Elemancer v5.8 —> v6
The changes I have mapped out warrant a jump to an entirely new digit. Alongside balancing damage numbers, I’m restructuring the type chart slightly and removing Elemental resistance from monsters. Monsters will still resist their own Element, though that could be toned down as well. I’m also planning to aggregate all monsters of a specific Element in each Tier, removing zone-specific monsters.
Elemental balance is pretty good, v5.8 showed that Aeromancy, Pyromancy, and Hydromancy are consistently above-average while Geomancy is inconsistent overall. With that in mind, several changes will make specific cards more interesting or flavorful while leaving their overall damage the same. Geomancy may need a larger overhaul to reconcile the mono-Gem and multi-Gem builds. I will leave that for a future update after testing smaller tweaks in v6.
Monster Mash
The current iteration has two stacks of monster cards associated with each Elements in each zone. In the past, Tier 2 and Tier 3 zones combined monsters of both the zone’s Elements into one deck, from which you could fight up to two monsters a turn. Then I introduced the “monster den” space, a designated spot to find monsters. Later I made the decision to split the monster dens by Element, so each of the zone’s Elements had a dedicated monster den. This decision was made to mitigate the feelsbad moment of flipping a monster of the “wrong” Element when all you want is a slightly favorably fight.
Now the idea is to remove zone-specific monsters entirely, and each Tier would have a pile of monsters separated by their Element. So whether you are in the Tier 2 Electric/Water or Fire/Water zone, if you want to fight a Tier 2 Water monster you draw from the same stack of monsters. This allows for more flexibility in the future, leaving the door open to specify multiple Elements per monster den space or even add off-Element dens to zones. A map redesign is almost certainly looming in the future that will leverage this newfound flexibility.
These monsters have come a long way, and I love that the iterations build upon each other. I couldn’t have skipped from the initial version to this version, but I like where it has ended up.
A short note on the type chart and removal of resistances. Without additional changes, Earth and Ice would have been strong against the same Elements: Electric and Time. This is an issue I realized I’d have to confront eventually when I added Element-specific discard effects. Monsters of those Elements used to have a different set of resistances, which differentiated them enough to be distinct. So I’ve made a small update to the type chart to account for this.
