Hi folks, The Mastery Balance Survey has concluded! Thank you to those 289 players who participated - it really does help us get a better idea of where DemonCrawl needs the most work. We can analyze the data in a lot of ways, but for now let's just look at the Top 5 Strongest, Weakest, and Most Balanced masteries as determined by the number of votes in each category, minus the votes from the other two categories. For example, a Mastery's "balance score" would be its number of "Don't Change" votes minus the number of "Buff" and "Nerf" votes. This isn't a flawless metric, but it's simple and fairly informative. -----

MOST BALANCED MASTERIES

• #1: Spy (90)
• #2: Novice (84)
• #3: Guardian (81)
• #4: Ninja (65)
• #5: Spark (59)

Developer comments: Honorable mentions go out to Scout (54), Immortal (54) and Exorcist (43). There are quite a few other masteries where "Don't Change" has the majority vote, but in those cases "Buff" is often closely behind. Spy, which I believe is an above average mastery in terms of power level, may be used as a metric for balancing masteries going forward.

WEAKEST MASTERIES

• #1: Barbarian (56)
• #2: Demolitionist (50)
• #3: Poisoner (22)
• #4: Ghost (21)
• #5: Snowflake (21)

Developer comments: Literally nobody voted for Demolitionist, Prophet or Poisoner nerfs, so if you fancy yourself a contrarian, those are some new viewpoints you can champion. You're welcome.

STRONGEST MASTERIES

• #1: Bookworm (-29)
• #2: Auramancer (-73)
• #3: Bubbler (-96)
• #4: Warlock (-105)
• #5: Spark (-125)

Developer comments: No mastery holds a majority "Nerf" vote. Even Bookworm, which is far and away the most overtuned mastery according to the data, is considered "balanced" or "weak" by most players. Perhaps this is unsurprising, as the prospect of nerfing a playstyle shouldn't excite players outside of games with a competitive/multiplayer focus. Still, sometimes nerfs are necessary for a game's integrity. As for the other 4 masteries here, take these results with a grain of salt - masteries that are less popular seem to have slightly higher Nerf:Don't-nerf ratio. ----- Which of the following would excite you most? The answers to this question surprised us! The majority of the playerbase is evenly split between "Prioritize other features" (34.3%) and "Mastery reworks/overhauls" (32.5%). Relatively few players are passionate about receiving new masteries (19.4%) or small/numeric balance changes (13.8%). Given this, we plan to release a couple updates that will re-imagine the weakest masteries in DemonCrawl and optimize those which are only slightly in need of buffs. Afterwards, we will shift our focus away from masteries to concentrate on other areas of the game - we will likely conduct another survey at that time to get a better idea of what our players are most interested in. ----- You can view the entire survey response data here:

• https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1V8k1nUvHPq33D_QIh7itAXAdU7HzKKR7CXoMA1FAotI/viewanalytics

Note: We have decided to hide longform responses to this survey, as we did not clearly communicate whether these would be published for all to see. I am still reading through the 125 text responses, many of which are quite detailed and very thoughtful! Thank you for reading!

[ 2022-10-11 04:40:54 CET ] [ Original post ]