Elemancer v7.4 and a brief hiatus
I will be offline for the better part of the next three months, and as most of Elemancer’s design and testing has become digitized it means I will not be able to test and update the game. But perhaps I will return from my inadvertent digital detox with fresh new ideas! I will be busy and largely unreachable during this time as I have reached an exciting inflection point in my life, but we’re here to talk about game design, so I’ll get back to it! I will note that this will be more succinct than my previous posts because I am leaving later today and I realized I hadn’t delineated any of my post-v7.3 insights yet.
Playtesting showed a couple outliers, though I was pleasantly surprised to find that testing between pairs of boss cards yielded consistent results. For most Elements, the damage range was similar regardless of which two bosses each deck used. The boss cards themselves often lead to interesting decisions and power spikes. This is the intent, as these could be considered “ultimate” abilities and the culmination of your journey throughout the game.
v7.4 has three main areas of focus: nerfing Time, buffing Water, and tweaking Earth.
Time had a high average damage, but the max damage hands were absurd. I removed some of the straightforward card draw (“Channel: Draw a card”) and reanimation (“play a card from your discard pile that was put there this turn”), making them much rarer. In general, I tend to leave some of the powerful abilities in Temples, since in my opinion it is easier to acquire Shrine cards and thus you tend to have more of them at the end of the game. For Time, this means the reanimation effects are found more often in Tier 3 Temples and very rarely in Tier 3 Shrines. Chronomancy may require further adjustments, but that really depends on how the next playtests go.
Water is difficult to test because the builds tend to utilize cards from other Elements, cards that are decent on their own (ideally). Such decks may also have a subtheme that leans on specific cross-Elemental cards (such as Water cards with Chain or Chain payoffs), so I can’t take a random assortment of Tier 2 and Tier 3 cards and consider that a good indication of how Water builds will play. I shifted some abilities such that their base power is stronger, which means you don’t have to rely as heavily on specific synergies to get a modest amount of damage out of your Water cards. I also removed some of the Reveal abilities from Water cards. Water’s Reveal effects usually had you check the top X cards for two or three different Elements. It was a bit too punishing when you whiffed, so I shifted the power to care more about cards in play.
Earth tested well, but the conflicting multi-Gem and mono-Gem builds still feel clunky. The new boss abilities help to smooth this over quite a bit. But I opted to change a couple Earth abilities to work more like Electromancy’s Chain: using thresholds. In this case, I’m testing out changes to a few abilities that give you +2 damage if you have at least 4 different Gems among abilities played this combat, and +1 more if there are at least 5. I even swapped a couple of the mono-Gem payoffs for this new, more granular payoff ability. I may need to look at the mono-Gem payoff rates and maybe move those to a threshold paradigm as well.
I will return briefly during the winter holidays, and if things aren’t too hectic I may get some time to test the aforementioned changes. Else it will be another couple months before I can dig back into Elemancer. With that said, it feels like it’s in a good place overall, I just want to polish things and get more feedback before taking it to publishers.
I’m curious how Earth and Time will perform after their changes, Air is on the watchlist, and Ice may need a bit of a buff (again).
