Elemancer v4.5 update
Following playtesting of v4, some trends have arisen in the data. It looks like Electromancy’s damage potential is too high while Aeromancy and Cryomancy are still on the low side. Interaction appears to have a positive impact, so I’m going to slightly increase the rate at which interactive effects appear on cards going into v4.5.
The preliminary Questline is ready for testing, and along with it a change to the rewards for fighting monsters and bosses: from VP to Essence. In that vein, Horror-type monsters are being removed from Monster Dens as the Escalation mechanic was not interesting, so I’ll be saving that for a potential expansion.
And finally, I will look at a particular subset of abilities with the Affinity mechanic and spice them up. These are the changes I plan to implement and test in v4.5.
Damage control
I’ve found most of the Elements are roughly within the same damage range. Electromancy is an outlier, by far. Aeromancy and Cryomancy have less explosive turns, but I think with some minor tweaks they will be reasonably competitive. At first blush I want the max damage to be around the same range so that determining who wins in the final showdown is a roughly accurate representation of who did well creating the most synergistic deck. Best-of-three might be a way to mitigate some variance, with a winner-takes-all hand if there is a three-way tie after the best-of-three round. It’s not set in stone yet, so I’m sure there will be some tweaks to the endgame.
Essence of Horror
As mentioned in previous posts, I’m switching from a unbounded Victory Point win condition to a PvP showdown. With this, the VP rewards from enemies were switched to Essence, a major component of the Questline progression. Previously, non-boss Horror monsters allowed opponents to pay VP or cards to ‘Escalate’ the fight, giving the Horror more HP, additional resistances, and/or other bonuses. This kind of mechanic can be compelling, as your opponents don’t know the damage potential of your hand. The most interesting cases are where the difference between (for example) 11 HP and 13 HP is the difference between a win and a loss. This is a very narrow range, and would require much more fine-tuning of damage to hit that window. For example, if you can consistently hit 15 damage at that point in the game, then such a decision doesn’t matter, your opponent should never escalate the fight. The balance challenge would be to restrict the range of damage you can deal at that point. Even so, you’d likely only choose to fight a monster if you had a hand on the higher end of your damage potential.
Essence will become a similar resource to VP, so it’s not unreasonable to swap Horror monsters to use take that as payment instead. However, I think the mechanic needs a redesign before implementing it into the game. This does reduce an avenue of player interaction, but it was rare in the first place. For now, all the Horrors will be switched to Beasts, and the amount of Essence gained will be normalized across all monsters in the Tier. Because Horrors used to have a lower base HP, most of the fights actually earned you fewer VP compared to other monsters in that zone, since I couldn’t expect opponents to always Escalate the fights. Now I can make things more even at the cost of a potentially interesting mechanic. But I do plan to tweak it so it’ll make an appearance one day.
Affinity for Elements
Affinity is a flat damage buff to all cards of that Element, but the cards themselves weren’t interesting. In Tier 3 (Ice gets some early Affinity cards to give it an extra buff) all the Affinity cards were 3 damage on the combat side with “Channel: <Element> Affinity +1 during the next combat this turn.” This meant that there was an interesting choice to make whether you want to Channel it for a potential 4 damage bonus (assuming the other 4 cards in your hand are the same Element) or just play it for the baseline damage. In practice, however, once you defeated your Element’s boss that provided you with a persistent +1 Affinity, this choice was no longer interesting: you could play the 3 damage ability for 4 damage, or Channel it for up to 4 damage. So what I wanted to do is to make those specific cards more interesting by giving them more situations where you might want to play the combat or Channel abilities.
Over time I’ve actually reduced the number of Affinity abilities in the game. The reasons for this fall into two main categories: the typical builds for that Element don’t heavily play cards of one Element, or the Element had a strong parasitic mechanic that felt like it overshadowed Affinity. Hydromancy falls into the first category, where Water Affinity +1 would give you maybe +2 damage with a good hand of mixed Elements. That’s not enough damage for a Tier 3 card. Electromancy falls into the second category, at least in my opinion. Electromancy already heavily relies on Chain setup and payoff cards, and I’d rather not give it more damage buffs. With the recent changes I shifted some of the power into Channel abilities, which naturally make Affinity worse.
Future updates
There are a couple changes I want to try out in future versions. Some of those are as follows: Warp Points in Tier 3, increase the number of cards in Tier 2 zones, and increase the number of multi-Gem cards (even outside of Geomancy). The Arena Showdown hasn’t yet been implemented either, but this will follow further playtesting of the present damage balance changes.
Tier 3 Warp Points will facilitate fighting Tier 3 monsters. It’s possible that this won’t be necessary and it does require a small map redesign. But it’s something to consider.
Tier 2 zones have 15 cards in both Temples and Shrines, which really doesn’t make sense at the very least on the Shrine side because (aside from the pure Time and Water zones) they are “evenly” split between the two Elements. This means that across all Tier 2 Shrines, in some cases there are only 7 cards of particular Elements available. There are 10 of each non-Water/non-Time Element across all Tier 2 Temples, but that includes 1 of each off-Element card in each T2 Temple. Shrines should be increased to 16 at the very least. *After writing this I’ve actually decided to just bump the number of T2 Shrine cards to 16 in each zone, the unevenness really got to me and it wasn’t hard to implement. Why talk about the changes when you can just do them? Now I have an extra card slot to mess around with.
The awkward thing about throw-forward cards with currently unreleased Gem colors (White and Pink) is that they are useless for gaining new cards. To say nothing of Geomancy synergies, multi-Gem cards give players more flexibility to acquire cards from Shrines/Temples. I don’t have a plan for multi-Gem distribution yet, but I may add these into Tier 1 and 2 zones to make acquiring cards easier in the mid-/late-game.
