Surveys for Days: Packet 2 Feedback and NEW Survey

It is I, your James Introcaso. I hope you all are enjoying the packet that we sent out to backers and yourselves at the end of August. That packet doesn’t reflect all of the feedback we received from you folks, but it does incorporate a fraction of what we learned from you all before we got to process it all. If you’re interested in providing feedback on this latest packet, we put together a survey for it here. You have until Monday September 30th at 8AM Pacific US time to get this survey back to us! Please only fill out the survey once.

If there’s stuff you gave us comments on in the last survey that hasn’t changed, you don’t need to take the time to type it all out again. I have reviewed your notes and logged a lot of information. There’s a lot we’re going to tweak, cut, and change based on your very helpful feedback. While I can’t get into every little change here (because I have to actually go make them with the rest of the team), I do want to give you all an overview of some of what’s to come.

Easier for Directors to Run Combat

This is actually a change we’ve already instituted in the backer packet you got at the end of August. It’s a problem that we actually detected at Gen Con (as told by Djordi) and so we started to make these changes before we got all your feedback, but the Patron surveys overwhelmingly confirmed it—running combat with the old rules was too much of a mental burden on Directors. While individually the rules for Villain Power, captain traits, and merely referencing ancestral traits in stat blocks seemed like good ideas, collectively they were really hard to track. A lot of Directors forgot some of these rules, making them frustrated. Those who did remember got so drained that they had to take a Rip Van Winkle style nap to recover. Many folks forgot stuff and felt exhausted!

So while players overall had a blast in combat (yay!), our Directors were frustrated and tired. We got to work, and you’ve seen the result. Villain Power is still a big part of the game, but it’s easier to track. There’s only one method of generation at the top of every combat round. No longer do you need to worry about the ways individual creature bands generate VP, which was an especially lovely nightmare if you had demons and goblins in an encounter.

Additionally, we slimmed down the number of VP options available to Directors. You’ve still got plenty of stuff to spend your VP on, but hopefully this helps you avoid analysis paralysis.

Finally, we increased the value of 1 VP. What once cost 12 VP now costs 7 or less. This means that VP is tracked in smaller numbers, making the math of tracking them simpler.

We also removed captain traits entirely, though you may see a sprinkling of them sneak back into support creatures in other forms. Instead, we gave captains and squads a couple of universal traits to share. Captain traits were forgotten left and right in the old rules, so we’re trying out one simpler and more universal rule to see how it goes. This new rule may also get forgotten, but we got ideas if that turns out to be the case.

Our playtest coordinator team also mentioned that they kept forgetting the ancestral traits (like Crafty for goblins) that are merely referenced in stat blocks instead of spelled out. With captain traits removed, we now had room for these in the stat block, and so we plunked ‘em down!

Our team also reviewed every stat block and looked for ways to make them less complex and keep the cool feel and fun things that they could do before sending out the latest packet. We’ll be tweaking stuff like that right to the end!

Victories OP

Patrons and our playtest coordinators identified an issue we’ve been anticipating as a possibility, which is that gaining 1 heroic resource for every 1 Victory you have at the start of every combat means that you wind up really, really powerful in battles at the end of the adventure. What we didn’t anticipate is that people got so powerful that they wouldn’t really need to use any Recoveries at a certain point, which allowed them to keep gaining Victories. Oops!

In the latest version of the game, we reduced Recoveries a bit, but this number may continue to drop. Additionally, we gave revised advice regarding building encounters for heroes with a lot of Victories. These adjustments may not be enough to fully address the issue. In that case, there’s still a lot we can do to keep Victories exciting and something players want to earn without removing the challenge from combat encounters. 

Lock ‘Em Down

Players and Directors want better ways to lock down their foes. Right now shifting allows for so much movement that tacticians and furies had a hard time protecting their squishier conduit and elementalist pals. Likewise, Directors felt it was difficult to protect their glass cannons from speedy, death-dealing shadows. The taunted condition helps, but it’s the only tool in the box.

I really like how dynamic our current shifting rules make combat, but we’re currently experimenting with making it harder to shift and a little easier to make opportunity attacks in our staff games at MCDM. If we like it, we’ll send it up the testing chain and see how it goes. If not, we’ve got other solutions we can try to make melee-focused tanks able to better lock down their foes and protect their buddies.

Class Balancing Act

When it comes to classes, we got tons of great feedback. I can’t get into great detail about each in this post, but here’s a quick overview of some of the more serious problems we discovered:

Conduit
People love the Prayer ability, but are afraid to use it after the second time in combat because of the bane that appears. Many folks like the narrative of the bane, but we do want to give people more temptation and opportunity to use Prayer, so we have some tweaks coming.

When it comes to features and abilities that are overpowered, Armor of the Faithful (which got a bit of a nerf already) and Animal Spirit need some work. Meanwhile Angel of Wrath needs a boost! Folks were generally unhappy with Fate Trance since it was too much work for the Director. You’ll see these and many other little tweaks coming to the Conduit.

Elementalist

Elementalist players feel like they have to take abilities that use the element tied to their specialization in order to get the benefit of reduced-cost heroic abilities. People would really like to pick abilities outside of the element, so we’re going to make that easier and give the elementalist a different way to earn some extra essence rather than reducing the cost of their abilities.

Players definitely loved using Open the Earth, but thought it was super overpowered, so we gave it a little bit of a nerf in the backer packet version. We’ll see what folks think of the new one! Incorporealness got a shoutout for being too strong (more on that below). 

Fury

The fury deals a lot of damage—too much as it turns out. Djordi is already hard at work making some revisions to the rage meters overall to keep the fury fun but make sure their damage is taken down just a bit. We’re also looking at revising the Berserker’s ability to make pushes vertical.

Shadow

If there is one thing to take away from this playtest feedback, it’s that Blade Dance needs to cost 5 (or more) insight instead of 3. Players love it, so it’s not going away, but it’s laying waste to encounters and needs to happen less often at 1st level.

Blade Dance isn’t all we’re looking at. Folks wanted Get In, Get Out and Shot and Step to be a little more appealing, especially compared to similar options. We’re working on it.

Tactician

Folks really like the tactician! It’s hitting the fantasy that was foretold. Still—it ain’t perfect.

Tactician players felt like they had to use Mark every round because it helped them generate focus. It meant that they often didn’t use Battlecry or other fun maneuvers they had at their disposal. Similarly, Seize the Opening was a problem for many tacticians. They wanted to use their own signature abilities to attack, but it was better for them to ask someone else to use an attack in terms of damage and because they might get a resource from it. It meant that many tacticians took the same turn over and over again when they had no focus to spend.

We’re also taking a look at making Flank Them Now a better option and we’ve already taken a stab at adjusting This is What We Planned For (considered OP by many of you) in the latest packet.

Heroes Deal a Lot of Damage

Monsters are getting wiped pretty quickly off the board. Some of this has to do with the Victories problem I mentioned earlier. Other creatures, like demons, are built to die in droves so that the heroes can face 20 or more of them at once. In order for a balanced encounter to happen, some of these folks HAVE to die before they can act, but it’s happening with too many creatures too quickly.

So we’re looking at reducing hero damage across the board at 1st level just A BIT in addition to adjusting Victories. You’ll likely see tier 3 damage results come down as well as damage bonuses granted by features like Holy Infusion. This is going to be a tweak in conjunction with some other adjustments, not an overhaul, because combat isn’t a cakewalk, it’s just not as challenging as we want it to be in some circumstances.

Too Many Damage Immunities

There are lots of ways to get damage immunity at 1st level. While they’re not all going to disappear, you will see some fade into the West and remain Galadriel. (Looking at you, Exposed Skeleton.) We’re going to be removing, toning down, or replacing a lot of these options. Some may become available at later levels, when a monster’s free strike isn’t completely negated by the immunity.

Boring Dwarves and Elves

You were all mostly disappointed that the elves and dwarves didn’t have more interesting ancestral benefits. We’ve added some flavor to the dwarves (who already have enough power) and some flavor and power to the high and wode elves. You probably saw this in the latest packet, but there may be more work to be done. We’ll see!

Caster Kits

People really love martial kits. They just want more. That’s always a good sign for a game that we hope to make a lot of supplements for. Caster kits are a little bit of a harder pill to swallow. There’s a few things we’re noticing.

The narrative of caster kits is a harder sell than martial kits. If we’re talking about fighting styles and I say, “Cloak and Dagger,” “Martial Artist,” or “Shining Armor,” you immediately get a vision of different warriors in your mind, and they’re basically the same as everyone else. If I say, “Frigid,” “Rook,” or “Ward Weaver,” you might not really picture anything. If you do, odds are it’s not the same as what I’m picturing. While many martial characters have a classic archetype that goes deeper than their subclass, most caster types do not.

But the other issue is that many people playing martial classes, felt like they needed to take a caster kit to get the benefit of a ward. This was especially true of the tactician, who gets two kits thanks to Field Arsenal. While we like that heroes can pick any kit to fit their backstory, but my designer brain detects trouble when people feel like they have to do pick an option because it’s the clearly optimal choice. This means that many tacticians were picking Dancer as a kit even though they really wanted to pair Shining Armor with Sniper.

We’re taking a hard look at caster kits. We’ve already tried a few different executions that didn’t quite work out, and it may be that caster kits need a total overhaul. At the very least, they need a rethink and new presentation to better serve the fiction. We’ve got a whole meeting next week to talk about it!

Clarify

There was a little bit of confusion about some of the rules, particularly when it came to areas of effect, cover, concealment, high ground rules, and hiding and sneaking. We’re going to get into it with more diagrams and clearer rules wherever we can. It is super valuable for us to know where these points of confusion are now so that we can make them easier to understand.

More, More, More

The best news from the test is that people want MORE—more levels, more classes, more complications, more rules for downtime, more languages, more treasure. Well more is coming, people! I’m excited to get it to you.

—James