[p]Hello everyone! [/p][p][/p][p]I was planning on spending some more time on getting this all polished up but there are two critical bugs that need to get patched. Like pretty much every new system this should be treated as a rough draft. There are probably many more options and tweaks to the balance that need to be made before the project is complete. That being said, we finally have it! Easy, Normal and Hard settings with an additional Custom slot. [/p][p][/p]

Game Settings:

[p]I've updated the Game-Settings menu, accessible when starting a new (non-ranked) game, to include Easy, Normal and Hard presets along with a Custom option. All of these can be customized to your liking in case you want to slightly tweak one of the difficulty settings. I've currently got enough options included to balance the game around this easy/normal/hard but I am planning on adding plenty more (probably under an advanced tab), for people messing around with custom game modes. As long as its hidden (not a wall of spam), I don't see a reason not to include toggles for all sorts of little things.[/p][p][/p]

Global Balance Shift:

[p]What I've tried to do here is shift the games balance down a full 'notch'. What is now called 'normal difficulty', the default setting, is quite a bit easier than what we've been playing with. I've managed to get all the numbers to line up right so that what is now called 'hard' is pretty much exactly what we previously had as the default. Obviously the 'easy' setting is… well very easy. I beat most of it by just auto attack tabbing. [/p][p]Its my hope that our new 'normal' should be appropriate for players starting the game for the first time assuming they don't mind dying a few times as they learn the ropes. For me, 'normal' now definitely feels like something I can play with my brain half off, listening to a podcast, and just make sure I snap back into awareness every 2-3 minutes to deal with something tricky.[/p][p][/p]

Ranked Difficulty:

[p]I'm planning on devoting an entire update (or two) to overhauling and rebalancing ranked mode in general but what I've added right now is that Bronze, Silver and Gold will now be set at Normal difficulty while Platinum and Masters are set to Hard. These are the default settings btw so it doesn't matter if you mess around with your Normal/Hard, it won't apply in Ranked games and you'l get the default difficulty settings.[/p][p]Given that Normal is quite a bit easier than our previous baseline, its my hope that this will encourage more players to give Ranked a try. If you've gotten used to the difficulty of the game then progressing through the early ranks should be relatively painless. The modifiers will give you something novel and challenging to deal with in each game but the global difficulty is not quite so murderous.[/p][p][/p]

Bugs and Crashes:

[p]Two major crashes that needed to get patched.[/p]

• [p]Fixed Celtius crash when he goes over a shroom[/p]
• [p]Fixed School Lessons not loading. They work now but I'm gonna need to probably do a full rewrite at some point as its interacting poorly with the new pre-cached vault files. Its a bit of a mess since the School files are loaded dynamically from the players local storage every time you boot the game (to allow for creation and sharing of files), while the rest of the games vaults now have to pass through a parsing and caching step on my end before I release each update.[/p]

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Talent Changes:

[p]Just had a chat with Random595 who made a very clean argument as to why a version of talents we had… I don't remember how long ago… was quite superior in terms of encouraging build diversity vs reducing starting talents. So adding back in the 6th starting talents but now Tomes-of-Knowledge no longer give the option of +1 talent point (you must pick a talent). Not only does this essentially force you to take new talents, it also does not give you the 'free' +1 talent to just keep piling into your starting kit.[/p][p]If I remember correctly the only real issue with this system was that you'd occasionally get a set of 4 talents that were really unusable for your class/build. But imo this is more just a matter of working on talents until every single one of them can at least contribute a little bit to any build. So please take screen shots and post them if you get a set of 4 that seems unusable and this can be a good gauge of what needs to be worked on. [/p]