Hello everyone, time for the monthly dev blog! This blog post will be focused on the advancements made in the last month toward update 0.10.

Finished Manor Visual

While some sneak peeks were shared during previous dev blogs, the zone was far from being finished. Finishing all the visuals took me quite some time, but I'm very happy with the final result. It's by far the best-looking area of the game. So here are new screenshots for the new area of the zone:

Shop Locking

As some may have noticed on the last screen, there is now the possibility to lock items in the shop. This allows you to guarantee they will appear in the next shop rolls. You can lock a maximum of three items simultaneously in the shop (slots are unlocked with soul-shop upgrades).

Card Requirement Change

Card player level requirements have been replaced by cumulated card level. This means that cards no longer care about the soul level of the player, but the total level of all the cards owned by the player. I believe this is a better expression of the progression of the players, as some avatars like the shopkeeper had much lower overall levels, or some challenges that directly removed any source of experience basically banned a lot of cards.

Active Talent as Passive Talent

From feedback I've received, most of the grindiness perceived by players was the level of talents, especially active talents that could only be leveled once at a time. To fix this issue, I've made 3 changes: [olist]

Increased mastery gain formula, there should be on average 50% more mastery gained.

Reduced the kill requirements to unlock a weapon's talent. Reduced from 100K kills to 50K kills for heroic weapons, and from 50K kills to 20K kills for Epic weapons.

Active Talents can be equipped as passive talents, so you can level up multiple at once. [/olist] Of course, simply making active talents be equipped as passive for additional mastery gain is boring, So in the process, I've added passive effects to each active talent that are only active when the talent is equipped as passive. This greatly improves the pool of passive talents and gives much more diversity of choice. Here are a few examples of passive effects for active talents:



There are still a few active talents that are missing passive effects as of now, but they will slowly be added over the beta lifetime.

Hyper-crit Rework

Hyper-crit got a buff to be a more important mechanic to play with. Until now, the scaling of hyper-crit was linear, with each stack of critical simply adding +1 to the multiplier in this way: x1 > x2 > x3 > x4. With the new scaling, the damage of critical is multiplied by 2 for each stack of critical applied, so it is now following this formula: x1 > x2 > x4 > x8. One of the main reasons for this change is that it was most of the time much more worth it to simply go for as much level of "Absolute Focus" than increasing critical chance above 100%, and didn't add any importance to the choice. I hope this change will add a proper build choice between going for hyper crit or going for absolute focus (in the case you're going for a crit-build). I also think this should make the addition of cards that increase critical chance but reduce critical damage more interesting.

Challenge Stacking

Maybe one of the more exciting additions for a few players and a massive QoL for many. After watching a few streamers playing recent versions of the game and collecting multiple feedback, a major issue that arose is that early-game challenges (specifically F-rank and E-rank) are more of a checklist than a proper challenge for most players, and can become especially frustrating for experienced players to play through. The issue is that they don't really feel difficult, especially when they are playing after completing other ranks and simply become boring bloat to go through. Directly increasing the difficulty of these challenges, while a possible fix for this issue, would also make the game less accessible, and would simply be satisfying a part of the player base while sacrificing another part, which is simply not something I was willing to do. The best compromise I could find was to make most challenges "stackable." In the way that you can now activate multiple challenges at once and complete them all in one go. This allows for challenges to still be "easy" to complete, while giving the possibility of more skilled players to have harder challenges and complete them faster.

Balancing

I'm not gonna go through every little bit of balancing done, but I think there is a few things that gonna please to players.

Necromancer Nerf

To the joy of many, Necromancer got nerfed (yet again). The nerf is a major reduction to the summon count of the necromancer. In addition, I've fixed a bug that allowed the necromancer to summon enemies directly on the player position and could cause frustrating death.

Divine Shield

Until now, Divine Shield required Moon-shield as a requirement, but it wasn't aligned with the theme of moon-shield, divine shield being a faith-build card, which usually wants to lower moon-tag and reduce defense and defense multiplier as much as possible. So from now on, Divine Shield will now require Light-armor instead. While not being perfectly aligned with the idea of the faith build, it'll work well together for them.

Moon Shield

As for Moon Shield, it got a rework. It'll now appear much earlier in the game (only requiring Card-level 5) and its main purpose is to rail the player into obtaining metal transmutation. It no longer reduces attack-speed, but instead reduces power multiplier by 20%, which no longer makes it collide with metal transmutation. In addition, it now increases moon tag drop-rate by 25% instead of 5%, which also greatly increases the chance of metal transmutation appearing and helps toward a defense build.

Other Balance

To get quickly through them:

• Silk Edge got a buff but appears later in a run
• Armor-less, Zealot, and Metal Transmutation all require Card Level 50
• Many cards now also provide a bit of tag drop-chance
• Tactical Soul kill requirement reduced from 10 Million to 5 Million
• Concentration is now a weapon modifier

Backup

As some may or may not know, the game creates a backup of your data every hour and always keeps them in the save folders. For various reasons, players can lose their progress, and it's almost always recoverable. I've made a guide on how to replace your current run with the backup on the Steam forum. However, many players are simply not tech-savvy enough to follow the recovery process, and I've often had to spend time helping some players recover their backup via emails, or seen negative reviews from players losing their saves (when they are easily recoverable). To help with that, I've decided to add 2 new buttons in the profile manager to load either Persistent data backup or achievement backup directly within the game.