does good damage to an Exposed target and Hypnosis can easily give you a temporary numbers advantage.

My general strategy centered around the fact that your SP is much more limited than your summons', meaning I wanted skills that give significant bang for the buck and don't need to be cast every turn. Defense debuffs make my team able to clean up much more effectively and last a long time, status effects like Guilt and Pariah (especially Pariah. God, Pariah is so good. SO GOOD) are huge boons, good healing spells like Mend and Regeneration swing total HP farther than the same amount of SP spent on damaging abilities does. I spent my points only on Magic and Cunning and kitted myself out with abilities like Dark Omen, Mend, and Vigor Siphon that don't check accuracy and prioritized getting smite-targeted abilities like Bane and Exorcism.

For my demons, I focused almost exclusively on high-Magic targets so I could have five or so demons that all had Tireless, Flame Dart, Frost Dart, and Shock Dart, plus whatever other handy things like Humble or High Voltage I could slap on them. Being able to rotate through a bunch of casters made most battles trivial, since they have enough elemental coverage to at least not be resisted and almost always hit a weakness and enough range to shred things before they get close. When things actually get on top of me, I usually have a couple of bulky (and/or evasive) melee users like Headless, Turdak, or a will-o-wisp (surprisingly useful for a surprisingly long time) to soak damage and clean up injured demons; my eighth slot was for demons with skills I wanted but stats I didn't like, modifiers I was saving to matrix onto one of my permanent party members, or impulse links. On about half of my primary casters, I'd put healing skills, but I'd make sure never to have a full party be healing-capable (because they waste too much time healing each other and end up letting the enemies get too close). After I got things going, I really was able to pretty much stomp anything and anyone riiight up until the last floor. Yeti/faerie bands were dangerous, though, and when I hit two at once which attracted the attention of a ruler/archangel/angel band, things got ugly fast.

In general, though, I feel like things are balanced very strongly in favor of elemental damage, ranged damage, and status effects, and balanced against physical damage, tanks, and low-accuracy bruisers.
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Re: Upcoming Feature: Relics

Postby Ferret » Tue Aug 11, 2015 1:17 am

Yeah, melee's running a bit behind the curve in the present build. Part of this is that the abilities offered for starting characters aren't all that great for melee, as it turns out. I think the new relics will address that somewhat. The stat issue is a good observation: I've been considering giving some melee-specific benefits to the stats they often need (for example, giving Agility a boost to physical damage too... less than Strength, but enough where it isn't so much of a 'tax'.) The differences in physical vs elemental weaknesses is kind of on purpose (though that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea!): physical types tend to be resisted/weak less, never (so far) immune, and even when resistant or weak, the effect of these is muted compared to elemental types, which are basically useless even against resistance, but which get amazing results when aimed at weaknesses. The idea was for physical elements to be a bit more stable and consistent, with the elemental types (Fire/Ice/Elec, specifically) being ones that depend more on matching spell to opponent.

The new relic that features the "magic" side of Light as a primary will be getting Punish, rather than Exorcism, so hopefully that will work out better. Exorcism will still be on the secondary though: in the new system you can take the same element twice, having Exorcism would let you "first strike" weak to Light targets rather than having to wait for them to attack (Exorcism also tends to hit considerably harder than Punish, which helps.)

Support starts do tend to be pretty strong, but I think this is more because many of the other options weren't as strong within their category as support was. With the relics I have tried to bump the others up to where support was, which will make the early game a teeny bit easier, but I think there's room for that: the bottom 200 or so (out of 500 or so) entries of the scoreboard are largely Tower:1 deaths. Adding in just Tower:2 takes you to 300 or so. I want even the early floors to be tricky... but 60% of all games ending on the floors where encounters are specifically weighted to be "easy wins" suggests I have some room to back off on that. :D

The observation about player SP vs. demon SP is interesting. It's true that your demons, collectively, have 800-1000 (depending on Tireless) SP total while you only have 100-125, I don't think I've heard anyone else talk about it in terms like that before (thinking of the demons' total SP as one pool, I mean) and choosing strategy accordingly. It seems to have worked out though. :) I think I see why you maybe weren't drawn to Refresh too: with Refresh, some of the demons are Refreshing you rather than attacking, so while you get to enjoy their SP pool, you're losing attacks per turn. Maybe I need to make Refresh a free action like Draw Wounds... that way you get SP, and they still can attack themselves. I'll have to think about this one some more, it is definitely a great observation though. :D Thank you. :) (Small aside: One of the few definite advantages melee builds do have is they pretty much never have SP issues. Melee abilities are much cheaper to use SP-wise, and melee also has better Stamina recovery options ability-wise.)

Magic/Cunning builds do seem to have a lot to recommend them... It's possible I'm not assigning the right "cost" to "ignore hit roll" in terms of my balance equations: with a lot of this sort of thing I do the "proper" math as a starting place, then have to adjust it constantly based on the things I couldn't calculate for or didn't account for properly. Even though the trip from Tower:1 to Tower:17 is supposed to be the "early game", I don't really want there to be easy/boring parts that people feel like they're mindlessly repeating after a death. It sounds like my problem exists somewhat on both ends: Magic/Cunning might be a bit too nice, melee might be a bit not nice enough. I've had thoughts on this direction before now, this is just another bit of feedback for that stack. I'm working on solutions, some of which I went into above in this post where I first mentioned melee, and I'll make a post about this specifically when I have some more concrete proposals to throw out. :) I am happy that T:17 at least was finally able to turn up the heat again. T:17 has a history of that for some reason, even though it was not specifically designed to be ugly (after all, in terms of the final content, T:17 is just another floor, it only happens that right now it is also the end of the current implementation.)

In short, I probably need to bring melee/physical up a bit and ranged/magical down a bit. Status effects may also need some poking too.

Thanks again for typing this up for me. :) Feedback is the most important thing at this stage, and I really appreciate you taking the time to write this out. :D I hope to repay the favor by putting the information to good use. :D

Bonus (like this post wasn't long enough): I'm friends with chillblain, one of the other winners, from pre-Demon days and have talked to him a fair bit about his win. If you're curious, his strategy was Vitality-based. He loaded up mostly on Vitality, took every reaction/survivability ability he could find (Fiery Veil, Shocking Veil, Arctic Veil, etc.) and waded into enemies more or less daring them to hit him, which of course, they were happy to do, much to their sorrow. His demon stable was 4 healers, 2 ranged DPS, 2 melee most of the time: he'd usually start fights with the ranged DPS and 1 healer out, shifting around as necessary (usually bringing in more healers as the first one ran out of SP, or switching to the melees in long fights that'd run the ranged DPS guys out of SP.)
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Re: Upcoming Feature: Relics

Postby Yax » Tue Aug 11, 2015 3:40 pm

Back when damage was about 20 percent lower, and vitality was a bit more effective, I was winning with ogres and centaur. Mostly I'd load up on passives like accursed and nightbringer and couple those with cleave and needle shot. Now ogres have less hp so they tend not to make it in range in time. Centaur are still quite good with crusader, venomous and the like and my best runs have been needle shot based, with regen and then passives.
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Re: Upcoming Feature: Relics

Postby chillblain » Tue Aug 11, 2015 6:57 pm

Someone invoked my name, thus I have appeared!

I've had a lot of success starting with X ability main and secondary always being body. The ranged life drain body attack (that can't miss!) is really, really good. The only real drawback is that a good number of creatures are resistant or even immune to it- BUT it also destroys electro birdachu packs. Just having that as a secondary has made just about any build work for me, although I will also add that melee has been the hardest to get off the ground and hopefully the relic changes will fix a lot of this (since I think it's mostly that the abilities you get aren't helpful enough to allow the player to risk being heavy melee early game, when the player is probably most vulnerable to attacks).

I don't think you have to build full on tank to win, but it does certainly help avoiding death (as it does in any game). I think the main character can easily get tankier than any demon you can get, but you have to sacrifice a good number of ability slots and stats for it. I'm pretty sure just about any build can win the game, but it's a matter of getting them off the ground and surviving long enough to get the key abilities/stats you need to make it work- some builds are certainly much harder than others at the start. Being in melee range is always going to put the main character at more risk than being ranged and I think that's part of the problem with the current melee ability starters- not enough risk/reward payoff (bigger damage to kill things faster) or things to help deal with the increased risk (heals, defenses), so the relic changes will hopefully help aid that.
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Re: Upcoming Feature: Relics

Postby Yax » Fri Aug 14, 2015 5:48 pm

I'd love for the high score boards at some point to show your starting options and how the person died.
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Re: Upcoming Feature: Relics

Postby Ferret » Sun Aug 16, 2015 6:51 pm

I'll see about expanding the scoreboard a bit in the future. I work with a friend of mine on backend stuff, so it may take a bit to sync up with him on it. :)

In other news, as you can probably tell from the previews on the main page, the relics build is getting pretty close to done. Mainly just some tweaks and balance testing left.... and redoing all the ability descriptions. Ugh. :P That one is important, I'm 100% a believer in it... but there's almost 300 of them now!

Still, I'll be moving as fast as I can, I really hope to get the build out sometime next weekend.

The only thing I won't be addressing much in this build is melee vs. not melee balance. I have some ideas on that, but I want to see where we stand after the new relics are in. I think part of the problem up until now has been a lack of good melee options early on, and the relics should address that. Stat requirement imbalance between melee vs. ranged vs. smite/heal is probably still an issue, but I want a clear idea of where relics land us before making adjustments there. I'd encourage folks to try out the melee relics once they're available: I think they do a much, much better job of illustrating melee's strengths than the old "default" relic ever did.
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