Attention Crew!
We hope you've been doing well! It's been a few months since our last Captain's Log, so we wanted to give an update here before the Holiday season.
This post, in particular, will be going over some larger balance changes, some new Wildlander enemies we'll be adding, and one of the Champ-exclusive enemies. A lot of this stuff is in active development, so not everything here may stay the same.
We're also going to be creating another holiday-themed Captain Q & A video!
You can find the question submission form here:
https://forms.gle/163wYFjAL1bHCfkr7
We were quite pleased with the reception to our last video, and they don't impede the progress of the mod, so we're going to continue to do these every once in a while.
Ready when it's Ready
We've been seeing several rumors/speculations about when our 1.0 release date would be. Most of these speculations are either hopelessly unrealistic (six months or less) or hilariously optimistic (before the end of the year). In our last Captain's log, we listed off all of the features we planned to include and clearly stated that this will be our largest update to date. In addition to this, we also stated that we planned to hold off on giving an official release date until everything in the update was ready to prevent crunch on our end. To meet those standards and expectations, the next update will take a VERY LONG TIME to develop, internally test, and polish, much longer than the aforementioned speculated timeframes. We want Black Reliquary and its conclusion to be a memorable experience, hopefully even as memorable as Darkest Dungeon's ending itself. To accomplish that, this update will be Ready when it's Ready, and we encourage our community to reiterate that message when asked.
New Wildlander Enemies
We're pleased to announce that we'll be including two new Wildlander enemies to the Exposed Interior. These enemies are not difficulty exclusive and look to diversify the threats of Wildlander Faction as a whole.
The first enemy we'll be including is the Wildlander Hecatomb:
The Wildlander Hecatomb was a concept from our previous Wildlander enemy poll. He functions as frontline stress-caster primarily but can apply some hefty defensive debuffs.
When his HP gets low, the Wildlander Hecatomb will make a pact with a member of the ancient pantheon, offering his life to bolster the rest of his team. During his next turn, the Hecatomb will sacrifice himself to provide a strong heal and offensive buffs to his team and may deal a large amount of stress to the hero party (details are still being sorted out).
The second enemy we'll be including is the Wildlander Powderclaw:
This ursine menace is as much of a ranged threat as it is a melee one, firing the cannon strapped to his back during the prep round and launching a payload far into the air.
A couple rounds later, this cannonball will land dealing tremendous damage and applying a stun to the target hero.
New Champion Exclusive Enemy
In addition to the two new Wildlander enemies, we're also ready to introduce the Bristleback Baboon.
This will be a new Champion-Exclusive Wildlife enemy, found only in the Treasury.
The Bristleback Baboon primarily feeds on Cactonids, using its sensitive nose to pick up on Cactonid blossoms to track and hunt its prey.
When found with Cactonids, the Baboon may choose to attack and devour one of them, bolstering its defenses and improving his blighting capabilities.
However, when found with other wildlife, the Baboon may fall into a hungered frenzy and release a blood-curdling howl, debuffing the hero party's DODGE/SPD, and buffing up its DMG/CRT.
Balance Adjustments - Toning Down Power Creep
Overall, we've noticed that many aspects of the mod have steadily power crept (heroes more steadily over time, and monsters a little with each dungeon patch), and we're going to be making some larger balance changes in an attempt to even out the balance a little.
Resistance Changes
A lot of people will be glad to hear this, but we're going to be toning down the scaling on enemy resistances to match hero scaling, having it match Vanilla Darkest Dungeon. We'll be toning down extra status chance on select skills that had their status chances increased specifically to deal with this.
Obviously, we'll likely be heavily rebalancing status trinkets/heroes that were already strong before this nerf.
Other Changes
Of course, we'll still be doing the usual balance to heroes, monsters, trinkets, ship decks, quirks, etc, but we're definitely more focused on nerfing overperformers rather than buffing underperformers this time around.
That being said, balance adjustments overall will take a back seat to the development of the rest of the mod.
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Just a reminder, a lot of what we're showing here is in active development so keep in mind that things may change.
We've also been hard at work sorting out the closed testing for the Black Reliquary dungeon, but as we've mentioned before in our previous post, we're not planning on sharing any details directly related to the Black Reliquary itself before the 1.0 Release goes live.
Thank you all for your support and patience,
-Team Reliquary