Shattered Pixel
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T1 Talent Tweaks | Patreon Weekly #252
🕑 Added 2024-04-01 19:57:37 +0000 UTCHey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going over a few misc. changes I’ve made recently that aren’t new trinkets. Mostly these are T1 talent changes, and I expect we’ll be back to trinket showcases next week.
Sorry for the delay this week as well, I thought I has scheduled this and was only able to post it manually now. No April Fool's stuff here either, though you might want to check the game itself before the end on the day.
Misc Changes this Week
Following from the recent Patreon poll, I’m making a few changes to T1 talents, mainly focused on improving the less popular T1 effects. I do still plan to make levelgen additions in v2.4 as well, but these changes were simpler to concept/implement, and so came first.
Hearty Meal has had a fairly simple change meant to make it easier to understand and slightly less powerful. Rather than having two thresholds, it just grants 3/5 healing when the Warrior is at or below 30% health (i.e. when his portrait is blinking red).
Cached Rations has been redesigned to give more interesting unique food. The talent now lets the Rogue find 2/3 ‘supply rations’ in the dungeon, which are eaten quickly, restore a little less satiety than a ration, and grant +5 health and 1 cloak charge. My hope is that this change makes the talent more popular, like the Huntress’ counterpart Nature’s Bounty.
I’m also completely replacing the Warrior and Mage’s on-id talents. These just weren’t very popular effect triggers, and so I’m instead giving them simple damage bonus trigger talents to match the other 3 heroes. I don’t like how much this homogenizes the T1 talents, but I do expect these options to be more popular and encourage better gameplay for new players.
Test Subject is being replaced with Provoked Anger, which gives the Warrior 1-2/2 bonus damage on his next physical attack when his shielding breaks. This obviously synergizes with his broken seal, and I hope will make the benefit that his shielding provides a bit more obvious.
Tested Hypothesis is being replaced with Lingering Magic, which grants the Mage 1-2/2 bonus damage in his next physical attack after he zaps a wand/staff. I’d like this to encourage the gameplay loop of opening with a zap at range before finishing off an enemy in melee.
I also spent some time this week on various miscellaneous fixes, both to the content I’m adding in v2.4 and older content, here are a few notable changes:
I adjusted the new trinket selection window to remember which trinkets it showed if the game is closed before a trinket is selected. Previously you could exploit by quitting the game and get new trinkets.
I fixed arcana+brimstone incorrectly capping shield gain at 1/turn at +50% power, where it should continue to scale past +50%.
Fixed some artifacts only ever gaining a max of 1 charge (or 1% charge) per turn, even if a highly upgraded ring of energy should give them more.
Fixed tipped darts not getting infinite durability when they hit 100 uses.
The usual assortment of visual and highly specific bugs.
Comments
Shattered Pixel
As I mentioned on the discord, my intent here when balancing it vs. the other talents is that it's about as easy of a trigger as the Huntress' followup strike, but grants about 33% less bonus damage. The huntress really needs the help from followup strike though, and the mage has generally benefited a lot from T1 talents, so I agree this might be on the strong side. As for the Warrior, there's the easy solution of boosting it to 2/3 damage if needed.
Shattered Pixel
This is because transfusion isn't considered a normal damage dealing wand, and so the logic for this talent never triggers for it. I'll put that on my list to look into.
allowiscous
Hey! This is off topic, but I noticed the wand of transfusion, when dealing damage to enemies “demonic” or “undead”, does not benefit from the mage’s tier one talent Empowered Meal. Is this intentional?
Veek
My bet is Lingering Magic will be too good. The Mage has access to a lot of wand charges with just his staff, and the condition to activate is itself (typically) an offensive decision, as opposed to say the Duelist who must ‘wait’ to get her bonus damage, or we can contrast to the Rogue who can only have his talent activate once per enemy. Your current wording even says it’s simply his next melee attack, not the zapped enemy either (like Huntress) which means he could finish a foe with magic, then have the bonus damage still. On the other hand, I worry the Warrior’s will be underpowered, but as you state I don’t notice how often the shielding breaks. These are just opinions though, and we will see how these new talents pan out in the beta.
