Something else Acid attacks and the Melting are good for: Vapor passives!

Vapor passives resemble the various passives that add status effects to Slash, Impact, and Pierce, but with some key differences:

1) They only trigger off abilities that have a chance to apply Melting, rather than all Matter abilities. Acid Dart will apply Vapor effects, Disintegrate won’t.
2) While the main ability needs to hit (and the target not be immune: this is a change from earlier design notes I released) in order for a Vapor to have a chance to trigger, Melting does *not* need to be applied: it just needs to have had a chance to be applied.
3) Vapor passives usually have rather high success rates… but their effects only last a small fraction of the usual duration for the effect in question.

Interestingly, while this may seem like a mechanic only of interest to Magic-heavy characters since Matter itself is a Magic element in terms of how it deals damage, this is not necessarily the case…

… with the Acidic passive, any Slash, Impact, or Pierce attack can begin to use Vapor effects as well, allowing for horrors like being hit with Poison++ in a single attack if you combine Toxic Vapor and Venomous.

And yes, there is also an Acidic Veil.

One of the simpler interactions Melting offers Matter users is a large boost to the power of Matter’s HP draining attacks. Relative to the Body versions of these, Matter’s are ordinarily a bit less powerful (-15 Power) and a bit cheaper (-5 SP) to use. But if the target is Melting…

… the Power is significantly increased to well above what the equivalent Body spell has, but still slightly discounted.

Of course, this isn’t all Melting status can do for you… I’ll show something even more interesting in the next update post: the Vapor passives!

Next up on the new status effect showcase: Melting!

Melting is by far Matter’s most commonly inflicted status effect: not only is it present on an unusually large number of Matter abilities, but it also has a fairly high success rate, making it relatively easy to apply even if Cunning isn’t the user’s strong suit.

Many of Matter’s abilities that apply Melting are “Acid” spells such as Acid Dart. Matter is unique among the ‘essence’ types (Body and Mind being the other two) in that it has a series of nukes available that are more like what you’d see from the ‘elemental’ types (Fire, Ice, and Electricity.) Matter’s Acid nukes tend to resemble Fire nukes, but trade Fire’s Ignite and a bit of their Power level to inflict Melting instead:

On it’s own, Melting is roughly equivalent to Poison: it lasts 5 turns, dealing 6% of the target’s MaxHP in damage per turn, but instead of being able to stack, it also shuts off HP regeneration (including from the Regen status effect, notably.) But in another example of how Matter sometimes more resembles an elemental type than an essence type, Melting has many abilities that play off of its presence and/or application, similar to how Ignite, Chill, and Shock do. I’ll show some of these off in my next post. Cheers!

The Matter build is adding plenty of new demons to give good homes to all the new Matter abilities. But, some older demons want to get in on the new flavors of fun too:

This might not end well.

Almost ready to start showing some of the status effects in action! Apologies for the delays on that, work continues to be pretty busy but I am making progress, if slow progress.

I finally got to the part of the process where I re-generate the ability icon texture atlas. My texture atlaser reported there were just under 700 icons in the atlas now. Pretty crazy! It’s been a long wait, and there’s still a ways to go, but I’m pretty excited to get these out to everyone ASAP.

Small update: I’ve started work on implementing Matter’s new ailments: Held, Held+, Held++, Blind, Melting, Harden, and Stone. Once I have something ready to show (hopefully soon!) screenshots and gameplay details will begin to follow.