Update 0.5

So week 2 of Alpha ended up being just as busy for me as the first with lots of development interruptions and non project stuff to do. I can't be the only one who's noticed that whenever you try to make a big change or embark on some major project the whole universe seems to conspire to stop you. I'm not sure what's up with this is but its pretty annoying :P

Regardless, made some decent progress this week. I was pleasantly surprised that the major changes to attributes last week didn't break the game quite as badly as I had expected and generally speaking it seems to have worked out. I'm finding my own play throughs quite interesting as attribute choices are definitely more balanced and complex then they were before. That been said, the changes to attributes certainly messed with the balance overall particularly with regards to the casters who got a pretty massive boost due to the huge improvement to intelligence. Overall the player character seems to have gotten quite a bit stronger especially in late game due to the abundance of attribute items which are now so much stronger. Strong enough in fact that I've now (finally) gotten my first TWO wins. Hurrah!

So a lot of this week was devoted to fixing bugs and just playing around with the balance. We're still in the early stages here so this is all just kind of fiddling and experimenting on my part. I really appreciate all the feedback in discord. I can't possibly test everything and I generally get the feeling that you guys understand the game at least as well as I do if not better, and so its extremely helpful to get all these extra opinions on what's turning out to be a really challenging balancing act.

I think its important to be clear with what I'm trying to achieve with Alpha, both so that you guys know what I'm trying to do and also just to keep myself on track. The purpose of Alpha is ultimately to reach Web Release which I'd like to get done sometime in November prior to the beginning of Steam EA which should hopefully begin in December and is where the bulk of the actual work will take place on the project. The Web-Release is basically a highly polished prototype of all the major features and changes I want to build on while also being the primary entry point for new players. I really want to establish a rock solid foundation for the big content push that will occur during EA so I'm focusing heavily on getting the new combat concepts working, the smaller tighter levels implemented and generally trying to get everything as balanced as possible. I think if we can nail done the balance early on then it will be much easier to pile on content without constantly having to stop and retune everything.

For the month of August I want to really focus on getting the game as balanced as possible while also cleaning up all the bugs and missing bits of descriptive text. I'd like to go full open Alpha by the end of the month so balance and 'clean up' is currently the priority. The remaining few months before Web-Release can then be devoted to reworking all the level generation, adding or reworking items to take advantage of the new item ability system and adding interesting new enemies that exemplify the new combat modal. 

So balance is key right now. I think of balance generally in 3 ways:

#1 Class / Attribute / Talent Balance:

This is the balance across the various classes, attributes, talents etc. Generally speaking the goal here is for each attribute to be equally valuable. While each class definitely has a primary attribute, the other 2 should still be highly sought after and never feel like dump stats. The classes should generally be comparable in strength and difficulty though obviously they excel in different areas. The talents should also be balanced so that they are all valuable and there are not clear 'must haves' and 'avoids'. This is especially complex when it comes to Tomes-of-Knowledge and taking talents from other classes.

#2 Game Progression Balance:

This is the balance over the course of a single game. Generally speaking the game should get more challenging the further into the dungeon the player goes. There is definitely a bit of a spike at the start when the player has 0 or few resources and a big spike at the end but otherwise it should be a fairly smooth increase in challenge and complexity from beginning to end. Tactics and mechanics that are important in the early game should remain important throughout the game all the way to the end. For example the player should not get strong enough that he can begin ignoring all the terrain mechanics and little tricks with shrooms by the late game.

#3 Overall Game Balance:

This is just how 'hard' the game is overall and is actually probably the easiest to balance and I think I can leave it to the end before really locking it in for the web release. Once the other 2 types of balance are achieved its not that hard to just globally adjust enemy HP and damage output to narrow in on an overall challenge for the game. Until then expect this to fluctuate all over the place as I work to get the prior two areas correctly tuned. I think ultimately the game should be tuned on the 'easier' side since the Ranked Mode will handle a smooth progression of challenge for more experienced players.

So with all this in mind, the update focused mainly on bug fixes but I did a lot of play testing along the way and listening to your guys feedback and so some balance fiddling was done as well. Please let me know how its feeling.

BUGS AND CRASHES:

• Invisible lava spouts
• Invisible Lich corpses
• Fixed disengage so that it now deals damage :P
• Salamander elites and priests are now lava and flaming cloud immune (like other salamanders)
• Fixed a crash when dominating Ice-Shamans (still have no idea how we're going to balance this and totems when dominated)
• Player can no longer jump out of constrict
• Enemies can no longer jump or lunge when immobile.
• A lunging enemy will stop lunging if immobilized.
• Falling through pit traps will now break agro on the previous level.
• Fixed the Shield-of-Recovery crashes (a tricky one)
• Removed the AI that was causing enemies to avoid damage at long ranges (trying to keep enemy behavior easily predictable).
• Fixed a bunch more generation crashes.

BALANCE AND MECHANICS:

• Removed the no-exp on mobs when using stairs as this seems to be both unpopular and simply unnecessary with all the other changes to stairs.
• Removed the little attack delay that was frustrating our speedier players.
• Changed Duelist Lunge to use flat melee damage bonus like all other abilities.
• Sleep-Bomb duration 6,9 => 4,4 (The AoE improvement is already strong enough)
• Sleep-Bomb cooldown 10,6 => 10,8 (Again the AoE is massive).
• Fountain-of-Healing regen is now half as strong (every other turn) as it was allowing face tanking of damage.
• Changed to 4MP for blink abilities. I'm still hesitant to go a full 6MP since I see these abilities as being chained together with other spells and I feel like 6MP makes this difficult. I'm waiting for someone to show me just how busted these abilities are with a low MP cost lol.
• 2MP per INT instead of 3. A big change here that I'm not necessarily settled on. Basically in my play testing, with the massive increase in damage output the casters, particularly the elemental casters were just disgusting, with huge damage and huge mana pools. Comments in discord seemed to agree with this. I think mana needs to be kept scarce in order for Energy-Shrooms and the various recovery type talents to make sense and to stop the player from just clearing everything in their path with endless mana pools. From the limited testing I've done with casters so far this has definitely made them much more challenging while maintaining most of the power that INT has gained. Let me know how this feels.
• Fortitude 20,40HP => 10,30HP. The talents that give attribute derived stats have always followed the formula of being equal to 2,4 attribute points but as attributes have become much stronger and talent points become more plentiful this may need to be reduced. Fortitude is just so good for everyone, is easy to get, and honestly could be nerfed pretty hard and I'd still likely take it. I didn't like the way that my squishy little casters could suddenly and easily double their HP with little difficulty.
• Mental Clarity 6,12 (would be 4,8 with INT changes) => 2,6. Pretty much the same argument as Fortitude. Its not as widely useful but for casters your basically always going to get rank-II of this talent and as per the 2MP/INT arguments above I'm experimenting with keeping MP really scarce.
• Moved jump to melee classes who likely benefit the most from it and made it not end the players turn. Still intending to add diagonal as per Randoms suggestions, just haven't gotten to it yet.
• Added Power-Strike to Warrior just to give him some knock back. I've got some ideas for more interesting variations of this ability for the future but for now we can see how the warrior plays with an innate knock back ability. 

MONSTERS:

Just adding abilities where it seems appropriate. In the future I'd like for more variations on melee movement abilities since this is the only way to make them really threatening to a skilled and mobile player. For now just using what I have on hand.

• Crypt Crawlers can now jump 
• Drachnid Warriors can now jump
• Blade Dancers can now jump
• Skeleton Captain can now blink allies
• Zombie bloats are no longer immobile (they weren't supposed to be, leftover from testing I think).

MAKING END GAME HARDER:

So remember up above when I was talking about Game Progression Balance. It might have just been the overwhelming absurdity of pre MP nerf casters or lingering over confidence in my two, that's right TWO wins, but the game actually feels like it gets quite a bit easier sometime starting at the mid game as the player gains tons of resources and the attribute bonuses start adding up. Mistakes can still kill you quickly but overall it felt like a lot of the careful, conservative and 'trick' heavy gameplay of the early to mid game started to be less necessary later on. Yendor is an exception due to still having way to many mobs, but we'll ignore that for now. So with all this in mind, I'm experimenting with various ways to make the end game harder. Please call me out if I'm crazy here, I still have yet to really test these changes in depth.

• Casters in Zone-3 and above now have a faster fire rate 2CD => 1CD and longer range 4.0 => 5.0. This not only makes the later game harder but really helps casters fill that role of extremely dangerous, high priority damage dealers.
• Boss casters have higher fire rate then their non-boss counterparts with the highest level casters having no CD (like Yendor). This might be a bit overtuned but I'm eager to see how these fights go now.
• Bosses now have a bit more HP in general x2 => x2.5. I think its appropriate if bosses are hard enough that they almost always require some consumable use.
• Finally scaled the max enemy HP up a little bit x3.5 => x4.0 (that's the scaler at level 16 from the initial HP). The biggest thing I noticed in the later game was just a lot of one shoting of enemies which is something I'm trying to avoid.

CONCLUSIONS:

Overall I need to do a lot more play testing myself to see how this is all panning out. Hopefully next week will calm down a bit for me so I have a bit more time to work on this. As always let me know what's working, what isn't working, any other suggestions or feedback etc. 

OPEN QUESTION:

I'd like to start asking weekly Open Questions to get a bit more structured feedback on things that are challenging me. I'll be setting up a channel in Discord (someone's gonna have to help me lol) for responses or you can just reply to this post.  For the first week my question / topic for discussion is:

In your opinion, given the current state of balance. How would you rank order the classes into #1 Under Powered, #2 Good, #3 Over Powered. Obviously as much detail as you'd like to provide as per 'why' is much appreciated and extremely useful. And of course suggestions on how to fix classes falling into #1 and #3 is super helpful. I've been mostly focusing on Fire Mage, Storm Mage, Necro, Barbarian and Ranger until now, but this week I'm planning on beginning to try to get the other classes roughly worked out so this topic is very relevant to me right now.