[Experimental] - 442070

[Kevin]

Hey Grifters,

We're working out the finer points of flourish presentation and UI- expect some fancier effects and a proper sound treatment soon. There are also quite a few fixes and balance fixes.

In particular, we determined that the win rate on the boss negotiation daily was way too low, compared to the others (these stats are for EASY difficulty):

This makes sense, because the boss negotiations aren't in the main game (yet?), so they've never had a good baseline tuning. Hopefully, the changes we made to the enemy resolve levels will help even that out!

 

GAMEPLAY

• Added SELF_DEFENCE flag to experiment_rook_hesh_boss.lua to prevent relationships on multiple fights
• Adjusted combat stats for mercenary_boss
• Adjusted resolve required at each boss stage in daily_boss_negotiation.lua and added an extra option for the bonus stages
• The option to heal your pet in daily_boss_rush.lua no longer appears if your pet is at full health
• Added a damage_mult to Tei's barrage attack 
• Set up a basic combat behaviour for Tei 

UI

• Make flourish pick cancelable; don't consume flourish until it's actually used to spawn the new card
• Added a delay between choosing a flourish and the flourish anim playing
• Add Controls tab to options screen (for now, only keyboard remaps)
• Flourish is a card type, which can be sorted on in the compendium

CARDS

• Flourish implicitly Expends and Burnouts
• Promoted Wealthy Merchant now only uses cha_ching when fighting against you
• Changed the order of Smith's bottle spending to always spend from draw, discard and then hand
• Fixed bugs with merged_glass and Smith's thickness caused by recent changes to Defend
• Fixed bug where scapegoat_plus2 could target enemy arguments
• GraftOwner:SetGrafts() now adds any starting grafts for the character unless otherwise specified. This fixes a crash in experiments caused by a lack of a flourish graft 
• Power Through now stacks.
   

View full update

[minespatch]

1 hour ago, Kevin said:

Promoted Wealthy Merchant now only uses cha_ching when fighting against you

[ZeppMan217]

3 hours ago, Kevin said:

Changed the order of Smith's bottle spending to always spend from draw, discard and then hand

Very nice!

Also, in regards to Nego Daily: the resolve decrease is a big help, but I also feel that Bossbit and Flekfis are a bit overtuned, with Bossbit's robodog spawning being so frequent that you sometimes don't have time to punch his core or even Light, while Flekfis' issue lies in the boss not incepting garbage (0 cost, Replenish, does nothing) into your deck, the way he does it in combat.

[RageLeague]

Also, while I only have direct comparison of Hanbi's special negotiation vs regular Jakes negotiation through my mod, I feel like Hanbi's negotiation is way easier than regular Jakes negotiation. Hanbi only deals 2 damage at a time by default, and if you draw sitting ducks, you can ignore them if you have enough composure cards. Drawing one sitting ducks makes him deal 4 damage(the minimum damage dealt by any other npcs), and only if you draw 2 or more does it really start to hurt. However, every 3 turns, sometimes the Jakes attacks twice for 4 damage(not sure how intended this is), so I'm not sure Hanbi's attacking capabilities is on par with Jakes attacking capabilities. One thing of note, though. Because Hanbi always attack twice per turn, he has high potential when having lots of impatience. But that doesn't come into play until turn 6 in wordsmith, and only increases once per 2 turns instead of 1.

In addition, Jakes also summons a turret(is that what we're calling damage dealers over time?) every 3 turns, while hanbi does not. Instead, he summons allurement every like 4 turns, and argument that gives lots of sitting ducks, but can be destroyed at will to remove all sitting ducks in every deck. This makes Hanbi's argument weaker in general. Note that shifty is not ignorable. You want to destroy it to get more info, but not destroying it in one go at high prestige makes more turrets.

Jakes also has built in defensive capabilities, with double edge. However, if you block Jakes' attacks, they will take 3 damage to core(or a random argument, if the core has no resolve or is shielded). In contrast, Hanbi does not have that, which is a good thing for you until you start to block every attack, then it's not really so good. He does give you 1 sitting ducks every turn, and more at high prestige. Depending on your deck size, it can either be very painful at times, or negligible.

Overall, I feel like Hanbi's boss negotiation is weaker than Jakes default negotiation. It's probably for balancing the wordsmith negotiation, but if you have boss negotiations in the base game, this is a day 2 boss, so it should be way harder than that. I have no experience with the other boss negotiations in the "base game", though.

[pacovf]

14 hours ago, Kevin said:

Adjusted combat stats for mercenary_boss

 

He's much more threatening now, but it still depends wildly on his attack pattern. If he starts with two debuff attacks on the first two turns, it's going to be a *much* harder fight than if he waits until turn 8 to apply debuffs for the first time.

Speaking of, boss experiments really should start with the flourish bar full. Players are likely to save the flourish for the boss fight in normal gameplay. But with the bar starting empty in the experiments, the fight will end one way or another before you get to play the flourish, which makes the fights quite a bit harder than in normal play.

[Scrumch]

2 hours ago, RageLeague said:

In addition, Jakes also summons a turret(is that what we're calling damage dealers over time?) 

I've just been referring to them as auto-attackers, lol