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.
Thanks again for all your feedback. I agree that dragon fire stopping you from fleeing away from the dragon in a straight line is a great idea, and I also agree that the bosses tend to draw out a bit much right now. More than anything I think there is a lack of content problem in the game right now, it needs more abilities and items, but this has to grow over time as the game slowly matures.
I'm on vacation this week, so no new game update this week, but I'll be back at it soon!
