Update 0.15

Hello Everyone! 

A pretty substantial update this week with lots of balance changes.

I'm currently bouncing all over the place trying to get the game ready for the Web-Release. This has been a pretty difficult and somewhat frustrating few weeks for me since I'm trying to 'complete' something that I know has another 3 years worth of work to do in Early Access. Pretty much every mechanic, bit of balance or piece of content I look at I can see what I'd like to do with it given 2-3 months of dedicated work. Of course right now I have maybe 2-3 days at best so its a matter of doing the most I can with the full knowledge that almost everything done right now will eventually be thrown out, replaced or at least completely reworked. 

With all the said the main thing I was focused on this week was tuning the overall difficulty and pacing of the game. Basically working on how I'd like the game to play and how hard it should be for the upcoming Web-Release. This generally meant making the game quite a bit easier in many places but I'm trying to approach this with some level of nuance. 

Why Easier?
With the planned Ranked Mode coming in Early Access, the base game is really just the first of several 'difficulty levels' and so needs to set the starting point or lower bound in terms of difficulty. To put it bluntly, the base game is basically 'easy mode'. Furthermore the Web-Release is intended for an audience unfamiliar with the game and likely even traditional roguelikes in general so 'Normal Mode' also needs to act as a sort of training mode.

How Easy?

For experienced players (most of us on Discord) the base game that is accessible in Web-Release should be reasonably easy. It should still be very engaging, require us to play at a high level, and throw some interesting situations at us but generally speaking as long as we are maintaining a roughly optimal level play we should have a pretty casual experience. 

We should be able to play fast and loose, take big risks, play aggressively, experiment with odd builds or play styles etc. We should totally be able to zone out for a bit, or play extra loose for awhile and then when we suddenly find ourselves in a tricky situation, get ourselves out of it with a bit of cleverness. Basically if you have 50+ hours of experience in the game you should be able to just kind of 'screw around' in the base game.

What do you mean by 'Easy'?

The best way I can sum this up is the following:

• Experienced players with good knowledge of the game and using all the little tricks and tactics should find the base game quite easy.
• The base game should not be so easy that it does not require the learning of game knowledge, little tricks and tactics.

The game is not inherently easy, rather it strongly rewards knowledge and tactics. There are hundreds of little tricks and optimizations that most of us have just sort of internalized and now perform automatically, without much thought. The base game should be balanced  so that playing at this sort of 'skillful but mostly automatic' level is rewarded enough to make the game a fairly 'easy' experience. So to achieve this sort of balance I'm trying to do the following:

• Reward the player more for good, skillful and knowledgeable play. 
• Give the player more opportunities to demonstrate skill and reward them for it. 
• Give the player more choices
• Make things that should feel impactful more impactful:
  • A lot of Rank-2 Talents should have bigger bonuses
  • A lot of Tier-3 items could use a pretty big boost
• Add a bit more progression to enemy abilities so that the first time a powerful ability is introduced its not completely devastating. 
• Generally just try to make the game play feel smoother and and snappier by applying buffs to the player where appropriate.

So with all this in mind, here's what I've been working on.

MAJOR MECHANICS:

• Mana-Point Regen 4T => 3T and Speed-Point Regen 10T => 6T
  • I think the game had a tendency to feel a bit sluggish at times. Speed-Point heavy builds especially suffered with the long recovery times and ironically ended up often feeling slow once they'd gassed out. 
  • From my testing this is a smaller buff then it seems since most fights are short enough that your only getting 2-3 more MP and an extra SP. Still its enough to give the player a bit of a boost and generally just makes the game feel smoother to play.
• Increased the number of non-healing shrooms per level by 50% and this number now scales larger for larger levels.
• Energy Shrooms now give +1 to MP/SP as well as 25% of your max.
  • This is a pretty massive change, especially in the early game where they are suddenly super impactful.
  • Note that Energy Shrooms now give at least 2SP so spending a speed point to get an Energy-Shroom is guaranteed to give you an extra SP.
  • Combined with the increased number of shrooms on each level this makes non-healing shrooms significantly more useful to the player. This is right in line with how I'd like the make the game 'easier'. An experienced player bouncing from shroom to shroom and cycling ability cool downs should feel kind of over powered.
• Power-Shroom duration 5 => 6
• Power and Protection Shrooms now restore and heal like Energy and Healing Shrooms. The same way that potions work.
  • Just more ways to make shrooms valuable.
• Increased the damage that traps scale up to by 50%.
  • Much like shrooms, reward the player more for using traps against the monsters.
• Slow Reworking:
  • Removed the hidden 40% Cold Resistance immunity to slow.
  • Reworked the formulas so that lower amounts of cold damage have lower slow durations.
  • Cold Resistance is applied after the 5T max slow is determined. So for example  20% Cold Resistance guarantees you cannot be slowed for more than 4T.
• Changed reflect, resistance and evasion caps from 75% => 80%.
  • Almost all sources are in increments of 10% anyway.
  • Its pretty tough to reach this value and so we shouldn't 'steal' that extra 5%

EXPERIENCE AND DUNGEON PROGRESSION:

• Adjusted player experience points so that he reaches or nearly reaches XL:2 by the end of the first floor.
  • The first character level is kind of a newbie trap with the extremely limited resources so lets get players over this hump as soon as possible.
• Adjusted player experience points at the later levels so that a player full clearing the dungeon should be pretty close to max level when entering Vault-of-Yendor.
• Lowered the Danger-Level of the second half of Orc/Elf
  • There used to be a big jump on level 4
• Lowered the level of the Orc/Elf Boss 16 => 15 since he's the first major boss in the game. 
• Generally lowered the max number of monsters in the 3 boss levels a bit.
  • Many static levels still need to be adjusted to reflect his.
• Generally lowered the number of monsters in Branch-2. It gets pretty grindy right at the end of the game.
  • A lot of the generation still needs to be adjusted to reflect this.

TALENTS AND ABILITIES:

Still a ton of work to do in this area. I have a mostly final list on paper of how I'd like the class talents to look for the Web-Release but it involves a whole bunch of reworks to existing talents/abilities as well as some new stuff. Hoping to get to that in the next week or so but for now a bit of fiddling.

• Burst-of-Flame: Conserves flame 0%,50% => 50%,100%
• Burst-of-Flame: Damage: 18,24 => 20,25
  
  • This is already a pretty tricky ability to use consistently so trying to make it a bit more accessible and rewarding.
• Fire Ball: Rank-II grants +3DMG instead of +1Range
  • I'd like to maintain the utility of Burst-of-Flame in the Fire-Mages kit by not giving him a long range fire ball.
  • Fire Mage should be the most damage focused of all casters. He should really feel good to blow stuff up with and so more damage to his abilities is a good way to make him more fun to play while also making the game 'easier'.
• Duelist: Added Strafe Attack
• Duelist: Added Jump
• Ranger: Added Second Wind
  • Over the course of 3 years I'm sure we'll eventually end up with mostly unique talents for all the classes but for now I need to fill empty slots. The idea is all classes need: 4 x Tier-1, 3 x Tier-2, 1 x Tier-3.
• Evasive: 5%,10% => 10%,20%
  • Its still probably garbage lol
• Charge Damage: 6,6 => 0,2
  • Barbarian is just so absurdly strong right now. With all the other changes he's just gonna get pushed over the top.
  • Base melee damage is already so easy to get high and his abilities have such useful utility that I don't think they even need to really add much to his damage output to be very valuable.
• Mirror Image: 20,15CD => 15,10CD and 24,24HP => 24,36HP
  • This still needs more work to be useful.
  • Adding a bunch of powerful to kind of lackluster abilities is another good way for us to make the game 'easier'.
• Power-Shot: Cool Down 6,5 => 5,4
  • Trying to get ranger to feel faster.
  • I'm considering replacing Storm shot with a similar single turn burst of 3 arrows with a short CD so that the ranger has 3 talents he can cycle in quick succession.
• Disengage Damage: 10,12 => 5,10
  • Don't know why this was so high
• Lunge Damage: 4,6 => 5,10
  • Don't know why this was so much lower

ITEMS:

• Quite drastically decreased the cost of most equipment and standardized it according to tier.
  • I want to give the player a lot more choices at the merchant and generally make the merchant a bigger deal.
  • Equipment needs to be reasonably cheap as the player is generally replacing another item so is gaining only incremental benefits.
• Improved the sell price of items 30% => 40%
• Attribute Shrines: 100GP => 75GP
• Enchantment Scrolls: 60GP => 50GP
• Goblin Swift Bow: 5%EV => 1SP
• Cloak of Stealth: 3ENC => 4ENC and +2PROT (its now classed as medium armor)
• Boots of Stealth: 1ENC => 2ENC and +1PROT (its now classed as medium armor)
• Removed that useless wind scroll
• Potion of Experience 30GP => 20GP
• Sweat Soaked Headband -2INT,2STR => -1INT,2STR
• Fan-of-Winds uses the old simple Burst-of-Wind
• Wooden Buckler is actually a Tier-0 weapon (starts on Warrior) and so should never drop.
• Wooden Shield is now that Tier-1 Shield
• All other Shields have their ENC raised by 1
  • Shields should be hard for non STR classes to wield
  • If I need to start buffing up items, shields are a good place imo.
• Reduced Death-Fog duration by 1T

MONSTERS:

• Boss HP reduces by about 20%
  • This might be to low for some bosses 
  • In general bosses tend to be tough when encountered with a bunch of allies. After killing all the allies the boss doesn't also need a massive HP pool to whittle down. Basically the challenge should be in getting the boss to the point where you can just burst him down.
• Replaced all the weak Poison Projectile attacks with equivalent Life-Tap ones.
  • There are likely other attacks to use in specific cases but I generally want to avoid Weak Poison Projectiles as they make no real difference compared to other damage and are difficult to track.
• Weak NPCs (think rats, wolves, bats etc) have had their experience value increased a bit to better reflect their relative strength.
  • The effect of this is that there will be less of them on a level
• Spawners have all had their EXP value increased so again there will be a bit less monsters on levels.
• All NPC Berserk has been changed from 100CD and 10DUR to 10CD and 5DUR so that low HP enemies can continuously go berserk if not killed. The lower CD also means the player doesn't have to kite for ages.
• Swamp-Siren Charm: 10DUR => 5DUR
  • This is the first introduction of this ability.
• Monsters with constrict labeled 'Grab' 5DUR => 3DUR. This is most golems and tanky guys.
• Centipede Poison 20DMG => 15DMG.
  • Again first introduction of the ability.
• Lavosa: Flaming Clouds 10CD => 5CD
• NPC Summoned Totem Nerf:  The caster must have LoS with the player
  • This should make it a lot more obvious when he summons it as well as make it easier to go kill it.
• Ice Imps and Fire Imps are immune to freezing and flaming clouds respectively.
• Synax The Snake Charmer has Shadow Step like the Dervish Assassins.
• Revert: Ice-Golems back to Ice-Giants
  • I had forgotten about this change and it had inadvertently made several Yendor configurations way harder then needed.

LEVEL CONTENT:

Generally just continuing to add vaults and rework some of the older content. Did quite a bit of work on Orc Fortress monster vaults. I think I got all the cases of those disgusting 3 healer rooms.

QUALITY OF LIFE:

• Increased the animation speed of FAST movement (traveling, exploring, mini-map moving). This should really be a configurable option.
• Enemies that have been spotted and are not moving will remain visible on the game screen.
• Makes it easier to scout out levels and determine how best to approach fights.

That's it for this week! I'm thinking next week I might try to make a final push to get all the player abilities sorted but there will definitely be more balancing in this direction. These are some pretty major changes so I'm eager to hear what people think and some ideas for other places that can be 'buffed up' to give the player a bit more of an edge