[Experimental] - 442347

[Kevin]

Hey Grifters.

Look! An Update!

GAMEPLAY

• Added Fralx to rook's story, dailies, and brawls
• New smith day 3 quest: side_smith_eden_deep_undercover
• fix brawl pet shop
• added lore entry for the aerostat
• Made tweaks to the automech boss' negotiation behaviour to make him slightly easier
• Set up new attack pattern for the mercenary boss
• Added the final "Kill" flourish gain
• Added a required_grafts table to the player characters to ensure that old saves don't break if/when we add new necessary grafts such as the flourish tracker
• Fix TooltipFlourish crash if you have no flourish graft (eg. old saves)

UI

• Argument descriptions now highlight the part that increases with multiple stacks (where applicable)
• Sorting the flourishes so the base ones always show first
• Update flourish so it plays directly from the UI (not as in inserted card)
• Fixed incorrect argument icons for upgraded negotiation flourishes
• Secret Collection: speed up dealt presentation
• Improving the description on the Flourishes screen. Making the header adjust to the size of the flourish container

CARDS

• Change Stimulating Brew description for consistency.
• Reworked the upgrades for Shelve and reduced the cost of the base card by 1
• Fixed incorrect bleed amount on hemomancy_ii
• Fixed description of Chaos Theory to account for multiple stacks
• Fixed missing card flags on the Promoted Luminiates attacks
• Duality II: should now respect max hand size. Also Prevent duplicates in the to_draw array.
• If Deck:InsertCard explicitly moves a card to the deck it already is in, to an index it already occupies, this is handled as a no-op.
   

View full update

[minespatch]

2 hours ago, Kevin said:

New smith day 3 quest: side_smith_eden_deep_undercover

Here's hoping I can check day 3 soon...

[Kevin]

You have to debug your way into day 3, because it's not quiiiiiite playable yet. I think it'll be good to go in experimental (with no variety) as soon as one of the bosses is done.

[pacovf]

9 hours ago, Kevin said:

UI

• Argument descriptions now highlight the part that increases with multiple stacks (where applicable)

 

Can you do this for buffs and debuffs too, please?

9 hours ago, Kevin said:

GAMEPLAY

• Set up new attack pattern for the mercenary boss

 

He feels a lot better now. Consider making it so that stun pushes back his pattern, rather than skipping one step altogether. Stunning him on the turn he would apply the debuff is extremely strong as he stands right now.

[ZeppMan217]

1 hour ago, pacovf said:

Consider making it so that stun pushes back his pattern, rather than skipping one step altogether. Stunning him on the turn he would apply the debuff is extremely strong as he stands right now.

That's true for all bosses and is the primary reason as to why character stun cards are so desirable and rare. Don't see why it'd need to be changed.

[pacovf]

Well, he only has 3 different actions which he cycles in order, of which one is just a defend, and another (double hit) is only threatening if he applied the debuffs (3-4 wound) the turn before. Stunning him on the debuff turn effectively disables him for 3 turns, not one. That's not the case for most other bosses, which usually do have a signature move that is really scary and that you want to stun, but their other moves are still dangerous.

That's my feeling at least.

[ZeppMan217]

14 minutes ago, pacovf said:

Well, he only has 3 different actions which he cycles in order, of which one is just a defend, and another (double hit) is only threatening if he applied the debuffs (3-4 wound) the turn before. Stunning him on the debuff turn effectively disables him for 3 turns, not one. That's not the case for most other bosses, which usually do have a signature move that is really scary and that you want to stun, but their other moves are still dangerous.

Is that really all that different from Eonwe or Threekwa? Granted, Threekwa's shtick is a bit different, requiring you to break his armor every turn to keep him down. If you look at other characters' day 1 bosses (with the exception of Jeol and his drone army), they all rely on their single signature move to make you hurt, so any sort of disruption screws em big time. Hell, it's been almost a month since I started facing Brut with Smith and I'm yet to see what his super attack even does!

And besides, Brain Tick undermines any and all status ailments.

[pacovf]

Threekwa doesn't break down from stunning him one turn. Eonwe does suffer from this too, I agree, although arguably a bit less. To be clear, I think it's a problem in her case too (as is the fact that she's absolutely laughable as a boss against anyone else than Rook).

Sparky's grenades are plenty dangerous already, his defend/cannon prepare turn gives him counter so you can't really exploit it, and his cannon shot is stronger than grenades but not that much more (and doesn't it preserve his spark charge if you stun him? I don't remember right now); he's just radically different from Fralx in practice, even if it sounds similar in paper. Bulleet's damage is pretty consistent from turn to turn, even if you skip Voltaic once. Jeol of course almost doesn't care if you stun him. As for D1 Smith bosses, they're just not tuned properly yet, Brut in particular is not intimidating. But I don't have experience fighting them at P6 yet, so I don't really want to comment.

This is compounded by the fact that Rook has much easier and earlier access to stun than the other two characters, due to Bog secrets, whichever core applies stun, and Guerrilla tactics. Smith and Sal have stun too, but for the most part limited at Rares, which you're unlikely to see before D1 boss. Although if you primarily pray Brawl rather than Campaign, then this doesn't apply.

Yeah, brain tick is pretty ridiculous, but that's a different question. You're far from guaranteed from getting it in any given run.

[Darth Shroud]

for the daily protection challenge, can you cycle through the characters we can protect? Its always the same female poor merchant every time, it gets repetitive. would love to protect jakes, luminari, etc.

[pacovf]

Some assorted things:

I got "deeper into the bog" opportunity twice in the same Rook run. I felt like that shouldn't happen, the dialogue feels awkward for Rook on your second run through. Maybe add a flag to avoid repeating it in a run?

I've also been experiencing a weird bug in which sometimes preparing cards didn't actually do anything, or at least didn't prepare the card (unsure if it triggered effects "on preparing a card"). I sent feedback in-game once, but it happened throughout the run.

Is it intended that hatching flead eggs allows going over your normal pet limit? Maybe the game should force you to send one pet to the pub after the fight ends or something.

Not a bug (I think), but the new implementation of Hatch means you can keep triggering it after you hit Fatigue. Makes parasites and Bog secrets easier to hatch, since you can play them towards the end of long fights when things are back under control (normally fatigue would have made that pointless, and playing them earlier is risky).

 

Edited November 27, 2020 by pacovf

[Scrumch]

Mercenary boss? Is this referring to the Phickets or is this a Smith Day 3 thing?

[ZeppMan217]

8 hours ago, pacovf said:

Is it intended that hatching flead eggs allows going over your normal pet limit? Maybe the game should force you to send one pet to the pub after the fight ends or something.

It's actually the same with any non-people characters. For example, in Rook's campaign when you're given 2 Baron/Rise mechs to fight the boggers, you can go to your room and leave em there. Naturally, you can't take both of em with you because of the 1 pet limit.

[pacovf]

Interesting! That definitely sounds like unintended behaviour though. I would not expect temporary "pets" to take a spot in your roster.

One could think of a situation in which a person has two pets (one with them, another in his room), starts the bogger quest, gets the two robots, but wants to leave his original pet in his room before the fight because it has been badly damaged... but then can't pick up his other undamaged pet because he is above his pet limit due to the temporary robots counting as pets! I would be very annoyed if this happened to me.

Conversely, I felt kind of like I was cheating having two pets with Rook due to the flead egg, and frustrated when I got opportunities / events that would normally give me a pet but didn't because I already had a pet with me. Normally I would just accept it's a limitation of the pet system, but in the Rise quest to sell Baron secrets to the highest bidder, the kickback from Admiralty is a vroc, that gets automatically sent to your room if you already have a pet with you. Why not do that by default with all pet rewards? Hesh knows Rook goes through pets like a kid through candy, having replacement pets in his room would be cool.

Alternatively, instead of having a hard limit on the number of pets you can bring with you, just give a malus if you try to carry more pets than you should, like a morale hit to all *your* pets every turn while you're above your limit, or a chance they will skip their turn, etc. Then it's up to the player whether that's a risk they want to take, or to just leave extra pets in their room for when they need them.

[ZeppMan217]

Well, it's been in the game since I started playing almost a year ago, so despite being very silly (e.g., you can stash the oshnu that Oolo tells you to grab before the Nadan fight) I figured Klei kinda wants you to do this... Doesn't make much sense though.

2 hours ago, pacovf said:

Normally I would just accept it's a limitation of the pet system, but in the Rise quest to sell Baron secrets to the highest bidder, the kickback from Admiralty is a vroc, that gets automatically sent to your room if you already have a pet with you. Why not do that by default with all pet rewards? Hesh knows Rook goes through pets like a kid through candy, having replacement pets in his room would be cool.

Alternatively, instead of having a hard limit on the number of pets you can bring with you, just give a malus if you try to carry more pets than you should, like a morale hit to all *your* pets every turn while you're above your limit, or a chance they will skip their turn, etc. Then it's up to the player whether that's a risk they want to take, or to just leave extra pets in their room for when they need them.

There's a glaring issue with automatic pet stashing, of hatched pets specifically: if it happens during Rook's expedition or any other kind of uninterruptible quest sequences, you've just lost your hatched pet, potentially permanently. Besides, Rook can't normally train, upgrade, or even heal his bio pets, and there are robodogs aplenty anyway.

As to the multi pet handling, there's already a perk for that, and being able to break the limit via hatch cards seems reasonable given the time investment and the limited amount of opportunities that allow you to even get such cards.

[pacovf]

Pet stashing was originally added so that you don't have to walk your half-dead pet into a boss fight in which you don't need it, but where it is guaranteed to die, so you still have it with you the next day (Klei, could you make it so the UI asks if you want to take any pet with you at the beginning of each day? I keep forgetting to take them back with me). I don't think all the ramifications of this functionality were worked out. Stashing temporary pets seems very silly indeed.

Maybe the game could ask what pet you stash? If you already have a pet and you hatch your flead on the way to the bog monster, you get to pick which one to keep for the boss fight. Seems like a reasonable compromise. And yeah, there already is a perk that allows to have 2 pets, and a mutator that allows you to keep 3. But making it so that it is a soft limit of 1 (respectively 2 and 3) instead of a hard limit would help some of the jank around pets we have right now. Well, also adding a clear distinction between beasts/robots allies and PC pets. Might also help with the Beastmaster sort-of archetype Sal has going on, although I would like to say more about that in a dedicated thread when I have the time.

Edited November 28, 2020 by pacovf