Some of your suggestions made it into v1.6 that just got released. Thank you again!
I tried the archer again and... wow. I had a very rough time. Here's another video: https://is.muni.cz/de/darek/horde-v16-archer.mp4 (171M, ~26 min).
I wholeheartedly agree with the bow nerf, except for starting with 1 arrow. I would still start with 3. There are two reasons for that: 1) the bow has always been a great weapon against single targets but not really good against large hordes of enemies (until late game if you can upgrade it). So the archer had a problematic start even before the nerf. 2) I would often take the bow with the other classes because it is a good supplementary weapon for clearing the space in front of you. I especially like to get it with the wizards, because their spells hit more or less randomly and they badly need something to clear a path to run through. But if it starts just with 1 arrow, it is useless in this regard. And I think we'd like to encourage various mixed builds at least a bit.
By the way, sometimes if the bow is fired at an enemy which is right in front of you, the arrows fly right through the enemy but they deal no damage. I never noticed this before, so it looks like it's a new bug. See for instance 00:53 or 05:16 in the video.
Finally, thanks for all the little "quality of life" improvements!
thanks again for providing such thorough insight and feedback from your experience! I've been considering giving the starting ability per character an extra level in that ability at the start, so that the archer would start with 3 arrows, while if a mage picked up the ability he would start with 1 arrow, and would then have to invest another point into it.
I have also considered whether a weapon would come with a given ability, that wouldn't take up a character ability slot. So that if you are a mage you could decide to wield a bow to get bowshot, even if you already had 4 abilities from levelup. That could be interesting, specially once more abilities make it into the game so that the build choices are much wider than they are right now.
I'd very much like to get to the point where a spell caster "can" operate as a pure caster "class" if you want to, but its intentional that the strong spells feel less controllable. Let me know if you have some cool ideas for new spells.
I'm the same way I'd like the archer to feel like a hunter, so maybe he's adept in laying down snares and other hunter things.
I'm glad to hear that the whirlwind warrior is viable now. Did you use fireballs or did you go pure warrior spec? When I eventually get around to add achievements, more meta incentive could be added to gain different types of achievements, like pure-spec'ing classes vs hybrid. Battlemage and Paladin are of course very typical class choices in rpgs.
I like the idea of spells being powerful but a bit random, and it's very obvious from the start that the spells were meant to be this way.
A couple of ideas for spells — of course with no guarantee of usefulness 😃:
- Lightning — several arcs of lightning would shoot out of you and go in "lightningy-random" fashion, more or less outwards. Good damage but shorter reach. The point is to have a spell that you can rely on to clean your immediate surroundings, but it wouldn't work like the spark and the fireball do (i. e. run away and the spells do the work for you).
- Tornado — one whirlwind going more or less straight towards random enemies (like fireball?), it would grab the enemies and throw them around, giving mild damage. The point: it should be good for scattering big hordes. Then you can defeat them part by part. Or, at least, the scattered horde will be easier to run away from. A con is that it can make your other attacks less effective.
- Poisonous mist/wall of fire/whatever — the spell would make a cloud of poison in a (not totally) random position. The catch is that the cloud would linger there for an extended period of time (20 rounds perhaps?), maybe slowly moving around ("with the wind"). Anything caught inside would be damaged, monster or player, each turn, as long as it remains inside. The point: a powerful damaging spell, but it's sort of a double-edged sword. Looks like it could make the game more interesting because you would like to go around the clouds while maneuvering the monsters into them. This thing should have a huge cooldown (having more than 2 clouds at the same time should be rare).
- Generic debuff spells — they would hit a bunch of monsters and debuff them for several rounds. The monsters could be e. g. slowed down, have their attack reduced to half, or they would take 50% more damage from each attack, while debuffed.
- Mistform — after casting it, you would become invisible for several rounds. The monsters would stop following you and you would be able to pass right through them without being attacked. Probably a good idea for some kind of powerup but a bad idea for a spell 😃. Not sure how it should be triggered.
- Mind control spells — one possibility would be a confusion spell that would hit several monsters and make them mull around randomly, perhaps attacking other monsters. Another would be a more direct control spell that would hit one monster, that would turn around and instead of running at you, it would run at the nearest monster and start attacking it. (Probably hard to implement but could be nice if the player can build combos around it.)
- Polymorph spell — it would transform a couple of monsters into frogs for a couple of rounds. It would do no damage but the monsters would have only 50% health and no attack power while polymorphed.
- Something that would detonate gems around you, destroying them and dealing damage to monsters around them. Probably useless idea, as the spell would wildly oscillate between useless and overpowered.
- Fetch spell — an utility spell that would fetch some gems and/or chests nearby every couple of rounds. Not sure if it makes any sense to have this alongside the greed skill.
- Rebuild wall — exiting a square where a wall has once been while casting this spell will renew that wall. Probably not worth a skill pick.
There's some detail left to work out, of course, e. g. bosses should be immune to some of those.
Ad the whirlwind guy: I had a single point in fireball and the other 10 skill picks were melee (whirlwind, slash, bash). So I had the fireball, but I don't think it was very useful. I guess it would probably be better to pick something else.
By the way, I managed to get a win with the fireball wizard. I got the life-draining artifact staff, so after obtaining it, I maximized sparks as much as I could. In the bossfight, I was hit 2 times but ended with full 100 HP nevertheless 😃 (I tried to continue but I couldn't obliterate the elemental giants as fast as I should. As soon as the little dragons came, I had to run like hell and grab the amulet. And I got hit for ~ 40 in in only five or six rounds just before that.)
Some awesome ideas in there Evolvent! Thank you! I've been trying to think about cleric style spells too. So if you have any ideas in that direction let me know ;-)
Lifeseed is a very powerful artifact isn't it! I probably need to nerf it a little bit, but fun to hear you've been able to discover some of these artifcats. Sounds like the end was hectic enough to where it ended up not being just a total OP item, so perhaps it's ok.
I don't think it needs to be nerfed. You need a lot of cannon-fodder to power it up, and the battle needs to be stable enough to give you time. WIth the dragon, it was possible because it has amazing numbers of those blobs with it. Sparks tear through the blobs by dozens and the HP grows nicely. In hectic situations, it's not very useful.
I would keep it as it is just for "coolness".
I really liked the meteorites in the boss battles. They add a feeling of epicness, although they're quite inconsequential most of the time.
I had an interesting run with the spark wizard. I managed to max out the sparks and that was a sight to behold. Here's a video (I'm not sure if you have time to look at these videos, I just try to record them in case something interesting happens): https://is.muni.cz/de/darek/horde-v17-sparkwizard.mp4. I think that at least the last 6-7 minutes are quite awesome, in spite of the fact that I was defeated at the end.
By the way, there is a weird bug that can be seen at ~23:25 in the video. I got healed for 1 HP for some unknown reason. (There's another instance of this at ~26:05.) That was very unfortunate for me, because I had previously used the supercharged potion and so I had a lot more HP than my maximum allowed. However, there's another bug that will discard any HP over the maximum when you're healed (I suggest first checking whether the player has more than maximum, and if so, the healing should be skipped altogether). So due to this weird 1 HP heal, in fact 50 HP have been lost. Maybe that has something to do with my premature death 😃.
Another by the way: there seems to be a big need for AoE now. The start has always been rough for the archer, but now, when the rats are smaller than before, I'd say it's a bit too much. It looks like in order to be viable, the archer needs to obtain the fireball as soon as possible; otherwise he will be destroyed simply because there will be more monsters coming than he will be killing. When I tried a run without fireballs, I had a huge tide of monsters tailing me, and by the time the grey orcs started coming, the horde still contained rats! Starting the bow at 3 arrows seems to be even more needed now.
oh that was an amazing run, that artifact makes the sparks so powerful! I see on the summary that the artifacts probably spawn a bit early. There's really not many items of significance after that.
I watch all the videos carefully, it's a great opportunity to get some insight into how others play the game. I get quite blind to that in my own runs since I read the game with complete knowledge of its inner workings.
I'm glad the new boss procs added some epicness! Rest assured this was only the first pass on this concept, and more variety and harder procs should come in the future! As always, please share if you have any ideas.
I'll buff the archer back up a bit. Next version will hopefully see a fairly big rewrite of the spawn phase system I've planned for a little while now.
Good catch on the super healing potion vs normal potions. That's a bug! So thanks for bringing it to my attention!
There is a pretty huge difficulty curve from when the dragons spawn until the black dragon appears. I'll have to think a bit about how I can add in more spikes like that which tests that you're on top of the powercurve a bit earlier in the game. I think the new spawn phase system will help with that.
Thanks again man for your continuous support! Invaluable feedback!
You can certainly make the artifact spawn a bit later; however, in that case, I don't get how they are spawned. I just thought that every time you have a new combination of weapon and book, there is a roll for an artifact to appear. So in each game, I tried to cycle weapons and especially books as fast as I could.
However the problem seems to be that for any given character, there aren't really many items of significance, period. Typically, you will want one specific weapon and at most one specific book. After that, you want winged boots and an armor, and that's it. Sadly, most items I find in any given run are junk. And I'm still not sure about the books because they seem to have a proper effect only with spells. With other weapons their effect seems to be much reduced (they trigger only rarely, but I can't say that they don't trigger at all — it's a bit weird). The artifact doesn't particularly change that state of things.
With respect to the boss: I think it should have much less health and much more "procs". As of now, the bossfight is quite simple and I'd say repetitive — you hit it 10 times, 20 times and then you start thinking "will it finally die?" It looks like the fight takes something between 150 and 200 rounds, which is a lot, and in that time, you unleash at least ~30 attacks, but it can be even as much as 60.
One thing that would make sense for a dragon is dragon's breath. It would make things a bit more interesting than just running straight away from it — you would need to dodge the breath weapon to the side. There could also be a lingering effect, e. g. the red dragon would breathe fire that would keep burning for a couple of turns, and if you step into it, you lose some HP. The dragon wouldn't be affected by these fires at all, and with other monsters — I don't know but probably they should be immune to it too. The black dragon could breathe some kind of poisonous vapors with a similar effect.
Finally: I think that the main game is pretty well paced now and there seems to be little need of adding some difficulty spikes. One such spike is, in my opinion, the bats, especially when the white spheres come right after them. I would rather tone down the little dragons a bit, because they seem to be very hard to defeat (the last time I managed to do that was with the overpowered archer in v1.5, after that I always had to run away and grab the amulet). The three problems with them are: 1) they have a lot HP, 2) they hit hard (for 8!) 3) there's so many of them and they come from all directions. I think that the third point is the most important: I always get swarmed, or there is such a serious threat of being swarmed that I need to run for the amulet. Maybe it would help if you spawned just a little bit less of them and give more time before the big black dragon comes.
By the way, I managed to win with the whirlwind guy, so he's no longer as useless as he was before. I obtained the freezing sword artifact and that essentially decided the battle with the dragon. After some initial wrong moves, I found a cycle of moves in which it was permanently frozen and I could beat the heck out of it.