A quick note: The build release target date is 12/20. Cheers!

I’ve made some other Upgrade and Relic tweaks worth mentioning during this balance pass:

• Most levels of Capacity Up are now more expensive than before. As a result, Crown now only starts with Capacity Up IV, not Capacity Up V. (They do however, now start with Copy Saver as well, which works well with large stables of demons.)
• All levels of Far Summon are now cheaper: 2, 3, and 5 points rather than 5, 5, and 5 points.
• Aux Guard and Power’s two levels are 10 and 5 points each respectively. (This means Titan’s Fist doesn’t start with any additional Upgrades than it did before, since Aux Guard and Power’s previous three levels were 5, 5, and 5 points each.)
• Nightingale is now a 15 point upgrade, up from 10. As a result of this and the Capacity Up change, Faithful Heart now starts with Capacity Up I, not Capacity Up II.
• Copy Saver and Fusion Saver now offer 33% discounts, up from 25%.
• Horns of the Hunt now starts with Scan Brand instead of Refine Brand.
• Several enemy summoners have had their Upgrade loadouts adjusted to be level appropriate with the new starting Relic loadouts and point costs.

Hey, just a quick update. The main thing left now is doing some testing before the release to make sure I didn’t break anything worse than the things I was trying to improve. With the somewhat extensive changes, I admit I expect I’ll probably need to do some follow-up tweaks sometime after release, but I want to try and catch any major issues myself. Not quite ready to give an exact date for the build release, but it will be before Christmas for sure. Cheers!

For my first balance pass on cooldowns, I’ve evaluated all Light, Dark, Presence, and Breath cooldowns and given those abilities an SP cost reduction and cooldown reduction, based on their previous cooldown. My hope is that many of these will be much more useful now (for example, Breath attacks now are all 3-4 cooldown with only 10 SP cost, making it feasible for melees who don’t typically spend much SP to use them at full or near full power multiple times in a fight.)

Next up will be a separate pass on the “conditional” Light and Dark spells (Goad, Humble, etc.) to re-evaluate the “credit” they are given for their conditions and adjust them based on that. As before, the additional “credit” could take many forms: increased Power, further reduced SP/cooldowns, etc.

Though, I am starting to think holy-themed demon groups are going to be nasty after this…

Hey folks

Just wanted to drop an update that I’m nearly done with getting Aux Power and Guard converted to their party forms. I’m testing them pretty heavily since I had to poke at the combat code a fair bit to adjust for the idea of a Summoner’s upgrades being able to affect allies’ combat performance, but so far so good.

The new stats on their effects (possibly still subject to change), if anyone is curious:

Aux Guard I: At 2 or less demons, reduces incoming damage and increases status resistance by 15% for you and your demons. No effect on Heroic targets.
Aux Guard II: At 1 or less demons, reduces incoming damage and increases status resistance by 15%, for you and your demons. Stacks with Aux Guard I. No effect on Heroic targets.
Aux Power I: At 2 or less demons, increases damage and healing dealt by 15% and reduces SP costs and cooldowns by 15%, for you and your demons. No effect on Heroic targets.
Aux Power II: At 1 or less demons, increases damage and healing dealt by 25% and reduces SP costs and cooldowns by 15%, for you and your demons. Stacks with Aux Power I. No effect on Heroic targets.

(Note: The 25% in Aux Power II, as opposed to the 15%s everywhere else, isn’t a typo. Math is a little weird on splitting Heroism among a party.)

As previously discussed, there is no longer an Aux Power III / Aux Guard III level of these, so there is no longer a benefit to playing with 0 demons. Splitting the “Heroism” at least 2 ways should fix a fair bit of the balance issues that existed with giving full Heroism to the player character alone.

I’m back at work.

This next build will be a relatively small one, focused on balance adjustments.

One of the main ones will be Aux Guard and Aux Power (the Titan’s Fist starting upgrades) being converted to give a bonus to you *and* your demons, based on the number of active summon slots not used, but with the bonus capping at only 1 demon summoned. (Thus, you would no longer get further benefit from dropping to 0 demons summoned.) This will still make these Upgrades and Relic play differently than most builds, but should remove some of the overpowered / too un-Demon like gameplay associated with the current version.

Another area I’ll be reviewing is cooldowns, especially on non-free action abilities (which means especially on Light and Dark.) Over time, I’ve come to believe some of these abilities aren’t quite as powerful as they should be for taking up an ability slot but only being usable every few turns. Not sure exactly what adjustment will be made to these yet (likely, it’ll be case by case), but in general these will stay where they are or be strengthened.

There aren’t any other major headings I plan to make adjustments under, but I may make other tweaks here and there: these will be called out in the build notes eventually (or in a further blog post, if they are major enough to warrant it.)

Cheers!

Hey folks. Small post to let you know I’ll be resuming Demon work next week. That’s a little later than I originally planned, but I’ve got a fairly major deadline at work this coming Friday, so I figured I might as well get on the other side of that before getting back in the saddle. Cheers!