Hey everyone! Our update yesterday did not hit the spot. Firstly, we changed the name of most of the stats in the game, to address a clarity issue that was only really noticeable for more hardcore players, but ended up introducing clarity issues for most of the other players. This change has been addressed yesterday a few hours after the original patch, and hopefully you are already finding it easier to process what the stats do and how they work. Secondly, we changed the skill tags to a different system. The new system intentionally had indirect tags that did not describe the skills, so we can create different groups for different synergies. We knew that losing the "descriptiveness" was a negative side of the change, but we believed it would lead to more interesting synergies down the line. And this update is all about this change. First, here is the full list of changes for this update, and then I will speak a bit more about the tags:

Patch v0.7.022e - September 21, 2022

General changes:

- Reworked tags to once again be descriptive, being closely related to the mechanics of the skill; - With the rework, skills now have 3-4 tags, and to compensate for the additional tags, power-ups that improve skills by type will only show if you have 2 or more skills with a certain tag, which will help with making sure you get more power-ups relevant to the skills you are trying to buff; - Fixed an issue where the Skill Tree bonus Minor Soulstones perk was not working at all for the first 4 points, and then working too much for the last point. Now you will receive the intended bonus; - Fixed issue where the "Skill Modifiers" in the tooltip for skills such as Bloodlust, was not showing the buff potency stat properly; - Re-enabled Festering Strike which was innadivertently removed from the game; So, to talk a bit more about the tags, why did we touch them in the first place? The main problem we had, is that with too few tags, too many skills are grouped together. With the current version, where you only have say... 5 melee skills, it is alright, that is a good group size. But, in the full game, with literally hundreds of skills, the "melee" or "physical" or "instant" groups would be huge, including probably over 100 skills in a single group only. This basically defeats the purpose of tags in the first place, which is to give you upgrades for skills that should work well together, but not to all your skills, all of the time. Going after skills based on their tags so you can build a deck of 6 "Fire" skills, that is a really cool playstyle that we want to support, but it must feel like a bit of a challenge to have 6 Fire Skills, maybe it doesn't happen every game, and when it does, it is really cool. With overly broad tags such as "Melee", in the old system, it would be very very common to get all 6 skills with the same tags. And this is the problem we wanted to address. So how does the new system work? Basically, we broken down some tags into more tags. Melee is no longer melee, but Swing for slashes of all kinds, Slam for impacts and mace-like attacks, and Thrust for stab/piercing melee attacks. Ranged is no longer ranged, instead, it is now Projectile for skills that fire actual projectiles (arrows, bolts, etc), Bomb for bomb type skills and Blast for explosive type skills. A few other tags have been added to describe skills, such as Burst when a skill fires a burst of things, Chain when a skill chains between enemies, Frontal when a skill can be aimed and fires in front of you, and so on. With the additional tags, we also had to include more tags, so skills now have, on average, 3 or 4 tags. This means you would have more tags in your skills, and that it would be hard to get upgrades that are "skill by type" that were actually relevant to the skills you are trying to buff. With this problem in mind, we changed so now you can only get these upgrades for tags that appear in 2 or more skills in your currently active skills. This way, we can have more tags, but still only give you upgrades for the skills you really care about. I do believe the new system will help with the original problem for future content, while also maintaining the original system descriptiveness. We are listening to your feedback, and clearly with this last update, we were simply wrong in the path we took, despite having run a test period prior to its release. I really appreciate the patience and support, even when things go wrong, and we are always here to listen and act as fast as we can, to make sure the game is always going in the right direction. Thank you all once again for playing the game, and let us know what you think of the latest changes! Best wishes, - The dev team

[ 2022-09-21 15:29:37 CET ] [ Original post ]