Update 0.17

Hello Everyone!

Seeing the threads sprouting up all over Bugs-and-Crashes on Discord and here on Itch I decided to spend the week clearing off as many bugs as possible as well as taking care of as many little details as possible. So basically a clean up week. Still a bunch of little odds and ends on my todo list before the Web-Release which is just over 3 weeks away. 

Really the only major stuff I still need to do is the class reworks for the remaining 5 classes, some additional level and generator content and at least twice as many levels for Vault-of-Yendor. Beyond that, its really just a bottomless well of 'nice to have' bits of detail, content or polish. The plan is to finish up the classes next week which should put us in the home stretch!

META BALANCE:

• Reduced the number of monsters slightly in the later half of the game. Really trying to keep the game moving along smoothly. I want to avoid hitting the player with endless hoards of enemies right near the end and grinding the game to a halt.
• Lowered the levels of many of the monsters in zone-3 (Fortress/Temple) to create a smoother level curve. Previously there was a pretty substantial jump about half way through.

PLAYER BALANCE:

• Lunge will now only work if the step brings the player closer to the enemy.
• Adjusted the damage of Lunge/Disengage so that Lunge is the higher damage ability. Lunging into combat is more risky than Disengaging out of it so should deal more damage.
• The restoration effect from the Energy-Fountains now also increases the players SP regen rate.
• Removed the blood reset mechanic from Blood-Lust (was never intended).
• Nerfed the level of the wolves from Totem-of-Beasts XL12 => XL10

MONSTER SCALING:

Working on scaling some of the enemy abilities a little bit more smoothly across the game. The first time an ability is introduced it should be a bit weaker so that players can get used to it before things ramp up in the mid/late game.

• Scaled Poison Damage
  • A bit lower than before in the early game
  • A bit higher than before in the later game
• Scaled Berserk so that it triggers earlier (at a higher HP percent) in the later game
• Scaled Healing so that it heals more and with a short CD in later game.

MONSTERS:

Just a ton of little adjustments based on my playtesting, notes, and feedback.

• All Spider Webs: 10CD => 5CD
  • Across the board I seem to be moving away from 10T as a cool-down and duration. The majority of fights take around 10-20T so 10T is this really weird middle ground between 'multiple times per fight' and 'once per fight'. 
• Spider Webs will never miss the player due to evasion since they are hitting the ground.
• Polar Bear now has constrict listed as 'Bear Hug'
• Polar-Worm now has a cold projectile instead of constrict (IC has a serious lack of ranged enemies).
• Polar-Worm is Medium speed instead of Slow.
• Skeleton Captain now uses a Spear type attack like the normal Skeleton-Warriors
• Berserk now increases movement speed even for normal speed enemies.
  • The only place this will make them Fast speed is Berserkers (see below)
  • Also getting inspired by an ally which may be more of a problem.
• Orc and Gnoll Berserkers are now Normal speed, relying on their Berserk to make them Fast.
• Casting Haste 10CD => 5CD
• Yak and Polar-Bear no longer have cold resistance.
  • I'm trying to not make everything in the elemental zones be resistant.
• NPC's will now use blink shrooms if they run over them to blink into good attack positions.
• Captains will not blink their sleeping allies.
• Captains will not blink the player when charmed.
• Reduced the duration of all cloud bolts 5T => 4T
• Replaced War-Cry (group inspire) with Inspire on Bojacks and Berserker and Minotaur King.
  • I'm leaning away from group buffs towards faster casting single target buffs. The issue I see with group buffs is they just sort of make the whole fight harder vs single buffs which suddenly make a specific enemy stronger which can more drastically change the dynamic of the fight.
• Cleaned up a bunch of ranged cool downs. I think a lot of this is just leftovers or things that got missed in previous balancing rounds:
  
  • Centaur-Archer-King 2CD => 1CD
  • Ogre-Cheff: 2CD => 1CD
  • Clockwork-Archer: 2CD => 1CD
  • Clockwork-Bomber 2CD => 1CD
  • War-Engine: 3CD => 1CD
• Added a random % to NPC Shadow Step so they don't all use it at once.
  • I've toyed around with adding this sort of check to all enemy abilities so that groups of the same type don't just spam the same ability on turn 1 of a fight.
• Blood will no longer spill onto lava.
• Demotaur now has Berserk (and so can become Fast). 
  • Yendor otherwise had no Berserk enemy.
  • I'm going to be trying to get most of the more important abilities in the game into Yendor somehow. Later on this may all be split out onto more enemies as they get added.
• Flesh Golem now has Berserk.
  • There was also no Berserk enemies in the second Branch.
• Death-Priest can now cast Haste similar to many of the other priests in the game.

USER INTERFACE:

I have a pretty massive list of stuff to do in this area prior to the Web-Release. This is probably one of the biggest categories of 'bits and pieces' that still needs to get completed.

• Fixed Dash-Attack description.
• Fixed Burst-of-Flame description.
• Pop Up +1SP on Disengage, Lunge and Dash-Attack when the abilities successfully conserve the SP.
  • Later on I'd obviously like unique sounds and animations to really 'sell' landing a killing blow.
• The player can swap between displaying MP and SP on the player (CAPS_LOCK by default).
• Holding Shift to sprint will always temporarily swap to the SP display.

BUGS AND CRASHES:

• Removed the odd extra range that Tunnel-Shot had (actually a fairly substantial nerf).
• Fixed the edge cases where Tunnel-Shot would miss enemies that were shown to be targeted.
  • This and the previous required complete rewrites of Tunnel-Shot code (which is really weird compared to most abilities) so be on the lookout for oddities.
• Removed the old Storm-Shot and Lunge from the game as they could appear on Tomes and in the Library.
• Fixed some crashes in Swamp
• Fixed the Shock + Freezing Cloud crash. There were multiple variations of this where the shock would spread and kill enemies and then try to apply the stun after they were dead.
• Added Power-Strike, Power-Cleave, and Smite to the list of 'isCasting' abilities for consistency. They will be interrupted by stuns, sleeps and knockbacks.
• Added Frozen status effect to the list of things that will interrupt 'isCasting'
• Fixed Blood-Lust-IIs cooldown being 'undefined'
• Finally fixed that freaking Switch + Portals crash.
• Burning Coal will no longer count as 'dangerous' to flying characters.
• Falling down a pit to Yendor:4 will always drop you into the safe antechamber