Talent Points | Patreon Weekly #86

Talent Points | Patreon Weekly #86

Hey Patrons!

You can find the VOD for the third Q&A livestream over here!

For the rest of this weekly, Iโ€™m going to go over some of the larger-scale design changes Iโ€™m making in v0.9.2.

T3 Talent Design Adjustments

As Iโ€™ve mentioned previously, the plan so far has been for there to be six T3 talents that take 2 points each.

For a few reasons, Iโ€™ve decided to change this to five talents that each take three points:

• 6 talents is a lot for a tier. It begins to look cramped in the UI and risks giving the player too many options at once.
• 5x3 talents means there are 15 slots for spending the 8 points you receive. 6x2 by contrast would be 12 slots, which is too few for the 8 points the player gets.
• By T3 I expect the player to have started working toward a build, and so I want to start encouraging more specialization. 3 points per talent gives players more opportunity to invest in specific things.

Major Class & Subclass Changes

Iโ€™ve also locked in some of those larger scale decisions I mentioned needing to make last week:

• The Rogue has been doing very well since his tier two talents were added in v0.9.1. Rather than heavily nerfing those talents, Iโ€™m instead taking the opportunity to reduce the cloak of shadowsโ€™ turns of invisibility per charge to 4 from 5. This should hopefully mean that the Rogue is forced to take more fights, but only enough to counteract his higher winrate. The Assassinโ€™s preparation will charge faster to compensate for this.
• The Freerunner is currently much less popular than the Assassin, despite being a bit stronger. Iโ€™m going to try and migrate his power away from a passive effect, and instead give him an active โ€˜freerunningโ€™ state that the player has to manually trigger after building momentum. Ideally this will give me more room to make him fun without making him any stronger.
• The Gladiator is finally getting the changes that he won back in Content Poll #7. Iโ€™m making combo easier to build and maintain by removing combo being reset by 2 misses, and making cleave into a talent, rather than a combo finisher. Iโ€™m also experimenting with letting the player choose any combo move theyโ€™ve unlocked, rather than being forced to use the strongest one. Naturally, the combo abilities themselves will be reworked/rebalanced around these changes.

With these changes now mostly decided, Iโ€™m free to move full steam ahead on implementing talents for 0.9.2. Iโ€™m hoping to have a good idea of when the update will be ready for beta by next week!