1.1 Design Manifesto & Patch Notes

Today we want to show the (extensive!) patch notes for our upcoming “Clockmaker’s Tools” update, coming September 29th!

By posting as much information as we can early, we hope we can have a conversation about the changes, and also allow you to prepare ahead of time.

Since this update brings significant overhauls to several systems, items and skills, we thought it would be valuable to also do our very first Design Manifesto explaining our reasoning behind each of these changes.

We believe that transparency and communication (as well as us being humble and changing things when we are wrong) are the key for us to make Hell Clock the best game it can be.

We won’t get into Crafting in this Manifesto, since we already did a deep dive on it last week, which you can read here!

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So without further ado, let’s get into it!

Why are we even making changes?

The game’s been out for a relatively short time, and has done well enough in terms of reviews and sales - so why are we making such sweeping changes to the RPG systems?

What we WANT to do:

• We want the game’s defenses to matter, and the challenge of building defensive layers into your builds to be fun and satisfying

• We want damage taken and healing to be more of a “battle of attrition”, and less “spiky”

• We want Boss fights to never devolve into boring slogs

• We want more build variety in the game, with more skills and combinations being viable in both campaign and late endgame

• We want our endgame difficulty scaling to be more sensible, and have a stronger foundation for the upcoming Endless Nightmares

• We want the Veteran Campaign to be a bit easier, but Abyss and Oblivion to be much harder!

What we DON’T WANT to do:

• We don’t want to nerf any already existing builds. Any build that is S-tier now should remain S-tier when the patch drops [Mark’s note: except for Manaloop, and Silver Bullets+Powder Bag. We absolutely had to nerf those two :( ]

• We don’t want crafting to add even more power creep to the game

• We don’t want Boss fights to resort to cheap one-hit kills

• We don’t want S-tier builds to blow through the entire endgame like it’s nothing, leaving you bored and unfulfilled

• We don’t want you to alternate between feeling immortal and suddenly getting one-shot.

Defenses Rework

Hell Clock is currently suffering from a common issue in ARPGs: the defenses start sensible enough, but as the game progresses, you become basically immortal - until something suddenly one-shots you. In our game this is happening mostly due to a couple of outliers. The first one was Lifesteal, which was reworked in 1.0.3; the other one is Conviction.

The issue with Conviction is that it is very weak if used at low values, and game-breakingly strong if invested in. There are currently many methods to get Conviction to the hundreds of thousands with minimal effort, and to millions with a bit more effort.

We are reworking Conviction from the ground up, and here are the major changes:

• Conviction is now capped, and the cap starts at 100% of your maximum Mana

• All “Conviction Gain” affixes have been replaced with “Max Conviction” bonuses

• Conviction Decay is drastically reduced and is no longer linear: it decays fast if you are at or near your Max value, and slows down as the ratio diminishes, becoming very slow if you are in the bottom 25% of it.

• Conviction Decay Resistance nodes, affixes and blessings have been slightly