Hello everyone, time for the (not) monthly dev blog of August!
(sorry to making an announcement about it soo late, I was busy finishing the event for beta update, and then this dev blog took me a bit of time)
Well, let's get on the devblog, and start directly with more advancement for
A new major addition with Update 1.1 is the addition of Run difficulty,
an (entirely optional) way to increase the difficulty of runs that can be enabled quite early for players that find the early/mid progression of the game too easy.
(Yeah there are a lot of typos left in it, no need to report that in the comments, it's going to be updated)
As of now there is only Expert Mode added in the game, but there are plans to add 2 new additional ones
(and to add some additional effects that will play a bit with Zone Modifier)
Another major addition of update 1.1 is modifiers that are applied to an entire zone. They can provide both positive and negative effects to a zone, affect the map generation, or affect rewards you can obtain
During the first loop, you are guaranteed to have a path with no modifier.
The number of modifiers generated on a zone depends on the number of loops.
Since update 1.1 adds in a lot of additional events (more than 10 new events) it could become quite frustrating to not encounter the event you are looking for.
With Update 1.1 you'll be able to encounter events after the end of any stage, which will overall lead to a lot of additional opportunities,
(note that "Event: Shrine of Reconstruction" can be viewed as a reward of this stage)
Events you'll encounter in an event stage are now generated during the stage generation phases (and no longer when entering the event)
This means it is now possible to view what event you are going to encounter before selecting a stage. As of now, event stages only have a 20% chance to not be hidden, but soul-shop upgrades to improve that will soon follow.
(Due to technical reasons, the game won't allow previewing events from stages not selectable since some events' chances to appear can vary based on many variables and change between two stage selections)
As said earlier, this update adds more than 10 new events (so far), which will about triple the current amount of events you can encounter (ignoring the Shrine event and the one-time equipment-related ones)
Here are a few ones:
Duelist is one of the least played characters, which is understandable, it doesn't really change most of the game, and can be a bit harder to play due to her very low HP pool and fragility in early game, especially as it is usually the first avatar unlocked.
The current main usage of this avatar at the current time is if the player wants to go with a faith-oriented build (due to her lower natural Defense) and is very inefficient when used in another way. So the Duelist got a bit of rework to try to expand which builds are possible with her,
Increase base health from 60 to 100
The reason for that is to make the avatar on par with rog when doing Health Transmutation builds as well as making her more viable in very early game.
Duelist no longer starts with -10 defense, but -2 base defense and x0.5 defense multiplier
This change makes the avatar scale way better with Faith in mid and late game, while still making her take much less damage in early game.
However, this clearly makes her non-optimal for Metal transmutation builds (but why would you do a metal transmutation build with Duelist?)
Duelist now gains 5% damage scaling from power every time her Death Door ability is used until the end of the run,
Death Door ability disables anachronistic during the debuff duration
Those are likely the 2 biggest changes to the avatar, the first one makes the player more rewarded when playing in high risk, while the second change makes sure the player is indeed taking risks. However, the player could just take heavy damage until Death Door is activated, and wait in anachronistic until their HP is higher than 1 again.
Reduced Defense cap of Duelist from 75% to 50%,
Defense cap is a new stat, that basically affects how much damage flat defense can stop at most, this change is another indicator to tell players not to try to make a defense-heavy build on her
There have also been a lot of minor additions, new artifacts (mostly related to events), new cards and equipment.
In addition, Eyes of Truth has been reworked, now required to unlock looping for the first time, and providing increased max level to cards for each loop completed, giving a really powerful (and unique) effect that's worth the drawback.
For now, the beta only has one additional Run difficulty (Expert mode) and two additional ones will come in the following patch, as well as tweaking Expert mode.
While a few soulcards have been added in, there are still a lot of soul-cards that are planned to be added in the upcoming patches
The logic for custom run is there, but there is still no UI to allow players to run it, so it is not properly implemented in the game, I'll have to spend time to properly allow players to start custom runs.
Of course, due to the many in-depth changes and version changes (explained in the previous), the patch currently has a lot of bugs that will take a bit of time to properly iron out.
Beta for 1.1 has already started, access is behind the usual code "BackUpYourDamnSaves".
You have to know this beta is particularly buggy compared to others, a patch fixing a lot of bugs is coming in the next few days (specifically related to the new events)
It is also important to know that saves from 1.1 cannot be read from version 1.0 (due to Talents layouts), so if you want to keep the progress after going on the beta, either make sure you know how to load back saves, or you'll have to wait for update 1.1 to be released