Playtest Alpha 2.0.4

This update contains a Strength overhaul and a major change to the game's health/armor system.

tldr: there's now a regenerating Armor system that protects your Health. It starts small but there's lots of support for making it stronger if you're using a Strength/melee strategy.

These changes are likely to make the game quite a bit easier for now, we'll see!

Strength and Mechanics reworks

• Added 8 Strength relics and reworked the majority of Strength relics and rituals with the new Armor mechanic and Might status effect.

• Armor is now a completely different and highly impactful mechanic.

  • Before: Flat damage reduction per hit

  • AdjustedNowArmor points act as an extension to your health bar, absorbing damage before your health is reduced.

  • Armor now acts similarly to recharging shields in some games - if your current Armor points are below your Base Armor, you will regain Armor points over time if you haven’t recently taken damage, until your Armor points equal your Base Armor.

  • You may also gain more Armor points than your Base Armor (with relic triggers, Rituals, etc.). These points don’t decay over time and carry over across levels, but they are capped to the same value as your Max HP.

  • Goal with this change is to buff melee strategies and overall aggression - you can now take a small hit without taking health damage, and melee strategies can build up excess Armor.

• Might is a new simple status effect: add a flat amount of damage and stun to your next melee hit.

  • It’s a simple payoff for Strength synergies and encourages melee play. The flat damage bonus is strong immediately, but also pairs nicely with critical hits.

  • Some sources of Ironflesh now add Might instead.

• Ironflesh status (increased armor) has been removed.

  • Although it could be strong, it didn’t feel like a tangible benefit in many cases.

  • Instead, most sources of Ironflesh now add Armor.

  • Ironflesh might come back in a modified form as a specific character mechanic.

Other game changes

• Improved score screen with more info about your run.

Steam post image(todo: deadliest foes might not be counting Armor damage...)

• Resistance has been renamed to Defense (%-based damage reduction). The former name is remnant from when this stat was elemental-only defense, and so the general name Defense seems better now. Cold status now reduces Defense instead of Armor.

• Ward status (increases your Defense for limited # of hits) is not capped by Devotion anymore, it should just synergize slightly better with Devotion builds due to mechanics around gaining/using it.

• Block points while using your shield melee attack and parries are now more clearly shown. I hope this helps with understanding why holding up the shield is mapped to Melee+Right-click: that is, you’re immediately blocking when you begin the melee attack.

  • I’ve gotten some suggestions to add a dedicated button for holding up the shield and I totally understand why that feels like something that should exist at first. My reasoning for not having one is:

    • Weapon secondaries need to be on right-click/left trigger.

    • On keyboard there are of course plenty of keys to use, but you would have to give up full WASD+slide+crouch movement control. Pressing F+Right-click to extend the block allows you to do this while consuming the input you cannot use while blocking anyway.

    • On a standard gamepad there simply aren’t more buttons to use, especially buttons that continue to allow you to move+look with the joysticks.

    • Holding up a shield is actually a specific mechanic that only the Mercenary will have access to - other characters will use other types of melee sidearms that can’t do this.

    • You rarely want to block for a long time anyway - while I want some mechanics to reward you for blocking attacks, I think holding up a shield all the time would be boring gameplay-wise.

  • All that said I am still considering adding an unmapped button that will allow you to hold up the shield without using melee, so people can manually map it to a sidebutton on mouse or controller paddle if they have these options. Let me know if this would be important to you.