Patch 1.05 - Major Balance Changes
- Losing a party member no longer decreases rank, and enemy turn timers are faster on low and mid rank than they were previously.
Previously, spamming attack and facetanking damage was an effective strategy, because the continual death of party members kept you at low rank, which in turn kept enemies slow enough for your DPS to out-pace theirs.
- Poise has been reworked. Enemies now ALWAYS get knocked back on hit. Knockback has been doubled globally, and enemy walk speeds have been increased by x1.5.
This makes the game much less spammy. Every hit will now reset the neutral, forcing you to re-approach to attack again.
- Lower ranks now penalize essence gain, with bottom rank only giving you 1/3 of the essence you would ordinarily get.
This was the case in pre-release versions, but was removed. The rationale was to introduce a dynamic where you would want to be selective about items and pickups in order to strategically delay rank gain as much as possible, since there was no benefit to being at higher rank.
However, in practice this dynamic did not occur. Even should the previous change make this emerge, a minor layer of added strategy does not justify encouraging the player to remain in a slower and easier version of the combat.
- Reverted extra time bonuses on lower rank.
Lower ranks still have a chance of despawning enemies on level load, but giving extra time would reward worse players with more essence.
Other Changes:
- Shield counter value now increases by 2 from melee hitboxes, making the guard much more useful.
- Reverted change to enemy alert distance scaling, as it made quick-killing too effective.
- Halved the range of the blunderbuss bullets.
- Reduced range of longbow arrows.
- Staff projectiles have less range and active time.
- Cure-alls now cure the entire party of status effects instead of just one member.
- Changed the water pillars section in 3-5 to be more forgiving.
- Added missing killfloor to 3-4 elevator shaft.
- Fixed locks requiring multiple of the same key accepting only one.
- Lock forcefields now visually disappear correctly.
- Fixed bad teleport in 1-6.
Previously, spamming attack and facetanking damage was an effective strategy, because the continual death of party members kept you at low rank, which in turn kept enemies slow enough for your DPS to out-pace theirs.
- Poise has been reworked. Enemies now ALWAYS get knocked back on hit. Knockback has been doubled globally, and enemy walk speeds have been increased by x1.5.
This makes the game much less spammy. Every hit will now reset the neutral, forcing you to re-approach to attack again.
- Lower ranks now penalize essence gain, with bottom rank only giving you 1/3 of the essence you would ordinarily get.
This was the case in pre-release versions, but was removed. The rationale was to introduce a dynamic where you would want to be selective about items and pickups in order to strategically delay rank gain as much as possible, since there was no benefit to being at higher rank.
However, in practice this dynamic did not occur. Even should the previous change make this emerge, a minor layer of added strategy does not justify encouraging the player to remain in a slower and easier version of the combat.
- Reverted extra time bonuses on lower rank.
Lower ranks still have a chance of despawning enemies on level load, but giving extra time would reward worse players with more essence.
Other Changes:
- Shield counter value now increases by 2 from melee hitboxes, making the guard much more useful.
- Reverted change to enemy alert distance scaling, as it made quick-killing too effective.
- Halved the range of the blunderbuss bullets.
- Reduced range of longbow arrows.
- Staff projectiles have less range and active time.
- Cure-alls now cure the entire party of status effects instead of just one member.
- Changed the water pillars section in 3-5 to be more forgiving.
- Added missing killfloor to 3-4 elevator shaft.
- Fixed locks requiring multiple of the same key accepting only one.
- Lock forcefields now visually disappear correctly.
- Fixed bad teleport in 1-6.