V31: Curses and Rebalancing!

Today we have a new ascension, along with a few cards to go with it!

Ascension: In-Jokes

Each stack of In-Jokes gives you the 'Cursed' card, increase damage to you by an extra 100% If you're keen-eyed you might notice a new element, Curse.

Each stack of Curse gives you +7 damage. (As a reminder, paper cards count for 1/2 a stack) Once you have a cursed card, other curses will start appearing in the level up screen!

New Cards: Curses

Steam post image Steam post image Steam post image There are 3 generic curse cards that just increase your damage taken to various degrees (giving you curse stacks and effectively damage in exchange) These 3 cards also let you qualify for curse medals appearing in the level up screen.

The Cursed Gem Medal! A big pay off for stacking a ton of curses.

Cursed Bronze, Silver and Gold tier medals, they can only show up mid-run and can't be bought. In regards to Frail: if you were already at 0 Defence, negative defence will increase damage taken by a flat amount.

New Combination Card: Awesome Blow

Unlocked via getting 8 Knockbacks. Some more knockback synergy, like most other combination cards, you can't buy this either.

QOL: Healthbars

Health bars are now only shown when an enemy is actually damaged to reduce clutter. Shielded enemies now have an armour bar so you can actually track how much damage has been done to their armour!

Planets now show off their health too!

Rebalance: Piercing

Piercing is simply a generically good stat, virtually every weapon wants it, piercing is also really effective because +1 piercing can effectively double your damage output by letting you hit multiple targets. So piercing is being nerfed quite heavily, however, as compensation, any projectile that kills an enemy will pierce that enemy, this will be a large buff to guns and other long cooldown high damage weapons. This is also an indirect buff to dev bias.

Rebalance: Contradictions Ascension

Contradictions now stacks up to x3! Each stack of contradictions:

• Makes enemy explosion hurt more.

• Make enemy explosions bigger.

Contradictions still makes enemy explosions destroy your projectiles, but it also now prevents enemies from taking friendly fire from explosions.

Rebalance: Enemy Difficulty

Enemies were in sore need of a look at after the Wave/EXP changes. To make it feel like a wave survival game, there are about four times the amount of enemies spawning now in the beginning, though the amount of enemies you get with each new planetoid destroyed scales slower. The amount of enemies that spawn scaling on player level is also increased. Enemy HP was lacking as well, even the worst builds could handily one-shot enemies, so enemies are quite a bit tankier now, though good and high damage builds shouldn't struggle at all, and you can still reach one-shot territory.

Changes:

• Healer enemies now heal twice as fast and gain max HP quicker.

• Big Blob and Healer enemies now have double their starting HP.

• Dealing damage to an enemy now reduces their armour by 10% of the blocked damage instead of a flat 1. This makes Antares A a lot more reasonable.

• The 'tutorial' waves (that show off each enemy one by one) that happen at the start of every run now only happen if you have less than 3 levels from metaprogression and only if you are below 1st Ascension.

• The start of runs begins with an extra wave spawner to increase enemy variety.

• Sun no longer deals damage to itself.

• Due to increased enemy spawns, honey, monster bone and coinlicker have all been reverted/nerfed to 1 hp healing.

• Planetoids now clear the abyss around them a little while prevented from spawning enemies. (which happens for 5 seconds after taking damage)

• Planetoids can also no longer generate new abyss while supressed.

• Big and Small Blob have had their damage increased by double.

• Arsenal can no longer show up twice during arsenal level.

• Antares B no longer heals herself unless she's alone.

• Joker face nerfed so the +4 mult only applies on attach.

• Fixed a bug where Integral did not give damage against the void.

• Red enemies are faster.

• Homing now homes in the first 10 pierces instead of the first pierce only.

• Homing now has a sharper turn the more accuracy you have.

• Buffing Snakes cooldown from 8 seconds to 4 seconds.

• Snakes now have a unique benefit that they can pierce shield enemies and planetoids, which usually destroy projectiles.

• Planetoids no longer have 100% poison resistance, now having a visual effect (toxic atmosphere) when poisoned.

• Abyss health no longer scales at all, and player damage against abyss does not scale with damage anymore. Base damage against abyss is roughly the same as before, but the only way to increase it now is with integrity or suppression, but there's also little need to actually increase damage against it.

• Lightning actually hits planets now.

• Tons of misc bug fixes.

• Yellow slimes have a base exp drop rate of 50% now due to how many spawn compared to other enemies.

• To reduce early level spam, the amount of EXP needed per level is now [Level x 2 + 3]. Previously it was [Level x 2].

• Fixed a bug that cause planetoids and suns to have way more damage reduction after stage 1 than intended.

Thanks for your patience, reading and playing! See ya next time!