[p]Hello everyone! Sorry for the long delay between updates. I went on a bit of an epic journey with this one that I was not expecting. The plan at the start of September had been to quickly knock off the last two bosses for Crypt and Click-Clock to bring us up to 3 bosses per zone across the whole dungeon. I already had paper designs for both bosses so was expecting this to be easy peasy. Famous last words…[/p][p]The first boss went pretty smooth. This is The-Soul-Warden in The-Crypt, easy implementation and pretty quick to get fine tuned and polished up. Moved onto the Click-Clock boss and… it sucked. The one I had on paper was not working out. No big deal though, I tried another approach aaaand, it also sucked. Went through a few more versions until finally, just as I was starting to lose hope I landed on one that worked pretty good. I started tuning it, polishing it, and it turned out pretty neat. I was, and am, very pleased with it. But wait.. this boss seemed awfully similar to the Clockwork-Controller we already have, a boss fight I've been intending to replace for awhile now. In fact its basically just a direct upgrade to that fight… oh no…[/p][p]So thus began an epic (brutal) journey of half a dozen or so attempts to come up with an actual unique 3rd boss for Click-Clock. Each one that didn't 'click' (haha) left me more and more discouraged until finally I was just completely and utterly burned out. It probably doesn't help that the last year has had me working on constant new content and systems in which every attempt to have an 'easy' update has morphed into something major. I feel like I also had a 'crash' like this last year around the same time so I dunno, maybe it has something to do with the end of summer. I took a few days off to try to regain some motivation and finally decided that I just couldn't bring myself to do attempt number 7 or 8 or whatever on a new boss and that I'd put it aside for now and work on some easy stuff on 'The List'.[/p][p]Now 'The List' is a pretty amorphous thing consisting of multiple overlapping text documents, things left over from every update going right back to the beginning, piles of loose paper scattered around my office, random scrap paper with cryptic notes, multiple note books, margin notes in my sketch books, documents on my phone, discord conversations and threads etc. I spent a little while trying to compile a bunch of this together into one central document and found that, even just combining my own text documents, its over 2000 items long… [/p][p]Now I think for some people this would seem daunting, but for me, having spent the last year or so hammering out giant updates that required pretty big upfront design and planning, I was looking over this list and thinking: hmmm like 75% of this is things I can knock off in an hour or less and a significant amount of it is just 5-10 minute little fixes or tweaks. Almost none of this requires much design work or decision making, its just stuff that takes time to do but is otherwise pretty easy to just grind through.[/p][p]So grind through it I did and slowly I managed to drag myself back out of the burnout hole to the point where I'm now feeling good about the project once again. Rather than dive right back into the next major update (supposed to be 50 new Vault-of-Yendor levels), I'm planning to finish off the year by just continuing to work my way through The List and try to make as big a dent in it as possible. Get some easy wins under my belt and hopefully come into the next and final year of development both refreshed and without 2000+ things hanging over my shoulders.[/p][p]So this update, and the next few will be a bit all over the place. There are two new bosses that I'm quite pleased with as well as a number of pretty significant balance changes, but mostly its just a giant mess of 'stuff'.[/p]

DESIGN NOTES:

Starting Talents:

[p]This got talked about previously on discord but I figure I'll highlight the thinking here. Each class now starts with one less talent, generally the generic Tier-1 talents like Mental-Clarity and Athletics. The thinking here is that I want each run to be more distinct, to encourage/force the player to adapt his build each time to whatever it is that the dungeon is giving you. By restricting the starting talent pool to just 5 we now have a nice balance where there are 5 starting talents and 5 talents guaranteed to be found on Tomes-of-Knowledge so builds should be roughly 50% fixed and 50% 'random'. Obviously you can still find the 'missing talent' in which case if you choose to take it then your choosing to focus your build, but this is now something that might not be available in every run, or you might have to choose between the 'missing talent' and something else you might want.[/p][p][/p]

Monster Cool Downs:

[p]You'll notice a ton of monster cool-downs got reduced this update. This is really just finishing up work that began at the very start of development where both the player and the monsters had their cool-downs generally slashed in half. There was a bunch of stuff that got missed in this pass and really a lot of this is just bringing outliers in line with everything else. My thinking here is that: whatever a monster does, he should do it a lot. I've tried to keep monsters streamlined to just 2-3 impactful abilities and I believe that they should be using those abilities very frequently. If a monster summons he should summon a lot, a healer should heal a lot, a debuffer should be debuffing you… a lot. I think this helps really create a strong, unique, identity for each monster while also making the game more readable as the more frequently they use their abilities the more obvious it is what they are 'doing'.[/p][p][/p]

New Drop Walls:

[p]Drop walls are something that have been around since RFIII and it think they serve a very important role in creating 'critical moments' those 'oh shit' moments when suddenly you need to stop and think carefully through your next few turns. Now this only occurs if a drop wall bursts while you are engaged with monsters which… sometimes happened with our previous system. But more often then not they'd just explode while you were running around and they just devolved to a standard encounter with 1-2 monsters. So the new drop wall system has them ONLY explode if you are currently engaged with monsters regardless of distance. In much the same way that tightening monster cool-downs helps define their identity, this change I believe helps to really cement what a drop wall ambush is supposed to 'do'.[/p][p][/p]

Testing:

[p]I did a ton of full run tests with this update so I'm basing the overall balance on my own 'feel'. What I'm going for in the base game is, for myself: pretty easy with the occasional challenge spike. I'm not the greatest player and I like to play fast and loose but I think I should be able to just sort of chill and beat the base game without sweating bullets every move. So roughly I'm looking for: 3+ beers auto pilot and occasionally snap back into awareness for a tricky fight or boss. I actually think its occasionally still a bit too hard based on this goal, but I'm not sure if that's just class or RNG variance. My thinking overall is that ranked mode should be something that most players eventually progress to. The base game should be easy enough for even new players to pretty quickly start getting consistent wins. Obviously once I get custom games working properly then people can setup the difficulty however they want.[/p][p][/p]

UPDATE 1.30:

The Soul Warden (Boss):

• [p]His arena is full of stationary Lost-Souls that will attack the player if he gets adjacent to them.[/p]
• [p]He will 'consume' lost souls if he passes adjacent to them, healing himself.[/p]
• [p]He phases in and out of uhhh 'solidity'. Basically a cycling invuln phase.[/p]
• [p]He constantly blinks himself to the edges of the arena where he will then path back towards the player, consuming souls if you don't clear the path.[/p]
• [p]He 'Enrages' souls near the player causing them to become mobile and chase the player.[/p]
• [p]He 'Corrupts' souls around the arena edge causing them to begin firing long range projectiles.[/p]
• [p]He drops a staff that creates stationary Lost-Souls whenever it delivers a kill shot.[/p]

The Clockwork Overseer (Boss):

• [p]Replaces the old Clockwork-Controller boss fight.[/p]
• [p]The 'boss' itself is a giant indestructible mechanical head in an arena full of turret hatches.[/p]
• [p]These hatches will open up to reveal Melee-Turrets and Range-Turrets. A big part of the fight is trying to keep the arena relatively clear so that the player can move around freely and not keep getting blasted.[/p]
• [p]The 'boss' head will occasionally open his mouth to spawn Shredders and Golems to chase the player around his little death trap arena.[/p]
• [p]Heat Vents slowly open around the edges of the arena which must be destroyed to overheat the boss and win the fight.[/p]

Game Balance:

• [p]Remove a single starting talent from each class (more varied builds based on dungeon drops)[/p]
• [p]The Elite modifier will never be put on weak enemies like rats, bats, wolves etc. (its pretty meaningless when it gets applied to something that is almost always gonna get 1-shot)[/p]
• [p]Guarantee an acquirement scroll somewhere in the dungeon (safety fallback for bad drops)[/p]
• [p]Tier-III items will now begin dropping halfway through Zone-3 instead of only in branches.[/p]
• [p]Zone-3 Merchant can now stock Tier-III equipment. Previously he was capped at Tier-II which was often irrelevant at this point.[/p]
• [p]Increased number of beneficial shrooms slightly (indirectly makes game easier by making it easier for player to utilize this core mechanic).[/p]
• [p]A slight reduction in overall monster damage and hit points (trying to keep overall base game difficulty roughly static despite a bunch of other changes making it harder). [/p]

Game Mechanics:

• [p]Reduce Knock-Back by 1 when in water[/p]
• [p]Increase Knock-Back by 1 when on Ice[/p]
• [p]Icicle-Walls: only overwritten by flaming clouds[/p]
• [p]Icicle-Walls: will be broken with fire[/p]
• [p]Bone-Walls: no cloud overwrites them[/p]
• [p]Cloud-Walls, Force-Walls, Stone-Walls, Bone-Walls, Flaming-Cloud-Walls etc. will all no longer 'poof' when you kill the caster. They have a short enough duration as is.[/p]
• [p]Summoners can summon even if out of LoS (force the player to actually engage them and discourage always just running away being the dominant strategy)[/p]
• [p]NPC Spreading Clouds (like poison cloud) will cast more often now. A bug was preventing targeting on roughly 50% of turns.[/p]

[p][/p]

Dungeon and Level Generation:

• [p]Remove Fire-Shrooms from The-Core. It has enough annoying hazards and the shrooms don't hurt enemies much.[/p]
• [p]Include Knights, Priests, Magi in Frost-Giant-King boss arena. Slightly less overall giants.[/p]
• [p]The-Orc-Fortress (healing totems): use the wooden Ogre versions as they are easier to see against floor tiles.[/p]
• [p]Rotate and reflect Static-Caves generators to increase variety.[/p]
• [p]Added a bunch of new challenge vaults to Arcane-Tower, Ice-Caves[/p]
• [p]Slimes and Jellys can now spawn in Toxic-Waste[/p]
• [p]Reduced number of bones in those crazy bone filled Sunless-Desert levels[/p]
• [p]Randomized bone frames in Sunless-Desert (this needs to be done everywhere, and also I need some frame variations for grass, rubble, etc.)[/p]
• [p]Trying to normalize levels around the 350-450 tile mark: [/p]
• [p]Crypt: Fence-Maze, Tunnels-Fence, Tunnels-Casket got made bigger[/p]
• [p]Sewers (tall): got made bigger[/p]
• [p]Core: Lava-Paths, Tunnels got made smaller[/p]
• [p]A number of Core Static-Levels were shrunk (some of these were old RFIII levels that were like 900+ tiles)[/p]
• [p]New Generators or Maps. Static-Caves are just hand made maps that still have monsters, side vaults, and terrain generated randomly. A very easy way to add unique layouts without adding a full generator. These often end up turning into generators later on when I have time. They should be rare enough that you very rarely ever see them repeat so they just look like neat levels. [/p]
• [p]Upper-Dungeon (Mine-Cavern)[/p]
• [p]Upper-Dungeon (Static-Caves)[/p]
• [p]The-Swamp (Small-Islands)[/p]
• [p]The-Sunless-Desert (Static-Caves)[/p]
• [p]The-Under-Grove (Tall-Forest)[/p]
• [p]Sunken-sea (Static-Caves)[/p]
• [p]The-Core (Static-Caves)[/p]

Monsters and Monster Abilities:

[p]As mentioned above a lot of this is about trying to stream line enemies around a unique gimmick or two that they use constantly. With the overall slight reduction in damage/HP I want each enemy to be uniquely challenging because of whatever 'thing' it 'does' as opposed to just sort of spammy damage and general tankiness.[/p]

• [p]Lava-Striders and Lava-Cubes: no longer unstable in lava.[/p]
• [p]Necromancer (Revive-Skeleton): 5CD => 3CD (same as toxic lich. This is his primary gimmick so he should do it a lot).[/p]
• [p]Death-Priest: swapped his projectile attack with a smite. He's a priest and we don't currently have a Smite type attack in The-Crypt[/p]
• [p]Death-Priest (Haste): removed (he doesn't need 4 abilities)[/p]
• [p]Death-Priest (Poison-Cloud): 5CD => 3CD (primary gimmick, make him do it a lot)[/p]
• [p]Skeleton-Elite-Archer (Chilling-Shot): 5CD => 3CD[/p]
• [p]Lock-Jaw now has a constrict ability.[/p]
• [p]Changed all Sniper-Mode: 10DUR/20CD => 5DUR/10CD (same as Yendor-Sharp-Shooter which seems to tuned nicely).[/p]
• [p]Clockwork-Engineer (Armor-Pack): replaced over heal mechanic with +1 temp Block-Point. I'm not really crazy about over heal mechanics and I've got plans to make Click-Clock quite Block-Point heavy.[/p]
• [p]Frost-Giant-Knight, Orc-Battle-Priest, Dark-elf-Battle-Priest (Over heal ally on hit): 30% => 40% and removed the over heal. These are nasty enough without making fights so much harder.[/p]
• [p]Orb-of-Force: standard magic projectile instead of a pull (he's a support, why is he pulling?)[/p]
• [p]Orb-of-Force (Force-Shield): 5CD => 3CD[/p]
• [p]Orb-of-Force (Force-Wall): 5CD => 3CD[/p]
• [p]Giant-Leech: instead of Over-Heal-Vampire-Attack (was this ever relevent?) he now has standard Vampire-Attack but with a 2x healing modifier. Basically makes him a super mosquito.[/p]
• [p]Beast-Master-Nix, Clockwork-Clamper, Shield-Knight: Pull-Ability 5CD => 3CD[/p]
• [p]Kocha (Range Variant): overheat timer 8T => 7T (she often swapped before overheating)[/p]
• [p]Mind-Bender, Mind-Flayer, Evil-Eye, Morrgue: Confusion 20CD => 10CD[/p]
• [p]Evil-Eye (Confusion) 5DUR => 10DUR (Same as Mind-Bender, Branch-II enemies should be basically as strong as Vaults)[/p]
• [p]Mana-Drain-Attack (Mind-Flayer, Indigo-Slime, Mana-Viper): 25% chance => 100% chance (again the idea is: whatever they do, they should do it consistently, no hidden randomness).[/p]
• [p]Clockwork-Knight and Skeleton-Doom-Knight now have 1 Block-Point. Both have shields on their sprite. Just slowly adding BPs to NPCs where it seems appropriate now that its become a core mechanic.[/p]
• [p]Gixlo-The-Witch-Doctor now has Totem-of-Regeneration making him a 'super shaman'. Forces player to engage him instead of kiting out of his lair. He really needs to be redrawn as a Froglok. Reduced his ally count a bit.[/p]
• [p]Fire-Bats now have the Swoop ability. [/p]
• [p]A bunch of summon cool-downs reduced to 5CD. This brings it in line with the majority of summoners. The difference was probably just oversight or a historical artifact. Scare-Crow, Gnoll-Beast-Master, Drachnid-Swarm-Caller, Dark-Elf-Librarian, Froglok-Fishermen, Troll-Necromancer.[/p]
• [p]All Shadow-Steps unified at 4Range, 5CD. Same as Shadowed-Assassin which seems to be tuned nicely. Generally this is a shorter cool-down and a shorter range. I think its a bit more legible when they don't 'blink' from halfway across the map.[/p]
• [p]Warlock and Wobi-The-Warlock (Torment): 20CD => 10CD, 4Range => 3Range. Same as Priest-of-Yendor. A common theme here is that I spent a lot of time tuning Vault-of-Yendor mobs and I think their stat lines work quite nicely. [/p]
• [p]Wall-of-Bone, Wall-of-Ice, Wall-of-Stone all unified at 5CD/3DUR. Generally faster casting, shorter duration. With the change where walls don't 'poof' on death this makes these a constant movement challenge but one which 'poofs' naturally pretty quickly.[/p]
• [p]NPCs with Whip-Pull now have standard melee attacks instead of the weird pseudo range attack. Just think its clearer that they pull you into a group of melee allies and they all melee you.[/p]

Items and Equipment:

• [p]Shield-of-Celtius: creates 2T Freezing-Clouds on the enemy whenever you block. I'd like to get more items interacting with the BP system so this is a good start.[/p]
• [p]Vine and Web bows always create vine/web but only on a single tile. Trying to get rid of random %s.[/p]
• [p]Clockwork Power Armor: allows two-hand weapons to be used with a shield.[/p]
• [p]Molten-Forged-Boots: removed the SP regen ability (non-thematic and doesn't really create any interesting gameplay). It now allows you to sprint on lava.[/p]
• [p]Construct-Power-Core: Magic-Power => Ability-Power making it more generally useful.[/p]
• [p]Blazing-Cloak: Create flaming clouds when sprinting. Got rid of the damage aura as I don't think its drastically different from just having a damage-shield. [/p]
• [p]Orc-Archery-Captain now drops either an Arcane-Bow or True-Shot-Bow (instead of the always disappointing Long-Bow)[/p]

Talents and Abilities:

• [p]Lunge now uses standard bolt targeting. This means there is only ever a single path that it can travel so there's no weird discrepancy with shrooms and traps. I tried to do the same with Charge but it needs a bit more work.[/p]
• [p]Freezing-Cloud: now uses the same targeting as the old Wall-of-Fire i.e. you set a start point and drag out a line. I've kept it shorter range than the fire variant as this is only Tier-II and Ice-Mage is supposed to be close range.[/p]
• [p]Battle-Frenzy (Base): attacks and taking damage will sustain berserk by default. Berserk DUR reduced to 3.[/p]
• [p]Battle-Frenzy (Damage): 30% => 50%[/p]
• [p]Battle-Frenzy (Duration): 3T => 6T[/p]
• [p]Battle-Frenzy (Fast): triggers at 5 rage[/p]
• [p]War-Cry: 2Rage => 3Rage[/p]
• [p]Power-Shot (Point-Blank): Crit at melee with no other modifiers. Basically splitting the old talent and removing the range reduction (I keep going back and forth on whether we should have reduced range options).[/p]
• [p]Power-Shot (Heavy): +2DMG, +1Knock-Back[/p]
• [p]Cone-of-Cold (Short-Damage): don't reduce range, or increase base damage, just add crit at point blank.[/p]
• [p]Shield-of-Ice (Slow) => Shield-of-Ice (Freeze): 25% chance to freeze when blocking melee. The freeze is only for 1T to try to keep it balanced.[/p]
• [p]Freeze (Base) 2Range => 3Range. I have a general desire to make Tier-3 talents stronger. IMO you should be really anxious to get your classes Tier-3 and other classes should almost always be happy if they can get another classes Tier-3.[/p]
• [p]Storm-Shot: 10CD => 8CD. Again trying to make Tier-3 the 'best' talent. [/p]

[p][/p]

User Interface and Targeting:

• [p]Fixed a bug: when you had a full poison bar but only say 10 HP remaining then your HP looked like it was nearly full (with poison).[/p]
• [p]Damage sustained in previous turn is now shown in red on your HP bar. This should hopefully help indicate if you just took a giant chunk of damage (and should probably move somewhere else)[/p]
• [p]All cloud immunities are now displayed in special stats.[/p]
• [p]Stealth Threshold: Show ?? instead of ??? when you are 1 tile away from threshold.[/p]
• [p]Lightning bolt now shows damage at tip when targeting (just like other spells).[/p]
• [p]Tier-1 Confusion will no longer let you target empty tiles.[/p]
• [p]Poison-Cloud can now be cast on top of yourself.[/p]
• [p]Sleep-Bomb (Smoke) can now be dropped on top of yourself.[/p]

[p][/p]

Text and Descriptions:

• [p]Added some short class descriptions to character select. Open to suggestions here of how to best describe these. I'm fine with longer descriptions as well if it can hint to new players something about the playstyle.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bunch of random typos, grammar and text spacing.[/p]
• [p]Will now show the mouse over description of clouds even if the tile is not currently visible.[/p]
• [p]Will now show the duration on White-Smoke (Sleep-Bomb).[/p]
• [p]Don't need to show Sniper-Mode in monster description (the attack with its damage is enough).[/p]
• [p]Fixed description on Mace and Staff of Shielding.[/p]
• [p]Added description to Cursed-Floor.[/p]
• [p]Fixed Lightning-Bolt and Fire-Ball showing 0CD in their descriptions.[/p]

Graphics and Animation:

• [p]Added a new unique animation for Confusion. I'd like to eventually have every spell have its own unique spell animation.[/p]
• [p]Added the spear animation to the player when using polearms.[/p]
• [p]Glow on the initial cloud of Poison-Cloud, Freezing-Cloud, Flaming-Cloud. Should eventually have an actual animation here to highlight it.[/p]
• [p]Glow on Wall-of-Cold, Fire, Poison etc.[/p]
• [p]Glow on Freeze[/p]
• [p]Game will not pause for Confusion and Discord animations (just have it move with the character sprite).[/p]
• [p]Added a little orange shield glyph for invuln (shroom) instead of just a white I. Also added a glow.[/p]
• [p]Added proper gate graphics for Click-Clock and Ice-Caves instead of using the default stone one.[/p]

Bugs and Crashes:

• [p]Finally rewrote some Tunnel-Shot code to fix the odd angles in which it was missing. Pretty sure it is now 100% consistent with the indicated targeting.[/p]
• [p]Fixed: npcs dying and getting spawned/summoned in same turn would have the popup text sometimes carry over to the newly created monster.[/p]
• [p]Dungeon entrance will no longer spawn on UD:2[/p]
• [p]Iron-Golems were getting Lava-Heal popups when spawned due to a hidden status effect.[/p]
• [p]Yendor had the wrong head sprites.[/p]
• [p]Attribute \[+] buttons were sticking highlighted when closing and reopening the menu.[/p]
• [p]Arc-Lightning will now properly end the players turn.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a note on an Orc-Fortress table that had 'eaten' the table.[/p]
• [p]Hell-Portals will no longer lose agro.[/p]