Valley 2 alpha v0.703 released!

[Misery]

Two major points I wanted to bring up before I forget:

The boss rooms that involve crates are still completely broken.   Mainly, the boss AI simply doesnt work here.   It seems like I have all of 5 seconds to kill the guy, or he *will* get stuck UNDER the crates, and then manage to wreck every single one of them in one go.

In the one I'm stuck in, there's magma underneath (and hardly any room ABOVE the crates to even jump over the guy or something), so if he isnt killed INSTANTLY, it's over.   And I actually cant even hit him, with anything, due to the screwball way he moves, and the lack of space in the room. 


And two, the Research Stations are still pretty broken.  I'm fairly certain that the game is still not removing extra-spawned enemies from the rooms after an attempt fails, and the spawn rate is still kinda overboard.  The one that I have available to me has a number of spots with those octopus things that shoot the blue shots, and normally this wouldnt be TOO bad, but the RNG was nasty with the spell classes for my current tier, and the only spells that are particularly effective against them are super-close-range ammo shots.   So it can take a bit of time to clear each octopus, and due to the area (and other enemies) simply bypassing them is not an option.  That the "escape" spawner keeps farting those jumping fireballs at me really isnt helping.  As best I can tell, the spawn rate hasnt changed at all.

At the moment, I cant really advance much, particularly as that boss is the one in the overlord's castle, so I cant just go to a different area or something.

In all honesty, I dont think the crate rooms are the best idea for these bosses;  like everything else in the game, they seem very much designed for slower, more careful combat.... cant really jump around crazily and just spray bullets at them, and if even a few crates break, it can end you really fast.    Doing things like having damage spikes on different bits of the floor, or having some of those blade traps around, might be a much better way of adding environmental hazards to the arenas.

[tigersfan]

Can you send me a world file with that boss fight please? I'd love to see that.

[madcow]

These changes sound interesting to try out. The limited resistance movement mechanic is going to take a lot of getting used to, but I intend to figure it out and see if it plays well. Can they move through warps?

There doesnt seem to be an option to do this.   That's one thing that should probably get added with this new system.   Makes the warps have an actual point other than just allowing Daemonica to jump around the map!

From what I've seen of the new mechanic, well, the game just got even better.   I'd wondered why such a mechanic WASNT there originally.


On another note, them dang crawlers..... I think they actually got EVEN MORE GLITCHY.   Oh, the previous glitches are gone.... to be replaced with a blob of new ones.

And Ocean Spray definitely is in need of a nerf.   It can do nearly 8000 damage point blank in less than a second!

I considered 0.702 ocean spray balanced by virtue of the regular spells being slightly weak, which I thought made for an interesting class. Haven't tried out 0.703 though.

[tigersfan]

8000 on tier II isn't balanced. :p

I'll have to nerf that, but, I'll see if I can do something about the other spells too.

[madcow]

I don't recall doing 8000!

Maybe like uhh, 1000.

I do like the idea of some classes with strong (okay not 8000 strong maybe) ammo shots to compensate for weaker normal attacks. And the class wasn't unusably weak.

Also I've noticed with some spells that enemies don't drop health/ammo with slain. The richochet shot on that class for instance (the other one I noticed it on was the rockets spell on the tier 2 class - forgot the name). Is that a bug or feature?

[tigersfan]

I don't recall doing 8000!

Maybe like uhh, 1000.

I do like the idea of some classes with strong (okay not 8000 strong maybe) ammo shots to compensate for weaker normal attacks. And the class wasn't unusably weak.

Also I've noticed with some spells that enemies don't drop health/ammo with slain. The richochet shot on that class for instance (the other one I noticed it on was the rockets spell on the tier 2 class - forgot the name). Is that a bug or feature?

They NEVER drop stuff when they are hit with those spells? It's supposed to be random.

As for Ocean Spray I'll have to play around with it and see. 1000 damage might be ok for that tier, but, Misery said it was 8000.

[madcow]

I just tested it on the targeting  tree and got 1600 with all hits connecting. That's with a +100% ammo attack strength perk on. I guess I could see it hitting 8000 if you had a critical hit and all +ammo shots.

And yeah, I -never- saw any drop with those spells. At first I thought it might have been something related to using special spells. But then saw other special spells resulting in drops.

Keep in mind both comments are based on 0.702, I haven't updated just yet.

[tigersfan]

Oh, definitely please try that spell in .703, the rules have changed a lot.

[Misery]

I just tested it on the targeting  tree and got 1600 with all hits connecting. That's with a +100% ammo attack strength perk on. I guess I could see it hitting 8000 if you had a critical hit and all +ammo shots.

And yeah, I -never- saw any drop with those spells. At first I thought it might have been something related to using special spells. But then saw other special spells resulting in drops.

Keep in mind both comments are based on 0.702, I haven't updated just yet.

When I've tried it on the tree..... or against bosses..... right around 8000 damage total is what I'm getting, if I start at 30 ammo, and just hold the button down and launch it all at once (I didn't mean just with a single quick burst).   End up with about 8000 damage in the space of one second.   Granted, this takes ALL of the ammo, but..... that's still way, way too strong even for that cost.

It does this every time I try it, too, no criticals or special perks needed.


Quick screenshot of this:



All ammo-related perks as well as Risktaker turned off, there.

Can you send me a world file with that boss fight please? I'd love to see that.

Yup, I'll attach the world file to this message.   It also has the screwed up research area (which is the northern one), if that helps. 

EDIT:  Forgot to mention:  Actually had that boss spawn IN the lava a couple of times as well.

[madcow]

Oh I see what you're saying. Individual shots are still about the same, but looking at a complete unload it's a lot.

Might need a cooldown (5-10 secs?) so it so spammable to completely unload at once maybe?

[Martyn van Buren]

We should probably do a better job of explaining it in-game, but, pretty much any building with a pit after it is meant to be gone through.

I think I'd prefer just having a straight wall in that case; it bugs me to have a fake branching path.  Ideally I'd prefer to have a choice of routes, or a dead end with an interesting reward, but if not I resent what feels like kind of a cheap trick --- that is, the game suggests that I can ignore the building and keep moving forward, but I know that if I do so I will be wasting time or jumping into a death pit.

[madcow]

I've occasionally storm dashed over a pit (...right into those slime monsters. It dealt 5 hearts of damage. Game over)

[madcow]

Just updated and:

Ocean spray damage is unchanged.

Energy rocket (on potionist) still does ungodly amounts of damage. Direct/indirect hits still seem to affect damage. I did about 900 with a full hit on the tree. Around 180 when just one section hit. So yeah

Edit: Just for fun attached a screenshot. I had risktaker equipped but no other damage perks on. My other spells did about 70 damage.

[Nanashi]

The cave exits still only take you to the entrance of the cave on the surface, which usually means a long and annoying trek out through the darkness, especially early on. Since there's no point in killing random enemies, I prefer to poison pill instead and take the hatch to get back to the game instantly.

Generally speaking, when the poison pill is more time-efficient than actually walking, you may either want to add a penalty to dying (which would annoy or frustrate me) or make the cave exits just port you back to the world map.

Yes, I realise equipment breaks, but I can't stand equipment - anything that loses durability quickly and permanently is something I refuse to rely upon or seek out. I view AVWW2 as an exercise in usage of real-life time - if the reward isn't sufficient to justify the length of time it takes to get said reward, it probably isn't worth doing (like most caves. 10 minutes for 1 perk token for a random perk you may not even want to use is generally a bad use for time unless you NEED an alternative perk since the ones that you got suck a lot)

The problem is - poison pill/death is still bugged for me and respawns me exactly where I die, so if I get a bad cave slice (which happens a lot), there's absolutely no way for me to get out of the slice, which makes it incredibly frustrating for me to alpha test because I have to restart a new world every time this happens.

See the attached picture: This is the surface slice. I've just returned from the cave (the exit in the cave after getting the perk ported me back to the entrance of the cave)
Now I have to manually walk out, but there's no way I can make this jump up to the surface. I can't poison pill back to the castle because I just respawn exactly where I died with that error. As it is, I can't continue testing 0.703 - it's turning into an exercise in futility

[Martyn van Buren]

I definitely support cave quick-exits taking you back to the bottom of the first chunk; it makes a nice balance between the interesting challenge of scaling your way back out of a cave you dove into and not having to do a ridiculous amount of backtracking.  I don't especially mind there being a poison pill option; I want to try climbing out anyway.

That said, over the long term it makes sense to me that there might want to be some kind of penalty for death, at least on higher strategic difficulties.