Rogue Fable III News

Hello everyone!

Getting close to the end of development and I’m pleased to say that everything is going according to schedule. The main theme of this update is a complete overhaul of the player races along with some final balancing and tuning.

I was a bit nervous going into this update as I had not touched races since they were very hastily added way back in alpha. Until now I’ve almost exclusively done all my playtesting with human and so this felt like less of a rework and more like starting completely from scratch. I’m happy to say that it went very smoothly and I’m quite pleased with the results, so much so that now I find myself wondering why I’d ever play human when there is so much more interesting complexity with the various race/class combinations. I think this should really add a nice additional layer of depth to the game.

Going forward the next update which should be done by the end of November will focus mainly on getting a bunch of achievements implemented and redesigning the character selection and records screens to reflect the choice of class/race. Also there are still some holes in content that I’d like to fill and a bunch more Yendor levels wouldn’t hurt either. Then its just lots of debugging and final balancing with a planned final release sometime in mid-late December in time for the Steam Winter Sale.

So with all that said, onto the update!


As mentioned above, this was the bulk of the update. The primary goal of races in my mind is to add a whole new layer of variation and depth to character development, to expand the scope and complexity of the game. The races are NOT balanced with each other by design, in fact they can probably be sorted into normal, hard and very hard difficulties.

Human should be the default choice for new players and should be the easiest race to play. All other races should be harder, or at least trickier to build and play characters with. I tried to avoid really obvious race/class synergies where certain races are just better at certain classes and worse at all others as I don’t think this really adds anything interesting to the game, though of course this can not be completely avoided.

So regardless of the race/class combination, all non-humans should be harder or trickier to play than their human counterparts. This took me awhile to fully wrap my head around and commit to fully but as an example an Ogre Warrior should actually be harder to win the game with than a Human Warrior. Now, in skilled hands, this Ogre Warrior is going to be an absolute monster of a tank that should feel stronger, or at least ‘tankier’ than the human but the key here is that it should take a bit more skill and game knowledge to actually get this to work.

I was kind of hesitant about doing unique race/class sprites for every combination as art can be pretty hit or miss for me as far as quality and time but I think they actually turned out quite nice and it encouraged me to clean up the human sprites as well which were getting a bit crusty looking. The next update will have an overhaul of the character selection screen and the game records/achievements to better integrate the more prominent role that races now play.

So here's the new changes to races and their various bonuses and penalties. Feedback here is definitely appreciated once we’ve all had some time to play through these. Again, the goal here is for the races to play very distinctly so feedback or suggestions on how to make them more distinct is most important.

Ogre:
Ogre is the classic lumbering tank race with the potential for a massive hit point total and the ability to wear the heaviest armor. Slow movement speed is a pretty big penalty, interestingly more so for melee focused characters.

• Large Size: +8HP, reduced knockback, only unstable in liquids.
  
• +2STR, -2INT
  
• Slow Movement (cannot move diagonally)
  
• No max encumbrance.
  
• +8HP per point of STR
  

The two-hand weapon + shield mechanic was removed for a number of reasons:

• Two handed weapons are not much stronger than they were before and this was a very overpowered ability.
  
• Two handers are quite rare and don’t drop every game so you had the situation where the roll of the dice was the difference between an overpowered ability and a completely useless ability.
  
• This is only really relevant to melee focused characters and tied the ogre far to closely with being a pure melee race than I wanted.
  

Troll:
The troll should be a frantic race to play where resting is not an option. Trolls should have to just barrel from one fight to another as quickly as possible in order to keep from starving to death. I think some additional traits may be appropriate here to further emphasis this sort of play style.

• Large Size: +8HP, reduced knockback, only unstable in liquids.
  
• 3 x HP regen
  
• 2 x Food consumption rate
  
• Vulnerable to fire.
  

Gnome:
The glass cannon race with huge offensive potential but incredibly fragile. I went through a few iterations here to try not to make the gnome just a better caster and worse at everything else. Don’t think I succeeded completely so suggestions here are appreciated.

• Small Size: -8HP, increased knockback, unstable even in grass.
  
• +2INT, -2STR,
  
• +2HP per point of STR
  
• +10% Ability-Power per point of INT
  
• Gains additional talent points on levels: 4, 8, 12, 16
  

Fairy:
Elves were kind of boring in my mind so they got replaced by fairies which are the DEX version of the gnomes glass cannon. The enchantment mechanic is actually very strong imo and works well regardless of class.

• Small Size: -8HP, increased knockback, unstable even in grass.
  
• +2DEX, -2STR,
  
• Flying
  
• +2HP per point of STR
  
• +5% Evasion per point of DEX
  
• Enchant an item on all odd levels (must be used immediately, cannot be saved)
  

Mummy:
Mummies were actually one of the few races I was quite happy with. They are very, very hard imo, the inability to use potions is just a massive penalty which the lack of food does little to balance against. I was playing around with also making them slow moving like the ogre but this was just way to much. The unique talent requirement system is at least some advantage that also makes a big difference as to how you spend your attribute points.

• Does not require food but cannot use potions.
  
• Poison + Gas Resistance
  
• Vulnerable to Fire
  
• Uses experience levels to satisfy talent requirements instead of attributes. The levels were chosen to match the pace that a character dumping all points into their primary attribute would unlock a talent. Of course the advantage here is that you can put your attribute points wherever you want and have all talents unlocked as you level up.
  

Gargoyle:
I was also reasonably happy with the gargoyles existing implementation. The change here is simply that only HP regen is disabled. The issue here is that gargoyle casters were just way harder. If MP doesn’t regen then really neither should cooldowns or speed points which would of course be ridiculous. I actually think the gargoyle might be to strong now, since I’d like him to be one of the ‘hard’ races, so feedback and suggestions here are appreciated.

• Does not naturally regenerate HP.
  
• Fully healed when descending to a new dungeon level.
  
• Flying
  
• +2 Protection, +20% Shock Resistance, +20% Toxic Resistance.
  

Vampire:
This should definitely be a hard race to play, though it can vary quite a bit based on what dungeon branches generate. He probably needs a few more interesting traits to fully flesh him out but I’d like to get some feedback on the initial main mechanic first. For the record I did manage to win a game going through the Iron-Forge with no blood but it was pretty insanely difficult.

• Does not naturally regenerate HP.
  
• Heals when stepping on blood.
  

• Passive talents Fortitude, Mental-Clarity and Weapon-Mastery now provide bonuses equivalent to +2/+6 attributes rather than +3/+6. The second rank is harder to qualify for so should give the larger bonus. Also the smaller bonus feels fine in the early game when stats are low and the larger bonus feels better later in the game as stat totals grow.
  
• Shield Wall is now a passive talent that grants Shield-Block 20%, 30% when at low HP:
• Berserk similarly now grants +20%, +30% melee damage when at low HP:
• Shield-Of-Ice is now a passive talent which provides a constantly regenerating shield of hit points (same basic idea as before). This was just annoying to have to recast constantly so what I did was just make it assume the player was constantly recasting it on cooldown. This ended up actually being far to strong so it got toned back a bit. I feel like the previous implementation was an example of a somewhat common design problem where some mechanic is overpowered as long as the player is willing to constantly do some mindless, repetitive busy work, obviously I’m not a fan of this.
  
• Infusion of Storm and Infusion of Fire now correctly raise Ability-Power not Magic-Power. The description stated this to be the case but the actual stats were wrong.
  
• Mana restored by infusions is now scaled by Ability-Power (before the status effect bonus is applied). So you get more mana with higher Ability-Power.
  
• Sleep Bomb has had its AoE range knocked back so that it is single target at Rank-I and cross target at Rank-II. Sleep bomb as has been noted by many players was just absurdly OP since it can easily be used to completely shutdown entire groups of enemies or even bosses on cooldown.
  
• Enemies will also now wake up once the sleep effect has worn off. Not sure if these changes go to far. The rogue is definitely a ‘trickier’ class to play, I find this sort of balancing the most difficult. More testing and feedback required here.
  
• Confusion has also had the same AoE reductions for similar reasons. A single 6MP cast of confusion could just destroy a room full of enemies while the player sits back, chilling, taking 0 damage. Duration was slightly increased as a bit of compensation.
  
• Dominate has had to be nerfed quite a bit since it was easily the single most overpowered ability in the game, which completely overshadowed the rest of the enchanters kit and pretty much made any other ability irrelevant. I think one of the biggest things I had overlooked is that dominate is essentially an unresistable, instant kill spell that only cost 6MP with the added bonus of giving an ally stronger than necromancer skeletons. The army of allies is less concerning to me than this ‘unresistable instant kill’.
  
• So dominate will now no longer work on bosses (it already had a bunch of random restrictions) since it previously let you ‘kill’ a boss with a single 6MP cast of a spell and it will now have a 10,6 cooldown so you can’t just win a fight by standing there turning the entire enemy team to your side. Dominate should have to be used in synergy with Confusion and Discord rather than completely replacing them.
  
• Burst-of-Flame damage at Rank-II was scaled back a bit from 36DMG to 32DMG but now only destroys the bursted object 50% of the time. Using Burst-Of-Flame on objects is one of the more interesting ‘skillful’ mechanics in the game so I’d like to emphasis that aspect of the ability rather than make it just mindless spammy damage. With sufficient Ability-Power it still hits absurdly high damage numbers (the highest in the game I believe).
  
• Enchant items can no longer be unlearned with Potions of Amnesia. This was just silly.
  
• Discord has had its damage reduced but its duration increased. Chain casting discord was just a bit too strong for my liking. It still works very well, but it is now preferable to pair it with a better damage spell. I’m always in favor of ability synergies vs anything where you just spam repeatedly to win.
  
• Talents with short cooldowns now got 10,6 instead of 10,5. A small change but the 5CD just felt slightly to short imo.
  

• Previously the player was gaining +1HP per level which was pretty insignificant, bit odd since he didn’t gain any equivalent MP or SP, and always had me scratching my head a bit when trying to figure out how my total HP was calculated. So instead starting HP is now simply +8HP with no gains per level. This has the nice effect of making the player a bit stronger in the first half of the game (makes the game a bit easier for newer players), while the slight loss of HP at higher levels is pretty irrelevant (a single point of strength nearly makes up for it).
  
• These changes were factored into the difference is size between races so small races actually have the same starting HP as before, medium races get the +8HP and large races get +16HP. Just a small way to further differentiate them.
  
• Boots, Gloves, Helms, and Rings now have a max enchantment of +2 instead of +3. There have been a number of pretty substantial buffs to the way enchantments effect stats over the last few updates. Attributes are now much stronger so enchantments are worth more here. There are a lot more items with multiple stats which are doubly effect (sometimes triple effected). Finally there are just a lot more sources of enchantment in the game now. So with all this in mind this slight restriction seemed appropriate.
  

• Increased the cost of enchantment scrolls from 40GP => 50GP. As mentioned above, enchantments are now incredibly powerful. I often find that buying enchantment scrolls was a far better investment than actually buying better items.
  
• Reduced the price of shields to bring them more in line with the previously reduced armor prices. Like the armor, the price reductions are pretty substantial in many cases.
  
• Added a new friendly enchanter NPC who sells enchantment scrolls for 75GP. Each game will spawn either The Enchanter, The Talent Trainer, or an extra Merchant somewhere in the second half fo the dungeon.
  

• Corrosive slimes are now lava immune (they often spawn near lava or in lava levels).
  
• Corrosive slimes no longer have a damage shield (their corrosion is bad enough).
  
• Torment has had its range reduced from 4.5 => 3.0. This is easily the most deadly enemy ability in the game with no real resistance or defense possible so I want to make it avoidable via positioning.
  
• Black Mambas and Crypt Crawlers had pretty pathetic poison damage compared to where in the dungeon they appear. I found poison to be very dangerous early game with centipedes and scorpions but barely even noticeable in the late game. So this was boosted a fair bit to maintain that ‘avoid poisonous enemies in melee’ mechanic.
  
• Yendor final form has HP reduced from 500HP => 400HP. I found that by the time you’ve cleared his guards, broken the goblet shield and taken control of the goblet the extra HP just make the fight drag on unnecessarily.
  

• Don’t double up teleport and pit traps on levels (at most 1 per level).
  
• Don’t generate pit traps above boss levels in the branches. Generally it was just dropping you into the little entrance alcove anyways.
  
• Don’t place traps blocking doors.
  
• Several levels in The-Vaults-of-Yendor were toned down a little bit in terms of number of enemies.
  
• As with most updates, a bunch of vaults added to various zones, wherever I noticed something lacking.
  
• Items:
  
• Ring of Evasion: 20% => 10%. Considering that the player only gets +3% evasion per DEX and that the Evasive talent only grants 10% evasion this was just far to strong compared to what are supposed to be comparable rings with HP, MP, melee damage etc.
  
• Totem of Beasts was significantly buffed to summoned 12 stronger wolves. This might even need to be buffed further as it should be pretty close to a ‘click to win the fight’ item, considering the relative strength of other items that can drop off bosses at this depth.
  
• Archery goggles were toned down from +4DMG => +3DMG. With the new changes to item damage bonus (exceeding damage caps). This item was just absurd.
  

• Edges of the screen will now turn red when low HP to give a bit of a warning. I swear this was already a thing once upon a time. It must have fallen down that same blackhole that's consumed so many other things I swear were already implemented/fixed.
  
• Changed the default unsafe move/attack toggle to Z instead of CTRL. There's some kind of conflict with using CTRL as a toggle since apparently Macs use this as the right click toggle (I thought it was CMD?). Anyways the underlying framework I’m using was giving some odd behavior here so rather than tinker some more with the framework we'll just use Z going forward. Its not like this is a very common button anyways.
  
• This all came up because… fire pots will now give the ‘unsafe target’ warning message when attempting to attack them and Z must now be held to proceed. No more clicking in the fog and insta dying to a fire pot!
  
• The option to ‘Play Again’ on the death screen with the same race/class combination.
  

• Poison clouds from enemies shooting bolts of… poison clouds at you were triggering the ‘dangerous terrain’ message for enemies immune to… poison clouds.
  
• Arcane arrows no longer trigger spike traps.
  
• Shield of Ice was not saving and reloading correctly (had its HP reset to 1 every time).
  
• Slow characters could not interact with the merchant on diagonals.
  
• There were some specific angles where an enemy would fire a bolt at the player near corners and the bolt would be blocked by the wall.
  
• Going up and down with a ranged enemy at max range would have them just mirror your movement and never move closer. They will now always prefer to move in a little closer than their max range.
  
• Enemies were wandering into poison gas (from vents) and agroing the player from across the level.
  
• When an enemy tramples the player and kills itself due to the players damage shield, they were leaving a ‘ghost’ on the tile which blocked movement. This has definitely been a thing for a long time.
  
• Constriction was lasting for 50T. I remember doing this for testing purposes not sure if this was left in after one of the last hotfixes or if I did this literally while doing this update. Anyways fixed now back to 5T.
  
• Strafe attack will not attack sleeping enemies.
  
• Scroll-of-Teleportation on the Yendor boss level will not take you into a different room.
  
• It was possible for an unenchanted buckler to spawn on The-Upper-Dungeon level 1 when playing as the warrior.
  

Well that about does it for this update. As always, the next week should have a number of hot-fixes to clean up whatever mess I may have made and then its on to what should be the final major update of the project. Thanks as always for everyone's support and feedback!

Hot-Fix 1.40.1

• Fixed some enemy pathfinding where slow enemies would take non-optimal paths when chasing the player down (and only down for some reason).
  
• Traps, items and gold will now never spawn behind pillars, cross beams and other objects that might hide or obscure them.
  
• Can now use burst of flame on the furnaces in kitchens.
  
• Non-ranged weapons were showing Max-Dex message when the player had a high dexterity (was not actually effecting their damage caps, just an interface issue).
  
• Fixed a crash when mouse over on an enchanted Charm-of-Draining (should not actually be enchantable in the first place).
  

Hot-Fix 1.40.2

• When you use > to fast travel to a side dungeon and change your mind, then use > to fast travel to the main dungeon stairs it crashes. This ONLY occurred when the large ornate zone entrances were used rather than the simple stairs. Fixed by stopping travel to the initial destination immediately.
  
• Don't multi-move, rest, or start exploring when enemies are agroed but out of sight. Previously when running around a corner out of LoS your moves would go from single stepping to multi-stepping without warning.
  
• Dark Elf Assassins poison damage 24DMG => 40DMG. This is part of a continued effort to keep poison melee enemies dangerous deeper into the dungeon.
  
• Closed a tile to monster spawning in Dark-Temple:6 that would trap the NPC between wall, pit and a fire cauldron.
  
• Enemies put to sleep with sleep bomb will now crit hit again just like normal sleeping enemies. Apparently the check for crit hit was on 'not-agroed', and previously sleep bomb caused enemies to lose agro. This broke with the recent changes where they remember you when they wake up i.e. they remain agroed.
  
• Flaming clouds from Lavosa will now extend to the players poison cloud
  
• Vampire boot description now updated to reflect changes
  
• Transferring a mod to a wand will now set its charges to max just as if you enchanted it (wasn't this a thing at some point?)
  
• Shield-Wall and Berserk had the wrong HP thresholds and were not activating at the hp % indicated in the description
  
• The 2nd and 3rd hotkeys for unsafe move were not working. Now fixed.
  
• Charging and activating a teleport trap should not stop charge. Made sure to test this in the case where the spawned monster is in your path, apparently charge is smart enough to connect with the new enemy.
  
• Fixed a level generation crash in The-Dark-Temple after something like 5000+ automatic regens of the level :P
  

Hot-Fix 1.40.3

• Fixed enemies blocking auto-explore 1 turn after dying to certain sources of damage.
  
• Fixed enemies dying on traps persisting on the mini-map for 1 turn.
  
• Level-up will now remove Berserk and Shield-Wall when it heals you to full.
  
• Parry, dodge and block will no longer work against trampling enemies.
  
• Fixed auto-explore being blocked on the first game turn after dying and restarting the game.
  

Hot-Fix 1.40.4
BUGS-AND-CRASHES:

• Fixed: Auto explore was not halting when spotting an enemy unless he was agroed.
  
• Stationary enemies will not block explore, rest and multi-move when not in LoS.
  
• Fixed: Transference tables were able to bypass the max enchantment bonus.
  
• Fixed: Slow explore was not working after zoning unless you took a single step.
  
• Fixed: Fire shrooms (possibly other traps), were blocking 1 tile wide bridges.
  
• Mushroom Kings summoned minions will eventually poof rather than chase you across the level forever.
  
• Merchants and other friendly NPCs will no longer spawn behind pillars, spans and other obscuring objects.
  
• Same with traps such as spike traps.
  

USER-INTERFACE:

• All abilities now show their range.
  
• Throwing weapons now show their range.
  
• Using
• (dot) characters wherever information is displayed as lists. I find this makes it read cleaner.
  
• Using a better -> (arrow) character when showing stat differences.
  

BALANCE:

• A few abilities had 0.5 fractional ranges which only shows up in like 5 out of 100 places range is used so I decided to just adjust up or down to whole numbers. Bear-Trap, Confusion, Discord and Dominate all went from 5.5 => 6.0. Fire-Ball went from 5.5 => 5.0 since Fire-Ball is pretty OP as is and will likely need some further balancing in the future.
  
• Magic-Power has been replaced by Ability-Power on all items. The only remaining source of it is from the enchanters starting talent and I'm considering either changing this to Ability-Power as well or just coming up with something different therefore completely removing Magic-Power from the game.
  
• Death-Aura now gives +3 Life-Tap at Rank-II.
  
• Staff of Power and Staff of Energy have had price reduced to be the same as other weapons in their tier like long bow and long sword.
  

MISC:

• Added the option to wish for charms.
  

Hello everyone!

It’s finally here! The last major zone rework in what's ended up being a nearly 2 year long journey. This time its The Vault of Yendor so for the first time, the game actually has a proper end game that doesn't make me wince every time I reach it! I'm quite excited :)

The next few months will be a lot of clean-up and polish as well as lots of additional content filling in obvious holes. A complete race rework is the first major priority and I’d also like to add an additional class or two. Achievements are definitely also on my ‘must have’ list and I'm sure there's some other important stuff. The current plan is to have the game totally finished with an official end to Early Access by mid December in time for the Steam winter sale. I'd love to hear from you all what sort of things you'd like to see in these next updates that you think should really be in the final game.

So now onto the update!


The main bulk of the update is a complete overhaul of The Vault of Yendor, its monsters and the final goblet level. I’m calling this a first draft which I’m releasing ‘early’ since I’d like to get feedback on the difficulty level here. I think getting the right balance in this last section of the game is pretty critical.

In contrast to the rest of the dungeon, The Vault of Yendor is composed entirely of hand-made levels, each with a carefully planned theme and challenge. There are over 30 of these already and I’m planning on quite a few more. The 4 main levels of the zone are selected so as to avoid repetition. So for example there will never be two fire themed levels. The idea here is to have the widest possible set of challenges to really test the players build.

These levels are intentionally pretty tough and during testing I’ve often found myself just searching desperately for the exit in order to save consumables for the last level.

The final level is now a proper boss fight with the Wizard Yendor himself. Several fights in fact due to his ‘immortality’. There's a pretty simple ‘trick’ to actually finally killing him which should be pretty obvious by design.

I’m trying to strike a fine balance here between providing an interesting and challenging last fight, while not totally screwing over the player at this final moment. With a good character build, a decent stock of consumables and no silly mistakes he should be pretty straightforward. As amusing as it would be to make this into some sort of elaborate death trap, I’d really rather not see a ton of character deaths at this late stage of the game. The fight should sort of be won or lost long before arriving here i.e. build a good character, don’t blow all your consumables, play the fight carefully and he should be ‘easy’. So please let me know how it goes, feedback here is very appreciated.

Yendor Taunts and Messages:
With the addition of The Wizard Yendor as an actual character in the game, I’ve added some dialog taunts as the player progresses through the dungeon as well as a bunch of signs and messages in various vaults. Though I have no intention of adding much of a story to the game beyond ‘goblet good, go get it’, I think it doesn’t hurt to characterize Yendor himself as a classic evil overlord persona and give a bit of context to the players quest. I’d love suggestions for more signs, messages, taunts, or anything else of this sort.


Another big chunk of the update is a final major rebalancing to character development, specifically with regards to attribute points.

There were two main issues that prompted this rebalance:

First, with all the new attribute items, shrines, potions and fountains, I was finding that all my characters were ending the game with an absurd number of attribute points. I’d often end up with characters with a maxed primary stat, a very high secondary stat and still have some points left over for the third stat. This resulted in all builds sort of converging on a single ‘do everything’ build rather than each character being distinct.

The second problem, which has been around for awhile is that 1 Speed Point per point of Dexterity is just really really good compared to the other two attributes. Previously it was even set as 1 Speed Point per 2 dexterity but I really dislike these sort of odd break points.

So with that in mind I changed attribute points to be gained on even levels only instead of every level and began rebalancing from there. With a lot less total points, I’ve been able to make each point more powerful. So instead of nerfing Dexterity and Speed Points somehow, Strength and Intelligence are simply stronger in comparison. The changes are as follows:

• Attribute points are gained on even levels (talent points on odd).
  
• Strength now grants +5HP per point (previously +3HP).
  
• Intelligence now grants +3MP per point (previously +2MP).
  
• Intelligence now grants Ability-Power instead of Magic-Power and so effects most of the abilities in the game. Intelligence has always been the least useful attribute in the game which non-casters tended to just ignore. This change should not be enough to encourage some kind of ridiculous pure melee build with maxed INT but instead make hybrid casters much more viable and make finding INT items not completely useless for non-casters.
  
• Magic-Power is still a stat on robes, staves, and the Magic-Mastery talent. It simply adds on top of the more general Ability-Power and of course only works with spells.
  
• The super specific Fire-Focus, Toxic-Focus etc. have been replaced with this Magic-Power stat. These were just way to specific. Either you found one that matched your class and it was stupidly over powered, or much more often it didn’t match and was useless.
  
• Speed points previously had an absurdly long regen time (20 turns), as a clumsy attempt to balance them which resulted in weird feast or famine balance. Either you had a full bar of speed points and were effectively unkillable or you were out and no amount of kiting around would regen them. This has now been cut in half to 10 turns making it actually possible to regen during a fight.
  
• Finally talent attribute requirements have been reduced so that talents are still learnable at approximately the same levels.
  

This ended up being one of those changes that unraveled a lot of design knots that have been bugging me for awhile. I did a ton of testing for this update and my observations have been:

• A pure class is now totally possible and quite viable. Maxing your primary attribute often leaves little room for the other two. Due to the increased power of the attributes this results in some pretty nutty characters. Tanks with 150HP or more, casters with 60+ mana, dexterity characters with… well 14 speed points was already pretty nuts, but now it regens faster!
  
• Hybrids still totally work but don’t end up maxing either attribute and generally have nothing to spare for the third. The change to Ability-Power makes it much more viable to take a spell talent as a non-caster and start raising INT since your other abilities will also benefit.
  
• Its still totally possible with the right combination of equipment, potions, shrines etc. to build a ‘do everything’ character, its just the exception now instead of the rule.
  
• Generally speaking all 3 attributes now feel reasonably useful to all character builds. Every point at least adds some usable bonus.
  
• Items in general are now quite a bit more powerful since a +2 attribute ring is a big swing, which can really make you rethink your build going forward.
  
• The starting stat differences between different class/races is now quite substantial.
  
• The overall difficulty level of the game has not really been effected. Its not harder or easier rather there are just a wider variety of character builds now possible.
  

Max weapon damage will now only apply to bonuses gained from attribute points. Any bonus from items or talents will now always be added. I was constantly annoyed when, say as a melee focused character, I’d find a +2 ring of slaying which should be the most amazing item ever, but I'd often be damage capped or close to it so it would be useless.

With this in mind the Weapon-Mastery talent has been reverted to once again simply add melee damage since this is now always useful.


Tons of minor tweaks here which I wont list, mostly fiddling with cooldowns, damage, defenses, exact hit point numbers etc.. Some more important ones:

• Substantially increased the damage of Smite on high level priests. Considering that this ability is quite easy to dodge, failure to do so should be very punishing.
  
• Monsters now lose agro when the player leaves the level.
  
• Tornados will no longer be summoned next to each other (this was getting a bit out of hand).
  
• Enemies will no longer cast discord on an already discorded player. It was possible to get hit multiple times in a single turn and instantly die even with full HP.
  
• Bojack the Berserker is no longer fast moving. A fast moving, high damage boss, this early in the game was pretty unfair.
  
• Minotaur King had no cooldown on charge (who knows why lol). He would charge constantly, back and forth, back and forth, making him trivial to kill.
  
• The Vampire Lord will 'poof' into less bats each time, making him slightly easier to kill.
  
• Tentacle Spitters and Lava Eels have had their damage reduced but also their cooldown reduced (they attack faster). Their cooldown was super long and so they tended to sit around doing nothing during a fight, but in many vaults where they appear in a group, they would all fire on the first turn and do pretty massive damage. They are actually more dangerous now in a fight, but less likely to gank you when rounding a corner.
  
• Orc Berserkers will now wait until they are close to the player to go berserk. It has a short duration and would often wear off by the time they even got close.
  
• Pathfinding changes: when enemies would bunch up in a doorway, some of them would often start to take an absurdly long alternate path around. I fiddled with this a bit so that the closest enemies will just wait their turn since its likely the player is either going to move, or kill the guy blocking the door. Of course the guys at the back should still try to find an alternate route, especially if its short. This is a work in progress which I'll be adjusting going forward. Does anyone know of any resources regarding this sort of thing? I'm having trouble even articulating on paper how this should work.
  
• Pathfinding changes: ranged enemies will now do a better job moving to a tile from which they can attack the player, rather than just giving up the moment they get blocked and running straight at you. This problem was very apparent with archers on fortress walls who would often conga-line to the steps away from the player (since this is the only walkable path), rather than just stepping towards the player back into range.
  

• All non casters now start the game with a healing potion (casters have always started with a mana potion).
  
• Rogues now start the game with a short bow instead of a short sword. Considering that they are DEX based character I think its fairer to start them with a bow and let them find a melee weapon rather than the reverse. Not that characters are totally defined by their starting weapon, but this does give a more even split of 3 classes starting with melee and 2 with bows.
  
• Due to attribute points being stronger, many items that provide raw stats have also been buffed.
  
• Two-Handed weapons have had their damage increased quite substantially. Giving up the shield slot is a pretty big penalty so these things need to be sufficiently over powered to compensate.
  
• Archery Goggles, which were always pretty junk, now add +4 range damage. Given the changes to damage bonuses this makes them a very powerful item.
  
• Added rings of Flaming, Toxic, Frozen and Stormy Energy. A mix of resistance and mana.
  
• Added Boots of the Wind with levitation and reflection.
  
• Boots of Vampirism now heal 10% max HP per blood puddle absorbed instead of just a flat +1HP.
  
• Wizardy Armor (dropping in The Arcane Tower), now grants fire, cold and shock resistance along with intelligence. This is end game armor and should be some of the best in the game.
  
• Shadow Silk Armor (dropping in The Crypt), now grants toxic resistance along with dexterity.
  
• All blunt weapons have had their damage increased. They now have the distinction of being the highest damage weapon type along with their armor penetration property.
  
• All cleaving weapons (axes) have had their damage reduced. Cleave is just absurdly powerful and honestly still is, even with this nerf. That said, I think these changes have at least made the sword vs polearm vs axe vs blunt comparison a bit more balanced.
  
• Serpent-Fang-Dagger and Blood-Stringer have had the Parry stat added since they are of the sword type.
  
• Greater Staves have had their damage increased (they should have higher damage then comparable bows).
  
• Protection now scales linearly with enchantment bonuses. This was actually a bug introduced... who knows when. It was absurd to enchant a +5 protection piece of armor a few times and get +10 protection.
  

A new and powerful item type that fits in the melee, range or shield slot. Still debating if shield slot should be included here. These items should have the highest stat bonuses in the game as well as some stats that don’t occur on any other items.

They make it possible to create say a pure archer who gives up his melee weapon for some big stat bonus. Or the more extreme case of the true pure caster, duel wielding charms, with no weapon at all. I’ll be adding more of these in the future. A lot of stats or effects that may have been broken on other equipment may find there way onto charms.

• The merchant will now provide a wider variety of equipment, hopefully resulting in more actually useful stuff to buy.
  
• The merchant will not add his stock until you actually talk to him. Previously just visiting the level would add the stock.
  
• Reduced the cost of many items (in some cases by quite a bit). For comparison I’m considering that a talent point or attribute point costs 75GP and stacks on top of everything you have, while a piece of equipment is often replacing another piece and so is not actually giving that much.
  

• Tomes of knowledge will try to provide a more even spread of passive/active talents and talents of the 3 attribute types.
  
• Recovery buffed: 20HP, 40HP => 30HP, 60HP
  
• Freezing Cloud range increased by 1
  
• Rogues now start with Evasive and Stealth-Mastery while precision has become their Tier-II talent instead of Second-Wind.
  
• Rebalanced talents that provide a raw stat bonus which is also provided by an attribute point. I felt that evasion at 10%,20% always felt good and this is equivalent to 3DEX and 6DEX so I used this as the reference.
  
• Fortitude: 15HP, 30HP,
  
• Mental Clarity: 9MP, 18MP,
  
• Melee Mastery: 3DMG, 6DMG
  

• Summoned-Skeletons will now path through poison clouds (they are immune).
  
• Stopped monsters that were casting discord from outside of LoS.
  
• Freezing and enemy will stop constriction.
  
• Enemies were activating charge when netted or otherwise immobile.
  
• The player will now immediately stop moving when enemies spawn in via portals.
  
• Large enemies are now knocked back by charge and miss their turn (same as other sizes).
  
• Dash attacking across a bear trap had a very odd bug where you would be trapped but your next click would complete your dash. Very odd, but now fixed.
  
• Even more odd. Dash attacking across an enemy that was standing on a bear trap that had just opened would trap the player on the same tile as the enemy resulting in crash or odd behaviour. In this very obscure edge case, the bear trap will simply be ignored and the player will complete his dash attack. I have no idea how else to even resolve this :P
  
• Force walls will now block pole arm attacks.
  
• The player can no longer rest while levitating over a pit. I totally didn’t discover this by falling to my death on an end level…
  
• Enemies that were standing behind a door were blocking auto-explore. The player now includes the door itself in the list of explorable tiles.
  
• Player was often opening doors with auto-explore and then darting off to explore some other area before returning to explore the hall. This has been somewhat fixed.
  
• Torment was effected by the the double discord multiplier and would insta kill you.
  
• Perfect-Aim was not adding range to thrown weapons.
  
• War-Wagons were oddly trampling their own orbs of fire.
  

Well that about sums it up for this update. As always I'll be doing a lot of quick hot-fixes in the next week for any issues or bugs that crop up. After that I plan on doing a lot of smaller, more frequent updates as the project wraps up. Thanks as always for all your support, I'm looking to hearing your feedback and suggestions!

Update 1.39.1 - September-20-2021
- Lava had NaN damage in Vault-Of-Yendor:5/5 which caused any enemies taking damage from it to also get NaN HP and become unkillable.

Update 1.39.2 - September-20-2021
- Fixed issues with Yendor not spawning portals on his death.
- Related but, also clicking some portals in Yendor:5/5 was crashing the game.
- Fixed a crash when mousing over items in inventory or shop (a stat rand-arts was causing the crash).

Update 1.39.3 - September-20-2021
- Fixed a crash occurring when triggering portal spawned monsters while also picking up an item in the same tile.
- Fixed some typos

Update 1.39.4 - September-21-2021
- Fixed a crash/lockup when wishing for a staff from scrolls of acquirement or wishing wells.
- Auto explore will no longer open doors if there is nothing to explore on either side.
- Added gates to the last level of The-Iron-Fortress to prevent levitating over the conveyor belts.
- Fixed: there were a few angles where the player or NPCs could shoot, cast spells, or otherwise interact through walls.
- Fixed: game would lock up when talking to the merchant occasionally. There was an infinite loops as he tried to stock unique equipment in some cases.
- Fixed: goblin storm mage (possibly others) was constantly swapping places with player when in melee range.

Update 1.39.5 - September-22-2021
- The game timer will now pause when dialog window is open.
- The game timer will now pause when loading new levels.
- Ranged enemies will now prefer to move to tiles from which they can attack you that are as far away as possible. They should not be rushing towards the player quite so much. Still working on pathfinding, not happy with it yet.
- Wizard Yendor will no longer regen HP. I'd like to let the player chip away at him without having to beat his quite high regen rate.
- Fixed: A crash in which Yendor was killed either while on a bear trap or when being knocked back onto a bear trap.
- Fixed: Charging the Wizard Yendor would cause the portal to spawn beneath the players feet and lock all movement.

Update 1.39.6 - September-23-2021
- Fixed: Killing a War-Engine w/ shields up resulted in a crash.
- Fixed: Game would crash when Yendor tried to blink away from the player while surrounded by force walls.
- Fixed: An enemy whipping the player into a pit would result in the whip graphic stuck on screen for the rest of the game.
- Fixed: At a specific angle, ranged enemies were not shooting but also were not moving into range.
- Fixed: At very specific angles, an enemy would be out of vision (greyed out by fog-of-war), but still attackable. It was actually the vision LoS that was not permissive enough since there was in fact a clear line between the two tiles. So the vision LoS is slightly more permissive to cover this specific angle.

Update 1.39.7 - September-25-2021
- Fixed a crash where tornados would kill a summoner, which would poof his summons, then try to kill the summons (all in the same turn).
- Fixed a crash with error message referencing 'noDuration' and statusEffects. Occurred when a dominated priest was constricted by, in this case, a golem and killed him with smite. There was a very specific order this had to occur in which was a fun little puzzle to figure out :P.
- Ballista's (and other rotating turrets) will no longer rotate and follow the player if they cannot see him.

Update 1.39.8 - September-29-2021
- Fixed a level gen crash in Ice-Caves.
- Dominated NPCs will no longer attack unaware or sleeping enemies.
- Healing potions now also cure Slow.
- Confused enemies will not summon orbs, blades etc. (confusion should not spread to their summons and so the summons would always attack the player).
- Freezing cloud, poison cloud, and dangerous terrain in general will no longer block spawners. If no safe tile is available they will spawn their monsters into dangerous terraion.
- Immobile enemies are now immune to slow (doesn't make sense).
- Players ability: Summon-Skeletons will summon into dangerous terrain if no safe tiles exist.
- Orc-Slavers now have a melee attack (same as Goblin-Slavers).
- The player will no longer perform melee strafe attacks on damage shielded enemies unless using a polearm or wearing Beast-Masters-Gloves.
- Sword-of-Energy now has parry stat added to it (like all other bladed weapons).
- Reduced the cost the merchant charges for enchantments on items from +20GP to +10GP. Continuing to try to make items in the shop more relevant.

Update 1.39.9 - October-02-2021
Hopefully this is the last hot-fix as I'm eager to get going on the next update. So assuming nothing is burning uncontrollably I'm planning on getting to work on 1.40 on Monday. Should be a quicker update since the focus is primarily on fiddling with the race stats and balancing talents and items in general. I'll likely release it somewhat earlier in order to gather feedback.
- Fixed: clicking fountains w/ explore. This was one of those infuriatingly simple fixes. I've seen this reported many times and experienced it myself many times. I've tried to fix it... many times, and was never able to actually replicate it in testing. I tried all sorts of different things. Finally I realized it ONLY happens with energy fountains, and in all my testing I was always using a healing fountain... durrrr. Literally the only issue was that 'Energy Fountain' was misspelled on the list of 'Spotted Objects', the objects that halt exploration and movement.
- Fixed some enemy pathing issues. Umbr had a good screen shot depicting ranged enemies that were out of range that would take the long way around rather than just stepping forward. Their pathfinding was prioritizing the furthest tile in range to the target (ranged enemies try to maintain distance). So this is now adjusted where they consider both the range to target (try to maximize) and the length of the path (try to minimize).
- Fixed: blinking out of a bear trap did not remove the 'immobile' status effect.
- Fixed: bear traps were not ticking their 'immobile' status effect on the first turn.
- Fixed: The-Spider-Queen will no longer become unstable on her own webs.
- Fixed: Dominating a hidden character will now make them unhidden. Previously they would remain hidden and never actually unhide / do anything.
- During my own playthroughs I noticed that there seemed to be a real lack of gold recently. I realized that by reducing the price of many items (in order to make them more affordable), this had the effect of reducing the amount of gold the player gets from selling items. Since the player typically sells more items then he buys, the net effect was slightly less overall gold. I really want the player to have a decent pile of cash before tackling Yendor in order to do final character development choices. So I've adjusted the sell price of items slightly from 0.25% => 0.30%. Not a huge change, but I'll be keeping an eye on this going forward.
- Fixed: enemies were fleeing while constricting the player.
- Fixed: enemies will no longer use their bolt spells when out of LoS of the player (even though they technically have a clear bolt path).
- Fixed another one of those odd angles where enemies were out of LoS but could still shoot the player (player could also shoot them). Actually did a ton of work on LoS and player vision and smoothed out a lot of odd things. Please let me know if you notice any more oddities in this area.

Hello everyone!

Another big update today. Last time I mentioned I was ready to start working on completely reworking The Vault of Yendor and I figured that I'd spend the first week or two cleaning up some bits and pieces across the rest of the game. Well those bits and pieces sort of grew, as they always seem to do, and as the weeks turned into months I figured it would be better to just make this a big clean up and all around content update.

I had a bunch of help this time from a friend who's worked with me before (Zellyna on the Discord server). He did a ton of new vaults and levels, vastly increasing the amount of dungeon content in the game. So big shout out to him, we'll be continuing to work together for future updates as we wrap this project up.

I also want to give a big shout out to Random595 (also on Discord) who has recently posted some quite frankly insane challenge runs to YouTube. His 1HP challenge runs pretty much confirmed in my mind that he understands this game far better then I do, so be sure to check him out!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4zVFdgPe_3gJUCoW5-YP-Q

Now onto the update:


As with the previous updates a ton of new vaults and levels across all zones in the dungeon. Roughly half the time on this update was spent in this area so there's a lot to see here. In particular Colten added a lot of new unique special levels filling out a lot of zones that were previously missing anything of this sort.

Attribute Shrines:
An attribute shrine (STR, DEX or INT) will now always spawn somewhere in the lower parts of the dungeon allowing the player to buy attribute points. This provides another place to spend gold and gives the option of either maxing out your builds primary attribute or else quickly building up a secondary attribute. This may later be expanded to a larger set of shrines to various gods each granting different bonuses.

Merchant:

• The merchant will now often spawn in little side rooms. Mostly just looks neat.
  
• At least 2 merchants are now guaranteed to spawn in every game.
  
• When the merchant spawns in the wilderness zones, he will no longer spawn on the first level. This gives the player a bit more time to collect guild, and increases the chance that you can actually afford something when you meet him.
  

Portal Spawners:
The Dark Temple now has triggered spawners that teleport in monsters. This lets us setup more ambush type vaults with enemies coming from multiple directions. I'm always looking for more ways to setup fights where the enemies are not just coming from one direction.

Misc:

• Steam Vent no longer push the player (its just confusing)
  
• Library (with the free talent/talent point) should not spawn on Wilderness:1 (give the player more time to establish his base character).
  
• Drop-Walls and Monster-Zoos will never spawn on the first dungeon level reducing the chance of a level 1 death.
  
• Items dropping in later dungeon levels have a much higher chance of being enchanted. I'm trying to make sure that the player continues to get upgrades throughout the entire course of the game.
  

General:

• Added a hardcap to evasion at 75% (I thought this was already a thing?)
  
• Increase mana regen slightly (1 point) 5T => 4T. It was taking 30T to regen the 6MP required for a single spell which I feel is too long compared to cool-down talents. Obviously casters have a big pool of MP with which to quickly spam spells but this still felt a bit to long.
  
• Reduced the attribute requirements slightly on all talents (talent points should be easier to spend)
  
• Slightly slower exp XL:11-16 since it was easy to hit max level well before the end of game. I'd like the player to still hit max level before the goblet if performing a full dungeon clear.
  

Talents:

• Bear-Trap and Sleep-Bomb now have 10,5 turn cooldown (same as other cool-down talents)
  
• Bear-Traps replace simple objects like blood, vines, grass etc.
  
• Sneak-Attack changed to Precision which improves ALL critical hit damage with ALL damage-types. Since a sneak attack i.e. attacking an unaware enemy, causes a critical hit, this is just a flat out improvement in the sense that it does exactly what it did before plus a whole bunch more.
  
• Shield-Block improved 10%,20% => 20%,30%. It should be strictly better than Evasive since it is Tier-II and requires a shield
  
• Fortitude-II now gives twice as many HP as Rank-1
  
• Mental-Clarity-II now gives twice as many MP as Rank-1
  
• Cone-Of-Cold-II increases range instead of damage. I've made similar changes in the past, my thinking is that Magic-Power increases damage so Rank-2 should grant something you cannot otherwise improve.
  
• Shields-Up-II now also reflects projectiles.
  
• Melee-Mastery-II completely removes damage cap on melee weapons. Melee-Mastery was always sort of sub-optimal since it was so easy to hit the damage cap with strength alone. This quite definitively makes melee weapons the highest damage weapons which makes up for their lack of range. Consider that ranged characters can often get 3-4 shots off before an enemy gets into melee range.
  
• Charge will no longer end the players turn when used (the same as all other quick moves). There was some odd interaction here where if you crushed an enemy against a wall it was still your turn but otherwise your turn ended and you'd get smacked. So now charge just works like other quick moves and does not end the players turn.
  

Items:

• Enchantment scrolls will provide a larger bonus on larger stats (stuff like 10+ HP items)
  
• Potion of Amnesia should be cheap (make it easy to switch abilities)
  
• Food should restore speed points
  
• Amulet of Spirit shielding should just be made a ring (Ring of Spirit Shielding)
  
• NEW: Ring of Harmony 8HP, 4MP
  
• NEW: Ring of Resistance +10% to all resistance
  
• NEW: Boots of Dexterity
  
• Circlet of Knowledge +6MP => +2INT (now have STR gloves, DEX boots and INT helm)
  
• Goblin Battle Staff Magic-Power:10% => Intelligence:1 (nice to give some early attributes)
  

Elite Monsters:

• All elite enemies should have extra health (making them like little mini-bosses)
  
• Tough elites should have a lot more HP x1.5 => x2.0
  
• Strong elites were not actually adding melee damage to their attacks. This is now fixed.
  

Monster Abilities:

• Walls of fire are now longer (5) but do not wrap around the player. I didn't like how it so massively restricted your movement.
  
• Bullfrogs now trample
  
• All imps now fire single elemental slow projectiles (makes the arcane tower unique with lots of dodging).
  
• War Engines now trample the player
  
• Air-Strike replaces Burst-Of-Wind on monsters so that they don't kill their allies quite so much
  
• The Demonologist Major-Boss now summons Hell-Portals quickly when engaged rather than a zone wide effect.
  
• Hell-Portals now count down and then summon 4 imps all at once.
  
• Bombs thrown by the Clockwork Bombers will now replace scrap, oil, blood etc. It was often the case that they couldn't even use their ability due to the clutter on the ground.
  
• Clockwork bombers now have a basic cannon ball projectile attack since its still quite easy to back them into a position in which they cannot throw their bombs.
  
• The Drachnid Queen now has Discord and a stronger arrow attack
  
• The Corrupted Ent now has a melee attack and vine whip that pulls the player in.
  
• Corrupted Druids now heal their allies.
  

Monster Balance:
Most of this is part of the general, ongoing theme, of reducing cool-downs to more closely match the length of fights. If you've missed the last few updates, I did a bunch of tests that confirmed that the vast majority of fights take well under 10T which was the sort of default, no brain cool-down I was using originally for most enemy abilities. Since I want enemies to actually use their abilities more than once in a fight, I've been gradually reducing cool-downs across the board.

• Spider nests spawn faster CD8 => CD5
  
• Bee Hives spawn faster CD8 => CD5 and spawn 3 Bees instead of 2
  
• Sun Flowers attack faster CD4 => CD2
  
• Dire Wolf Cage spawn faster 8CD => 5CD
  
• Demonologist Boss faster throw ice CD:4 => CD:2
  
• Orc berserkers has more HP
  
• Orc-Chaos-Knight is now XL:12 (same as Arcane-Archer)
  
• Ogre Shaman major boss has faster shoot rate
  
• Gnoll Shaman major boss has faster shoot rate
  
• Gnoll Shaman major boss has group heal instead of single heal
  
• All Group-Heals changed from 0.75HP/10T => 0.5HP => 5T
  
• Knock-Back-Cannon-Ball chance 0.25% => 0.50% (turrets, war-engines, clockwork bombers)
  
• Giant leaches now have more HP and damage and no longer spawn in big swarms. The Sewers already have a good swarm enemy with the plague rats.
  
• Mummys never flee (undead should never flee)
  

• Cold duration is now proportional to damage taken mitigated by cold resistance. Taking 1DMG at 100HP should not slow you for 5 turns.
  
• Tomes do not immediately add talents (click them to add talents or sell them)
  
• Sneak attack crits (attacking an unaware enemy) now work with ALL damage-types. This makes stealth more generally useful for all character types since you can, for example, get some massive group clearing crits with something like a fire ball. Add the new Precision talent which improves ALL crit damage for even more destruction.
  
• Teleport trap will unagro enemies (just like teleport scroll)
  
• Drop walls now reveal the entire area when they explode (just a visual thing).
  
• Reward rooms now reveal the entire area when first spotted. This stops the annoying case where you can't see some of the corners behind a locked gate.
  
• Poison gas vents cycle faster and the gas fades faster. No more spamming wait to get past them. This is part of the same line of reasoning of many recent changes where cool-downs and durations have been reduced to more closely match the actual length of standard fights.
  
• Cone-Of-Cold now breaks Walls-Of-Fire
  
• Cone-Of-Cold (and other freezing spells) now creates ice on water even if there was blood on the water (just destroys the blood).
  
• When an enemy goes to sleep he will lose berserk
  
• When an enemy goes to sleep he will stop constricting you
  
• When an enemy goes to sleep he will stop casting fire storm
  

• Space bar (or whatever key you have bound to 'accept' will now close the level up message box.
  
• Indicate the max value for reflection, resistance and evasion on mouse over
  
• Dominate Ability mouse over desc now indicates how many allies you have
  
• Equipment comparison now shows attribute changes
  
• Wand of draining was previously showing targeting on allies even though it did not effect them.
  
• Scroll of fear will not show targeting on immune enemies
  
• Pop-up text counting down when levitating over a pit to make it clear that you are about to fall.
  
• Show Win/Loss and win % on main character select screen
  
• Changed default movement controls to WASD. Doesn't effect anyone with custom key bindings but this is likely what new players will reach for first. This is how I've been playing the game for a few years now, relying mostly on WASD movement with the occasional click for diagonal movement when I need it. If I could start all over again from scratch (or you know, for the next game), I would balance the entire game around orthogonal only movement so that WASD would work completely. Considering that numpads are becoming increasingly rare (neither of my keyboards have them), and WASD is basically the universal movement control scheme, I'd like to move in this direction in the future.
  

Did a bunch of little improvements and cleanups that I'm not going to bother listing but I did spend an ENTIRE DAY making nice little corners tiles for pools of water and other liquids so damnit I'm listing it here!

• Made nice little corner tiles for pools of water.
  

Totally worth it...

• Heartwood Bow was creating vines on water when the water was covered by ice.
  
• Summon rats was going through 1 thick wall
  
• Slime King rune door was opening when one one was still left alive.
  
• Shock was spreading over water when the water was covered in ice.
  
• Auto range attack will not attack enemies through smoke even though you could still click to attack
  
• Don't show sprint targeting in unexplored space
  
• Diagonal steps should count as slightly more in A* pathfinding code. Sort of a funny result of having diagonal and orthogonal movement both take one turn. The player would sometimes zig up or down a tile when traveling in a straight line since technically the paths are the same length. Making the pathfinder count diagonal steps as slightly more expensive fixes this problem.
  
• The player will no longer stop Go-To-Zone traveling when passing through portals.
  
• Netting enemies now agros them
  
• Slimes were giving too much EXP considering that a single slime splits into a dozen small ones.
  
• Discord could not be shot through clouds of smoke even though its a perfectly clear path
  
• Burst-of-Flame could not be shot through clouds of smoke even though its a perfectly clear path
  
• Cannon turrets had no duration on throw bomb. I think this was left in from some previous debugging and was quite disgusting to deal with.
  
• Charging enemy when put to sleep will no longer continue charging as soon as it wakes up
  
• Falling through pit trap on a 4th floor will no longer drop you into the boss vault.
  
• Fixed a bug with the regen rate of trolls that made the amount of HP they regen actually max out at some odd range (I think around 60HP) and then actually decrease as you gained more hp. It was as insane as it sounds. They now correctly have double regen rate as indicated in their race description.
  
• Resting for HP was resting far to long. It was not taking into account improved regen rates.
  
• Added a max range on webs. After missing the player they were flying across the entire level.
  
• Charging an enemy at the edge of a pit w/o levitate will not take the final step onto the pit causing you to fall down.
  
• When auto traveling to the stairs if the player hit a teleport trap he would then do some funny sliding through walls thing and continue to the stairs.
  
• Traps and vents should not spawn next to each other
  
• Dominated allies will never run
  

Alright, that about wraps it up. Next time The Vault of Yendor for real this time! I cringe every time I reach it since its so primitive compared to the rest of the dungeon now.

Thanks as always for everyone's support, feedback and the positive steam reviews (we passed 300! weee!). Will be spending the next week or so doing hot-fixes as per tradition :P

Update 1.38.1 - Saturday August-07-2021:
- Fixed goblet not spawning on some of the the last levels.
- Fixed level-gen crash (there was a note mentioning food and totally messed up tiles if you reloaded)
- Fixed crash w/ a level in The-Upper-Dungeon where clicking the Tome-Of-Knowledge resulted in a crash.

Update 1.38.2 - Wednesday August-11-2021:
- Fixed a Slow-Explore crash when playing Ogre in The-Iron-Forge near conveyor belts.
- Fixed a crash in The-Iron-Forge when poison clouds (or any clouds) were cast atop a steam vent. Game would crash when the steam tried to come out.
- Fixed some messed up platform walls in a few vaults/levels.

Update 1.38.3 - Friday August-13-2021:
- Fixed some inaccessible vaults that were being placed in the wall in The-Sunless-Desert
- Fixed shrines either allowing you to buy points past your natural cap or not allowing you to buy points when you were not at your cap. It was not checking your race/class bonuses.
- Fixed a whole host of level-gen crashes in The-Orc-Fortress. This took an absurd amount of time (10+ hours) just to isolate and replicate. What I finally found was that a few vaults were off by one in the map file and so they had open floor tiles on their edges. When these were placed up against the map edge a number of different crashes could occur. So after all that time spent isolating this damn crash the solution was... to move the vaults over by one tile. Programmers will understand the mix of pain/euphoria :P
- While holding an item on the cursor both the talent and attribute upgrade buttons will now be hidden.
- The spell Discord was incorrectly requiring clear LoS. This has now been fixed.
- Fixed a bunch more messed up platform wall tiles. I believe I caught them all this time.

Update 1.38.4 - Saturday August-14-2021:
BALANCE:
- Weapon-Mastery-II changed to only increase damage cap to 3x base damage (still found it very strong during testing).
- Charge-II has its range reduced from 6 => 5. I found that 6 is so close to the max LoS range that you very rarely have to even maneuver to get into charge range.
- Mummy race is now immune to poison and poison gas.
- Levitate now completely negates the effects of conveyor belts.

BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- Traps will no longer be placed adjacent to conveyor belts.
- Fixed an odd bug where enemies near a Tome-Of-Knowledge were treated as if they were in your LoS even when far away.
- Fixed some odd pathfinding behavior where enemies would step back and forth, never attacking. This ones been an issue for awhile now.

Update 1.38.5 - Monday August-16-2021:
- Removed some debug text that was spamming the console.
- Dominated tentacle spitters will now move in toxic waste.
- Fixed a bunch of issues with charge. Clicking after charging was causing you to charge again. Any type of quick move (including lunge) was causing the game to stop ticking turns. This was also causing the cooldowns to not tick and a few other oddities that were reported.

Update 1.38.6 - Tuesday August-17-2021:
- Shock was targetable and would spread on stuff like Arcane-Arrows and Orbs-Of-Fire.
- You could press Slow-Explore key while charging and it would halt the charge.
- NPC Necromancers were reviving the boss skeletons, which would then drop copies of their unique item.

Hello everyone! Update 1.37 is finally here after a long development cycle but I'm very pleased with this one. The main thrust of this update is a complete rework of the Branch-II zones (Forge, Arcane, Crypt) and the addition of new end zone bosses. Along the way I added an absurd number of new vaults and special levels throughout the game and generally fine tuned the balance in many places.

After this, I'm planning a final major update for The-Vault-Of-Yendor which is looking pretty lame now in comparison to all the levels that come before it and then its just a number of final clean-up updates before I'm calling the project complete.

Zone Expansion:
Due to the new boss levels generally consisting of a single large room, I've expanded the length of the two branch zones (Sewer/Core/Ice and Arcane/Forge/Arcane) to 5 levels. So there are now 4 standard levels and the special boss level at the end. These special boss levels now have unique level names reflecting the boss so for example The Crypt levels now display as "Crypt:1/4" - "Crypt:4/4" followed by "The Tomb of the Lich King".

Zone Partition:
The zones in the later half of the dungeon (the two branch zones + Orc/Temple) have had their difficulty and spawn tables more distinctly partitioned. There is now a more pronounced jump in difficulty at the halfway point and of course the boss level is another noticeable jump. I tend to prefer these kinds of discrete 'breaks' in content which as opposed to just smooth gradients. During my testing I found that this encourages a much less linear path through the dungeon where, depending on my build, I may do the first half of a zone then return later when I feel better prepared for the second half. For reference the following levels are roughly equivalent in difficulty:

Orc:1-3 and Ice:1-2
Orc:4-6 and Ice:3-4 and Crypt:1-2
Crypt:3-4 and Yendor:1-2
Yendor:3-4

Branch-II Zone Rework:
This is the bulk of the update with complete reworks on the generation and content for The-Iron-Forge, The-Arcane-Tower, and The-Crypt. Pretty much rewrote all the generators from the ground up and added a ton of new vaults, layouts and levels. Also added new end zone bosses to these 3 zones which I'll leave as an exercise for the player to discover. Some specifics:

• Reworked all the tiles in The-Iron-Forge as the old ones were pretty crusty.
  
• Added conveyor belts to The-Iron-Forge that push the player and monsters along.
  
• Special armor sets with attributes have been moved to Branch-II so Wizardry, Shadow-Silk, and Heavy-Brass Armor now drop in Arcane, Crypt and Iron-Forge respectively.
  

Vaults in Other Zones:
During the Branch-II rework I significantly improved the system I use for creating, storing and tagging vaults and so I ended up adding a quite frankly ridiculous number of new vaults, layouts and special levels throughout the rest of the dungeon. I'll be continuing to do this for the remainder of development as ideas and inspiration strike. Just for reference we're now approaching nearly 2000 unique vaults.

Monster Power vs Num Monsters
With the introduction of so many vaults to the game it was becoming common for single large vaults to contain most of the monsters in a level leaving the rest of the rooms empty. Furthermore, I find that large fights with lots of different monsters tend to be more interesting, particularly in the late game. So to this end I've reduced the hit points and damage of enemies a bit and increased the number that spawn, specifically in the later half of the game. Note that these changes are more of a nudge then a drastic change, I think most of the values only changed by about 20% but I feel like it makes the later half of the game play a lot better.

Monster Hit Point Rounding
Monster hit points greater than 20 are now rounded to the nearest 5. This doesn't really make much of a difference balance wise, I just prefer the 'cleanness' of not having enemies with 39 or 41 HP.

General Boss Changes:

• Boss hit points have been quite drastically increased. I want to really push these guys to be as big of a spike in difficulty as possible.
  
• Bosses now give a lot more experience when killed (always satisfying to get a level up from killing a boss).
  

Specific Monster Changes:

• Imps now use a special Surround-Blink ability rather than randomly blinking when hit. They will now attempt to 'surround' the player by blinking to the adjacent 'quadrant' with the least enemies.
  
• Dark Elf Summoners and Summoning Statues now have a basic magic projectile attack.
  
• Summoned Battle Spheres can now be attacked and destroyed (getting blocked into a hall or corner was pretty lame).
  
• NPC Discord ability now deals more damage (it barely dealt any before)
  
• All healers now heal twice as fast for half as much. Similar changes to cooldowns were applied in a bunch of other places. I was using 10CD as a default but after some testing I noticed that 10 turns is actually a long time and so unless an ability is intended to be a once a fight thing, its better to have shorter cooldowns and just reduce the power accordingly.
  
• Poison damage on Crypt-Crawlers has been increased to make them more specifically dangerous.
  
• Skeleton archers now fire slow moving arcane arrows. I'm always looking for ways to add these sorts of dodgable, multi-turn attacks, which tend to be more interesting then 'always hit' damage projectiles.
  
• Necromancers now summon exploding skull bombs rather than poison gas to differentiate them from Pestilence-Priests.
  
• Wraiths now blink to surround the player and have a life tapping melee attack.
  
• NEW MONSTER: Clockwork Knight that raises and lowers a reflective shield
  
• NEW MONSTER: Clockwork Turret
  
• NEW MONSTER: Clockwork Pyro Turret
  
• Iron Forge monsters are now immune to lava and resistant to fire (there's a lot more fire and lava in these levels as I try to make the 'Forge' label more appropriate.
  
• NEW MONSTER: Storm Vortex - just to fill out the fire/ice/storm elemental set.
  
• All statues now summon vortices and have a very long range projectile attack to distinguish them from standard casters.
  
• Reworked the monster sprites in The-Iron-Forge
  
• Reworked the monster sprites in The-Arcane-Tower
  
• Storm Elementals now summon tornados that suck the player in and deal damage.
  
• Reduced the duration of Confusion when cast on the player as this could often be an immediate death sentence.
  

Attribute and Talent Gain:
The old system was a bit messy and difficult to predict. I cant even remember on which levels the player got attribute and talent points. So to simplify things and make it easier to plan your build the player now consistently gets an attribute point every level and a talent point on every odd level. To compensate for the greater control over attribute points, talent requirements have been slightly increased.

I've decided to remove random attribute gain from leveling up as I believe the player should not be 'forced' to take some random attribute as part of the basic character progression system. Fountains and potions of attribute gain will continue to give semi-random attribute points.

Tome of Knowledge

• Tomes of Knowledge now immediately train the selected talent rather then just making it available. I didn't like how there was a deferred choice here where you'd first have to choose which talent you wanted and then later choose to spend a point on it. Now the choice is combined, you just pick the talent and you get the talent. For the case in which you want to wait before making your choice (I often do this with the elemental resistance talents and wait to see what zones appear), you can always return later.
  
• Tomes of Knowledge now have the option to simply take +1 Talent Point so the player always has some default option, and pure, non-multi-class builds are possible.
  
• Reworked the graphic for the Tomes to make these important milestones a bit more visually distinct.
  

Non-Magic Ability Cooldowns:
The second rank of most non-magic abilities now reduces the cooldown in half rather than increasing the power. Though on paper this doesn't effect the balance (say half damage, twice the speed), what it does is provide more options and control for higher level characters. I was finding it frustrating to use my 2-3 abilities and then have everything on cooldown and be left with no better options then just spamming attacks. This is related to a point above regarding monster cooldown. Most battles are over quite quickly and so shorter cooldowns should be preferred.

Levitation
Changes the way that levitation works when hovering over pits. Previously you could float there indefinitely and melee enemies would never be able to attack you. So now when floating over a pit, a 10 turn timer will be added to your status effects after which you will fall down the pit. Not really a massive change but simply removes an obvious exploit.

Talents and Abilities:

• Replaced the enchanters ability to siphon mana with 'Enchant Item' which immediately summons 2 enchantment scrolls. Siphon Mana was kind of wonky and was either rarely useful or could be used to completely cripple a boss so I wasn't happy with it. I like that the enchanter has the ability to actually enchant. Finally this is just a really nice talent in general and I've found myself taking it from Tomes-Of-Knowledge with lots of different builds.
  
• Reversed the requirement tiers of Poison-Cloud and Summon-Skeleton for the necromancer and adjusted their power accordingly. Summon-Skeleton is basically the signature ability of the necromancer and so I feel it should take a bit more work to get it online. Given the changes to attribute point gain, I can still typically get it by the mid point in the game.
  

Enchantment
Many stats will now increase by a greater amount when enchanting. This was mostly apparent with stuff like hit points where +10HP was only turning into +11HP/+12HP/+13HP when enchanted multiple times. Its now roughly a 20% increase so many items that were not worth enchanting now get pretty substantial upgrades.


A bunch of stuff I'm likely forgetting to list but the following has been fixed:

• Charge will no longer halt when going through clouds (its a sprint so should avoid the damage).
  
• Charging through a trap will no longer halt the charge though you will take damage.
  
• Fixed a level generation hard crash in The-Ice-Caves (a complete freeze when descending).
  
• Trying to attack a trap when out of range was causing a console error to continuously throw (though not crash).
  
• At XL:16 the players exp was showing NaN (not a number) percent. Now exp percent is just hidden.
  
• A soft crash (lockup) was occuring when using a wand of draining on a summoner and his summons. The summoner was killed, his summons would poof, then it tried to apply the AoE damage to his now non-existent summons.
  
• Infusion of Storms (and possibly other talents) had its text overflowing on Tome of Knowledge menu.
  

As always there's tons of little tweaks and additions that I've failed to list so give it a whirl and please let me know how it goes, what's working, what isn't working and any suggestions etc. As is always the case I'll be dedicating the next few weeks to reading through feedback and bug reports and trying to hammer this thing into a stable state with daily hot-fixes.

Thank you everyone for your continued support and a big thanks to those who have reviewed the game here on steam, it makes a big difference in terms of discovery in the Steam searches. Just one more to go to hit the big 300 :).

May-10-2021 Update-1.37.1

• Lowered the attribute requirement of the final ability rank to 24 so that most (but not all), race/class combinations can get it.
  
• Only the last instance of The Slime King should give experience when killed.
  
• Fixed a Fire-Mage vault in The-Upper-Dungeon that had a door on top of a wall.
  
• Summoned fire and shock glyphs should not fire on the first turn they are summoned.
  
• Fixed: was possible to see the blast radius of fire pots when mousing over them in unexplored space.
  

May-12-2021 Update-1.37.2

• Fixed a bug where confusion (cast by the player) was wearing off within a few turns when monsters went out of line of sight of the player.
  
• Dominating the Lich King will now unlock his glyph gate (all bosses are supposed to do this).
  
• Dominated Lich King will now raise allied skeletons.
  
• Obsidian Golems (and other monsters) are immune to lava but when dominated they would avoid it. This is now fixed and allies should now move through terrain that they are immune to.
  
• Fixed a special level in The Iron Forge that was missing a switch behind one of its gates.
  
• Fixed: dash attacking an enemy on oil or ice would cause him to be knocked back into the tile that the player would then land on resulting in a crash. Dash attack will simply no longer trigger these environmental knockbacks.
  

May-13-2021 Update-1.37.3

• Fixed: level generation bug that was spawning bosses early in The-Upper-Dungeon.
  
• Fixed: goto stairs would not cancel when given a manual move order.
  
• Fixed: crash in Vault-Of-Yendor resulting in the console log: Uncaught getCharWithID: id is not a number. Occured when a fire/storm glyph was summoned, the player left the level and then returned. The glyph was not storing its casters ID. There were several more crash reports in Yendor so maybe this is related.
  
• Fixed: level generation bug in The-Iron-Forge that would create a room w/ a conveyor belt leading into it and the conveyor belt was blocked by a wall.
  

May-17-2021 Update-1.37.4

• Fixed a vault in The-Iron-Forge that had adjacent conveyor belts pointing in different directions.
  
• Fixed evasion not working against non-physical projectiles. There was actually a ton of stuff this was applying to so evasion (which was already pretty powerful) just got a big boost. I'll be adjusting some of the values going forward to balance this. My thinking is that evasion should be weaker than armor or resistance but should be the most general of the defensive stats.
  
• Fixed a broken minotaur zoo in The-Orc-Fortress that had walls that were broken by hall generation.
  
• Fixed conveyor belts so that you can now sprint up and off them correctly (previously you couldn't take the final sprint step off the belt).
  

May-18-2021 Update-1.37.5

• Fixed a crash when starting the game when the scrolling menu background was on Crypt:5. I believe this occurred for a number of different zone and dungeon level combinations.
  
• Strafe attack will no longer trigger twice when moving on a conveyor belt. It should only trigger when the player moves.
  

May-24-2021 Update-1.37.6

• Fixed: Occasionally when equipping an item, the escape key would no longer work for closing the character menu.
  
• Fixed: Game would crash when a Cannon-Turret tried to throw a bomb through a flaming cloud which was atop a ground object like scrap metal. The bomb object would be created on top of the scrap metal causing the crash. The bombs will now just explode with their usual radius and damage when hitting a flaming cloud.
  
• Boots of Speed and Molten Forged Boots are now enchantable (not sure why they were flagged otherwise).
  
• Battle Spheres now show their full NPC stats on mouse over since they are now treated as normal monsters i.e. you can attack them.
  
• Fixed some incorrect floor tiles in the corners of narrow hallways.
  

May-28-2021 Update-1.37.7

• Fixed: Falling down a pit while auto traveling will continue to try to travel on the next level, sometimes resulting in a crash.
  
• Fixed: Teleport traps also had odd behavior when auto traveling (or quickly pressing explore after), resulting in the player 'sliding' across the level to the destination through walls.
  
• Potion of Gain Attribute was incorrectly showing attributes raised beyond their max (when wearing equipment that raises the attribute). You should still be able to choose this option in case you want to remove the equipment but the UI text now shows that it will not break the max cap.
  
• Fixed: bear traps could be thrown onto pits.
  

Hello everyone! Big update today with lots of new content, talent reworks, balance tweaks and general improvements.

The big focus of this update was to finish the bosses for The Core, The Ice Caves, and The Sewers, continuing my slow march through the dungeon, finalizing all the content for the finished game. Along the way I did a bunch of balancing and tweaking to player attributes and talents, trying to get everything pretty close to how I'd like it for the final version. Of course lots of bug fixes, interface improvements and general clean up.

NEW-BOSSES:
All bosses have been given unique drops and at least 3 variations of their boss levels. The old end-levels have either been removed or have been reworked to be standard static levels that can generate anywhere.

• The Sewers - The Krakken: has a bunch of tentacles that act as independent monsters but move alongside the main body.
  
• The Sewers - The Slime King: has reworked mechanics where he will split himself repeatedly until killed.
  
• The Ice Caves – The Ice Giant King: basically just a massive melee/tank battle.
  
• The Ice Caves – The High Shaman: another massive fight but this time with Grax healing and hasting his allies.
  
• The Core – The Efreeti Lord: summons clouds of flames all around himself, launches powerful fire attacks and blinks away when threatened.
  
• The Core – The Lava Eel Queen: devastating ranged fire attacks.
  

USER-INTERFACE:
Cleaned up the HUD a bit so that everything fits better.

• Flattened the ability bar by reducing to 7 slots so that it fits evenly above the consumable bar.
  
• Since we lose an ability slot with this and there has been a longstanding issue of running out of ability slots, you can now remove abilities from your bar by picking them up and dropping them on the screen. You can add abilities to the bar by clicking on the associated talent to create a new icon. Though personally I never have an issue with the ability bar filling up, this at least provides the option to shuffle things around for those who like to build characters with tons of abilities.
  
• Added cleaner looking slots for melee and ranged weapons w/ associated damage text. Again mostly just lining everything up more evenly.
  
• Cleaned up the HP, MP, SP, Food and EXP bars so that they sit nicely at the top of the screen.
  
• The mouse over description of HP, MP and SP bars will now show their regeneration rate.
  
• The mouse over description of attributes will now show their total stat contribution while mousing over the [+] icon shows the incremental improvement.
  
• The Go-To menu now displays a
• icon next to the name of a level to indicate the presence of some interesting feature ex. Merchant. The details of the feature will be listed in the mouse over description. This just makes it so you don’t have to remember where a merchant or locked treasure room was.
  

ATTRIBUTES:
There are a number of goals here. Each point in an attribute should be useful to all builds i.e. you should always get some sort of noticeable improvement. An attribute should never be useless to a particular build (trying to not have dump stats here). An attribute should never feel REQUIRED i.e. you should be FORCED to put a bunch of points in an attribute. In general, I felt like STR was just a bit too good compared to the other attributes and was often required simply in order to wear equipment, even for pure spell casters.

• Strength: 4HP => 3HP per attribute point.
  
• Strength: the encumbrance of many armor pieces was slightly reduced. I don’t think that a character should feel forced to dump points in strength just to wear basic equipment. Of course heavy plate armor will still require an investment.
  
• Dexterity: you now gain +1 speed point per DEX though the recovery rate of speed was reduced a bit to compensate (still an overall buff to DEX). I really didn’t like the ½ point we had before. EVERY point should actually do something imo.
  
• Dexterity: reintroduced evasion as a general stat tied to dexterity which provides a small chance to dodge both projectile and melee attacks. This gives builds that don’t want to pour points into STR at least some defensive capacity. Of course, since evasion requires no equipment and applies to all damage types it should definitely be the 'weakest' of all defensive stats.
  
• Intelligence: 1MP => 2MP per attribute point. Casters just generally felt like they were much more difficult to play and a single point of intelligence just didn’t really feel impactful.
  

TALENTS:

• Replaced the small library rooms (crystal chests w/ tomes) with a single ‘Tome-of-Knowledge’ object. I found that often times you really only want 1 of the talents in a tome and the other talent just becomes junk noise in your talent list. So the Tome of Knowledge simply lets you pick a single new talent from a list of 4. Has the added benefit that the interface lets you check what the talent actually does and what attribute requirements it has.
  
• I’ve generally reduced the cooldowns of many abilities. I would rather have slightly weaker abilities that the player can use more often rather than the old situation in which you’d get into a big fight, pop your first ability and 1-shot a monster, pop your second ability and 1-shot the next monster and then suddenly you’ve run out of interesting actions to take for a long time.
  
• Similar to the above point, I've set all magic abilities to just use a flat 6MP. First, this does the same as the cooldown reduction above i.e. the higher tier talents are a little weaker than before but can be used more frequently. This also simplifies a bit of the math the player needs to do in his head since you don't need to divide damage by mana to get a 'damage-per-mana'. Finally, the common case where you've run out of mana, and pass a few turns to regen just enough for one more spell, in this case you can choose from any of your spells. In general, spells should be different, and be useful in different situations, slight differences in mana cost should not be a major factor in determining what spell to cast.
  

WEAPON DAMAGE:
All weapons will now have a maximum damage of 2x their base (including enchantments).

First, this helps to balance the pretty substantial power gain in abilities from the cooldown and mana reduction changes above. Generally speaking, I'd like a lot of the players 'power' to be coming from the use of abilities rather than just spamming away w/ weapons. This also makes better weapons 'much' better. Previously all you'd get from an upgraded weapon was say +2 DMG. With these new changes you not only get the +2DMG but actually get +4 to your maximum possible damage which makes a pretty big difference in the later game. Finally this adds some clear breakpoints to character building where, once you've maxed out your current weapons damage, it makes sense to start spreading attribute points around a bit more until/if you find a better weapon.

DUELIST:
I’m trying a complete rework on the duelist so feedback here is appreciated. There were a number of issues that I’m trying to fix here:

1) The duelist was just brokenly OP pretty much from the very first level.
2) The duelist felt oddly tied to his rapier since it felt very odd to suddenly lose the ‘lunge’ attack when changing weapons.
3) The duelists would then sort of gain this ability back with his ‘lunge’ talent which is even odder and overlaps heavily with the charge ability.
4) The duelist talents all use DEX as a requisite and yet increasing DEX didn’t really feel like much of an improvement in itself.

So the idea behind this rework is to really tie duelist talents to speed points and make the duelist the basic ‘speed’ build while cleaning up the weird rapier/lunge progression. This should also feel like a bit of a nerf since, as mentioned above, the duelist was just absurdly over powered previously.

• The duelist no longer starts with a rapier, and rapier type weapons have been removed from the game.
  
• Instead, the duelists 2nd tier talent ‘Lunge’ now provides the intrinsic ability to lunge with any melee weapon. This way the duelist gains the ability to lunge and then keeps it for the remainder of the game, even when switching weapons.
  
• Both lunge and disengage now use 1 speed point instead of working on cool-downs and do not end your turn when used. This effectively makes duelist abilities an improved ‘sprint’. Increasing your DEX in order to gain more speed points now provides an immediate and obvious benefit.
  
• Weapon shield was removed as a talent since it overlaps with the warriors Shield Wall and has been replaced with a Dash Attack which allows you to hit multiple enemies in a line, consuming speed points and not ending your turn.
  
• At Rank-2, all of the duelists abilities will not consume a speed point when dealing kill shots.
  

MERCHANT:

• Leather and cloth armor are now quite a bit cheaper (I’ll be taking a closer look at all item prices in the future to make the merchant a bit more useful).
  
• The merchant now stocks 4 consumables and 4 pieces of equipment. Should help to guarantee at least a few useful things each time you encounter him.
  
• The merchant now splits his inventory into consumables and equipment to improve clarity.
  
• Added special tables to the merchant that he uses occasionally rather then just a random assortment of equipment. Stuff like selling all 4 leather armor pieces or each of the elemental rings.
  
• Merchant now clears out the stuff you sell him when you leave the level to avoid bloat and improve clarity.
  

MISC:

• Whole bunch of slight tweaks and adjustments to enemy cool-downs (generally they attack a bit faster).
  
• A bunch of tweaks to duration of enemy summons, clouds and detrimental status effects (generally they don’t last as long).
  
• Javelins and Chakrams will now take advantage of the players range damage bonus.
  
• Summoning items like Wand of Blades and Rat Pipes now scaled based on the players magic power bringing them in line with all other evokables.
  

BUGS-AND-CRASHES:

• Solid walls are being broken by overlapping vaults (results in halls breaking solidWalls)
  
• Bee hive vault: enemies won't path around (they should go around if the clear path is less than half as long as the blocked path)
  
• The Drachnid Web Bow had description added in 1.35.5 but still sells for 1 gold
  
• Robe of Cryomancy boosts the damage of Staff of Storms
  
• Ogres (and anyone slowed) can now reach fountains/switches on the diagonal
  
• When an ally is pulled by a tentacle terror, he leaves sparkles
  
• When the only thing left to explore is terrain with stuff on it you won't go that way and it'll just say partially explored.
  
• Fire Crosses, Storm Cross, Ice Bombs etc. should not spawn on water or lava
  
• Dialog menu w/ 4 options does not align correctly (ex UD:1-4 discovered)
  
• Chakram is blocked by ice (convert ice to a simple status effect and remove from clouds)
  
• Allies should follow you when falling down a pit trap (same as they do when usings stairs or falling down big pits)
  
• Hidden pit traps could drop you into locations with no clear path to the stairs (now using same code as normal pits)
  
• Game crashes if you have too many allied NPCs and nowhere to put them (flood limit 5 => 10)
  
• Torches spawning on the inside of generic drop wall rooms and visible through the wall
  
• Strafe attack may need attackDelay again (you have an ally hasting you)
  
• Scroll of teleportation does not work in Frost-Giant-King-02 (not pathing through portal)
  
• Projectiles are not disapearing after range (dodging)
  
• Netted leaves me stunned for multiple turns
  

As always, I'll be spending the next week debugging and tweaking in response to feedback so please let me know what you guys think or if there's any issues. After that, we're really getting into the home stretch here. I've got another update planned handling bosses in The Crypt, The Arcane Tower and The Iron Forge, then another update to rework Yendor and add some bosses there as well (its getting a bit anti-climactic atm). After those two updates its really just a lot of cleanup and auxiliary stuff like achievements, better record keeping, maybe an online leaderboard etc.

Bugs and Crashes:

• Fixed the crash when selecting staves in acquirement menu.
  
• Teleportation will no longer place the player on tiles near gas traps (it previously considered them safe as long as the gas was not currently spread there).
  
• Fixed Corrupted Ent (and other bosses) spawning in random levels w/o their special vaults.
  
• Auto attack (tab and q for ranged) no longer tries to target nearby but unattackable targets (example behind a closed gate).
  
• GOTO travel now works in the Arcane Tower when traveling through portals.
  
• Cloud now save correctly when leaving and reloading a level (how did this take so long...)
  
• Fixed clouds actually lasting 1 turn less than their talent description indicated.
  
• Charge will no longer try to pass you through immobile allies resulting in a crash. I didn't even think this was possible due to domination not working on immobile enemies but the reported case was w/ a dominated demonologist summoning a hell portal which was both immobile and considered your ally.
  
• Fixed: GOTO menu could be opened multiple times and had to be closed multiple times.
  
• Using freeze on an empty tile was using mana and generating a bunch of error text with no effect.
  
• Added prices for Molten Forged Staff and a number of other itmes
  

User Interface:

• Locked doors in boss rooms will now indicate in their desc that they will unlock on the bosses death.
  
• Fixed desc of Recovery (was overwritten by Second Wind)
  
• Fixed buttons in many menus remaining clicked (visually) when closing and reopening the menu.
  
• Life Tap and Life Spike will no longer popup +HP if the player is already at full HP. This is in order to reduce some unnecessary battle spam.
  

Bugs and Crashes:

• Polearms will now allow you to target the more distant of 2 lined up enemies. Previously you had to target the one in front of you and the polearm would 'strike through'. Basically an interface improvement with no changes to the underlying mechanics.
  
• You can now use Charge on enemies when you are in a dust or steam cloud.
  
• Changed one of the Ice Caves boss vaults that had the rune room hidden behind drop walls (definitely was a design mistake to hide the thing).
  
• Corrupted Ent (and other immobile enemies) will no longer attempt to flee combat.
  
• Cyclone strike will no longer hit allies or fire pots.
  
• Berserk enemies will no longer ignore evasion.
  
• Fixed a bug when lunging w/ a polearm that would put the player into a wall.
  
• Fixed a bug w/ using multiple potions of amnesia not correctly removing abilities from the hot bar.
  
• Fixed a level-up bug that would put the players speed points speed points over max when performing a Disengage kill shot.
  
• Cyclone strike will now correctly trigger weapon special effects like poison
  
• Fixed Spear + Lunge giving the 'dangerous terrain' message when used over traps or flaming clouds.
  
• Dominating an enemy that has charmed you will remove the charm.
  
• Boss monsters that blink allies will no longer blink water enemies (like eels) onto land.
  
• Dominating a boss will now cause his boss door to open. Note that I'm strongly considering disabling dominate on all the major branch end bosses in the game. Considering that Vault of Yendor will eventually have some kind of final boss, it doesn't make sense that you could just dominate him and win the game.
  
• Fixed an issue where leveling up in the middle of a sequence of Shields Up counter attacks would stop the rest of the counter attacks. The Level-Up dialog will now wait until its the players turn before popping up.
  

Balance:

• Potions of healing and mana are now cheaper than resistance / power potions.
  
• Orbs of fire, spectral swords, hell portals ect. (summoned stuff) will no longer grant lifetap heals when killed.
  
• Potion of Amnesia will no longer drop in the very early game (doesn't really make sense here).
  
• Orc Archery Captain will now drop a compound bow (previously had no loot).
  

Bugs and Crashes:

• Fixed an issue w/ non-symmetric LoS where enemies could shoot at you but you could not shoot back at certain angles.
  
• Roots from the Corrupted Ent will no longer flee
  
• Sprint will now show pathing over dangerous terrain (it will always show the shortest path). For example sprinting across multiple tiles of lava can now be done with a single click.
  

Balance:

• Slightly increased the time it takes to consume food. I feel like food should never really be an issue unless your doing something really ridiculous.
  
• Guaranteed a merchant spawn in Orc Fortress / Dark Temple. I think its important to have at least one guaranteed merchant somewhere in the world.
  
• Adjusted enemy projectile range to match the players slightly reduced range.
  

Interface:

• Interface text like HP/MP will now appear above clouds.
  
• Level-up dialog will only be delayed when using Shields-Up. The slight delay almost immediately began to annoy me. Are there any other abilities anyone can think of that might need this delay?
  
• Fixed a bunch of names and descriptions.
  
• Explosion radius of goblin bombs will now display when moused over (same as fire pots)
  
• When the player is unstable he is unable to dodge (this has always been the case). Previously this was setting the players evasion to 0 so if you checked your stats while unstable you would see your evasion reading 0% which can be confusing. So now your evasion stat doesn't change but your character simply wont dodge (this is indicated in the mouse over description of the 'unstable' status effect.
  

Bugs and Crashes:

• Fixed Dominate ability not respecting the maxCharms restriction.
  
• Removed the Charm item catagory from acquirement menu since these are not currently being used (they don't drop anywhere normally). Still considering whether these should be included, reworked, removed etc.
  
• Fixed a crash (soft lock) that occurs when you try to use the stairs in the same turn that an enemy completes their 'slow charge' i.e. hits a wall or another enemy.
  
• Fixed clouds spreading uncontrollably when leaving the level and returning (it def does look cool and will keep it in mind for future tweaks to talents).
  
• Lunging an enemy to death and gaining a level will no longer put speed points above max.
  
• Fixed a crash that occurs when descending a level while casting a spell. Not sure how this actually occurs in game (could replicate only w/ console commands). It results in a whole slew of bugs that have been reported where the tiles in the next level are all messed up (set in their default state), the stairs don't connect correctly, the game crashes after a few steps etc.
  
• Fixed Drachnid Queens vault having broken walls.
  
• Cyclone strike will now trigger damage shields.
  
• In the Demonologist boss level, the summoned imp portals will now stop the player from moving on the turn they are summoned. Previously you could zip right past them and the game would only pause a few turns later when the imp is actually summoned.
  

Balance:

• Poison statues are now immune to poison gas (they summon it themselves).
  
• Adjusted the stats on Lockjaw Hide Vest to differentiate from Noxious Armor and make it comparable to the Bear Hide Cloak in The Ice Caves.
  
• Reversed the damage balance on staves and bows. The basic balance is now: Melee is highest damage/lowest range, staves are mid damage/mid range, and bows are now low damage/high range. Did a quick play through with a ranger and he's still overpowered as ever even w/ the slight reduction of damage. This should give casters a bit more of a fighting chance and make staves a bit more desirable for other chars.
  

User Interface:

• Continuing to fiddle w/ sprint pathing. It will now compare the safe path to the unsafe path and use the safe path if its the same length (or shorter) than the unsafe path. From my testing this seems to take care of most of the accidental clicks on mushrooms. Will be continuing to play with this until it feels right so feedback here is appreciated.
  
• Added descriptions indicating the use of CTRL to unsafe move to lava tiles, toxic tiles, traps etc. anything that triggers the the 'dangerous terrain' message.
  

Bugs and Crashes:

• Drop walls triggered by switches were not actually triggering the walls (when switch is used in place of a chest).
  
• Fixed: Charge + Lunge was always triggering lunge on the last step of the charge using a speed point.
  
• Merchant will no longer buy your runes since this can result in a soft lock when he clears his inventory.
  
• Fixed: unable to sprint while standing ON dangerous terrain ex. lava.
  
• Fixed: unable to sprint ONTO dangerous terrain ex. lava.
  
• Fixed: dominate was not reducing max MP.
  
• Fixed: scroll of dominate was counting towards your max talent based dominate cap.
  
• Summon skeleton and Dominate talents will reduce your max MP at same time as they reduce your current MP (there was a bit of visual lag on the MP bar).
  
• Increased the size of many of the entrance rooms to bosses since descending with a ton of allies was causing a crash b/c no room to place them.
  
• As a last resort, if the game is unable to place allies when descending levels, it will just delete them rather than crashing the game.
  

Bugs and Crashes:

• Charge w/ spear was behaving oddly since the impact was applied at the max range of the spear and the player then moved into position. This caused all sorts of odd movement patterns that did not follow the indicated path. Changed this so that charging w/ a spear only impacts at standard melee range.
  
• Fixed: If you have Strafe Attack 2 and you use two or more Sprint Points at once, you will only make one attack with a ranged weapon. But, if you break up that movement, using only one Sprint Point at a time to cover the same distance, you will attack every time if all other Strafe Attack criteria are met.
  
• Fixed: You can charge things you cant see. Sit in a dust cloud and you can charge things completely hidden in the fog.
  
• Fixed: You click to use stairs. Enemies get one turn to act before you descend. You are trampled off the stairs. Next time you walk across stairs it pulls you down.
  
• Fixed: Dash Attack through a Hell Hound (likely any blinking enemy) leaves an invisible enemy on the tile after it blinks.
  
• Fixed: Knockbacks, tramples etc. will no longer trigger the players strafe attack.
  
• Cyclone strike will now trigger critical sneak attacks on unaware enemies.