Welcome to Death Must Die dev log #3!
Today we want to focus on game design and balance, namely how we are improving build variety in the upcoming Act II update.
The problem we posed last week is that Attack-based builds are currently inferior to spell-based builds. It’s easier to visualize it, when we look at the hierarchy of stats in the game:
At first glance, the tree looks balanced. Attacks and Spells are the main stat categories and they inherit from the global stats.
But while you are limited to one attack blessing, in most runs you end up with a huge number of spells. So the sheer quantity of spells vs attack is the first issue.
But a bigger problem is that summons and dashes are technically spells as well. So the tree actually looks like this:
This means that any bonuses to spells (damage, duration, area, etc) also affect summons and dashes. This makes spell+summon or spell+dash builds very strong, but further disincentivizes attack-based builds. It’s just not viable to make an attack+dash build, for example.
This attack vs spell disbalance also removes the interesting choices in gearing your characters. When looking at items that provide attack damage vs spell damage, the latter is obviously stronger.
To fix these issues, we’ve completely redesigned our stat hierarchy into this:
We are separating the summons and dash into separate categories, while also splitting spells into three new types:
- Strikes are spells that trigger with attacks - like Breath of Fire or Chain Lightning
- Casts are cooldown-based - like Meteor Shower or Blades
- Powers are various other abilities - like Flare or Incineration
Now we have a bunch of similarly-sized categories that can be easily mixed and matched!
This brings the choice back in gearing your character and allows us to make new and interesting abilities or items:
It was a lot of work to migrate everything to the new system, but we think it’s worth it. The new system will allow us to bring a lot more variety and interesting decision-making, both in items and blessings.
And to further encourage build making with all the new affixes, we’re completely removing item binding and doubling the total stash tabs to 8, coming with the Act II update in April.
So this is how we are improving the balancing and build variety in Death Must Die!
Next week we want to introduce our new character - The Ranger, as well as some of the new map locations from the upcoming act.