AVWW Beta 0.519, "Mysterious Pylons," Released!

[x4000]

I imagine we could do that, but part of my reason for decoupling that is multiplayer.  If the action difficulty is set high on a server, that's global for all players on that server.  However, the regions the players choose to go into while on that server can still affect the individual difficulty they face rather to a large degree.  I'm trying to balance it so that you can really tweak different things about your experience in that manner.

[c4sc4]

Oh, right, multiplayer. Well, just leave it separate then, it's not really a feature I'm dieing to see anyway, I just thought i may be an interesting change for difficulty settings.

[Tayrtahn]

If you want a demonstration of the difficulty with microbosses, I've uploaded a save file to mantis. Civ level 3, microbosses are level 1. There are some ice bats this time for added fun. I find the speed of the skelebot microboss particularly notable.

I tried it after zipping up the save, and I got wrecked pretty badly. Good luck if you try it out!

http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=4648

[Baleyg]

Removing the random speed mods to bosses might be a good idea.  Perhaps bosses should have to roll for speed boosts along with the other bonuses?  They'd need some sort of cap, though.

Something to think about, but I can't really recommend it until I've seen how shield spells work.

[x4000]

Thanks to for the save!  Will check that out in the morning and balance appropriately.

For the speed boosts, could be interesting to roll for, but I'm not ready to do that just yet.

[BobTheJanitor]

Fighting some bosses for a node in a level 1 area with a level 26 character took a pretty long while. No real danger, since they do mediocre damage, but they did have a lot of HP, and there were 2 giant skelebots and 2 crippled dragons. I have no idea how I'd manage that at equal level...

Also a few things I wondered about. Should two hits from an ice bat kill all your movement? I can see it slowing you down, but just stopping you in place feels wrong, especially since you can still jump just as easily, but lose all left and right movement. It also seems odd to get this same effect from a bat 25 levels lower.

Other thing, the HP of low level spawners seems much higher. Before the rebalance, I was able to knock them out with two or three fire touch applications. Now they take much laonger.

[c4sc4]

Also a few things I wondered about. Should two hits from an ice bat kill all your movement? I can see it slowing you down, but just stopping you in place feels wrong, especially since you can still jump just as easily, but lose all left and right movement. It also seems odd to get this same effect from a bat 25 levels lower.

Yeah, apparently that is intended, I put it on mantis and was told it was intended.

Although, making the speed reduction vary depending on the bat's level compared to your level seems like it would be interesting, kind of like fire dot from lower level enemies does less damage than higher level ones.

[BobTheJanitor]

Yeah, apparently that is intended, I put it on mantis and was told it was intended.

Although, making the speed reduction vary depending on the bat's level compared to your level seems like it would be interesting, kind of like fire dot from lower level enemies does less damage than higher level ones.

It would feel better if it would do something like freeze your pose and shift the palette of the character to an ice blue one or something, so it became more obvious what was going on. And probably not allow you to jump at all, since that just seems odd.

Also, another unrelated thing I noticed. With the change in tiers of spells, douse monster nest needs to be changed to 10x the gem's level or your level, whichever is lower, instead of 5x the gem's level like it was before.

[c4sc4]

Also, another unrelated thing I noticed. With the change in tiers of spells, douse monster nest needs to be changed to 10x the gem's level or your level, whichever is lower, instead of 5x the gem's level like it was before.

I reported that one to mantis already too. It seems that it is just a typo in the tooltip though, it seems to already do the 10x spellgem level.

[Armanant]

Hilarious - ran the update, loaded up, am boxed in on a 2x3 plot of tiles ~10 levels above me 

Well, not quite, one of them is my level  hopefully I can gain enough levels on it to be able to get out of my lil box..

[eRe4s3r]

Phew.. i am finding level 1 bosses on shard nodes WAY WAY too hard, i mean 4 dragons with 40k hp? And i didn't even get any XP ;/

Can hardly see anyone beating that as level 1 char, and by the time you can beat them, you don't get XP (and its still hard)

On the other hand i am also not amused that spell of mark 2 i already had got downgraded to mark 1 (including potions and scrolls) 

[x4000]

The microboss balance is way off, I'm working on that this morning.  Also: shield spells are finally in place for this next release!

And the bug with ice bats is that they are becoming guarding monsters in a level 1 region at all.  Those are supposed to be gated until about level 6.  And by then you should have shield spells and that's an excellent defense against them since it provides a way to avoid their attacks without having to be such a good dodge-er.

"On the other hand i am also not amused that spell of mark 2 i already had got downgraded to mark 1 (including potions and scrolls) "

You didn't lose anything -- the tier II stuff you used to have is actually equivalent to tier I stuff nowadays.  Don't worry!

[eRe4s3r]

Ah ;p You know how gamers are, you rename their Tier 8 stuff to Tier 1 and they are gonna break out into ice cold stare frenzy 

Any news on when memory crystals are good for anything? ;p I seem to have amassed a few of em...

[x4000]

Quite understood, no worries -- we try to do that as infrequently as possible.

For the memory crystals, I'd be surprised if that happens any sooner than a month from now, honestly -- we've decided to push multiplayer forward sooner than later, and so that pushes the memory crystal stuff further out.  It's still coming, but it's a lower priority than multiplayer for the moment.

[Gallant Dragon]

So, basically it's gameplay first, story later?