Elemancer v6.2, Storming Off
Fun fact, Electric was Storm in the initial ideation of Elemancer. This update could warrant a larger version jump, but who’s really counting? Trends in playtesting show that Electromancy is hurting. Unsurprisingly, slowly pulling its teeth over the past several updates has finally caught up and its average endgame damage numbers put it squarely at the bottom. This has led me to rethink Electromancy, and I think I have an interesting solution.
Let’s briefly look through some of the history of Electromancy. It’s core mechanic is Chain, which is in some sense a secondary resource that you build up during combat. Early on, Chain translated directly to damage, and in this way Chain was a lock-and-key mechanic. This proved to be too strong, and until recently I counted “+2 Chain” as effectively “+2 damage.” Many updates ago I even had cards that dealt damage equal to twice the amount of Chain. This led to extremely high potential damage numbers, and even the low-rolls were still consistently good.
This is when I began cutting such multiplier effects (2x or 1x your total Chain). At present (pre-v6.2), there are only 6 total cards (out of a potential 58 total Tier 2 and 3 Electric cards) that convert Chain to direct damage. Instead of a direct payoff, I shifted design of the payoff abilities to a threshold, i.e. “+2 damage if your Chain is at least 3 this combat.” This is a much more granular way to attenuate how Chain translates to damage. In the above example we see a Chain-to-damage ratio of 3:2. Higher-Tier cards could have a better ratio (5:4 is featured on several Tier 3 Shrine cards) or simply extra thresholds on the same card, i.e. “+2 damage if your Chain is at least 3 this combat, +2 more if your Chain is at least 6.” This is the kind of design I am expanding upon in v6.2.
The redesign of Electromancy is not a complete overhaul, but the way it is represented visually will be. By removing the cumbersome wording of “if your Chain is at least X this combat” it frees up physical space for extra thresholds, as seen above in the before/after shot of a redesigned Tier 3 card. This provides an avenue to introduce high thresholds onto lower-Tier cards that are better balanced for late-game. Take for example these redesigned Tier 1 and 2 cards:
7 Chain is not feasible until the final phases of the game, but it means that such Tier 1 cards could technically remain in your final build and pull their weight. What this also elegantly addresses are hands where you have low base power but high Chain amounts. Adding more of these high thresholds onto cards mitigates feels-bad situations where you have a bunch of Chain and few payoffs. Going forward I will be monitoring how consistent this makes Electric builds. Fortunately this is an easy knob to tweak: increase/decrease the Chain, increase/decrease the damage bonus, add/remove thresholds.
I’d like to draw attention to how much more space efficient this new design is. It’s very satisfying, and on printed cards will look nice and clean with plenty of room for stylization.
As an extra note, I was looking at a visual redesign in a similar vein for Aeromancy cards. In that case, there would be symbols along the left and right sides of the card that would indicate 1) how many cards should be before it (along the left) or after it (along the right) in sequence, and 2) the damage bonus you would get for meeting those requirements. The symbols would be simple >, <, = in most cases. Who knows, in the final design of the game, this could still happen! I’ve added more complex criteria to Air cards since I first had this idea, but I’m sure there’s a way to represent that with symbols and a few key words.
As for other future plans, I’m still keeping an eye on Geomancy builds and how well the contradictory mono-Gem and multi-Gem builds play out. The issue is that the damage floor is low, and while the ceiling is high it is not unreasonable, so when you fall in the middle the damage can be underwhelming. One solution is to raise the floor/ceiling so when you fall short it’s still decent damage. I want to avoid the pitfalls of earlier iterations of Electromancy’s multiplier effects, so I’m hesitant to increase the scaling of variable-power abilities (i.e. increasing “2 damage for each other ability matching this card’s Gem” to “3 damage for each”).
I’ve started trimming some of the discard effects from Pyromancy (i.e. “discard the top three cards of your deck, +2 if you discarded two Fire cards this way”) and leaning harder into strictly Firestarter setup and payoff. Part of this is because of the endgame ability that buffs the extra Firestarter cards that you Channel, which was largely unused since it was quite weak. In terms of more mechanical space, I am interested generating cards that would be added to your hand or discard pile by Fire abilities. These could be an additional resource to be used by other cards or simply one-time-use abilities.
