[Experimental] - 440305

[Kevin]

Hey Grifters!

We have a couple of new systems appearing in this update: Flourishes and Mettle.

Flourishes are special attacks that you can perform after filling your flourish meter. You fill your meter by playing cards and doing and taking damage. The bar carries over battle-to-battle and negotiation-to-negotiation. When it is full, you can select one of your unlocked flourish cards to play on your turn. We'll be adding an in-game unlock screen for flourishes - you will unlock new cards there by spending points that you earn by defeating different bosses at the various prestige levels.

Mettle is a new currency that you earn through quests, or by killing characters with the mettlesome condition, or by destroying mettle bounty arguments in negotiation, or with shills. Play a run with each character, and they will meet a special character who will take those points in exchange for permanent character upgrades that carry over between runs.

We've also been adding content here and there - there are a couple of new npc defs and promoteds in various states of completion, and the bones of smith's day 3 are there for dataminers to puzzle through. As this week continues, we'll be finishing flourishes and mettle (with presentation, shop screens, etc), and the new characters.

Oh, and there's a small Sal card balance pass in-progress. If you have any specific sal card/graft change suggestions, we are all ears!

UI

• Suppress 'hit' flash for characters that evade.
• Hooked up placeholder mettle tab in the compendium - it doesn't actually do anything yet
• Hooked up the flourish bars in both negotiation and battle so that they are activatable
• Show relationship history in AgentTooltip
• Fix delayed presentation of image slide following a movie slide.
• Adding a temporary Flourish widget to the Negotiations and Battles (it will look better soon)
• Added Smith's Battle tutorial to the pause menu
• Fix grifts button on the PerkScreen showing grafts.

GAMEPLAY

• You can now run away starting turn 1.
• don't show hated message if you kill the merchant in side_smith_sponsorship_deal
• add mettle vendor to brawls, allow mettle upgrades in dailies
• set up all character's mettle shops, make the mettle seller present themselves to all players
• Set up mettle_bounty and mettlesome spawning
• Set up a new def for the Pearlies
• Create 'upgraded' versions of trained_pet/untrained_pet per pet type, so the arguments can be recreated without knowing which pet they are supposed to belong to.
• added battle card temp art and negotiation temp art to flourish cards
• hook up seemli's build, and the partner hideouts on smith day 3
• adjust numerical difficulty down in story mode
• add an opinion event when letting the admiralty go in drop_smuggle_in_admiralty_weapons
• Fix killed dialog not being run if you kill the loan shark.
• Fixed bug where Phroluk wouldn't buy mechanical pets
• Set up a combat behaviour for the Promoted Luminitiate
• Added the missing Turncoat boss to Sal's Brawl 
• Switched the functionality of Chartreuse and Taupe to match their descriptions in oppo_beach_goo.lua

CARDS

• Hatch cards no longer show an xp bar, because they cannot be "upgraded".  The Hatch keyword indicates the number of times the card must be triggered for it to hatch.
• smith's day 3 is functional - needs dialog, bucket quests, and boss fights to be complete
• Update Catchpenny. It doubles at the start of your turn.  Remove the Poor Merchant aoe attack.
• Picking "Chug" from Smith's Wide Flask, now plays wide flask instead of the base card
• Add upgrade split for Tough and Angry
• Galvanized now injects the Voltaic keyword.

MISC

• use the defended/evaded tag on the specific hit to determine hit result anim.
• Only play the step_back anim on the first hit in a multi-hit attack.
• Revised shroke eyes in slide
• Revised Nadan slide
   

View full update

[RageLeague]

Now that sal's cards are being balanced, I feel like dominance should be changed. Right now, mathematically speaking, if you can consistently get more than 1 dominance per turn on average, dominance can scale without bounds. This makes cards that gives you two or more dominance at a time very powerful, and makes the Tyrant coin broken, because you can consistently gamble and get lots of dominance from it.

Perhaps dominance should exponentially decrease, like maybe remove half of its stacks per turn rather than 1. At low dominance count, the changes are unnoticeable, but you can't increase dominance without bound, because as your dominance gets higher, so does the amount it decreases. This will open up a lot of design spaces for hostile cards, as more dominance cards can be made without worry about it being too broken with dominance, as there's like a soft cap for it.

Also

Spoiler

* {tei} tells you that {bishop}, your brother's right hand, is personally overseeing the anointing of new Hesh priests at a secret ritual near the Beaching.
* {bishop} is more corrupt than usual, and is selling priesthoods to the highest bidder.
* {tei} will sneak you in to the ritual site as an aspirant, and get you close to {bishop} so that you can kill him!
player:
    Do I get to wear a funny hat?
agent:
    Of course! How else would I sneak you in?!

 

Do we unlock smith's cult outfit at this point, or is it just a temporary story thing?

Edited November 17, 2020 by RageLeague

[ArtixBot]

Ooh, card balance suggestions? I'm always up for that.

• (Not so much balance but a bug?) Relentless is a card in Sal's compendium, but I've never seen it offered (I assume it's a Spree unique, but I've never seen it).
• I'd like some more card support for Doubt for Sal's deck to enable a new deck archetype.
• Wild Lunge just seems like a worse Bedlam (6 less minimum damage in exchange for not discarding a card, but that can actually be a non-synergy when using a discard deck!).
• Zig Zag's upgrades feel pretty weak (+1 defense or +1 Wound only, and it's random targeting).
• Thirst probably could reduce the cost of the improvised card by 1 (or set its cost to 0), to make it similar to Thieves' Instinct.
• I've personally never taken Graven Muscle Memory when I could reduce its cost to 1 instead. Maybe make Graven Muscle Memory make two duplicates?
• Freighter looks like a card that belongs in Rook's deck instead (since at least Rook's deck has Boat Anchor).

(Also I don't see the Flourishes anywhere?)

Edited November 17, 2020 by ArtixBot

[Kevin]

2 hours ago, RageLeague said:

Now that sal's cards are being balanced, I feel like dominance should be changed. Right now, mathematically speaking, if you can consistently get more than 1 dominance per turn on average, dominance can scale without bounds. This makes cards that gives you two or more dominance at a time very powerful, and makes the Tyrant coin broken, because you can consistently gamble and get lots of dominance from it.

Perhaps dominance should exponentially decrease, like maybe remove half of its stacks per turn rather than 1. At low dominance count, the changes are unnoticeable, but you can't increase dominance without bound, because as your dominance gets higher, so does the amount it decreases. This will open up a lot of design spaces for hostile cards, as more dominance cards can be made without worry about it being too broken with dominance, as there's like a soft cap for it.

Also

  Hide contents

* {tei} tells you that {bishop}, your brother's right hand, is personally overseeing the anointing of new Hesh priests at a secret ritual near the Beaching.
* {bishop} is more corrupt than usual, and is selling priesthoods to the highest bidder.
* {tei} will sneak you in to the ritual site as an aspirant, and get you close to {bishop} so that you can kill him!
player:
    Do I get to wear a funny hat?
agent:
    Of course! How else would I sneak you in?!

 

Do we unlock smith's cult outfit at this point, or is it just a temporary story thing?

I think we might unlock the outfit in general the first time you get that far, but I'm not sure yet. The outfit itself has yet to be designed

[pacovf]

6 hours ago, RageLeague said:

Now that sal's cards are being balanced, I feel like dominance should be changed. Right now, mathematically speaking, if you can consistently get more than 1 dominance per turn on average, dominance can scale without bounds. This makes cards that gives you two or more dominance at a time very powerful, and makes the Tyrant coin broken, because you can consistently gamble and get lots of dominance from it.

Perhaps dominance should exponentially decrease, like maybe remove half of its stacks per turn rather than 1. At low dominance count, the changes are unnoticeable, but you can't increase dominance without bound, because as your dominance gets higher, so does the amount it decreases. This will open up a lot of design spaces for hostile cards, as more dominance cards can be made without worry about it being too broken with dominance, as there's like a soft cap for it.

I can't say I agree, aside from maybe the Tyrant coin (I have only played with it once; it is indeed strong, but not a whole lot more than other late coins). The difficulty with stacking Dominance is the rarity of cards that offer more than 1 Dominance, and that it's an argument with only 2 resolve while Hostility decks are bad at producing Composure. Most Hostility decks accumulate Dominance very slowly throughout most of the run, adding exponential Dominance decrease would limit them to ~3 Dominance maximum for most of the game, which is just not enough to make up for the lack of composure of those decks (you want to hit around ~5 Dominance for that). And once you get to the Critical Mass point in those decks in which your Dominance production explodes, halving Dominance each turn won't change much, since you're already overproducing Dominance anyway and ending negotiations in 3 turns tops.

In other words, this change would make the hard part of Dominance decks even harder, while not really affecting the late game part. It's not like Dominance is the only sort of Negotiation deck that breaks the game in the last 30% of each run.

For more general Sal comments, unless I missed some card additions she was still very short on Defense cards that weren't discard-synergy-only?

[ZeppMan217]

31 minutes ago, pacovf said:

For more general Sal comments, unless I missed some card additions she was still very short on Defense cards that weren't discard-synergy-only?

Chamber, Slippery, Defensive Surge, The Slip, Seeker, and Waylay. Seeker doesn't need to be discarded, it's 6 (8) DEF out the box. Active Defense's upgrade also gives 6 DEF without any discards. There are also Shoulder Roll for Combo and Barnacle/Blood Guard for Bleed.

• I think Zig Zag should have an upgrade with improved numbers, and an upgrade that reduces the cost to 0. I'm not a fan of Improvise in general but ZZ seems like a tutor that's not worth spending energy on.
• Brazen Attack could use a 1 energy upgrade instead of increased Impair.
• Crusher would've been more appealing if its cost was reduced whenever you Improvise, without needing to have the card in your hand. Its cost could reset after you play it, so as to balance the improved accessibility.
• Muscle Memory was already mentioned. Don't really know what could be changed about it, don't really see why you'd want it at 2 base cost.
• Base version of Dagger Storm at 2 cost is unappealing. I get that adding 0 cost cards to your draw pile has synergy with Improvise but spending 2 energy to maybe get 2 pokers? No thank you.

This is kind of an overarching thing, but I really dislike Unplayable Discard and Evoke cards, like Spare Blades, Abrupt Remark, Erupt, etc. The reason I don't like em is because there's real risk of ending up with a completely unplayable hand should you draft a bunch of these cards. This applies to all characters, not just Sal.

Sure, some of the cards have upgrades that make em playable for 1 or 0 energy, but why would I even draft em if I can't guarantee that I'll be able to reliably discard/evoke em? It's especially egregious because Sal's core Discard cards, like Kradeshi Barbstorm, Stringer, and Seeker show a simple path to making the base versions of these Unplayable cards appealing: just make em cost 1 and tweak the effect so that you'd get more out of these cards when they're discarded/evoked as opposed to just playing em.

 

[spacescrew]

11 hours ago, Kevin said:

Hatch cards no longer show an xp bar, because they cannot be "upgraded".  The Hatch keyword indicates the number of times the card must be triggered for it to hatch.

So now we can't hatch parasite faster with brain gill? or it's just UI change?

Edited November 17, 2020 by spacescrew

[ZeppMan217]

1 hour ago, spacescrew said:

So now we can't hatch parasite faster with brain gill? or it's just UI change?

If it's based on uses then yeah, gills won't help. I suppose it's only fair that the negotiation parasite should be made just as worthless as the combat one.

[pacovf]

4 hours ago, ZeppMan217 said:

Chamber, Slippery, Defensive Surge, The Slip, Seeker, and Waylay. Seeker doesn't need to be discarded, it's 6 (8) DEF out the box. Active Defense's upgrade also gives 6 DEF without any discards. There are also Shoulder Roll for Combo and Barnacle/Blood Guard for Bleed.

Ok, so no big changes since my last post about this (scroll down for my last update). It's not enough. This handful of cards are drowned in a sea of non-defense cards.

[ZeppMan217]

1 hour ago, pacovf said:

Ok, so no big changes since my last post about this (scroll down for my last update). It's not enough. This handful of cards are drowned in a sea of non-defense cards.

I see your angle with comparing Sal to Rook by rarity, but Rook has a bunch of gimmicky cards: among commons, he has Challenger (bad in 1v1) and Telegraph (does nothing without Conc), with Dugout being a tough pick to justify even if you're loaded on Brain Ticks; among uncommons, Arc Deflection (does nothing without reliable OC generation), Boat Anchor (straight up unplayable because you have to empty your entire hand to play it for 1 energy); and among rares, there's Garbage Day (which is garbage itself because of the 2 energy cost and the lack of Sticky in either upgrade).

Throw those cards away and the rift is suddenly not all that big. Sure, Rook also has innate defensive capabilities via empty cells, but he doesn't get energy grafts or access to the merc market.

Edited November 17, 2020 by ZeppMan217

[RageLeague]

3 hours ago, spacescrew said:

So now we can't hatch parasite faster with brain gill? or it's just UI change?

It's just UI change based on how the code works.

They are probably doing this for backwards compatibility.

Also, hatch cards are hard-coded so that they aren't affected by fatigue. I'm not sure whether this is the case before.

Also, the name flourish already exists as a sal graft.

[Morganchase]

Hang on, so is smith's day 3 playable now, or no? Where can I find the data for it?

[pacovf]

1 hour ago, ZeppMan217 said:

I see your angle with comparing Sal to Rook by rarity, but Rook has a bunch of gimmicky cards: among commons, he has Challenger (bad in 1v1) and Telegraph (does nothing without Conc), with Dugout being a tough pick to justify even if you're loaded on Brain Ticks; among uncommons, Arc Deflection (does nothing without reliable OC generation), Boat Anchor (straight up unplayable because you have to empty your entire hand to play it for 1 energy); and among rares, there's Garbage Day (which is garbage itself because of the 2 energy cost and the lack of Sticky in either upgrade).

Throw those cards away and the rift is suddenly not all that big. Sure, Rook also has innate defensive capabilities via empty cells, but he doesn't get energy grafts or access to the merc market.

I did put between parenthesis the numbers if we ignore narrow cards (eg. Telegraph). And it's true that I am counting some defense cards even though they're so bad you will never pick them (e.g. Boat Anchor), but that's a problem with the balance of those cards, not with the number of defense options. Ultimately Rook's defense card ratio still looks quite a bit better IMHO. Energy grafts for Sal don't help with this since that is solving a different problem, and while mercs would solve it, they're too expensive to use very often.

It looks like it's a matter of opinion then. I wrote that post initially because you could feel the lack of defensive options for Sal when running a non-discard deck with one of those mutators that remove your starting deck, and you don't feel that as much with Rook.

[Scrumch]

Sal changes? Well okay then;

Sal's Savvy feels non existent to me, Smith's Confrontational has direct synergy with most of his playstyles and Rook's negotiation deck revolves around his. A simple solution imo would be to add the single point of composure to all friendly arguments too - since Influence and Dominance have very little resolve. If I could suggest an entire rework, I'd like her core argument to randomly reduce the cost of a card by 1. I feel this fits in more with  the name of the ability - and has more direct uses. I know there's already a graft that does this, but it's pretty rare and there's also already grafts that apply composure to your arguments every turn.

I feel Sal's Hostility deck is pretty balanced right now, there's purposefully no hostility cards that trade dominance for composure and other defensive buffs as it's meant to be the hare to the Influence's turtle strategy (if that allegory makes any sense).

Although I feel that Vulnerability should really work like Wound, where each stack increases damage done by 1. That one niche graft where vulnerability is twice as effective would then become a lot more valuable, I feel.

Combat wise, I feel like Sal's got the weaker builds compared Rook and Smith. Maybe that's because I think those two are AMAZINGLY designed while Sal is pretty simple. This is understandable - she's the default started character so having a ton of complex mechanics is a bad idea. 

Bleed decks seem to do the whole 'use this resource to gain a benefit' better than combo does. Having stacks of bleed does stuff on it's own while bleed cards add Impair, Wound etc on top of that. Combo on it's own is meaningless, especially early on where you don't have a lot of combo cards - you're just stalling while you wait for the right finisher card to appear. If I can pull a comparison to another character, Concentration with Rook is a much better version of Combo, it's passive effect naturally helps out Rook when he's low on charge by lifting the damage floor of his moves, and when you have a card that requires that resource (e.g. that one card that trades Concentration for Defence and Counter) there's a genuine choice in whether you want to keep the damage 'buff' or activate this one boosted card. 

I'd suggest just giving Combo Concentration's floor-lifting capabilities (since Sal already has her fair share of wide damage range cards)but I know that'd make the two characters a little too similar.

Also, I'm kinda onboard with Sal having a defence problem - though mostly WITH combo, I've so far never been able to beat P6 Kashio with a Combo deck since getting hit more than once per turn kneecaps a lot of combo stuff, and she can have like 4+ ways of hitting you multiple times. Not to mention how Combo gets hurt by Bleed making some Spree fights pretty annoying. I had an amazing run with 3 stacks of Bargaining but I got a Gnarled Effigy and it made my Combo build really bad. I get that Banes are supposed to be detrimental, but having just 1 completely ruin a build seems a little unfair. 

Personally, I'd have combo act like more like Overcharge or Renown, where it naturally decays instead of it being susceptible to damage. This would allow Sal to make more use out of cards that give her combo, without fear that a Yote will delete all of that gain in a single turn. If combo isn't going to give Sal a passive benefit while she has it - could you at least buff the Finisher that hits all enemies (Fan of Knives or something like that)? Sal's negotiation deck has a similar card that uses Influence to hit all arguments, but it's base damage is much higher. 

One more thing, discard and improv decks are already very good (dare I say better than her default bleed and combo ones)- and can handle metallic foes okay-ish. But the other two, especially !bleed Sal have no real way to deal with metallic enemies aside from a few rare card upgrades or shoeing in a dagger flash card and even then the daggers on their own are pretty weak. When I use bleed decks I try to steer as far away from Jeol, Luminaries, etc. because when your entire deck revolves around dealing bonus damage to enemies with a certain status effect, when you fight an enemy that is immune to that effect - you're stuck (unlike Burn)! Reworking some of the cards people have mentioned here to do be piercing would really help.

[Maniafig]

Quick thoughts on Sal card/graft balance:

-In general I think it's fine that Sal's cards are a bit weaker than Smith's and Rook's since she gets extra energy from boss Grafts. This immediately takes me to a recurring issue I have with Sal's campaign: The Negotiation Boss Grafts are kinda crap relative to the combat ones. I never want to take the damage when gaining Influence/Dominance ones, Roller Drum is extremely binary in whether it's a free +1 energy or a 50% damage penalty and Distributed Processing does absolutely nothing in a lot of Negotiations.

-Boss Grafts should be listed as Sal Grafts rather than Other Grafts if only Sal is going to be able to get them. Maybe this would alleviate the confusion over why Rook and Smith can't get Boss Grafts when they're not listed as Sal-exclusive Grafts.

-I don't understand why most of the Sal-unique Negotiation Grafts are unique to Sal, since they don't really capitalize on any mechanics unique to her. Her Combat Grafts mostly function around Bleed/Discard/Combo/Improv, which are her unique gimmicks.

-Distresser should be unique to Sal instead of in the common pool since Sal's the only character who even has access to a card that incepts Vulnerability. There should also be more cards that incept Vulnerability in general.

-Salvager should be a Sal-only Graft, she's the dedicated Combat Discard character, it's way overvalued as a Rare Graft for Rook and Smith. 

-Seconding the notion that Thirst needs to be buffed, even in a Bleed deck I'd rather just play whatever Bleed cards I have instead of taking a gamble with Thirst. Either lower the energy cost or make the improv'd card cost 0 energy.

-There's a bunch of ability cards that cost 2 energy which I rarely if ever take. They're mostly just too slow, they use up a card draw and energy for payoffs that don't compare to just using whatever other cards you could have drawn and played.

-Stone Zig-Zag is underwhelming, +1 Block is a very weak upgrade.

-I've never taken Sneak Attack. 2 Energy attack that consumes Combo for a mediocre payoff? Just way too finicky and inefficient for my tastes.

-Is Recall any good? It doesn't seem worth the energy and card draw investment to be able to draw more cards later.

-I've never taken Aplomb, sources of Compsure that are only usable conditionally and use up resources are a hard pick, especially when there are other sources of free and reliable composure.

I'll save thoughts on Flourishes and Mettle until they are implemented, but I am wondering how many more mechanics are going to be added along the way. 

[AscendedOne]

24 minutes ago, Maniafig said:

Quick thoughts on Sal card/graft balance:

-Is Recall any good? It doesn't seem worth the energy and card draw investment to be able to draw more cards later.

Recall is great. First off, you only suffer from card disadvantage if you don't play recall. If you play it, you trigger its effect even if recall is not already in play. Second off, it works amazingly with both variations of Sal's instincts. Allowing you to replay your hostile card to deal damage and increase dominance for larger and larger amounts of damage, which is also an infinite with that card that spends dominance to gain 2 actions. Being able to deal 5 aoe damage with the other variation multiple times or deal increasing amounts of damage as you scale influence is also great.

I particularly like recall with pocket bomb as it can add 3 damage to any draw card, or 6 damage if it draws into an empty deck after having drawn at least one card.

Edited November 17, 2020 by AscendedOne

[Cpt. KatKit]

I think some of Sal's cards might benefit from Sticky as an upgrade. So it is easier to do some specific combos without needing to have decks that zoom through a deck a million time per fight.