As bad as being turned to Stone is by default, it can get even worse, as a couple of Gandayah learn the hard way…

In addition to the horrifyingly high Power instant-death-to-Stone-targets causing Crumble and Shatter, there are also the disintegration beams, which deal double damage to Stone targets, and a few melee attacks that exploit the status effect as well.

(An astute observer will note the Gandayah did not seem to be weak to Shatter. Let’s just say that particular feature of Stone didn’t survive very long. Stone now only removes resistances/immunities if present, and doesn’t create any weaknesses. Also, (and this isn’t new) only some resistances/immunities are affected: Body, Mind, Light, and Dark are left unchanged.)

As it happens, being turned to Stone is pretty horrifying.

Hey folks. Just wanted to drop a line on the current plan.

Just wrapped up a major deadline at work on Friday that unfortunately had taken up most of my energy for the past couple of weeks. However, I’m on holiday break from now until Jan 3rd and after a few days to relax, I will be switching over to a heavy chunk of Demon work.

I can’t promise it will be enough to completely finish the Matter build… but it will get us pretty close at the very least.

Thank you everyone for your patience with the slower development pace while I’m working full time. I think the wait will prove to be worth it.

Oh, and one last thing: I’ll announce the details on the forum at a future date, but I plan on doing a test run of this build before wider release. You won’t need to sign up or anything like that, I just will be posting the build links in the forum instead of in the usual spots so that I’m more likely to hit people aware of the fact it’s a test build and who are okay with the fact it may have bugs (even very nasty bugs, potentially, though I hope to catch most of those before even the test build, especially since I’m not taking great pains to limit distribution.)

Happy holidays!

And now, a few examples of some old and new demons who use Acid attacks.

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.