[Experimental] - 440569

[Kevin]

Hey Grifters,

There's a grab bag of things today, including the start of achievements, a new smith event, and a bunch of sal card re-balancing. Here are the card details:

 

MISC

• Pass on achievement implementation. (the criteria are not yet validated)
• Hookup Tank, Efficiency achievements.
• Add achievement checks for Machinist, Just Cards, No Upgrades, Brawler, Soluble Fish

GAMEPLAY

• Add event_smith_meets_sal
• Added two new mettle grafts to grant xp to battle and negotiation grafts
• mark mettle buys as shop transactions for discounts
• fix for getting stuck at the end of smith day 2 if theroux is killed

CARDS

• All flourishes now have burnout
• Balancing pass on some of Sal's battle cards
• Comedy club, fight club, bogroot eclair, brain gills: skip hatch cards for consistency.
• Add auto_target to Curve Ball
• Renamed Sal's "Flourish" graft to "Best Offense"
• Carbon Copy should use Duplicate, not Clone.
• Card cost calculation on 'Weight' now applies after Force Compression.
• Update some rook grafts to use the Charge keyword.

UI

• Adding content to the Mettle compendium. Doesn't support gamepad yet
• reset the mettle shop buy option every day, in main game and in brawl
• Animating the defend bar when defend is hit
• Show opinion events in order of occurence in the TooltipAgent widget.
• Typecheck parameter for the #agent locmacro, to be resilient towards format changes.
   

View full update

[ZeppMan217]

Barnacle buffed? I might have to start running extra copies. Also, if Tackle gets a 2 Impair upgrade it might become an auto include, just like Smith's Headbutt/Nerve Strike/Splinter. And Finishers consuming pre-set amounts of Combo instead of everything?! Oh, baby!

[RageLeague]

2 hours ago, Kevin said:

 

This reminds me, for some upgrades, some card text are removed. For example, "enduring" upgrades removes the expend keywork. However, it might not be immediately obvious to the player. Maybe for those upgrades, you can add a strikethrough to indicate that some words are removed? I'm wondering if strikethrough is supported through the game engine, because the game's markup tags don't support it right now.

[bryank724]

The game keeps crashing whenever I win a battle, ever since this update.

[ZeppMan217]

Also, does the new Wretched Strike work off the start of turn card draw, so it automatically gains +5 damage when drawn?

Also, in regards to Prediction, I hope Guarding Prediction is replaced with a +2 or 3 base DEF. Giving +2 DEF to allies seems really silly considering that "ally support" kit is not a thing and that we can just apply DEF to allies with targeted cards, not to mention that you might not wanna help your allies at all (like in a certain Brawl mission).

Edited November 18, 2020 by ZeppMan217

[pacovf]

The new Sneak Attack is better than the old one, but still a bit meh. I hope the upgrades are quite a bit beefier.

The new slaughter is bad at 2 Action cost. It's rare that you have so many actions that you would consider spending two on extra draw. I assume one of the upgrades will reduce its cost, but I think that's the wrong approach to this kind of card.

Everything else looks good at first sight.

[ZeppMan217]

51 minutes ago, pacovf said:

The new Sneak Attack is better than the old one, but still a bit meh. I hope the upgrades are quite a bit beefier.

The new slaughter is bad at 2 Action cost. It's rare that you have so many actions that you would consider spending two on extra draw. I assume one of the upgrades will reduce its cost, but I think that's the wrong approach to this kind of card.

Everything else looks good at first sight.

2 Combo is easy to cough up, especially if you're Combo focused. It's kinda like Bedlam, cept you discard combo and can target, though it's far worse without Combo.

Sal can get 2 extra energy in the Campaign, and up to 4 in the Brawl (not counting Quick Charger). She could use more neutral card draws regardless. Perhaps a 1 cost, 2-3 damage base version? It'd be sort of like an offensive version of Readiness, cept more scalable, which is fitting for an Uncommon. Its upgrades could be the following: an option that increases the damage from 2-3 to 3-5 (which lets you draw more), and an alternative option that does the base 2-3 damage and applies 3 Bleed (essentially increasing the damage of the card without increasing the card draw).

[ArtixBot]

Guarding Prediction as an upgrade feels stronger than Selfish Prediction.

Guarding Prediction's applied Guard goes as follows: 6->8->10->12->14... while Selfish Prediction's applied guard goes from: 3->6->9->12->15...

Thus, Selfish Prediction only becomes on par with Guarding Prediction once it's been improvised 3 times in a battle, and then only becomes marginally better after being improvised 4 times.

Given that the only cards which can improvise Prediction are Slippery (which itself gives Defense!), Thieves' Instinct (which will probably give you a better card than Prediction), Muscle Memory (which costs 2 by default!), and Zig Zag (and the Manuever-focused upgrade is very mediocre), I feel that Selfish Prediction should be +4 Defense when Improvised for the rest of battle (for 3->7->11->15).

[pacovf]

Bedlam is not even in the same tier than Sneak attack. Discarding a card is rarely an imposition, and very often straight up beneficial. It's a great D1 draft because of the huge spike in damage, and stays relevant afterwards even if you don't go discard synergy due to Hanbi, the Drusks, and a few others. The only advantage Sneak attack has is that you can target it. Sure, spending 2 combo is not huge, but I would rather spend 2 combo on pretty much any other combo card with better returns, and this card is essentially dead if you're not spending that combo.

A 1-cost new Slaughter would be good yeah, even with 1-2 damage at base. The scaling is a big deal.

[ZeppMan217]

9 minutes ago, ArtixBot said:

Guarding Prediction as an upgrade feels stronger than Selfish Prediction.

Selfish would probably be 3 DEF base, +3 when improvised; if Guarding is kept as is it'll be 3 DEF base, +2 when Improvised, and give allies 2 DEF. So Selfish would still be better for yourself if improvised at least once (3+3=6, as opposed to Guarding's 3+2=5). I still hope Guarding's replaced with a base DEF buff and without the ally stuff.

 

 

[ArtixBot]

Guarding and Selfish Prediction were reworked, I'm referring to the reworked versions, of which Guarding Prediction seems superior to Selfish Prediction:

[ZeppMan217]

Ah, my bad! That's what I get for not checking in-game.

[Scrumch]

Achievements??? In a Klei game???? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS??

 

(I kid, these balance changes look neat btw) 

[Szczuku]

Ayyy the new update introduced you vs grifter negotiation (although no behaviour yet)

[Scrumch]

By the way, the event that unlocks Mettle can only be encountered on day 3 - but Smith can't reach that day right now. The event should be moved back a day so Smith can try out the Mettle grafts.

[RageLeague]

2 hours ago, Szczuku said:

Ayyy the new update introduced you vs grifter negotiation (although no behaviour yet)

Pretty sure it has always been there, but no one touches it ever.

[bryank724]

18 hours ago, bryank724 said:

The game keeps crashing whenever I win a battle, ever since this update.

Reinstalling has fixed this.