Elemancer v5.6
More changes to Chronomancy are needed, as I have found an infinite damage loop, which felt appropriate. So I’m trying out some drastic changes for v5.6 to Time cards, hopefully the abilities aren’t too much of a burden to activate and there is still enough of a satisfying payoff. Pyromancy also underwent some big changes when the damage numbers were a bit too consistently high. I made a lot of little tweaks to a variety of Elements, mostly one-off exchanges to abilities or updated wording.
Chronomancy
The loop should’ve been apparent, but sometimes you don’t have the right combination of cards in hand to realize it. I’ve nuked that from orbit, the key to removing the combo is making the Channel ability cost an extra card (i.e. “Channel: Discard another card, if you do then…”). This is an effect I’d introduced a while back starting in Tier 2 cards to justify a powerful Channel effect such as an early Affinity +1. My design philosophy has since changed and those are now mostly Affinity +2 to justify costing two cards. This “tandem Channel” is something I’ve been sprinkling into Time in particular to allow you to put exactly the cards you want into your discard pile. While a lot of the “if this card was discarded this turn, +X damage” have their own Channel abilities to self-activate the bonus, some require a bit more setup.
I’ll note that otherwise, Time felt pretty good with the v5.5 updates, but playtesting was marred by the infinite loop. I had to make these changes ASAP.
Another ability I’m experimenting with that also addresses the infinite loop is a Channel ability that plays a card directly to combat. Bypassing the hand is the key here. I don’t think it’s necessary to spell out “you can only activate this ability during combat” but we’ll see where the wording ends up.
And to make up for removing the interesting ability of swapping cards into and out of your discard pile, I added “Channel: Draw a card” to some Tier 3 Time abilities. That may be too powerful, but it does still capture the exchange of current resources for future resources. In that vein I may bring back “Channel: Draw an extra card at the end of your next turn” but that was always a bit of a headache to track.
Pyromancy
In the latest playtest, Fire was a bit too consistent; it’s abilities are basically always at max damage in the end-game. The persistent boss ability felt like it undercut some of the synergies that the player had to build throughout the game. The ability in question made Firestarter always active in combat, while also giving a +1 damage buff to Firestarter abilities you Channeled. The issue I found with this is that your deckbuilding throughout the game was basically meaningless, as it no longer mattered how much of your deck was Firestarter setup vs payoff. So I removed the permanent Firestarter from the ability in exchange for an extra buff to Firestarter cards you Channel.
I also nerfed the damage of some cards. Hopefully this isn’t too many hits at once but we’ll see where the numbers end up in the next round of playtesting.
Finally I’m also looking into different thresholds for certain abilities. In a pure Fire build they are inconsequential, but I want to explore the possibilities. In vague terms, these abilities discarded the top X cards of your deck and checked for Y cards that matched a criteria. In this precise case X=3, Y=1, and the criteria was just “is a Fire card.” I’ve changed these abilities such that the threshold, Y, is 2. I think this type of ability can be utilized in Geomancy to check for particular or different kinds of Gems in the top X cards, which might be an interesting direction to take. Alternatively, Fire (or another Element) could care about certain Tiers of cards (i.e. “Discard the top four cards of your deck, +2 damage if you discarded two Tier 2 cards this way”). I don’t think that’s where I want to take Pyromancy mechanically, but it’s an attribute of the cards I haven’t used in ability checks yet. It could be particularly interesting to build a deck that wants a lot of Tier 1 cards, but the payoffs would have to offset their lack of power by a lot.
Miscellaneous
Water, Earth, Ice, and Electric had some tweaks, mostly to one or two kinds of abilities or just one or two particular slots.
For Water, I wanted to update some of the abilities to check for the number of non-Water cards rather than the number of different non-Water Elements present on those cards. It’s a subtle difference, but it should help Hydromancy builds where you have multiple cards of one non-Water Element compared to one card of multiple non-Water Elements. For example, you’d get the buff with the new wording if your cards in combat are: [Water, Water, Earth, Earth, Fire]. Old wording would require three non-Water Elements.
For Earth, there are some abilities that are at odds with each other. Namely, there are abilities that get a bonus if you play cards with matching Gems and there are abilities that get a bonus if you play multiple different Gems. I removed one of the “matching Gems” slots from Tier 3 and made it a Gem threshold card (i.e. “+X damage if there are at least Y different Gems among abilities played this combat”). Very small change, but I wanted to point out how there are in a way two different Geomancy builds. But the “rainbow” Gem build is much more conducive to acquiring cards. I’ve mitigated the downside of some of the “matching Gem” cards by putting the ability on dual-Gem cards, but that may need to be changed to 100% dual-Gem cards to make the ability less volatile.
For Ice, I buffed some of the cross-Element synergy cards in Tier 3 Temples. I’ve also added more “if a player discarded a card this turn, +X damage” type of abilities. While this plays in a similar space as “if an opponent has four or fewer cards in hand” abilities, there is a subtle difference. While both are activated when you force your opponents to discard, the former isn’t always active during the Showdown, unlike the latter. As such I can make these abilities stronger since they require more setup. I’m hoping they also make for an interesting choice during the Showdown.
For Electric, I had to cut yet another Chain multiplier effect. But I did add an interesting new ability, similar to one I introduced in Chronomancy in the last few updates. This ability grants cards in your hand a Channel effect that you can then activate mid-combat. Some such abilities also draw you a card, which is something I’d otherwise abandoned a long time ago since drawing a card mid-combat was useless for that turn. In this case, you can Channel cards in your hand to give you extra Chain, and if you draw a card then such an ability effectively has “+X Chain” since what else would you do with that extra card? But such abilities introduce the interesting choice of whether you want to play cards as they are or Channel them for the effects granted during combat. I may explore this more in the future, but for now just having a handful of cards with this layout is enough.
Now to get back to playtesting! I’ll be focusing on Chronomancy in particular to see if the changes have completely gutted it or not. I’m hoping I wasn’t too heavy-handed, but this really isn’t the game for infinite combos so I had to take swift action.
