Elemancer v5 update
This is going to encompass the smaller update v4.6. I’ll start with those changes, which were of two varieties: number tweaks and additional Gems. As for the larger v5 update, I’m trying to hone in on the correct pacing of the game overall with a focus on the overarching quest and it’s stages. Additionally, some Elements still need rebalancing. I’m hoping to accomplish this without Arena effects during the final showdown, contrary to what I was considering previously. Damage output has been within a reasonable range for most Elemental builds during playtesting, so I think it should be possible for them to be balanced against each other without the additional knob of an Arena. However, the Arena idea is still on the table to potentially address replayability and making each session unique.
In that vein, I realized there is a potential issue in the 6 Tier 2 zones, and that is it’s technically possible to take 4 of those zones and only have 4 unique Elements available: pure Time, pure Water, and then any two of (Fire/Water) (Air/Time) and (Electric/Time), it’s especially noticeable and egregious with 3 Time zones. This necessitates a fairly large rebalancing of zones.
v4.6
Playtesting of v4.5 went well, the sample games were quite balanced. I still felt that Electromancy and Pyromancy had too high a ceiling, and Geomancy underperformed. Hydromancy did quite well, and while I’m still making tweaks to Water abilities I think I might have to pull some of the power back in the future. Electric and Fire cards have some effects that double power, so I’ve cut the rate of those abilities. Those were almost certainly the culprits that led to outliers in the data.
As alluded to earlier, I added more Gems to cards. This serves two main purposes: indirectly buffing Earth and smoothing out the mid-late game by making acquiring cards slightly easier. Dual Gem cards now appear more frequently in Temples and in Earth zones. I also rebalanced and shuffled around some Gems to ensure that each Element has a more even distribution across all Gem colors. I realized that Earth cards, for example, had very few Blue Gems overall.
Gems on Shrine cards, as well as Gems on specifically Air Shrine cards
v5 restructuring
As a follow-up to the changes in v4.6, I cut the Tier 3 doubling abilities entirely. I still think Electromancy has a high damage potential, but removing the power outlier felt correct. Same for Pyromancy, while it was a great synergy with Firestarter Channel abilities to put all your power into an effect that is doubled, the ceiling was too high on that ability. I’ve shifted design more towards thresholds and payoffs, for example the new Electromancy ability is baseline 2 damage, +2 if your Chain is at least 3, and +2 more if your Chain is at least 6. That gives a clean cap of 6 damage while still being a reasonable payoff for Chain effects. The Pyromancy ability changed to a much simpler variant of an existing ability: “2 damage, +4 if played with a Firestarter.”
I’ll explain more about rearranging Tier 2 zones below, but with this big change I’m taking the opportunity to rethink the map once again. For the most part I’ve liked the spacing of the points of interest on the map, but traversal is still cumbersome at some points. To address this, I’m changing the rules around Warp Points, which currently appear once in each Tier 2 and 3 zone, such that you can travel between any Warp Points you’ve unlocked. At a minimum this will cut down on travel time back to the start for the Showdown/Finale. I may add a Warp Point to Tier 1 that unlocks during the last stage of the questline.
One consideration is to condense the map once again and reduce the movement speed from 4 spaces to 3 spaces. This will make “+1 movement” effects much more potent, encourage players to take the generic action of “Discard 2: +1 movement” more often, and make “-1 movement” effects more punishing. That said, I don’t want to mess with things too much if they’re working. And currently 4 movement on the current board is largely working. The takeaway here is not to be married to your first designs, always consider that you can change things. You have to start somewhere, but you can use later designs and insights to adjust your starting point.
Tier 2 and the Time issue
Part of the incentive of rotating zones is to increase replayability, so in each session the available Elements vary by Tier and physical location on the board. However, as outlined in the intro, it’s possible for 3 of the 4 selected Tier 2 zones to have Time cards. Not that I don’t enjoy the gameplay of Chronomancy, Channeling and discarding cards only to replay them for added value (it’s a very twiddly strategy), but the bigger issue is that it’s possible for very few Elements to be available. This is in part because of the “prestige” Elements, Elements that only become available in higher Tiers. In the base game, those are Water and Time. Initially this is why I justified having a pure Time and pure Water zone, which seemed reasonable to catch those Elements up to the base Elements.
Let’s take a quick look at the numbers. There are 5 base Elements (Air, Earth, Electric, Fire, Ice) and 6 possible Tier 2 zones with up to two Elements each. In other words we have 12 half-zones. If the base Elements each appear once, that leaves 7 half-zones to be filled by the prestige Elements. Those 7 slots can’t be evenly split, but pre-v5 both Time and Water have a zone in which they occupy both half-zone slots. To end up as equal as possible I made 4 half-zones of Time and 3 half-zones of Water. The distribution is off, though, because of the 2 pure zones, so Water only appears in 2 of 6 zones while Time appears in 3 of 6.
Old Tier 2 Element distribution
With v5 I’m restructuring and rearranging the Tier 2 zones such that Water no longer has a pure zone. Because of Water’s strategy, I feel it works great as a support Element so I’m also swapping the appearance rate to 3 half-zones of Time and 4 half-zones of Water. All 4 of the Water half-zones are going to be paired with a base Element half-zone as Tier 3 has a Time/Water zone that I don’t want to duplicate. This does mean that Water appears in 4 of the 6 Tier 2 zones, but I think that’ll be ok. Alternatively I could stick to the original distribution of 4 Time half-zones and 3 Water half-zones, which would mean they each appear in 3 of 6 Tier 2 zones. But, again, I think Water works well as a supporting Element and its natural build is multi-Elemental.
New Tier 2 Element distribution
Having so many Water half-zones will hopefully encourage players to branch out into a multi-Elemental strategy. That could mean more players are drawn to and compete over the same Tier 3 zones/cards, which is good and bad. Good in that it’s additional player interaction but bad in that each player may not get the cards they want. Competing over the same bosses is the bigger issue, especially the Water-related Horror boss, whose ability I’ve found invaluable in playtesting Hydromancy builds. Whoever gets that will have a huge advantage since it currently offers so much flexibility and baseline damage. I may scale that back and buff Tier 3 Water abilities to compensate.
I’ve talked myself out of making too drastic a change to the board, but v5 is still a big shakeup in the mid-game. As for future changes, I’m considering removing some of the resistances from monsters and rethinking my Elemental “type chart.” Removing resistances without a rebalance would mean that Electric and Time have the same weaknesses (Earth and Ice) and no other distinctions. Due to having 7 Elements the type chart is 7x7 which results in an odd number of spaces, hence why Time monsters are sometimes weak to Earth and sometimes resist it. While I do count it as one of Time’s weaknesses for purposes of “hate cards” (presently just discard effects), this anomaly does give Time monsters an interesting twist. But in reality it means Geomancy builds sometimes have an easy fight against a Time monster that’s weak to Earth and sometimes get hosed by a Time monster that’s resistant to Earth. That’s frustrating and it’s a much bigger delta compared to a fight where you either get a favorable weakness bonus or no weakness bonus.
The map restructure is still on the table, but I’ll await more data before making that change.
