Elemancer v5.7 & v5.8
It has been a while since I’ve checked in, and that time has encompassed a few updates. At this point, “updates” are mostly balance tweaks: change some numbers, test them, repeat. The latest (v5.7) and next (v5.8) updates are focused on reining in builds that are too strong and improving clarity of card text. In particular, I plan to reword Channel abilities so it is apparent that you can activate them during combat. Overall I feel that I have kept the wording of abilities fairly consistent throughout the development process.
Surprisingly, Aeromancy came out strong after v5.6, and unsurprisingly so did Electromancy. I peeled back their power in v5.7 and for once Electromancy felt like it was in a reasonable range! We’ll see how that holds up in future playtesting. Chronomancy received some big changes in v5.6, and they’ve proven to be a little too strong as of v5.7.
Lightning and Thunder
Aeromancy has been a little too consistent, at least during my playtesting. It may be too small a sample size, but I’ve found that the abilities aren’t stepping on each others’ toes too often so I can get close to max damage out of all of them. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, it just means that the max damage has to be reduced a little to account for this.
Electromancy still has outliers when you have too many multiplier effects, so I’ve reduced that number even further. In the last playtest session I actually didn’t have enough Chain enablers, which really hindered the build. I will look for some extra places to add Chain and consider excising even more multiplier effects as a preemptive strike.
Chronomancy
The main offender for Time is now the abilities that give cards in your hand “Channel: +2 damage next or current combat.” In the endgame when I’d expect players to have the passive Horror ability active, this means that each Channeled card will give you +4 damage. But the actual culprit may be the fact that this ability draws you a card. At a baseline, that is a 7 damage card in the late game at minimum, which is above rate (5-6 is expected average). Combine that with the ability to replay cards that were discarded this turn and you get to double-dip with those cards. So while I enjoy that Chronomancy is doing its thing, that thing is currently too strong.
I was hitting pre-v5 Electromancy numbers with this Chronomancy build. I don’t believe that nerfing the ability to instead give your cards in-hand “Channel: +1 damage next or current combat” would solve the problem, I think I have to remove the additional card draw. Chronomancy is certainly a highly synergistic build, very clearly 1+1=3 territory. In a vacuum without the card draw, the aforementioned ability is 7 damage across two cards (assuming you discard one from hand) which is not great in the late-game. However, that doesn’t consider replaying those cards that were discarded, and therein lies the power of the build and the reason why this card is the most likely power outlier.
I will test the same abilities but without the card draw. As I’ve laid out, my rationale was that the ability itself doesn’t appear impactful at baseline 3 damage and so the free card draw brought it up to effectively 7 damage baseline. With that in mind, I may bump up the base damage to make up for the lack of card draw.
Potential Philosophical Shifts
Other big considerations for the game moving forward: intentionally reducing the power level of Elements (below expected values) in Tier 1/2 to slow players down (initially targeted at Electromancy), increasing Gem diversity within each zone (more slots dedicated to “off-color” Gems), and adding an alternate cost for Tier 2/3 Temple cards.
The point of reducing power level would be to delay the player from completing questline stages too soon, thus giving other players time to catch up and build their deck to compete. But if the average power of cards is too low, no amount of those cards will get you to a reasonable damage threshold to beat monsters.
Gem colors present among your cards are potentially more important than your Elements as you move from Tier 1 into Tier 2 and Tier 2 into Tier 3. Tier 2 is the crux of this question, so that would be my focus for a potential redistribution.
Temples
It may be just the way that I play the game, but I find myself favoring Shrine cards over Temple cards. My endgame builds typically contain twice as many Shrine cards as Temple cards. There are two factors that likely contribute to this phenomenon: Shrines allow you to Tribute my lower Tier cards away, and Temple card costs are stricter. One idea to address this is to make the cost of Temple cards more flexible. Early on, Tier 3 Shrine cards required you to Tribute a card of a matching Element (or Tribute a specific Gem color card). I may introduce a similar cost requirement for Temple cards, potentially as an alternative to the current cost. I fear it may make the cards too easy to acquire for all mono-Element builds, while inadvertently punishing multi-Element builds, specifically Hydromancy. A solution for this would be to treat Water cards as a unique case and allow you to pay with cards of specifically 3+ different Elements (including Water).
Shrines and Temples still need to be mechanically distinct, and in Tier 3 a big difference is that Shrines each contain just one Element while Temples have cards of both the zone’s main Elements. In this way, I intended for Shrines to be the go-to for mono-Element builds while Temples could allow you to play a cross-Element build. From a flavor perspective it might not make sense for Temples to incentivize you to build mono-Elemental, so the costs shouldn’t reflect that.
I also don’t want to punish players who are looking to change up their Tier 3 build entirely. There are also cases where there are no Tier 2 zones of the Element, so it is difficult to have a reasonable number of cards from a particular Element. Having a base cost and alternative cost mitigates this issue.
As always, I’m looking forward to playtesting this next version, I’m particularly interested in how Time builds will play. I’m looking into what it would take to make a functional version of the game in Tabletop Simulator, as that would allow me to playtest with a larger audience. I’m also looking at ways/places I could code the cards and have a quick way to shuffle up a deck of selected cards and have a GUI display hands. That is partially for my own purposes, but it could be leveraged to allow others to playtest as well.
