On Mettle and Prestige

[ZeppMan217]

I'm gonna keep it short.

I think the introduction of Mettle was a mistake, being an unnecessary meta layer on top of Perks. While it did make the player feel as if they were getting stronger as they kept playing the game over and over, it also trivialized the various gameplay aspects that clearly were not designed with Mettle in mind.

Prestige 7, which disables Mettle, is a mistake, too. Simply cutting Mettle away instead of wrangling the various game mechanics to work with it cheapens the game experience, rendering all of the time spent acquiring Mettle and carefully picking your upgrades pointless.

With these points in mind, I came up with a short list of Prestige 7 changes designed to work with Mettle, allowing the player to keep growing stronger while keeping the game challenging.

• Health and Resolve are no longer restored when sleeping. (Synergy with HP/Resolve restoration after Negotiation/Combat and extra restoration from eating/drinking upgrades)
• Shill bonus for picking rarely picked cards is removed. (Synergy with extra shills for skipping cards)
• Add extra copies of Basic cards to your Combat and Negotiation decks. (Synergy with reduced XP requirements for Basic cards. Sal starts with 1 extra copy of Threaten, Deflection, Fast Talk, Stab, Feint, Elbow Strike; Rook starts with extra Grumble, Rationale, Pleasantries, Hunker Down, Kick, Blast; Smith starts with extra Bully, Brag, Bewilder, Bash, Toughen Up, Drop Kick)
• Lose 75% of your current Flourish charge at the end of every Combat and Negotiation. (Synergy with increased Flourish gain)

The extra HP for pets is the only Flourish I figured wasn't worth touching, given how varied the bestiary of Havaria is.

[Maniafig]

I like most of these suggestions, the current Prestige 7 is a huge difficulty spike if you've accumulated a lot of Mettle, and it just doesn't feel good to have that progression you worked for be rendered useless.

I'm not fond of the Flourish change though, that one takes away the strategy of saving up your flourish for battles/negotiations you know you'll need them for. I do agree it's currently too easy to spam Flourishes since several of them let you do a lot of damage to instantly build up significant charge for the next Flourish, so how about increasing the charge needed from 200 to 300? That way they can still be stocked for specific encounters without being as spammable as they are now.

As for the shill bonus for picking rarely picked cards, does that bonus ever really matter? If a card actually accumulates a significant bonus it's probably just because it's just a uniformly bad card, I'm not going to pick a bad card even if it gave me 100 shills since I'd just want to remove it ASAP anyway and that'll probably cost me more than 100 shills. This is more of a critique of that mechanic than the suggestion here.

[ZeppMan217]

3 hours ago, Maniafig said:

As for the shill bonus for picking rarely picked cards, does that bonus ever really matter? If a card actually accumulates a significant bonus it's probably just because it's just a uniformly bad card, I'm not going to pick a bad card even if it gave me 100 shills since I'd just want to remove it ASAP anyway and that'll probably cost me more than 100 shills. This is more of a critique of that mechanic than the suggestion here.

If you did a Bleed run and skipped a bunch of Combo cards a few times, then decided to do a Combo run, you'd be drowning in shills. That's what it prevents, the variety bonus. Granted, it probably doesn't offset the skipping bonus by that big of a margin but, I reckon it's quite a bit better than simply jacking up the price of everything by X%, again.