Reining In Explosions (v0.12.4)

Hi all!

Thanks a ton for the feedback on explosions from player weapons. It seems they were a little too potent, especially in later levels where it's almost impossible to avoid some friendly-fire damage as you're swarmed with hordes of fast-moving enemies.

Explosive weapons are generally meant to be more powerful than other weapons, with an inherent risk of self-damage associated with the big AoE damage they provide. There are definitely some improvements to be made in how explosions work and how they're communicated, which I hope this patch provides.

Some notable callouts before getting to the full changelog:

There's now a new visual indicator for every explosion so you can see the exact radius of damage; you can now stack Armor in your build to more effectively shield against explosion damage; and explosions are now capped at 30% of your max health per hit to give you a little more time to react in situations where you need to tank a hit or two (and also to prevent people from just instantly dying when they wish for a nuke at the Wishing Well...).

I don't want to completely remove the friendly-fire damage from explosions yet -- I think there's a lot of fun to be had in how you mitigate that risk, especially in the kinds of swarm-heavy levels you'd most want AoE clears in -- but if there are still issues with surprise explosion deaths, we might just disable the friendly-fire damage until we have a better solution. I'll be watching!

Explosion Changes

• There's a new visual effect for weapon explosions to help visualize their radius and damage type.

• Armor is now twice as effective at mitigating explosive self-harm damage (previously, you took 1 less damage for every point of armor you had; now you'll take 2 less damage per point of armor).

• Self-damage from your own exploding weapons is now limited to 30% of your max health per instance of damage, and triggers the standard 0.5s of post-hit invulnerability (with damage flash) that you get from any other damage.

• Melee weapons and Aura weapons can no longer roll explode-on-hit effects. Any existing melee/aura weapons will have their explosion effects removed.

Character Changes

• Sproing's Slinky weapon has been redesigned to look more like a slinky (smaller, slower expanding projectile) and now includes a very slight "pull-back" on any enemies hit by it. Also now always rolls a +1 Magnet affix on the base weapon.

Enemy Changes

• Expanded the variety of enemies that spawn in Rumbridge.

• Reduced Chicken move speed by 50% and changed their logic to run around the randomly instead of always swarming the player.

• Paper Lanterns now spawn a hazardous Fire in the level when they burn up (after 5 seconds). You can kill them before then to prevent the fire, but you'll spawn a Paper Lantern Ghost instead.

• Paper Lantern Ghosts now attack half as often and their projectiles are 50% slower.

• Increased the scale and damage of Wendigaunts by 50%.

• Hellforge Cultists now summon legions of Imp Tormentors to attack the player.

Bugfixes

• Fixed several enchantments that the Halo Forge could bless your items with that either did nothing or very little (e.g. a flat +0.1 Might instead of +10% Might)

• The Fire that Emberlings spawn when killed can now be destroyed like any other Fire.

• Fixed a bug that resulted in explosion radius being slightly larger than expected for some crafted weapons.