It's time for more dungeon building, future overlords!
Today's update focuses on making dungeon building more meaningful. Right now the dominant strategy is to place a group of super monsters at the dungeon entrance and leave the rest empty. Not exactly in theme with the game.
New abilities, stealth and shield, will let heroes strike deeper into your dungeon. Stealthy heroes sneak past the first few monsters, while shielded heroes take no damage early on. Dungeons will need 2-3 combat rooms to effectively deal with the variety of heroes.
Healing monsters is now harder. To compensate, dungeons can have up to two infirmaries. The best monsters will need to step out of the fight for a round or two in order to heal up before returning. The design goal is to encourage players to have more combat-ready monsters and to convert an empty room into a healing utility room.
The Hero King is getting new allies. This has been a consistent point of feedback: players don't think the King can be defeated. The final encounter is now split into 3 heroes: the king and his two most powerful Knights of the Round. The overall difficulty is around the same, but hopefully splitting into 3 lower HP heroes will seem more possible.
Last up is the Boss Crown. Turning enemies into a Dungeon Boss gives them the powerful taunt abilitiy, which pretty much invalidates all the shield/stealth changes. The Dungeon Boss is thematically the final monster that heroes must overcome, but tactically, it's best to place the boss in the first possible monster slot. The new update adds a cost each time the boss enters combat: the Dungeon Heart takes 100 damage. The boss is still a deadly powerful monster, but now needs careful planning to limit how many times heroes can reach it.
Patch Notes v0.6.0
- A new hero, the rogue, will now enter your dungeon. They start with 5 stacks of stealth.
- Level 4+ Paladins now start with 5 stacks of shield.
- The Hero King boss fight now includes the two most powerful Knights of the Round: Tomodachi the Sword Saint and Isolde the Star-Scribe.
- Added the Infirmary dungeon plan to heal monsters more easily.
- Monsters no longer heal when merged, and will give a consistent amount of EXP when merging, no matter how much damage they've taken.
- Monsters no longer heal on level up.
- The Aura of the King passive has been removed.
- Boss monsters now take 100 HP from Dungeon Heart in order to enter combat.
- To make it easier to get essential dungeon plans, the first round of selection will always include: Kitchen, Mana Chamber, and Infirmary.
- The HP debuff from Sacrificial Altar has been decreased from -50% to -25%.
- Jar of Souls no longer has a reap ability.
- Level 7 heroes have less HP to compensate for the new shield/stealth abilities.