Gauntlet Mode

The Gauntlet is a new game mode that unlocks for every challenge once you have beaten it on Gladiator difficulty.
You'll start every level as you know it, with only a single affix. Once you beat the level, you'll be presented with a choice between two options:

• Continue: You will replay the level, with an extra affix, and increased enemy stats. Doing this will increase your gold and experience multiplier.
• Stop: Take your winnings and end the challenge.

There's a catch, though! Should you choose to continue, and die in the next round, you'll gain no rewards at all. This means you'll have to get to know your own limits, and stop before you lose it all. The level selection menu will always show you the highest round you've reached for each Gauntlet:
On top of that, you can earn new achievements, along with new game-wide rewards by playing Gauntlet:
Of course, these achievements were also added to the Steam Achievements.

Balance

Experience gains

Experience and gold rewards no longer depend on how much damage you took during the game, because this negatively impacts tank playstyles, like Krogar and Ember's Ability Heal build. Instead, experience gained is now set per level, but still with a modifier for each difficulty level. Rewards are still reduced when you lose, and experience multipliers from achievements still apply. The average experience gained in early levels is still the same, but the change above allows us to tweak experience gains per level. We have slightly increased experience gains in later levels (Taikaan Jungle and Neonwave City) as a result.

Gladiator difficulty

Gladiator difficulty should be hard, but not unfair. We're reducing missile and movements speed multipliers to make things feel a little more fair.

• Gladiator difficulty missile speed multiplier: 1.3x -> 1.25x
• Gladiator difficulty movement speed multiplier: 1.2x -> 1.15x

Supremacy

Losing points when you're getting hit is fine and interactive, but taking a breather shouldn't penalize you so much. We've reduced t he score drain speed in Supremacy in higher difficulty levels.

• Warrior Supremacy score drain speed multiplier: 1.2x -> 1.1x
• Vanquisher Supremacy score drain speed multiplier: 1.4x -> 1.2x
• Gladiator Supremacy score drain speed multiplier: 1.6x -> 1.4x

Gladiator stats

Gladiators base stats increase more quickly in later levels. Previously, base stats would increase linearly as a gladiator's level increased. Now, all levels gained above level 5 increase stats by an additional 40%, and all levels gained above 10 increase stats by an additional 100%. In practice, this means that gladiators with a higher level will now be stronger than they used to be, with the difference in strength increasing as the level goes up. This will make the later levels feel more useful than they currently do.

Taikaan Jungle

Panthers are annoying, and especially punishing if you don't instantly kill them. We're toning down their stats to make them a little more forgiving.

• Panther base health: 35 -> 32
• Panther movement speed: 35 -> 33
• Panther base damage: 20 -> 18

Raven

For how easy it is to stack damage using Recall, it did a lot of damage. We're cutting back a little bit here.

• Recall bonus damage per level: 0.3 -> 0.25

Ember

Ember needed some more identity, so we decided to focus some more on her strengths and fiery fantasy!

• Movement speed: 34 -> 35
• Afterburner bonus damage per level: 0.5 -> 0.75

Krogar

Krogar takes a lot of unintended damage, due to his melee range. This change effectively means Krogar will have fewer penalties for taking damage, helping him out in Supremacy.

• Damage score reduction multiplier: 1 -> 0.7

Other

• Bossfights now also grant some experience and gold. Their main reward remains Runes, but we're now a little less stingy on the experience and gold.
• Added tooltips to the difficulty selection screen.
• All affixes now have icons. These icons are permanently displayed on the screen so you can always keep track of which ones are active.
  
• Fixed an issue where gladiator stat tooltips for attack damage, attack speed and health regen would not be correct if the player had crowd bonuses enabled for these stats.
• Projectile on-hit sounds now correctly trigger when hitting a wall.
• Ingame menu now correctly shows that gladiator level 15 is the current maximum.
• Enemies will no longer look at you at weird angles when you're really close to them.
• Fixed an issue where the you would not be able to equip new runes, if your other gladiators hadn't yet unlocked that rune slot.
• You are now invincible during the first second of every level. This allows you to reposition safely if there's a meteor that just happens to try and spawnkill you!
• A maximum of 20 dead enemies will now be visible at any time. Older bodies will fade away if new ones occur, to make sure you GPU doesn't melt trying to render all enemies that already died.
• You can now see a gladiator's level and beaten difficulties for each level, when selecting your gladiator for a specific level. Go hunt those skins!
  
• The continue button can no longer be clicked on level 15, because, well, there is no next level.

[ 2021-11-23 19:46:01 CET ] [ Original post ]