Update 0.23 - Web Release!

Hello everyone! Today is finally the day and I'm working to get the game loaded to various web portal sites. 

Your help with upvoting, thumbs upping or whatever the equivalent is massively appreciated! The success of the project at this point is really in your hands, as none of the work I've done this past year really counts for anything if the game gets buried by the algorithms.

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/908763

https://www.kongregate.com/games/Justin_wang123/rogue-fable-iv

I'll be continuing to update and support the web releases for at least the next week or two at much the same pace I've been maintaining this past month so expect frequent updates with lots more balancing and content. I've got quite a few things that I'd really like to get either implemented or fixed before moving onto Early Access.

Early Access will be starting December-22-2023 (I'm just putting the finishing touches on the steam page). I'm planning on at least reintroducing the races, adding the very basics of the ranked mode and probably adding 40-50 totally new items since I've got a lot of them queued up in my design notes.

Other then that this update contains some additional balancing, polishing and bug fixing.

ENCHANTER BALANCING:
The main thing I'm doing here is trying to take some of the power from Confusion which is grossly over-powered and shift it into the Enchanters other abilities. The reduction in duration seems extreme but is actually not so bad when you consider that just to qualify for the talent you'l have 3DUR. 50%AP will get you 4DUR and 100%AP will get you to 5DUR. In my own testing the vast majority of confused enemies will kill each other in just a few turns so even 5DUR tends to be overkill. Nonetheless this should go some way from stopping Confusion-2 from just insta killing whole groups of enemies with a single cast.

• Confusion Duration: 4 => 2
• Confusion Range: 6 => 5
• Discord Duration: 4 => 5
• Mirror Image CD: 15,10 => 5,5
• Mirror Image Range: 1,1 => 2,3
• Dominate Mana: 9MP => 8MP
• Dominate CD: 20,15 => 15,10

ITEM BALANCING:

• Reduced the damage on staves across the board (except the starting).
  • Staves grew in power much faster than ranged weapons and topped out significantly stronger. It was not at all hard to achieve 20+ DMG with staves without even really trying.
  • For awhile I was trying to balance range/staves/melee to be roughly equal but much in the same way that I've settled on a rough DEX>INT>STR I'm happy with Melee>Range>Staves. Of the three Attribute Arch-Types I feel that INT should be the least reliant on their actual weapons.
• Swapped the Life-Tap ability and flat HP bonus on Blood-Stained-Axe and Goblin-Battle-Staff.
  • Similar to the points above I feel that it is melee weapons and not staves that should be the 'strongest' since they are otherwise the most dangerous to use. We were at a point where the Goblin-Battle-Staff was totally viable as an end game weapon and this really shouldn't be the case with the very first boss drop.
  • The staff that drops in the swamp fills the role of a life-tap staff and can be obtained in just the next zone.

MONSTER BALANCING:

• NPC Protection x 2
  • The amount of protection especially on later game monsters compared to average player damage was just completely irrelevant.
• Ajax The Flame Shaman HP: MLOW => MHIGH
• First half of games spawners 5CD => 4CD
• Second half of games spawners 4CD => 3CD
• Escape Blink (used by some bosses) 20CD => 10CD (same as Yendor)
• All summoners have been rebalanced to have shorter CDs in order to make their primary ability more noticeable in combat.
  • 3-Summons / 12-Turns => 2-Summons / 5-Turns (a slight buff here)
  • 2-Summons / 10-Turns => 1-Summon / 5-Turns
• All Slow-Projectiles: 5CD => 3CD
• All Wall-of-[X] spells: 10CD => 5CD
• Orb-of-Force is now reflective (we have so few properly reflective enemies in the game)
• Salamander Archer: Slow Fire Projectile

BUGS AND CRASHES:

• Shield-of-Ice is now correctly flagged as Tier-1
• Tunnel Shot will no longer crash on reflection (there's still some issues here)
• Summoning Mirror-Image on a healing shroom will no longer start its HP at 0.
• Blood-Lust heal will now work when adjacent to blood