With update 0.8.1 we are adding 2 new lightning skills which are also available as legendary effects, we are reworking how condition damage works, improving critical hit feedback and controller and steam deck support.

New Features

New Skills

The new skills bring some brand new mechanics to Striving for Light: Survival. The lightning skills have a range of 1-3 possible effect triggers which can be increased by stacking the skills. Damage is also scaling with skill stacks but as a trade off they don't scale additionally with your projectile or melee damage. So in contrast to other skills you will gain not only more skill damage but also more possible skill effect triggers. If you for example stack 5 of the same lightning skill your attacks will trigger 5-15 of those lightning effects.

Discharge: New Melee On Attack Skill[/h3
Your melee attacks discharge a lightning ray from your position in a random angle piercing through all enemies in this attack angle. Damage and the amount of discharge rays scale with your skill stacks.

Lightning Strike: New Range On Attack Skill

Your range attacks call 1-3 lightning strikes to a random area around you damaging all hit enemies. Damage and the amount of lightning strikes scale with your skill stacks.

Critical Hit Feedback

New critical hit visual effect that is always triggered when dealing critical hits to enemies has been added. This should making dealing critical hits feel more impactful. Also the critical hit sound effect is now triggered independently from your damage number settings.

Backend improvements and fixes

Backend systems have been improved and several fixes have been supplied which should fix the issues with not transfered and saved builds and characters to your leaderboard entries.

Controller/ Steamdeck improvements

Cursor movement with controller has been completely reworked adding a softer and more fluid cursor movement when using a controller in the skilltree and the pathfinder.

Condition Damage Rework

Conditions got a complete overhaul and now work a bit different in terms of damage and duration calculation calculation. Lets first recap how the old condition damage system worked. Old condition damage system: You apply a burning condition which has a total duration of 3 seconds and deals 10 damage per DoT tick. If you have applied further burning stats to enemies the damage would add up. So for each burning stack the damage would be increased by the amount of your condition damage. But this is the part where it gets not so straight forward to calculate the actual condition damage because the timing on when the stacks are added play a big role. Lets say your attack speed is a bit lower than 1 attack per second you would only be able to apply the next condition stack a bit after the second DoT tick has applied the damage. So you would loose out on the +10 damage for second first DoT tick. So therefore only the last DoT tick would deal the 20 damage. After the total burning duration has expired all DoT stacks were removed which lets you start at 1 stack again. As you can see this lead to some unsatisifying situations especially for low attack speed builds where conditons could not be applied efficiently in the duration of a condition. We therefore redesigned the condition system so that condition damage is valid choice also for low attack speed builds. New condition damage system: The new condition damage system allows to prolong the total duration of a applied condition. If we take the above example of applying a burning condition in the new system each additional conditon stack will prolong the total condition duration for 1 second. So if you have a bit below 1 attack per second you will as well lose out on the added condition damage on the second DoT tick but as the total condition duration is increased from 3 to 4 seconds now there will be one more DoT tick which also benefits from the added skill stack. So with this new system you can in theory pretty much keep this burning condition going forever if you always prolong the duration in time by adding additional stacks. As this alone would lead to infinite DoT damage ramp up as the damage is increased by your condition damage on each applied condition stack we introduced a system that was present a while ago in Striving for Light and tweaked this to balance out the prolonged condition duration. For each DoT damage tick the additionally applied damage from condition stacks will be reduced by 1/3. So when you fail hitting enemies consitently the ramped up condition damage will slowly decrease again but never fall below the base condition damage value. On more example how the damage decays on multiple applied condition stacks. Lets say you apply 3 further burning stacks all at once after the first burning DoT was calculated this will lead to 3+(3)= 6s of total condition duration. If you then dont apply further stacks this is what the condition damage for base 10 condition damage will look like:

• 1st DoT: 10 (only one basic burning stack)
• 2nd DoT: 10 + 2/3(3x10) = 30
• 3th DoT: 10+ 2/3(20) = 23
• 4th DoT: 10+ 2/3(13) = 18
• 5th DoT: 10+ 2/3(8) = 15
• 6th DoT: 10+ 2/3(5) = 13

We hope that this new system makes playing with conditions a lot more enjoyable and we are looking forward to hear your feedback on this new condition damage system. We might roll this system into Striving for Light if there is enough positive feedback. So let us know what you think.

Improvements

• Performance improvements to all enemy hit and enemy death visual effects.
• All player projectile trails are now also affected by the player effect transparency setting, so now it is possible to hide your projectiles completely by setting transparency to 0.
• Achievements for already unlocked skills and weapons are now synced on each game start
• Improved visuals of the light staff projectiles

Balancing

• Reduced enemy HP scaling
• Reduced boss HP scaling

Bugfixes

• Fixed weapon achievement description to reflect what weapon has to be unlocked by the NPCs in town and which weapons have to be found defeating bosses
• Fixed tooltips flowing off screen

If you encounter any bugs or issues please let us know. The best way to engage in the ongoing development of Striving for Light is our discord: Join our official discord!

[ 2023-03-22 19:02:42 CET ] [ Original post ]