Feedback after 500h in

[delicate yarrow]

I'll let my playtime speak for whether I like VOIN or not. This feedback is moreso aimed at the minutiae that you notice after playing for so long.

• High Toughness often leads to fully sated items becoming empty well before a half-hour/hour run ends. It incentivizes sating multiple items to swap to mid-run. Whether this is desirable is a game design question.
• +Luck is critical to getting good loot frequently. It feels like it has a significant impact, even with just +2%.
• There are 3 uniques I want to theory craft and experiment with -- Lightning's Sword, Mace of Spirits Repose, The Snakes -- but can't without starting a new save and hoping for a good roll. I understand a remedy for this is in the works.
• The diagetic feedback and dynamic HUD are well designed. I turned as many aspects of the HUD off as possible while playing, and I can still feel how powerful my blows are against enemies. I can see when crits happen, when effects activate. The dynamic aspects of the HUD are large and easily readable (even if the icon choices are unconventional) and most importantly, only display when needed.
• Sudden Death feels underpowered. Per the above point, it can be hard to tell if enemies are dying to raw damage or the instant kill effect, but it feels like they die to raw damage most of the time. So infrequently does it activate that I'd consider it underpowered. Combining Sudden Death with Second Wind to spam Vortex helped but also highlighted just how infrequent 2-7% is.
• Admittedly, I can't comment on Perfect Strike. The Dual Iron Swords look cool, but I'd rather spam heavy attacks with a maul or slow-but-hard-hitting weapon than twin blades. I'll experiment with them more in the future.
• The Sickles are quite weak as a weapon, held up by their affix: Vicious Butchery. They don't fall far behind because of this, but with their weak damage and short range, I don't like using them. I have seen others greatly enjoy the Sickles, however, so it may be preference.
• Necklaces are lacking in options. The only universally applicable one is the Poison Vial Pendant due it triggering on crits. The issue isn't the necklaces being too situational but rather there's no necklaces themed around physical or lightning damage.
• Lightning clones are my favorite ability.
• A couple Firstborn combinations I've crafted stand out from the rest. Death Spiral + Overwhelming Butchering and Poison The Blood + Poison Overflow. While the former requires reaching and maintaining 300+ combo, the latter is alarmingly effective at clearing dense crowds of enemies. Two combinations to keep an eye on if you're concerned about player power getting out of hand.
• Crusher is unweildy to swing. It's so slow, I often end up queuing extra attacks that can take seconds to complete. Slightly speeding up the very slow mauls would resolve the issue, but so would tweaking the attack queue window to be later in the swing. Crusher is still my favorite weapon to wield despite all that.
• Not many runes seem worthwhile at the moment. Gathering Storm + Thunder Echoes is what I've used the whole time, which is why I use "seem" and not "feel". Minor Energy Flow and Major Energy Flow would definitely be more appealing once more abilities are available; as-is I am not in the habit of using abilities unless they synergize with an affix. Purist is simply a matter of me not knowing how much it actually heals, as no healing on light/heavy sounds like a steep penalty.
• Owl Statuette's wind motes have too much blur on them, they visually obstruct everything behind them. I'd also say zigging to gather motes is too annoying for the buff if not for them also restoring dash charges, which is an unlisted benefit.
• I love high density fights, especially ones with summoners in them. A higher density setting than 6 would be appreciated.

• I like fighting assassins in groups. Mixing them with the horde is more frantic and enjoyable; currently only one spot in the caves has assassins and normal enemies spawn close enough to mingle reliably. Fighting assassins alone is often a waiting game.
• Assassins deal 2 hearts of damage, unlike every other enemy. It's a bit much when they're also durable and hard to spot. That does make them a high priority threat, though.
• Bouncing back from the edge of the map with an exasperated "please go the other way" from Master is always fun.
• The hidden chests, hidden fights, and power motes are a great reward for exploration. More randomly respawning chests of higher rarity (like the basic ones, not guaranteed respawns) in obscure locations would continually reward repeat explorations.
• Having music play when fights reach a certain intensity, a la modern DOOM, would heighten the experience.
• It's unclear what any status effects do to us. I had to pay close attention to piece together what Poison does; Ablaze is the only effect spelled out to the player currently. I still don't know what Weakened does.
• I look forward to more gear so I can theory craft more shenanigans.
• Item storage may be worth considering since I keep grinding more Firstborns and Primevals. Won't need it now, but when you add more items, there might be 3 pages worth of combinations to try out.

[torpid ore]

owl statuette's wind motes always spawn right in front of the character

although i recognize the issue of this not being obvious, might need to reword the item's description

any enemy will do 2 damage if the character is poisoned

all status effects will later be described inside the in-game journal

thank you by the way, this is extremely valuable

[delicate yarrow]

I thought that might be the case, but I'm not poisoned and hit often outside of fighting assassins so I wasn't sure enough to call it out.

[delicate yarrow]

Them spawning in front isn't necessarily an issue, until you start looking around and changing direction. Then the mote spawns where you were going instead of where you are, forcing the zig if you want to grab it.

The bigger issue is the few times I've spawned them mid-combat, they block LOS on enemies. The blur effect looks see through but it doesn't actually appear to be.

[delicate yarrow]

A major reason I don't habitually use abilities is because they don't interrupt other inputs.

I'll be chaining slashes and see an attack incoming, hit Lightning Sting and nothing happens, Lightning continues the swing I originally queued up. The ability isn't even added to the attack queue - I have to wait until I'm in neutral to use abilities.

That clunkiness is why I don't often use abilities unless I'm building for them.

[delicate yarrow]

I didn't go into my thoughts on each enemy type.

• The slow, shambling zombies are apt fodder. They aren't threatening and gib nicely. They're great for proccing effects off of. While they can take a lot of light attacks, they don't last against more serious swings.
• The armed fodder are a step up. They're more durable than fodder but are still just as slow. The arm blades extend their reach, making them a modest threat. The underhand swing feels like it has a much larger hitbox than the overhand swing. I can dodge the overhead by side stepping or back stepping, but the underhand I have to perfect dash to dodge, even when it looks like it should miss.
• Barbarians are another step up from the previous tier. They display more aggression and a variety of attacks to match. They're significantly more durable than armed fodder, making them a lasting threat in group fights but a bit drawn out once alone.
• Midgets are annoying little buggers. It's good to have an enemy to hate. They surprise with uppercuts and leaps, getting in cheap shots and sucker punches. Their lower stature makes them harder to hit, as well. Their durability is on the lower end and as such don't overstay their welcome in single combat and crumple easily in group combat when prioritized.
• Spitters are also a hate-able enemy. Being ranged attackers they act like one, pelting from afar and fleeing as you near. Their slap is a sucker punch, but nonthreatening beyond that. Once adapted to, spitters are easily goaded into teamkilling. Spitters will engage from well beyond their own detection range if the player is in combat, immediately resuming idle once local combat has ceased; it leads to spitters from the next group over opening fire only to turn around like nothing happened once the local gang dies.
• Assassins are the only thing I die to at this point. They're almost completely invisble, love to flank, apply Poisoned rapidly, and are durable. This makes fighting them the first handful of times feel like a duel, baiting strikes and counterattacking. Once you learn how to track them, they're simple to defeat. However, they're so transparent that any visual noise will cause me to lose them. I like this; "invisible" enemies tend to be easy to spot and track in other games once you know what to look for, but assassins remain hard to track. Once used to fighting assassins, single combat became a waiting game upon losing track of them. Group combat is more fun, because the assassins get collateralled by wide swings and effects, all while being a constant threat. Every challenge the assassin poses can be trivialized with the right item, making them VOIN's only gear check.
• Ogres are a bit janky. They don't have a walk animation nor appear to have a hitbox while red during their spin2win move. Their attack speed can take me by surprise, but are otherwise just very very durable. Visually imposing.
• Summoners are the best to fight. They summon enemies infinitely which fills the area with so many targets the game runs in slow-mo whenever I swing due to the constant hitstop. They make the battlefield chaotic but manageable and I love them for it.
• Prime spitters can catch me offguard with their burst fire, but what really sets them apart is their poison rain. Unfortunately, they don't use poison rain that often. Prime spitters are more durable than they're worth if they just burst fire, but poison rain makes them a proper threat.
• Prime midgets are just midgets that can clone themselves. This is a suitable progression from midgets. Multiplying when left unchecked just upped their target priority without adjusting their moveset.
• Antler knights are the most in depth enemy to fight. Ranged wind slash and varied attack chains up close. The strikes are swift, sometimes unreactably so, so you have to give them their space or memorize attack patterns. The one enemy to remain engaging in single combat, they never outstay their welcome.

• A common theme is that enemies are durable enough to remain present in group fights and proc effects on, but are simple enough that they overstay their welcome in single combat, with the exception of the antler knight. This can be built for with Focus Fire and Head Hunter enchants, but it's a noticeable contrast. This may also be due to me staying on Lv11 as to not trivialize combat with overpowering numbers.
• Perfect dash activates when dashing near an attacking enemy, rather than when dodging said attack. This can be abused with the Butterfly ring. The attached video highlights my point. Though, the ring falls off as a source of kills at higher Toughness.

[delicate yarrow]

After giving it some more thought, complaining about Toughness 6 enemies being tough is an oxymoron. I've deliberately capped my level so of course I'll hit a point where enemies are "too spongy"; that's the whole setting.

You can honestly throw out all my feedback about durability because of this point.

But if there's one thing I can say on the topic: I want enemies to be durable enough to do their thing in group fights, with all the area damage/effects going off, but once one-on-one to not overstay their welcome.

tbh finding the Toughness sweetspot accomplishes that. I've pushed myself to 6 because I want to test my builds, but 5 was closer to my ideal.

This does mean you'll need to add more levels to both settings in the future to keep pace with player power scaling.

[delicate yarrow]

Having now made a few Firstborns out of the Dual Iron Swords, I have a nascent opinion on them.

• I've come realise I'm not that fond of dual weild weapons in VOIN. There is a nitpick in swing variety for gamefeel but it primarily comes down to preference in playstyle. I prefer weapons with bigger hits and deliberate swings. Dual wield weapons hit fast but weak, often the opposite of what I look for.
• Perfect Strike is an interesting addition to the toolkit. It does just about preclude the use of light attacks, but it has some interesting synergies. It boosts the damage of Explosive Strike and Slashing Winds, and lends itself well to the deliberate weapons I like, as Very Slow attack speed highly incentivizes heavy attacks for longer active frames.
• Despite my general misalignment in playstyle, I still find the Dual Iron Swords to look cool and I keep wanting to use the Firstborns I've made with them.

[delicate yarrow]

Increased storage may need to be a higher priority for players like me. My weapons bag is looking like this halfway through a run. Happens about 1/4 runs.

[delicate yarrow]

I know I said I didn't like the tradeoff of the Purist rune, but I've started using it to keep the bonus from the Twin-Fused Heart. The build's at least half there, need to get another Dragonhead necklace with All Damage+ to make a Firstborn with the Screeching Neklet. There's 3 options for artifacts and similar for rings, so those are going to need some testing... not to mention the rune pair with Purist could be ability cooldown.

[delicate yarrow]

I really love how you've implemented weapon hitboxes.
It feels like the weapon itself has an active hitbox while swinging, as opposed to a cone cast from the player. While not to the same extent, because we can't fully determine swing direction, your system offers a similar level of manipulation as Mordhau or Chivalry.

Being able to rotate myself in sync with my sword to make a bigger arc (even a 360 arc!), or utilize movement to hit the entire crowd with a single swing...

[delicate yarrow]

I've started branching out with runes and while I haven't used Minor Energy Flow yet, I think I can expand a little on how they feel to use.

• All the runes feel a little lackluster to use on their own. When combined into Firstborns, they become powerful additions to the kit. For something that can be used so frequently, the power level makes sense.

• The Purist will likely turn off most casuals, but it's one of a couple ways to deliberately disable healing, to trigger other effects that scale with missing health. Purist in particular gives you the agency to decide when to heal, though which rune pairs best with it is still up for debate.

• Major Energy Flow is small but noticeable. As long as you regularly weave in runic strikes, ability cooldowns are greatly shortened. The issue is as mentioned before, abilities are clunky to use because they aren't queued like normal attacks nor interrupt attack chains.

• Gathering Storm and Thunder Echoes can feel weak, but they're meant to whittle down the horde. When paired together, runic strike may not kill much but it'll damage everything. At 3 runes to charge, it can be used every other attack in dense crowds.

• A tangential note from runes: Learning Lightning's moveset and mechanics isn't really required at the default difficulty, just mashing LMB will suffice. I'm not asking to raise the base difficulty, but to keep this in mind when looking at feedback from low difficulty players. Abilities, synergies, and attack types have great difficulty displaying their unique traits when there are few/flimsy enemies.

[delicate yarrow]

This note's more of a suggestion than feedback, in line with the item ideas thread. But since this pertains to an already existing effect brought up earlier in this thread, and is fairly short, I'm posting it here.

On Sudden Death feeling weak:

• My first instinct was to increase the percentage from 2-7% to 5-10%. A 1 in 20 to kill at full health, scaling up to 1 in 10.
• After giving it a bit more thought, the percentage could be conditional. Adding on "Expending a knockback charge increases the chance by X%" will make big hits feel even bigger, without buffing faster hitting attacks like Vortex.

[delicate yarrow]

Revisiting Vipers

• They are the only enemy I have to fully focus on the game to reliably defeat (I do play videos in the background occasionally).
• My "waiting game" comment from the start stems from the fact that if you can't track them, you have to wait for the Viper to attack. This is novel in the fact that the Viper dictates the pace of the battle, not the player, but it does become tedious if the player hasn't learned how to track/counter invisibility.
• Vipers don't appear to dash while invisible, making them relatively easy to hit. It's satisfying to seize the initiative against them.
• Vipers become incredibly dangerous once the player is poisoned. There is the ring of Forceful Cleansing, but without that, the only solution is "don't get hit."
• Vipers are easily dealt with when mixed with other enemy types, due to how much splash damage the player deals (chain lightning, wide swings, lightning clones, death knell, etc.).
• As I've gotten more comfortable fighting Vipers, I don't think they're out of place in the roster, but they are an outlier in difficulty.
• There's a few ways I can think of to tune them downwards in difficulty: 1) Reduce poison build up. Which can have design side effects such as inconsistent poison path durations or weakening other enemy types. 2) Reduce transparency. Which may make Vipers too easy but is ultimately something that has to be playtested. 3) Reduce the frequency of their poison dash move. Which will cause Vipers to use their close range swipes more often and poison the player less, both increasing opportunities to counterattack and reduce threat. 4) Mix them with other enemy types. Will need playtesting to determine what ratio is too many Vipers, but will result in more collateral kills.

[torpid ore]

you feel like they need to be tuned down?

[delicate yarrow]

I'm not 100% sure. They do stand out as the most threatening enemy type. If you intend to introduce them early, then yes, players will have difficulty dealing with Vipers compared to the rest of the enemy cast. If they're introduced a bit later, I don't think they need tuning.

But there's also your intent for VOIN's difficulty. All I can say is Vipers are a notch above the rest of the enemy cast.

[delicate yarrow]

On weapon swapping

• Weapon swapping is generally disincentivized.
• Death Spiral's combo is wiped on weapon swap.
• If you intend players to swap as part of combos or synergies, the action is too slow.
• If you intend weapon swap to be "a weapon for this occasion and a weapon for that occasion" (e.g. crowd clear vs single target) then the swap speed is fine, but, while weapon mechanics are unique, they lack defined roles.
• The best use of weapon swap I've come across is activating Death Knell then swapping to hit the bell with a faster weapon. Firstborns almost make this moot.
• Can't swap weapons while sheathed.

[delicate yarrow]

I am torn on Vipers. Fighting them on Toughness 6 is a chore, but 5 and below is fun. But most enemies are very durable on 6 and only the best builds I've found can make short work of anything.

In that environment, Vipers are an outsized threat because of how many opportunities they have to hit you, and then poison doubling the penalty for getting hit.

But I also capped myself to Lv11 for +50% damage, so I could just be punching above my weight. Because once I go back down to 5, I'm engaging Vipers willingly instead of avoiding them.

So... I think what I'm feeling is Vipers aren't overpowered, but a notch above average as a threat. By pushing myself to Toughness 6, I'm exacerbating that edge.

Honestly, at this point, my advice is just to keep an eye on Vipers.

[delicate yarrow]

Clarifying Ogres (Abominations, I believe is their official name) and Spitters

• In my initial enemy review I had missed the fact there are 3 Spitter variants. The middle Spitter variant is the only one I think needs a slight HP reduction. Burst fire is an increased threat, but they should still be similar to their base version in durability. Unless they already are the same durability and I'm just experiencing a placebo effect of higher tier = more HP
• The 3rd Spitter variant (can cast poison rain) that I've only seen appear alongside Abominations is fine. In fact, I would like to see them mixed with standard enemies to the same degree I want to see Vipers mixed as well.
• Small correction on Abominations: They do have a walk cycle. However, their steps are so small/slow that with stop motion enabled, it looks like they're gliding, not walking.

[delicate yarrow]

Kicks could use a rework. The kick itself is satisfying, but its place in the toolkit is almost redundant.

• Kick applies knockback, but also consumes a knockback charge to do so. Using it as an interrupt/get-off-me has 2 independent cooldowns to keep track of: knockback charges and the kick itself.
• Ignoring knockback, kicks deal the same damage as Runic Strike's physical portion but comes out almost instantly. In that regard kick can be used as an instant heavy.

Kick is just a fast and narrow heavy attack with a lengthy cooldown.

Kick doesn't need a redesign but a reworking of values. It wouldn't take much to flesh out it's utility in the kit.

• As an interrupt: Guaranteed knockback or new form of interrupt separate from the charges. The key point is removing kick from the knockback charge economy, leaving it restrained by only its own cooldown.
• As a damage source: Reduce the cooldown. As kick can be used without interrupting other actions, it can be interspersed between attacks to enhance DPS. But the current cooldown is rather lengthy for such a purpose.

The rework should be down one route or the other, as choosing both would overpower the action. Of course, being the developer, you could create a third path to take kick down; I keep my feedback to tweaking what's already present and possible, as I have no means of playtesting more outlandish ideas.

[delicate yarrow]

Initial impressions on the 0.1.5 patch

• Your handling of Sudden Death impresses me. Instead of taking my feedback at face value, you addressed a more fundamental issue: lack of feedback. That gives me confidence in your ability to digest feedback. Now that I can see when it activates, I'll have to get a feel for it's power level again -- but it already activates more than I noticed prior.
• The new enemy spawns are great: exactly what I wanted! Elite variants are mixed with mooks and even elite-only spawns have variety to them now. I'm seeing combinations I never saw before and getting surprised by them!
• The enemy runes spice things up and wreak havoc on target prioritization. It's too soon to give a nuanced appraisal, but it feels like the right direction.
• +400% resourcefulness for Toughness 6 is... absurd? I could get 90k in a full run before, but a third of the way through a run now and I'm at 300k. It does still get all consumed by making primevals... I simply wasn't expecting this much of a reward for max Toughness.
• Which brings me to Luck rebalancing: my inventory is more colorful now! I still get primeval drops, but it's far from the 30-50% of 0.1.0. The dramatically increased ichor means there's not much of a net loss in primevals per run.
• The decreased satiety drain does have a negative impact: an abundance of loot. With fewer firstborns coming back hungry, there won't be enough mouths to feed my magical bag of treasure! Haven't played long enough to fully hit this issue, but have played long enough to see I need dramatically less loot to refill than before. Rather than rolling back this change, it's moreso a warning bell to think of alternate loot sinks to satiety.

[torpid ore]

• i also feel like the amount of ichor drops is a bit overtuned, didn't have enough time to playtest properly 😄
• satiety fix was a quick one, i'm still thinking about more substantial changes

by the way, thanks for such amazing feedback and continued involvement
currently roles don't mean much, but I still wanted to thank you in some way, so you're now a blacksmith 😄

[delicate yarrow]

Thank you for the recognition!

VOIN clicked with me pretty strongly (over 110h on my save ) so I obviously love what you have already and look forward to more. As someone who's studied & played games for almost 3 decades and has experience programming, I take the time to interrogate and understand things before sharing. I was an armchair dev at one point, but I've since learned it's far better to let you cook and I tell you what's both on the mark and off after taking the time to savor what's been offered.

[delicate yarrow]

Going waaay back to the Owl Statuette, this clip demonstrates the behavior I took umbrage with. At this point, I don't think the Owl Statuette needs changing, it lets you go plenty fast. The issue is the context of usage:

• When you know where you're going and know how the wind motes spawn, you can keep your camera aligned with your destination. The motes are naturally gathered as they spawn, building up tremendous speed.
• When you're exploring, your head is on a constant swivel as you survey your surroundings. The motes spawn where you're currently looking, which is not where you plan to go. This forces zig zagging to maintain the buff.

The "fix" isn't with the Owl Statuette, but a new item to enhance speed in an easier to maintain way. I know several were proposed in the item ideas thread.

[delicate yarrow]

The wording here is ambiguous. Is critical power increased per stack of Weakened on myself? On the enemy, like Slayer of Otvrats? On the target? All active stacks, both myself and enemy?

I assume resistance will be explained in the journal.

[delicate yarrow]

• Vipers are considerably easier to manage now that they're mixed in with other enemies. First clip is a good example of how I can kill a Viper without even focusing on it. While this does reduce the threat of Vipers, it also eliminates the waiting game.
• Ichor gain for toughness definitely needs toning down. Getting hundreds of thousands of ichor per run leaves me with actually too much to ever spend. Rolling for a batch of primevals only cost 200k, which is a small dent in my now perpetually over 1m stock of ichor.
• Equal parts bug report and feedback: enemy AI pathfinding breaks when on water, see second clip. AI generally avoids going on water, but can end up there after a dodge or attack. Programmatically, I understand it's simpler to code the water as a floor, but for gameplay expectations I'd expect the enemy to sink and/or die.
• Same point on falling enemies. We don't suffer fall damage, but you'd expect the enemies to.

Allowing water and gravity to serve as environmental hazards for thee but not for me will take some fine tuning. People will abuse easy instakills, so making it believable but not too easy will be the tough part.

[delicate yarrow]

Thoughts on balancing environmental deaths

• Falls can deal lightly scaling damage. Enemies get hurt from falls, but unless from exceptionally high up, will not suffer enough damage to die outright.
• Enemies no longer water walk, and upon reaching the end of the terrain, die. When enemies die in this manner, no ichor/loot is generated (or is generated out of reach). For when the terrain extends deep enough to fully submerge before death, drowning damage can be dealt over time, or terrain adjusted so enemies are never fully submerged before dying.

[delicate yarrow]

I'm not even using ichor boosting items anymore.

[delicate yarrow]

Although I initially had concerns about there being too much loot to satiate my items with, that has yet to pass. While it can appear to threaten doing so at times, at others I have far from enough to fully satiate everything. I believe the reduced satiety drain has been more than offset by the reduced loot rarity.

[delicate yarrow]

1 run later...

[torpid ore]

patch incoming

[delicate yarrow]

From 90k per run with ichor boosting items to 400k without
Looking forward to the patch

[delicate yarrow]

The damage increasing secondary effects should be looked at again.

I'm having a hard time decisively declaring Execute/Suppress/Influx as weak, because they're for all damage, compared to Slayer of Otvrats/Head Hunter's just physical. But within that sphere, they are hands down worse. After killing a couple enemies, Head Hunter matches the bonuses from Execute/Suppress/Influx, but there's often ~10 enemies to a group on quantity 6, with a handful of significantly larger fights.

As we get more items, non-physical damage may become potent, in which case Head Hunter/Slayer of Otvrats becomes a powerful niche, but for now they are the best secondary effects to get.

[delicate yarrow]

To elucidate further, in the larger fights that can drag on for minutes, I have gotten enough Head Hunter stacks to deal over 1,000 damage on non-crit light attacks. Is this common? Not even close. But that's the kind of power scaling the other effects have to compete with.

[delicate yarrow]

Under the current satiety and Luck balancing

• I exhaust 2 sets of items (12 total) on a full run
• Without upgrading any loot, I can refill half of them
• And I get enough ichor to make several pages of primevals

[torpid ore]

how different was it in 0.1.0?

[delicate yarrow]

Without upgrading, I'd always come close to refilling everyhing I used. I could go through more sets of items. It's hard to say exact amounts, but compared to before I'm bottoming out fewer satiety bars and refilling fewer, too.

[torpid ore]

hm, i'll increase the amount of satiety items refill

[delicate yarrow]

After upgrading (rolling for +7s), currently I can refill 3.1 categories, while in 0.1.0 I could refill 5

If I didn't swap out items, I'd have an excess of loot and actually be looking for stuff to feed it to

I'm not upgrading stuff to feed in 0.1.5, but to roll for stats, same as before. If I were upgrading to feed, I would probably have 3 pages of loot leftover

But that speaks more about the known issue than satiety balancing

Few things I have memorized from all my feeding is

• 5 primevals to fully satiate an item
• 1 fully satiated primeval ups 1 item to middle of Lv3
• 1 fully satiated Firstborn fully satiates an item

From the last run:

• 8-9 items were refilled
• 4 items remain unfilled
• 2 Firstborns were made (4 more items filled)
• 1 Firstborn was fed to a primeval

[delicate yarrow]

Implementing fall damage will also require fixing enemies falling properly when near walls.

[delicate yarrow]

In light of the status decay tweaks, Poison the Blood (Viper's Blade) and Corrosion (The Snakes) are weak compared to other options.

• Combining the two together to achieve Big Poison, I was only able to maintain stacks in the mid 20s. They were decaying at a rate of 2 per second, which made it nigh impossible to break 30 stacks.
• Viper's Blade has no effect until a target dies from the blade; poison DoT doesn't appear to trigger Poison the Blood.
• While capped at 8 stacks, Poison Overflow (Viper's Saber) is a stronger version of Corrosion, with guaranteed stacks and burst damage.
• While both can be combined into potent Firstborns, they are both carried by Poison Overflow.

For your consideration, here are a couple avenues to bring the two effects up to par:

• Increase poison damage. Then fewer stacks are needed to achieve high damage over time. Has the side effect of buffing all items that apply Poisoned.
• Give Poison the Blood a chance to apply Poisoned on hit, less than Corrosion to account for Poison Overflow Firstborn. Give Corrosion a chance to apply Weakened in addition to Poisoned, to stay true to the name and make it unique from the new Poison the Blood.

[delicate yarrow]

Performed an abbreviated run (took "main road" to boss):

• 1 set of items reduced to Lv2 satiety
• 1 item upgraded to primeval from fledgling
• Fully satiated all items used
• 2 primevals leftover
• Found an item to feed the leftovers to

[delicate yarrow]

Performed a full run:

• 1 set of items used, did not swap out once satiety bottomed out
• 16 items upgraded to primeval
• 2 Firstborns made, 15 primevals used (1 pre-fed item)
• Fully satiated all used items: 21 primeval, 4 elder, 99 fledgling used
• Marked to keep: 1 primeval
• Remaining loot: 3 ancient, 3 elder, 7 tempered

[delicate yarrow]

Performed a full run:

• 2 sets of items used, 2nd partway through Lv1
• 5 items upgraded to primeval
• 1 Firstborn made; 1 Firstborn, 5 primeval used
• Satiated most items: 34 primeval, 7 ancient, 5 elder, 6 tempered, 119 fledgling used
• 2 items unsatiated: 1 fully empty, 1 Lv4.9

[delicate yarrow]

On Head Hunter:

• Whether you bring the other effects up or Head Hunter down, I am fine with either.
• Head Hunter is strong enough to warrant preferring over Firstborns. It is not strong enough to warrant using all Head Hunter, but I do prefer running 2-3. With the number of enemies in quantity 6, it is common to reach double damage.

[delicate yarrow]

Performed a short run (returned after satiety bottomed out):

• 1 set of items used
• 0 upgraded
• Sacrifice report: 7 primeval, 1 ancient, 3 elder, 3 tempered, 53 fledgling
• Fullness report: 2 full, 1 Lv4.6, 3 empty

[delicate yarrow]

Performed a short run (returned after satiety bottomed out):

• 1 set of items used
• 0 upgraded
• Marked to keep: 1 primeval
• Sacrifice report: 6 primeval, 0 ancient, 5 elder, 5 tempered, 75 fledgling
• Fullness report: 2 full, 1 Lv5.2, 3 empty

[delicate yarrow]

Performed a short run (returned after satiety bottomed out):

• 1 set of items used
• 8 upgraded
• Marked to keep: 1
• Sacrifice report: 24 primeval, 2 ancient, 5 elder, 1 tempered, 45 fledgling
• Fullness report: 6 full
• Leftovers: 9 fledgling

[delicate yarrow]

I've gotten a lot more proficient at fighting Vipers (also discovering tech/mechanics helped).

• Vipers now go down as swiftly as other medium beef enemies, occasionally in one combo if the crits/effects line up.
• While there is a little wild flailing involved, I can now choose when to play the waiting game.
• I am now only hit by Vipers when I let down my guard. I no longer fear getting poisoned and even take the poison stacks if it means I can keep initiative.
• Discovering heavy kick was a major component in this shift. Learning dashes can be held and dash jumps was a lesser part.

[delicate yarrow]

Re-evaluating kick sentiment after discovering heavy kick:

• Kick is now a normal DPS rotation, used off cooldown. If the intent of kick is to be additional DPS, then it does not require changes.
• If the intent of kick is to be crowd control, I still stand by removing kick from the knockback charge economy. Knockback charges are often depleted soon after the fight starts and remain depleted throughout, removing kick's utility as an instant interrupt.

[delicate yarrow]

Do you want more satiety data?

[torpid ore]

no, thank you a lot! made some changes according to it
got an idea of alleviating some of the frustration of having to refeed items indirectly by increasing satiety bonuses

[delicate yarrow]

Revisiting Sudden Death:

• I do have a higher opinion of it now that I can see when it activates.
• It's difficult to peg it as over or under powered because of the RNG nature. I could get 3 instakills in a row, or I could go a whole fight with only a single activation. It's not weak, but it is RNG.
• The only adjustment I can recommend considering is tweaking how RNG works. i.e. 25% chance = every 4th hit is a proc or 25% chance = roll the 25% every hit, but force it to proc on the Xth hit or 25% chance = 25% until the 4th hit, then start ramping the chance up until it hits 100%. Humans are notoriously bad at intuiting probability, so tricks like these are how devs have made the percentage chance match our incorrect expectations.

The warframe wiki's drop tables actually put things into perspective the best:

The easiest analogy to this is thinking about flipping a coin. A coin always has a 50% chance to either land on heads or tails when flipping it, and much like drop chances, this 50% chance does not change no matter how many times the coin is flipped. Each flip will always have a 50% chance to be either heads or tails. That said, consider the question "If I flip a coin 2 times, what is the probability that it lands on heads at least once". The chance per flip may be 50% for heads, but the probability that it lands on heads at least once within those two throws is not 50%, it would in fact be 75%.

If you flip the coin thrice the probability for it to have landed on heads at least once within that time now goes up to 87.5%. Four times will result in a probability of 93.75%. 25 times will result in a probability of 99.99999702% (one might say it's nearly guaranteed at that point). Remember, the coin itself is not changing, each flip still has a 50% chance to be heads, but you have increasingly larger probabilities to have gotten heads after each flip.

With this in mind, the purpose of "Nearly Guaranteed" is to tell you the number of runs a player needs for a 99% - 99.99% certainty of having received each component in question at least once. More specifically, in Excalibur's example above, 27 runs are needed for a 99.9% probability, 18 runs are needed for a 99% probability, and 36 runs are needed for a 99.99% probability. ```
The base drop chance is 22.56% for the part in question.

[delicate yarrow]

Some quick numbers for consideration:

• @ 2%, there is a 36.417% chance for Sudden Death to not activate after 50 hits
• @ 8%, there is a 1.547% chance for Sudden Death to not activate after 50 hits

[delicate yarrow]

I want to redress one of my earliest points: diagetic hit feedback.

• The flinch and sound design are
• Blood decals do you let you know when an enemy isn't at full HP. The bloodiness of the decal seems dependent on hits rather than HP threshold, so it doesn't indicate anything more than "not 100% HP".
• The above isn't an issue with low time to kill, but using a low damage build on high toughness leads to you asking "when will it die?" regularly.
• Critical hits have no identifying feature, but due to so many effects triggering off crits and those effects having distinct tells, you can generally tell when you crit.
• I do notice the blood splatters as you hit enemies, but they easily blend into the scene; I had to pay attention for them. A subdued red on dark background/already bloodied flesh.

This is all in regards to having damage numbers and health bars disabled.

• A potential elegant solution is having the size of the blood splatter scale with percentage HP dealt.
• Paired with the blood decal scaling with HP lost, it should be possible to gauge both how strong your hits are and how much HP they have left.

[torpid ore]

blood decals do scale with hp, but i agree that it's hard to notice any difference mid-fight

and critical hits have a unique sound

[delicate yarrow]

I'll keep an ear out next I play, with damage numbers on so I'm not imagining normal variations as critical variations

[delicate yarrow]

Crits do have a distinct sound, and the only bit of feedback I can think of is it should stand out in the soundscape a bit more.

When it happens as infrequently as our base crit rate allows, it sounds like a variation on the normal hit sound and easily gets lost in the sounds of combat. But when you have something like Death Spiral giving you frequent crits, it's clearly not the usual hit sound either.

I suppose a visual component could help, too. A small visual flare. Sparks, gibs, extra blood, etc. The gibs on Overwhelming Butchering are something I notice.

I also have to ask myself "how important is that we can clearly tell when we crit?"
By itself, crits are double damage, but nothing more without item effects. And those item effects have clear tells, so...

[delicate yarrow]

The simple solution would be to tweak the blood decals to be a more noticeable progression. It feels like they max out on bloodiness at pretty high HP percentages.

The much clearer but that much more work solution would be to make model changes based on damage. Stripped away flesh, jutting bone, missing chunks, etc.

You've been pretty good at parsing feedback, but I'm starting to see an issue with scope creep. I urge you to put that second solution in your backlog for later.

[delicate yarrow]

The biggest offender seems to be sound ducking from perfect dashes. Drowning out all sound does leave an impression of power and makes Voin's soundscape unique, but maybe crits should be ducked less than other sounds.

[delicate yarrow]

One thing I really appreciate is how the earth rune rocks drop to the ground instead of hurling at you from beyond the grave when their caster dies.

[torpid ore]

yesss, someone noticed 😄

i'm implementing suggested ideas btw 😎

[delicate yarrow]

that is one of the mechanics I'm going to have a field day with

[lofty sorrel]

Thunderborn looking better and better every day

[delicate yarrow]

Pincer kick definitely feels like a bug, but it plays out how a proper mechanic should: tight timing rewarded by massive damage, limited by cooldowns.

But that damage increase seems to be 4x and, born from jank, has some jank interactions of its own.

Since you've remained silent on whether to patch out pincer kick or not, I'll take that as you either accepting it as a feature or pondering whether to fix it. What I can rather strongly recommend is to understand how pincer kick works. Because it's a mechanic born from unforeseen interactions, it's going to have unforeseen interactions. Knowing how it works, you can surgically nerf any interactions that are too strong while leaving the rest of it intact.

[torpid ore]

it's all because attacks/kicks/powers don't have their own damage values, they instead manipulate character's existing damage attributes. so, for example, releasing a heavy attack temporarily increases your physical damage multiplier by 1.0 (basically doubling it), and since kick uses the same attribute, its damage will be doubled too if performed at the same time

it's janky, but for now i think i'd rather balance around it since it increases the number of possible interactions between actions

[delicate yarrow]

Since you know exactly why, it may be worthwhile to formalize pincer kick as a mechanic, giving it a SFX/VFX when you pull off the timing just right.

The only variant of pincer kick which could be considered overpowered is runic kick, since kick creates 2 instances of damage during runic strike for some reason.

[delicate yarrow]

What would be a nice feature to pencil down for the future is death animations for each element.

• The gibs burning for fire.
• Dissolving for poison.
• Gibbing as ice chunks for cold.
• A scorched, pitch black lump for lightning, if not total evaporation.
• etc.
  Not necessarily a full blown animation, but a VFX/texture for the corpse/gibs to reflect the element they were killed by.

As for triggers:

• Determined by the type of the final point dealt. Damage is already divided by type in the numbers display, so I assume they're dealt one after the other in calculations and treated as one "instance". The final value to push the target's HP past 0 would be captured here and type gotten to determine the kill animation.
• Determined by weighted chance. The chance for a specific kill animation to play is determined by that damage type's amount divided by total damage. i.e. 90 phys + 10 fire hit has a 10% chance to trigger a fire death, as opposed to a phys death.

I've been using fire damage lately and there isn't a noticeable amount of flames on the target. I do see the flame shader when they're hit, but it'd feel more satisfying to have the viscersal gibbing and bissecting reflect all the fire with some, well, flames.

[delicate yarrow]

In a similar vein, destructible environments. You already have this in the pots from the tutorial and necrosever. If this could be extended further, that'd be great! The pots are already very satisfying to break, even though there's no mechanical reason to atm.

• Destructible bushes. Not sure if them obscuring enemies is part of your encounter design, but cutting them down to restore sight lines would be cathartic.
• Cuttable grass. Because any hero with a sword has to double as a lawnmower.
• Cuttable trees. More the maybe side. Would be an impressive show of force to fell a tree with a sword, but may also alter the terrain too much.
• Hit effects for terrain. The sword simply phases through walls and floors currently, no sparking or scratching, nor denting. Admittedly, is useful to cut through terrain when enemies get stuck inside walls.

Also opens the possibility of using destructibility in map design. Destroying terrain to navigate.

[delicate yarrow]

The Emerald Heart has significant issues.

• When losing a single charge, the effect restores a pitiful amount.
• Multiple charges have to be lost in quick succession to get a significant amount of healing.
• When Poisoned, the effect only triggers once despite losing 2 charges.
• More than 5 stacks are required to regain 1 charge from the effect alone.
• 3 stacks are required to regain half of a charge.

• Ablaze also blocks the Revitalized effect. This is more of a design consideration than a balance issue, as Ablaze explicitly blocks regeneration and Revitalized explicitly regenerates.

[delicate yarrow]

If you haven't already, it'd be worthwhile to re-examine every stacking effect. After the introduction of exponential decay rates, every stacking effect got nerfed.

• Phoenixes Feather provides 1 less stack on average
• Emerald Heart requires almost dying in short order to get significant revitalized stacks, making the cap moot
• Poison based builds that aren't Poison Overflow lost a significant amount of potential damage
• Status effects on the player decay faster, making the Ring of Purging Shock more niche
• Gratitude of the Dead should be affected, too, though I've still yet to experiment with the mace

I know a couple of these were pointed out already. I've listed all the stacking effects I'm aware of.

The exponential decay rate has introduced a soft cap to all stacks. While this did achieve the target of reducing Overwhelming Butchery's capacity to stack Weakened and likely prevent many future stack related balancing headaches, it also adversely impacted every stacking effect rather significantly.

As a side note, descriptions mentioning stack durations (e.g. 6 seconds) are no longer accurate.

[delicate yarrow]

Feedback after 200h in

receipts

[delicate yarrow]

A full run of Hadracon netted 300-400k with my ichor boosting items on 666. You hit just about perfectly in the middle of the 90-100k I got on 0.1.0 and the 600-700k I got on 0.1.5

[delicate yarrow]

With the addition of the 2 new necklaces, I am now using Firstborns in every slot.

It is now debatable to use primevals, rather than a foregone conclusion.

[delicate yarrow]

1 day impressions on Thunderborne:

• Ichor economy isn't hyper inflationary anymore. I am either slowly losing ichor or staying neutral. Either way, I haven't reached 10m since the update.
• I have spare loot rather frequently now. I have fully satiated every single Firstborn and Primeval I have, and there's still anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen items leftover, often of primeval tier.
• The arena was the hardest content yet. I didn't die, but I was tested; I was tensed, even panicked at points, forced to disengage to restore dash charges... tested is the right word. I can tell you balanced this around pincer kick from the sheer number of elite enemies in each wave.
• The new boar enemy types were surprising (and a little scary). While they were ultimately one-shottable, they're still intimidating and I look forward to encountering them naturally elsewhere.
• Umoray was a neat encounter to discover. Felt like a soulsian boss design.
• Filling the edges of Nomme's arena with enemies was a surprise.
• The first big room to the Citadel of the Other Side, Depths, was a well designed one. Spitters attack from (initially) out of sight, positioned above the battlefield, while brutes charge/distract from the front. More encounters like this would be welcome.
• The new items are a great addition. Haven't tried to build around all of them yet, but Cleave and Rolling Death are standouts. Rolling Death in particular makes dash hopping even more powerful and is how I'm able to one-shot so frequently.
• The irony of being a swordsman who's favorite weapons are all hammers is not lost on me.
• Hearing the constant crackle of chain lightning while Stormforged Strikes are active is satisfying.
• Poison Cascade / Overwhelming Rage as my backup weapon have been replaced by the Fleshsmith's Grand Boulder.
• I've currently stopped using Head Hunting + Slayer of Otvrats because there's now enough synergies to make all Firstborn competitive.
• Already halfway through page 3 on Firstborn weapons. I've had to disable auto-pickup for fledglings to keep my inventory from quickly filling. Expanding inventory to 5 pages was a good call, but adding pages for every update isn't the best idea. Adding a storage/bank to offload items without discarding them would be best.
• If you're happy with satiety balancing, an alternative loot sink would be helpful. As previously mentioned, there's not enough metaphysical mouths to feed all these items to. May revisit this point as I run out of secret chests and adjust my play habits.

[delicate yarrow]

Also, don't think the changes to the Spitter, Vanguard, and Abomination models went unnoticed

[delicate yarrow]

Do not change how the fodder dash forwards. That sped up walk cycle unnerves me and is unintentional horror.

[delicate yarrow]

• While I initially had concerns of power creep, I find myself starting to return to old items now that the newness is wearing off. That's a good sign they aren't so powerful as to eclipse the old offerings.

• The standout effect is still Rolling Death. I'm aware from conversations it is inherent to my playstyle that I can build Momentum quickly. Combined with my ability to cleave, it really is the ideal effect for me. On the one hand, I expect it to be deemed too powerful and tweaked downward, but on the other hand, I also appear to be an outlier. Either way, this is an effect that directly translates moving fast into damage. An effect that perfectly compliments my fighting style.

• Loot is indeed overflowing now. To make sure I keep par with satiety use, I either have to not pick up a couple tiers of items, or find creative ways to inefficiently feed my items, which includes precisely tracking my satiety usage so I can waste as much of a primeval as possible. I can record some more satiety data, if you so wish.

• Ichor gain is in a good spot. Just upgrading every item I'm interested in to primeval actually results in a net zero or net loss of ichor from running Hadracon. Actually attempting to save ichor is required to reapproach 10m.

[delicate yarrow]

Initial impressions after finally FBing Gratitude of the Restless:

• It's in a good spot.
• I still have no idea what the ideal combination is.
• Maintaining stacks is fairly easy.
• Capping at x11 (88%) makes it a pretty potent +All.
• Still have no idea what'd work best with it, but trying it out with Rolling Death for now.

The ghosts can be hard to see, but that's also part of the balancing for it. The faint cries they emit helps me locate them in combat.

[remote iris]

Wanted to note something about your comment that assassins cant be tracked.

They can if they have visual effect on them, which could be fire, crit marker from ring of murder, or even tricking them into running through their own poison pool

[delicate yarrow]

I'm well aware they can be and how to do so. It's still worth acknowledging they are faintly visible without relying on items, as that may pose an issue to new players.

[delicate yarrow]

The verticality of the Cathedral of the Other Side, Depths is great. It incentivized me to use Power Leaps and to explore up, not just around. Revisiting the area, it's a fun challenge to navigate my way up the cliffs to the upper levels, without using the wind launcher (that's actually how I found Umoray the first time, by finding my own path). Future map design that encourages this kind of vertical exploring and scatters points of interest throughout the "footholds" would be .

The crypts are also a good location to keep in your tool belt. Narrow corridors and a low ceiling limiting not just visibility but mobility; adds a sense of unease to exploring and increases combat difficulty without touching the enemies.

I also applaud the decision to place the entire dungeon underground, where escape must be earned. I bet that upped the tension for many players. However, I'm not one of them. Even the arena can't kill me, I'm no longer a good barometer for such restrictions.

[delicate yarrow]

I'd been hearing the sound for it, but never quite put 2 and 2 together until now: there's a mantling system.

[delicate yarrow]

I know I've harped on about Sudden Death previously, but it is in the top handful of effects I use.

The Black Razor just feels good to use.

[delicate yarrow]

I trimmed what I could, but inevitably...

[delicate yarrow]

The Alum Heart might be too strong. It could be simply my playstyle, but I seldom run out of temp hearts. It also eclipses the Quartz Heart, since it gives more temp hearts overall without needing to sacrifice a red heart.

It may be a me issue. I'm not exactly of average or low skill level anymore. With that acknowledged, I'd like to suggest some ways to tweak the effect if you deem it's too strong rather than a skill issue.

• Increase cooldown.
• Reduce cap.
• Change regen method to hits.

On a related positive note, the Alum Heart has great synergy with the Twin-Fuzed Heart. #📺│media message

It's considerably less risky staying at 1 HP, allowing this heart to truly shine. Add in the new cold items, and we can finally capitalize on both halves of the boost.

[delicate yarrow]

• Make the cooldown reset upon taking damage.
  I notice sometimes temp hearts are restored instantly. I think the timer is constantly ticking down, rather than only when not capped on temp hearts.

[delicate yarrow]

I feel enough time has passed to return to my assessment of loot and ichor balancing.

• Ichor is, as before, in a good spot. While we can get a lot more ichor with the new items and fixed Necromantic Goblet, it's dedicated farming items rather than baseline. I'm actually below 8,000,000 ichor now, spending it all on rolling +7 +Luck for the new items. As long as new ichor boosting items have to compete over the heart and artifact slots, you shouldn't have to worry about compounding boosts breaking the economy.

• Loot is the most plentiful it has ever been. With the new Luck boosting items, I'm getting more primevals than I did under the old formula in 0.1.0. Combined with the satiety changes, I have ~2 pages of unneeded primevals. If we count the +7s I'm holding onto for when I get a +Luck base, ~3 pages. Weapons are creeping onto the 4th page.

69 spare primevals across all 6 categories atm

[delicate yarrow]

On nerfing Shardcaller assuming you haven't settled on a change already: The ice pillars appear to strike instantly, while Dragonhead's fireballs have a delay till impact. How about giving the ice pillars a delay as well? Then any chain reaction of it triggering off itself will be staggered, rather than everything getting frozen all at once.

[delicate yarrow]

In dabbling with the Viper Eye, I have run out of temp hearts and taken damage to my red hearts.

In evading while waiting for the temp hearts to return, I came to appreciate how long 4.2 seconds is in combat. As such, I must retract my suggestion of increasing the cooldown.

My own opinion on it feeling overly powerful stems from a couple pieces of jank with its behavior, both of which I mentioned here or in bug reports.

• Alum Heart does not trigger Weird Claw's cooldown.
• Alum Heart's regen timer is constantly ticking, leading to instances where a heart is immediately regained after taking damage.

That second bullet is something I've noticed with the Vampiric Heart as well. The crit heal and subsequent cooldown are triggered on any crit, regardless of if you're at full health or not.

If these behaviors can be addressed, triggering Weird Claw's cooldown and resetting the regen timer upon losing a heart (temp or perm), the Alum Heart should be in a balanced spot. I will have to re-evaluate the heart after experiencing it without these 2 jank interactions to re-judge if my other suggestions are warranted.

[delicate yarrow]

Finally using a poison-centric build, I totally get why you nerfed the cap to 20. Poison Overflow + Viper Eye leads to exploding enemies every hit. It's a very straightforward (in the sense that all you need do is stack poison related effects) and powerful build.

My initial reaction was it being too powerful, but considering the number of items required to reach its full potential and the fact you are constantly poisoned balances it out. Definitely in the "keep an eye on this one incase you think players are getting too strong" category, but not a target for further nerfs going by the balancing ethos observed thus far.

[delicate yarrow]

On Cleave:

• Favorite effect.
• I had accepted it as it was, but after seeing the changes to Avatar of Undeath, can Cleave affect lunging attacks as well?
• Cleave is active strictly during light and heavy attacks.
• Pincer kick is affected.
• Lunge attack is unaffected, but would make sense.
• Kick is unaffected and makes sense (not the weapon swinging).
• Abilities are unaffected and makes sense for balancing concerns.
• Runic Strike is unaffected and makes sense for balancing concerns (Runic Kick is the strongest single target attack we have).

[delicate yarrow]

For awareness's sake, the triggering of Poison Overflow's explosion on every hit requires at least 5 stacks of Poisoned. Viper Eye averages 5 stacks.

[delicate yarrow]

On Frostfangs:

• Rather lacklustre on its own.
• Adequate supporting effect to Winter's Wail.
• Damage is bugged #1352109913626771466 message
• Highly effective for single combat.

The ice pillars apply a considerable number of Freezing stacks, but the random targeting makes it almost useless in group fights. When there's only one enemy to target, however... Frostfang does quite well in duels, quickly and safely freezing the opponent. All that's left is setup for a powerful shatter.

[delicate yarrow]

Be aware of stair placement in encounters. As demonstrated in the clip, the mantle system can activate on stairs, impairing leaping.

Note to self: adjust OBS recording settings or compress video in editor

[delicate yarrow]

I'm going to immortalize this here.
It's a peak example of why I made Cleave and why I love Voin's hitboxes.

[torpid ore]

https://tenor.com/view/high-fiving-high-five-gimme-some-skin-greeting-congratulations-gif-14414580

you ^

giving cleaves to all otvrats

[delicate yarrow]

The UI is designed well enough that playing without sound isn't a hindrance.

[delicate yarrow]

The hits in this attack chain are distinct and should be dodgeable, but only the first and last stroke are flagged as dodgeable.

[delicate yarrow]

I was going to post screenshots of item satiety post run to demonstrate what my drains are, however I'm finding myself losing more satiety than normal. And to top it off, I may have an adequate amount of loot this time instead of excessive. 🤔

I'll do some more runs and gather more screenshots.

The key difference, or rather absence, of this latest run is returning to Ruby Heart from Mortal Heart. The extra damage would lead to shorter combat time, so less satiety drain; and +80% Luck may have been pushing my drop chances over some break point for primeval rarity.

[delicate yarrow]

Very clear demonstration of Alum Heart's regen timer not resetting upon losing a temp heart.

[delicate yarrow]

An instance of losing all temp charges. It actually takes quite a tense while to regen them. This is why I believe if the timer issues are addressed, Alum Heart will be balanced without further changes.

[delicate yarrow]

Pretty good example of blood decal scaling being hard to notice. I can tell it's wounded, and if I really pay attention, I can see the blood decal expanding. But from the moment it becomes notably bloody, it doesn't become notably more bloody until the final hit.

Some possible solutions:

• Make the blood decal tiered.
  Decal remains the same until a preset percentage threshold is reached, then the decal is changed. Sudden change is more noticeable than gradual. Less granularity in eyeballing enemy HP.
• Make the blood decal scale exponentially.
  Decal will be barely present until half HP is reached, at which point its presence significantly ramps. Makes low HP state distinct from high HP state. Difficult to gauge HP while still above 50%.
• Introduce new blood decals.
  Decals scale as current. At preset percentage(s), the blood decal texture is swapped for something more bloody/fleshy/wounded/damaged. Requires new art asset(s). Can make low HP very distinct from high HP while maintaining granularity in eyeballing HP.

[delicate yarrow]

Also, somebody needs to point out the little animation detail of Runic Strike rebounding off the ground.

[delicate yarrow]

I had kinda brushed off Eternal Duty because it was a defensive effect, but it's actually pretty fun, powerful and gets you to use all your abilities.

• Different playstyle from my norm, which focuses on cleaving.
• Timer management. Eternal Duty active duration, ability cooldowns, runic strike charge, everything must be juggled to maximize penumbra time.
• Abilities create visual spectacle & variety while being helpful. Penumbra also looks cool and can give certain moments cinematic feel.
• More aggressive. Maximizing penumbra time minimizes spacing and breathers that are normally required.
• The mental resources spent on tracking enemy actions is reallocated to managing timers, entirely because of penumbra.

[delicate yarrow]

Here's final satiety levels for 5 runs.

• Full clear of Hadracon (~90 minutes)
• Fully satiated between runs
• Swapped hearts once initial heart fell below Lv3
• Builds varied. Swapped builds alongside heart, if not more frequently.

[delicate yarrow]

Loot addendum:

• When loot felt adequate, I had made many Firstborns upon returning.
• When simply satiating used items, there is always an excess.
• If not discarding excess loot, creating junk Firstborns to compress inventory space.

Screenshots are of loot discarded after a single run, each.

• Only 2 screenshots correlate to runs reported above. Other 2 are from earlier in time.
• As implied by the previous bullet, have not been diligent in capturing how much loot is discarded/wasted between runs.

[delicate yarrow]

On primeval vs firstborn usage.

• Still keeping Head Hunting variants of items.
• Slayer of Otvrats has been discarded due to a combination of new items and non-Otvrat enemies. Enough instantaneous power can be generated at combat start. Maintaining Slayer of Otvrats variants alongside Head Hunting was cramping inventory.
• Necklace is the only slot commonly kept primeval. The category's effects are still conditional enough that a build either can't leverage 2 effects or can't leverage 2 effects often enough to be worthwhile over a relatively non-conditional damage boost.
• Despite the above, necklace slot is primeval half or less of the time. I expect this ratio to further favor firstborn as more necklaces are added.

[delicate yarrow]

Satiety report:

• 2 Firstborns made
• 1 Primeval filled

Screenshots make these so much easier.

[delicate yarrow]

Satiety report:

• 0 firstborns made
• 0 upgrades

I'll give 3 more reports so you have 10 runs worth of data

[delicate yarrow]

Satiety report:

• 0 Firstborns made
• 0 upgrades

[delicate yarrow]

I've only been hearing bad things about new games made on UE5, performance & stability issues, high system requirements... meanwhile Voin is here running at over 100 FPS on a 2070 SUPER, not hogging RAM, small file size and stable.

[delicate yarrow]

Satiety report:

• 1 Firstborn reforged (previous version fed to components of new)
• 1 upgraded

[delicate yarrow]

Satiety report:

• 0 Firstborns made
• 0 upgrades

That makes 10 reports

For funsies, here's the progression of loot dwindling through feeding

[delicate yarrow]

Do you want more satiety reports as runs finish?

[torpid ore]

haven't gotten to rebalancing yet but that will surely be enough, thank you so much!

[delicate yarrow]

Returning to Emerald Heart

• It pairs best with natural healing, that little extra to top off / kick start your charge.
• By itself it's weak.
• Gaining higher stacks (i.e. 4x) without dying is possible by actively trying to heal alongside Revitalize.
• It can be paired with Hunger Heart to half the ichor cost per charge.
• I neglected it because attack healing can already be sufficient.
• A runic strike heals 1/3 ~ 1/2 a heart per hit, runic kick is 1 heart per hit.
• Revitalize is for when getting struck with moderate frequency.
• Not enough to trade blows, but enough to give healing an edge while under fire.

[delicate yarrow]

After performing a challenge run, a couple of restrictions would make for fun modifiers:

• No extraction. Leaving the map requires finding an exit, or dying.
• No corpse run. Items and ichor lost on death are lost for good, no chance to reclaim them.
• Corrupted items only. You can only use what you pick up (or "smuggle" from another run).

They were restraints that made gameplay refreshing, but would become onerous if constants. Hence, map modifiers. They'll be infrequent, preventing the restraints from overstaying their welcome.

[delicate yarrow]

Vipers are easier to spot with anti-aliasing disabled.

• Tracking the weapon glow w/ AA.
• Tracking body outline + weapon glow w/o AA.

It doesn't come across that well in the video, but you can tell how reliably I'm tracking this Viper throughout. 0:48 is the clearest example of what I'm seeing, line art.

Without AA, I'm able to track Vipers clearly enough to drag my Runic Kick from one to the other.

[delicate yarrow]

Used Curse of Greed and Lucky Streak, only looted Elder+, this was the excess.

[delicate yarrow]

Going right back to the beginning, Crusher handling.

I finally got a grasp on what I felt way back then:
The attack queue window starts immediately, so double clicking results in 2 swings of the maul.

[delicate yarrow]

Been experimenting with sharpening, motion blur and different AA methods.

• Vipers have a black highlight applied while invisible.
• AA destroys this highlight, making only the glow of their weapons visible.
• DLSS w/ 2.0 sharpening makes the highlight visible.

Will test a bit more over this run.

[delicate yarrow]

DLSS Quality has made the highlight visible so far. And Balanced seems to improve framerate over no AA 🤔

[delicate yarrow]

Thoughts after playing on 1.2 game speed for a day.

• Game feels snappier.
• You get used to increased speed.
• Once adjusted to, it doesn't feel different from playing on 1.0 game speed, save the animations feeling better.
• Feeding and upgrading are notably faster.

[delicate yarrow]

I can understand why you don't 📝 most speed boosting items. Even simply sheathing renders the player too fast for most enemies to hit.

I still want more speed. Going fast is fun in and of itself. But I know any speed buffs that get added need to have significant limitations to keep from trivializing combat.

[delicate yarrow]

Really not sure if this is a bug or design decision, so I'm putting it here. I've mentioned before how Blood Rapture also has a timer issue like Crystallic Growth. You can see in the clip I don't regain a heart upon crit, because I crit while at full health earlier in the clip, triggering Blood Rapture's cooldown.

[torpid ore]

yep, that's a bug

[delicate yarrow]

Having played on 1.2 game speed for a week:

• Much of my previous sentiment still holds.
• I forget I'm on 1.2 sometimes.
• The game does require more focus, due to the increase in speed.
• Vanguard attacks can feel unreactable if I'm not focused.
• Vipers require focus again, lest I start taking repeated hits under Poisoned.

[delicate yarrow]

Some QoL for satiety:
After combat ends, briefly show Satiety levels of equipped items under the ichor counter.

Toggle for states of detail:

• Off
• Average (only show 1 level)
• Detailed average (show 1 level + bar, same info as inventory screen)
• All (show each item's level)
• Detailed all (show each item's level + bar)
  If an item is Ancient or lower, do not include in averages nor display.
  Stop displaying when satiety is bottomed out.

This feature would remove the need to open up my inventory after each fight to check satiety levels.

[lone saddle]

you know the funny thing is that's weird to think about is that thats actually Anti-Aliasing working as intended. Aliasing occurs when your sampling rate is below the nyquist rate of the frequency of patterns, resulting in weird sampling and patterns, and it appears that the glimmer effect that they have causes this aliasing to occur, which can actually be seen in your clip at 3ish seconds(it looks smudgy, as its attempts to color the pixel blends weirdly). As such, Anti-Aliasing filters remove that glimmer, meaning that this isn't an issue with Anti-Aliasing, but that the texture itself has aliasing

realize its so late for this post, but I found it interesting

[delicate yarrow]

Perfect Strike doesn't really feel worthwhile to use. Looking at the stats, it doesn't seem weak. But in practice, that forced tempo slows attack rate, offsetting the damage bonuses it provides.

I'm not really sure how to address this, but my current instinct is to slightly increase the critical chance bonus. 14%, 15%, and 18% each feel appropriate. 🤔

Buffing the physical boost to 100% would invalidate Rage. A constant +100% vs periodic +50% does not give pause for thought like +80% vs +50%.

The forced tempo itself is a neutral. A negative if you're not used to it (can't attack when you normally would), a positive if you are (fixed tempo makes attacking almost subconscious, freeing brainpower for other matters).

[delicate yarrow]

Having gotten to the Viper's Blades in my inventory, I still feel the same way about poison by itself.

Poison Status:

• Requires Weakening to bypass the hard cap of 40 damage per tick.
• Fades quickly, but also has several avenues of stacking quickly.

Viper's Blade:

• Poison the Blood doesn't do anything to help kill targets while being an on-kill effect.
• Requires Ring of Rot or Poison Overflow to make meaningful damage out of Poison the Blood, while other effects don't require a synergy to be viable.

The Snakes:

• A bit lacklustre on their own but still viable, able to build Poison quick enough due to being a dual weapon.

Poison does have a fair few synergies, but trying to build into poison exclusively, it ends up being Poison Overflow or bust.

[delicate yarrow]

While big dungeons are impressive (always a "how big is this place?" reaction so far), it would get stale for every level to have 1 dungeon. Small dungeons like the crypts in Necrosever would be a welcome change of pace for some levels.

And who knows, maybe a couple of those small dungeons turn out to not be so small afterall.

[delicate yarrow]

I'm still playing on 1.2 game speed. Old clips at 1.0 speed feel slowmo.

Feedback after 400h in

[delicate yarrow]

Initial impressions on a couple systems, haven't re-explored much of Necrosever yet at this point.

Sorting

• Nice to auto-sort by type over manual
• No control over sorting beyond favoriting
• No sorting by tier, secondary affix, or recent (old sorting)
• Bit more effort required to drop spare loot, no longer all pooled at the end

FOV

• Gives a different sense of depth from the previous implementation
• Enemy distance is no longer notably distorted at close range; looks like the enemy is touching me on damage instead of a meter away
• Peripheral vision feels smaller at point blank
• Preferred the higher FOV on arms; could see my left hand on the hilt and the weapon took up less of the screen. Broader weapons now take up ~25% of the screen, per screenshot.
• Would like a broader range for camera FOV, up to 180

Minor QoL related to FOV

• Keybind to toggle between 2 FOV values
• Acts as a type of manual zoom

[torpid ore]

maybe a separate slider for hands FOV?

[delicate yarrow]

Exactly what I had in mind

[delicate yarrow]

Wind's Hunger is a good addition. Gaining 300 speed from dashing does throw my footwork off, but I'll adjust to it. In the meantime, it provides either the same or slightly higher speed than dash hopping in regards to traversal.

My one critique is to try giving the speed boost some subtle speed lines on the edge of the screen. I see the camera lower, I see the FOV increase a bit, but both of these effects are difficult to discern while midair. I wasn't sure if it applied while airborne until I did some testing.

[delicate yarrow]

Really woulda thought there'd be a secret here

[delicate yarrow]

By favoriting everything I want to keep, it does recreate the old sorting of all new loot at the end of the list. Not ideal, since I view favorites as favorites rather than keepers, but it'll do for now.

[fallen rivet]

just explored, you're on the way to one! Sozidar went above and beyond on this one

[delicate yarrow]

You put the hags back on the bridge to the citadel!

[delicate yarrow]

I also like "Pain per Second" instead of "Damage per Second"

[delicate yarrow]

Piezoelectricity and Crystallic Regrowth are balanced now. Crystallic Regrowth is obviously better if you don't get hit, but 8 seconds can be a long time in combat. Meanwhile, Piezoelectricity is don't take actual damage every 8 seconds. Within that distinction, Crystallic Regrowth lets you start every fight with a shield while Piezoelectricity gives you a shield more often.

[delicate yarrow]

The soulfruits could use some refinement, but they're on the right track. I've only used a handful due to keeping my level low until now.

• Leveling in the teens isn't quick, but it's not painfully slow either. Enough to make each level up an event.
• I will never remove the +300 speed on dash fruit. Ever.
• Runic Maw (heavy triggers Runes) is one I'm keeping an eye on. It doesn't consume the runes and a sweeping strike is definitely easier to sweep with than a vertical.
• for finding a way to get a style meter into VOIN.
• I suspect people won't use the Alchemist fruit much until you add the journal explaining that elemental resistances decrease status build up.
• Missed bit of symmetry in the Hall of Reflection, not reflecting the soulfruit slots on every side of the talent tree (even if we can never fill up the slots you've already given us).
• Soulfruits and unique weapons will be good ways to reward exploration and gate progression.
• Necrosever feels a bit sparse on discoverables.
• As mentioned elsewhere, there are many many more dastardly spots to hide discoverables and duplicate soulfruits gives you the excuse to do so without locking the casual out of options.
• Strongly suggest placing duplicates of soulfruits that appear in later areas in dastardly hidey holes in earlier areas, rewarding secret hunters with early unlocks.

I've been toying moreso with Viper's Eye and Ring of Rot than the rebalanced Veilrender. From when I've used it:

• The tooltip says it deals 50 cold damage, but I'm seeing it tick for 118 w/ +18% cold; 200 w/ +30% all and +18% cold. Either the tooltip is wrong or the calculation is still off.

• The reduced tick rate has put the current implementation in a good spot for droppable loot. It's lacking as a one-and-only affix, but it shouldn't make many OP Firstborns.

• If you plan to make a one-and-only item, like Veilrender is currently, strongly recommend making it drop as a Firstborn. If people only get 1, you can eliminate the disappointment of making a bad combination and balance headache of unintended combinations by having it drop in a preset combination.

I'm guessing you tried adding a delay to Shardcaller, couldn't quite find a way to make the delay not feel bad, and decided to nerf the things around it instead -- freezing and shattering. It's a fine call. Freezing and shattering are still strong, but just a little yet noticeably weaker than before.

[delicate yarrow]

Because Runic Maw doesn't spend runes, it doesn't trigger Runes that require it, such as Major/Minor Energy Flow.

Force Overcharge isn't activated because it explicitly requires Runic Strike.
Purist still blocks healing from Runic Maw because it is a heavy attack. But this does allow Runes to be activated with the Purist wihtout healing yourself! Should empower Twin-Fuzed Heart builds.

I still feel activating Panacea + Chaotic Causation in a huge sweep is a bit strong (for crowd clear), but seeing as it's the minority synergy with Runic Maw, the soulfruit overall appears balanced.

Then again,

I am using Viper's Eye

[delicate yarrow]

Looking at the old clone bug (6 mil shatter), VOIN may benefit from having a neutral damage type.

Other games may refer to it as true or almighty damage. Nothing resists it, nothing is weak to it. It simply is. An absolute value.
With no interactions whatsoever, it should reduce occurances of bugs where damage is used to instakill targets for various reasons.

[delicate yarrow]

The Duelist's Muse seems to heavily favor a thousand cuts over quick kills.

It's hard to say if it's disproportionate or unbalanced.

• Because the flavor context is putting on a show for a dead audience, dragging out the fight a bit does make sense.
• The ranking is one way you can guide players towards your intended playstyle.

While I feel my "kill everything in one swing" moments go unrewarded, that's viewing the ranking as a measure of power or efficiency, when it's contextually more about putting on a show.

All this to say I don't know if it needs adjustment or not. I'm not privvy to your intentions on what type of playstyle the ranking system is supposed to encourage. What I can say is it favors builds that swing wildly and stay in the fray without getting hit.

[delicate yarrow]

Duelist's Muse really does push me to fight more intensely. Keeping the ranking high requires not giving myself a breather, instead moving as quickly as possible between encounters, stirring up as big a mob as possible, and somehow not get hit in the process.

indicator is appropriately hard to achieve, let alone maintain.

Only improvement I can think of is a QoL one:
A way to tell how close we are to the next rank. A style bar, basically. It itself can be stylized,

• filling the ranking letter with color
• filling the background of the rank title text
• intensifying the effects around the rank

Then we can see how quickly we're filling the bar and how quickly it drains, too. It gives more feedback, basically.

[delicate yarrow]

Duelist's Muse turns VOIN from a game I can kinda autopilot to something I have to fully focus on.

[torpid ore]

so, a welcome change? 😄

[delicate yarrow]

Yes. I can actually empty my head with VOIN again

[delicate yarrow]

Runic kicking a Viper pushing me from empty to a C hammers home my subtext here. It is rewarding my playstyle but my expectations were misaligned. What's really going on is I need more experience with Duelist's Muse.

[delicate yarrow]

Consider making Lightning Strike trigger not just on downward velocity, but overall velocity.

I did decelerate a bit at the end, but the speed achieved here is comparable to what's required to Lightning Strike.

It could also be a soulfruit to enable a "Lightning Crash", a Lightning Strike that triggers on collision at a certain horizontal velocity threshold.

[delicate yarrow]

With more experience under my belt, I can say it favors multihit builds slightly. Vortex into crowds is a consistent way to build and maintain style. This does encourage power usage, which is good, but one-hit-many-kill doesn't rely on powers. Big bonk can still compete in style through the sheer speed of kills.

All in all, what I felt was "lacking reward" was actually me not being aggressive enough. I have to approach this like I'm speedrunning kills to maintain a Slayer rank.

Vindicator? I catch glimpses of it here and there, but only see it for extended periods during the biggest fights.

[delicate yarrow]

The current EXP balancing has the player reach at least level 2 by the end of the tutorial. This is good design, intentional or otherwise, because it introduces the level system by experience. The average player should intuit "kill more monster = higher level"

[torpid ore]

just wanted to say that I really appreciate you sticking around and occasionally sharing your thoughts on things. thank you ♥

[delicate yarrow]

Gambler's Guillotine needs an eye on it, if not a rebalance already.

It reduces crit chance by 100% in return for +ALL, but it seems that 100% is ignored by affix effects. Force crits still apply as well as Death Spiral. With these loopholes, there isn't a reason not to take +28% damage. The base 6% crit chance at base x2 modifier means an average damage increase of 6%, far less than what the fruit provides.

With only satiety to boost crit chance directly instead of forcing crits currently, there isn't really a downside to picking Gambler's Guillotine in the current patch.

Aside from recoding the effect to close up the loopholes, there's a couple other potential avenues for rebalancing the fruit:

• Make increasing crit chance directly easier than forcing crits. This requires adding more items/effects/fruits, but will make the downside of 0% crit chance more pronounced while leaving the loopholes intact as harder to obtain (through loot dilution) synergies.

• Shift the effect to -100% crit power. Crits dealing x1 damage would make the loopholes a non issue while still gimping crit based builds. Crit power increases are harder to come by, though larger in magnitude, and come at the build cost of using a slot to negate the fruit's effect instead of enhancing crit chance.

[delicate yarrow]

I have yet to see a lightning clone miss a swing this patch.

[delicate yarrow]

Another "rule of cool" suggestion: directly impacting an enemy with Lightning Strike should do enough damage to vaporize common enemies. I want to be in the center of charred gibs as they're scattering to the winds.

I do recognize this could be exploited to instagib larger enemies/bosses, so exact damage value is pending testing.
It's not the Lightning Strike's AoE, but the thing I land on that should take more damage.

And if it's not clear, you can hear a leaper's pain sound as I land, and I step down when I step forward; I landed on the otvrat's head.

[delicate yarrow]

• Aurelia's first dialogue has timing issues. The lines overlap one another slightly. Try delaying each line by a second to give a more natural flow to the conversation.

• Gore Chasm is the kind of challenge location you should definitely add. Near pitch black cave, endless monsters to fight through in narrow space -- you can tell something's spawning them, but do you press through and risk being surrounded or slowly advance? Only complaints: too short; could definitely make a medium sized dungeon out of this concept, and the exits drops you back at the entrance; break immersion a bit when there's no clear teleportation involved -- Gore Chasm could be used as a shortcut through the mountains.

-# Writing these notes as I'm playing through the update finally

• Quest design choice of giving actual directions instead of a marker? Aerelia didn't speak the directions, though, and there was nothing to point the player to the new Journal tab (though that may be an old player issue instead of a new player one).

[torpid ore]

did the other dialogues have timing issues?

[delicate yarrow]

Vindicator's didn't. I've only just entered the zone, so only the one dialogue so far.

• Having otvrats spawn in via falling flesh ball, like in the tutorial, is an immersive way to spawn them in and can trip up the player. You won't actually see the enemies you're fighting until they're already upon you. Only drawback is for people who want to kill everything super fast, they have to wait a bit for the ball to impact.

[torpid ore]

yeah, a tooltip about the journal is a good idea. writing it down 📝

[delicate yarrow]

Do need to reinforce how good the choice of going with actual directions is. It makes the player observe their surroundings instead of following a UI marker on auto-pilot. VOIN is a pretty game and this style of navigation will make more people realize that.

• Every time I scale to a high point, there's at least 3 locations that catch my eye. Some of which obscure yet more locations, both preventing choice paralysis and rewarding further exploration.

• Having a different SFX for hitting an enemy with a resistant element would be nice. Currently the only way to tell you're hitting the enemy for less/more is by turning on damage numbers. Would ostensibly double/triple the number of impact SFX (normal/weak/strong).

Some footage of the timing issue I encountered. While Aurelia never quite talks over herself, she gets very close.

[torpid ore]

oh, it's probably due to the game's speed setting

yeah i can fix that, thank you

[delicate yarrow]

I tested if 1.2 game speed had an effect on dialogue back in Hadracon by annoying master and heard no pitch shifting. Was not expecting it to manifest differently.

[delicate yarrow]

• The design of the frost giants and the way they send you airborne is a clear nod to Skyrim.

[torpid ore]

https://tenor.com/view/todd-howard-howard-nodding-gif-13246550

[delicate yarrow]

• First time portalling back since the update, and while a part of me wants to defend the system I knew, that new zoom into the sky is

[delicate yarrow]

• Unsure if intentional, but you can go inside the towers. Another cool place for secrets.

[delicate yarrow]

Performance is largely solid, like usual, but this spot in particular was causing frame skips. As shown, it's the location/facing that's causing the poor performance, as opposed to the steady degradation you just solved.

-# tbh I'm posting simple bugs in here to avoid potential spoilers in other channels

[delicate yarrow]

• The unfamiliar enemies have me actually utilizing weapon swapping. The resistance to cold eliminates my strongest stick, so I'm forced to experiment and keep falling back on my emergency hammer. Even then, it's not the one-whack-kills-all it was in Hadracon, so I'm forced to... build around swapping as the situation demands.

[delicate yarrow]

• Would be nice if the journal kept a log of all entries. For a quest or two so far, I've completed them without reading the corresponding journal entry (good game design), but that also means I missed out on whatever flavor text the entries had.

[delicate yarrow]

• Found the Gore-Wrought Chasm and... yeah. Yeah, that's what I was asking for. After the initial push, some spawned behind me and I had a slightly panicky descent through an increasing mire of otvrats. Looking forward to finding more.

At 0:45 I realise I'll be surrounded no matter what and the dead sprint begins.

[delicate yarrow]

• A consistent flaw with map design is accounting for the player going offroad. You set up an intended path, a road (often literally) with enemies and items on it, yet allow us the freedom to go as we please via Super Dash. When the player does so, there's often nothing to find, no enemies, no loot, no secrets. We can scale mountains, sheer cliff faces, yet there's often nothing there besides a view.

[torpid ore]

the map is not fully populated yet

didn't have enough time

[delicate yarrow]

• Affix aside, Frostcore & Ice Needle are the first dual wield weapon I think I actually like. Has decent range and power. Average speed doesn't bother me.

[delicate yarrow]

Seeing the Momentum overwrite bug of the soulfruit synergy and Rolling Death, I have a design proposal for how affixes work backend:

• All affixes are attached to the character at +0, deactivated.
• Upon equipment change or other bespoke state changes, a list of all affixes above +0 are collated and set to active. Remainder set to deactive.
• Equipment, true to the tooltip, adds their value to the corresponding affix. e.g. The soulfruit synergy grants Rolling Death +1, an item grants Rolling Death +7; together the player has Rolling Death +8.

I know you use templates for most coding, so refrained from pseudocoding the system.

[torpid ore]

this is pretty much how it works 🤔 but instead of attaching all affixes to the character (that's hundreds of objects) i add them once they're needed
in case with status effects, their logic is usually attached to the status effect's object, so multiple items can manipulate status effects stacks and their logic remains separated.

[delicate yarrow]

That twist is the core of the redesign. Affixes are attached to the character and items add/subtract levels to them as they're un/equipped.

For performance, I'd keep 2 lists: 1) all affixes 2) active affixes. That way you avoid iterating over everything every tick. Then the onus is on firing change events to update the list whenever an affix level changes.

I suppose the list of all affixes can be kept separate, and only attach > +0 to the character. 🤔

It is quite similar to the current implementation, but instead of 2 sources of the same effect overwriting one another, they add.

Then there'd be how to handle weapon swapping, which would require categorizing each affix's list of effects into active and passive categories. Active requiring it be equipped, while passive only requires it be holstered.

Winter's Wail for example. The frost aura is passive, while the building of it is active. When you swap off of it, the aura continues to be active and decays -- you simply cannot expand/refresh it without Frostcore equipped.

When a weapon is unequipped via the inventory as opposed to weapon swap, it's effects are cleanly and immediately removed as is currently the case.

Mace of Spirit's Repose and Rolling Death already function similarly to this design, with their buffs remaining present after swapping.

[delicate yarrow]

geez, that's a powerful blade

[torpid ore]

working on it

https://tenor.com/view/sweaty-sweat-heat-hot-wipe-sweat-gif-17716050

[delicate yarrow]

Final initial impressions:

• Upped the challenge with new enemy types.
• Freezing is the most threatening status ailment.
• Map is very big, but sparsely populated (being worked on).
• Some performance hiccups in areas, but the most notable has been mentioned prior.
• New weapon is very nice, shame everything's resistant to cold here.
• Gore Chasms are . Pitch black, infinitely spawning enemies in tight, maze-like spaces is what keeps my tension high. Wouldn't want the whole game to be this tense, but would want more.
• General quest design is good, encourages/demands exploring the world.
• Going to have to sit on NPCs more. I was in the camp "everyone's dead except for you", so I'll need to wait until that part stops being disappointed to properly critique what's here.
• 10/10 for finally fixing performance degradation.

[delicate yarrow]

There better be a soulfruit up in there

[delicate yarrow]

Haven't used Shatterflesh much yet (having just obtained it), but it already sounds like you have your eye on it for the nerf hammer.

The first half of the preface is pertinent because I'm not sure how the calculations work. Going by the description's wording alone, it's a final x2.0, like how the Butchering effects work. In which case, it'd be appropriate to make it an additive +100%, just like Cleave/Rage.

All I know at this point in time is it's a perfect fit for my combat style that utilizes Thunder Dash with kick boosted strikes.

[delicate yarrow]

Scratch the above. Per #1389576412658143283 message, the math is inconsistent with known formulae.

[delicate yarrow]

I think I've sat on NPCs enough.

• While I don't hate it, I'm also not sold on the current story direction. It's the common pitfall of speaking the unspoken. A person's imagination is more vivid than most stories; horror uses this to great effect by leaving monsters/threats unseen and only described in vague terms. The inclusion of a chatty NPC starts to fill in some of those blanks our imaginations used to draw in.
• Nice lampshade to use telepathy instead of animating lips. I know from development documentaries how complex accurate mouth movements are to animate.
• On that note, the Matron's model has a clear mouth/lips and no animation either. It feels a bit incongruous with the previous lampshade. Could remove the mouth from the model or provide a similar explanation (i.e. the face is purely for show).
• The blue scroll highlight for dialogue options is a double edged sword. One the one hand, it makes it clear which options will advance/start a quest; on the other, it felt like not picking the option would risk missing content, even if I really don't need a new weapon to cleave a fleshsmith in twain. In the end, I only ever chose the highlighted options instead of what felt best.
• While I imagined Lightning as more Doomslayer-esque silent protagonist, his speech is nonetheless perfectly fitting for his imagined character. We clearly don't need help killing things and he knows it.
• I think what was the most off-putting about the execution was immediately being engaged in dialogue upon entering the new zone. If we had to find Aurelia, or if we witnessed her approach (while still in full control of ourselves) before engaging in dialogue, it'd feel better. Her dialogue wouldn't need to be changed much, either. Probably a new line to get the player's attention as they pass.
• I believe NPCs can work well, you just have to be careful not to fill in too many details and not to make the world feel too alive. It is post-apocalypse, afterall.
• To that point, while not directly NPC related, it is a great addition to add those infested towns. Remnants of what was once there, riddled with otvrats. Really does help sell the whole "the world already ended" vibe.

[torpid ore]

i've also sat on npcs enough and concluded that the only thing I achieved with the story was diluting the game’s strengths by introducing fresh new weaknesses. as a result, i’ll be removing npcs and dialogues in future updates.

i wanted to experiment with storytelling and exercise my ability to write dialogue, and while I think it turned out okay in the end, ‘okay’ is not something I want to settle for. considering how much effort and time it takes to write a compelling story and dialogue - and then implementing them is a whole other can of worms - i decided that perfecting that aspect is simply unfeasible. so, yeah, i’ll be toning things down in that regard and focusing on the game’s already established strengths instead.

[fallen rivet]

Honestly, I kinda like the NPCs. I felt like having a "guide" while entering the new area worked pretty well. Aurelia has the same vibe of the "Exo stranger" in Destiny 1. We don't know her intentions. We know she wants our help and that maybe she might help us back. We don't know if she'll stab us in the back after she gets what she wants, and a character like that works pretty well in this setting imo. It took one hour after the update drop for me to feel more attached to Aurelia than I felt attached to Master!

The Matron on the other hand felt more like experimenting with extra characters in the story. It doesn't seem necessary and having someone in a position of power in the "end of the world" be this friendly and willing to help felt definitely off. I think the character would work well as a bossfight maybe jumping out of the arena and summoning some enemies before coming back in, so instead of "showing our worth" we are beating the information out of it!

NPCs could even add to the Amarict! It would be cool to get an npc in a few maps that when we are done helping, they join the Amarict and maybe unlock some of the functions we've been asking for, like satiety re-rolls or weapon infusion to lvl up Enchantments from +5 to +6 and +7 instead of grinding brand new weapons again. We've compared this setting to Dark Souls, and this system from that game would be really cool in VOIN as well imo.

To conclude, I think the story telling sould be done in small bits of lore (the gore caves and corrupted vilages are already doing an incredible job at it, along with the notes). I think NPCs don't even need to be attached to story, (even though Aurelia worked really well) and work more as guides or assets!

Since the sale went on, a few friends of mine picked up VOIN! They love it, but they struggle with navigation, not in the moving sense, but where to go. A lot of newer players in the server are also having the same concern of where is progress. Point being, even with story aside, Aurelia did a great job at guiding us to progress through the map! I think an NPC in every map would be too much, but one every few maps would be great. Master should be that guide on non NPC maps. As of right now, all we got from him is basically "kill stuff" and "don't go there, focus on killing stuff"

[fallen rivet]

I think you are underestimating yourself on that story honestly. It's definitely WAY more than "okay". I came back to another game I've played for 200h+, Generation Zero. That game has terrible story, and miserable "dialog" honestly (more like monologues from NPCs, we don't answer back), and yet is one of my favourite games from gameplay alone! What I mean with this is that story doesn't take away from what you have, it's just another addition. You were also LEAGUES above Generation Zero writing, I feel bad even comparing it to VOIN.
I understand it takes a ton of work and toning it down seems like a good decision when it comes to your work load, but keeping a few NPCs in would be really cool imo. Also didn't mention it, but i do agree with most of what Daric mentioned.

[delicate yarrow]

The journal gives directions, so retrofitting a quest onto the previous maps would guide just as well as an NPC (assuming the player is made aware of the tab).

Sozidar has also had excellent landmark design. Words aren't needed when the landscape itself draws your eye to a specific spot. Hadracon is very well designed in that sense, with every point of interest extending into the skyline or somehow being drastically different from its surroundings. Necrosever is also well designed in that regard but it's clear Cathedral of the Other Side needs a second pass with how many people ask where the actual boss is.

Point is, an NPC isn't necessary to resolve the navigation issue.

[delicate yarrow]

The quest design itself is good. I especially like the way we stumble into most quests. e.g. Entering an infested town starts a quest to clear it; finding and clearing a gore chasm starts the quest to clear them all; finding a note starts the quest to find more notes.

I'm still against populating Amarict. While it is Sozidar's decision, the solitude of our situation would be betrayed by a lively home base. Those functions can just as well be performed by an altar and tome of knowledge.

I'm glad you acknowledge having too many NPCs would detract from the atmosphere. I'm personally still hesitant on the idea. Whether it'd be worth it is something I'm not equipped to answer: only Sozidar knows how much effort goes into adding NPCs and what kind of world he wants to ultimately make.

All I can posit is that the world we started with suggests a land with narry a person in it; the hero failed to stop the evil, and now Master has bound us to this plain as a janitor. "The world is broken and you are its reckoning."

[delicate yarrow]

Initial impressions on v0.4.0
These are my initial thoughts as I start a new save, so they are varying degrees of well formed and entirely meant to capture my initial reaction(s) before they fade from memory.

• You put breakable walls in the tutorial, you sly bastard! If not for the chest glow leaking through, I wouldn't have thought to look for them.

• Directional heavies can use some refinement: option to invert left/right input. Option to make it based on mouse look.

• New super dash hand animation gives the impression of swimming through the air, very fitting.

• New inspect idle is very welcome, suggest adding a second inspect animation so there's some variety.

• New itemization is overwhelmng, menu-wise, not sure what Pressure Level means, but already resolves all the major inventory issues I had.

• Parry riposte is satisfying, parry is rewarding.

• I can tell this is going to be a long climb back to where I was.

• Interrupting attacks with block/ability is responsive

• Hand of Misfortune rework is funni

• Explanation button is a godsend

• This update is an overall improvement that has sanded down many of the rough edges Voin had

[delicate yarrow]

• The runes bending around your knuckles for hammers is a nice touch

• Lightning Sting isn't really pointed at the enemy like the previous animation was (screenshot of new animation).

• There isn't much of a tangible difference between attack speeds (for 2h sword, at least).

• The hammer idle inspect cleaning the blood off is another nice touch

• Hammer just feels really good, abilities included

[delicate yarrow]

Parry boosting is a tech now

Like kick boost before it, timing's kinda strict but it's consistent

Or is it just riposting with an ability?

-# I always double back on my own naming

[delicate yarrow]

Congrats on fixing the minion AI in Nomme's fight!

[delicate yarrow]

Without the loot shower, the death glob feels anti-climactic to break. I do think instantly giving back all the lost ichor is good (avoids long wait time and potential lost ichor due to collision issues), but it's just lacking that flair.

[delicate yarrow]

It's been a couple days, and while I will post more feedback as I feel necessary, I do feel enough time has passed to solidify an overall opinion on the update.

The update has its rough parts, but those all lie in the implementation/execution. The ideas, the designs of all the additions and changes are solid. There's bugs to fix, usability to improve, but nothing needs a redesign, only refinement. You struck gold with the new systems. Parries, directional heavies, itemization, powers, animations, all great additions to VOIN.

[delicate yarrow]

On directional heavy refinement:

This topic is the easiest to address issues on.
There's 1 minimum effort fix and several wishlist items. As long as you implement the minimum fix, the rest can be put on the backburner for when you have the bandwidth.

Minimum fix:

• Add a Game options toggle/checkbox for "Invert left/right heavy input". Unchecked, strafe right -> swing left-to-right; Checked, strafe right -> swing right-to-left.

Wishlist:

• Add a Game options selection box for default heavy direction. Up/Left/Right
• Add a Game options selection box for backwards heavy direction. Up/Left/Right/Default
• Add a Game options toggle/checkbox for mouse look controls for directional heavies. Look right instead of strafe right

[delicate yarrow]

Here's a neat little alcove to hide things in

This is in the open air cave system under Hadracon's lighthouse

[delicate yarrow]

On the new inventory system menus being overwhelming:

It's actually just this one screen shown in the attached screenshot. I'll walk through the experience I had:

There's nothing immediately grabbing my eyes so they default to center screen... where a big white blank space flashbangs me (cursor on spot).

Seeing nothing to focus on, my eyes dart to the next conspicuous thing, which is the colorful numbers at the bottom of the tabs, but I lack the context to know what they mean, leaving me increasingly confused, unsure, and, as a result, mildly intimidated.

Finally, with nothing else to focus on, I read the text on screen and learn what each option actually is.

However, it's still unclear what Experience Points and Pressure Level are. My eyes dart to the bottom for a "[T] Explanation" prompt and spy nothing.

There is the known issue of not all tooltips being updated to reflect the new systems. I can catalogue instances (post screenshots), if you'd like.

The most glaring issue in my eyes is one that will be subtly insidious to the average player: Runes with multiple augments don't work as advertised.

I created a bug thread for it, and while the behavior is easily reproduceable, it's not consistent, being rune by rune misbehavior. I'll spare rehashing details here, just know it took me a few hours to notice one of my equipped Rune augments hadn't activated at all and the average player isn't that attentive.

[delicate yarrow]

The only other issue I took with the new itemization menu is Augment Points. Specifically, when spending them, the downtick should be eye grabbing. I personally had no idea Augment Points existed until I inadvertently spent them all, failed to unlock an augment, and scanned the screen for something red or zero.

[green pulsar]

do you get three weapon skills on one if you continue to level it up or is it just buffs

[delicate yarrow]

The new powers aren't just , they're

[delicate yarrow]

With the new rune system, there is a concern on balancing depending on how they're supposed to behave.

If all effects trigger simultaneous (as the runes fully charge), there are definite concerns over the validity of using runes with higher charges. The base does get +2 over it's attached augments, but that isn't enough to offset, for example, turning Panacea from 7 hits to 3.

If all the effects are meant to trigger asynchronously, then the only concern is graphical, as the runes charging on the weapon would correspond to but 1 augment.

Delving further into the topic doesn't feel wise considering runes aren't functioning as intended. I'd be operating too much on assumptions.

[delicate yarrow]

On the weapon angle being misaligned during Lightning Sting:

It appears to be aligned for Lightning's Sword, but for other models it doesn't look right. The other swords are longer (or curved in the case of Storm Tachi), so their points extend past center screen, revealing the thrust to be misaligned.

[delicate yarrow]

I don't think I've said it yet but the new itemization menus are snappy and responsive. It's quick to upgrade.

[delicate yarrow]

I've refrained from commenting much on balance because of all the new systems and interactions, but I feel I should make sure these are on your radar:

• Dragonhead hits 4 digits relatively easily. Unknown if this is simply a second order effect of multiple modifiers stacking, or multipliers applying multiple times.

• Arcane Retribution hits 4 digits rather easily as well. Likely due to second order effects of other changes.

• Sharpening can be stacked very quickly. While a good addition and brings dual wield up to par with other weapon types, it seems Counter Surge may be triggering on augments in addition to powers; Puncture Therapy also allows for rapid stacking as enemies form clumps on higher difficulties.

[delicate yarrow]

It has not gone unnoticed that Weak Link's status is no longer consumed when the attack would've been a crit without it.

[delicate yarrow]

The transition to powers interrupting attacks in addition to new powers has flipped the dynamic from last patch: from rarely using powers (excluding kick) to only using powers on certain builds.

[delicate yarrow]

Attack speed is pretty valuable now. It influences power animation speed in addition to attack speed. The rages were fairly situational before, but are now almost universally applicable as power speed buffs, to say nothing of their additional effects.

[delicate yarrow]

Hand of Misfortune is something I've considered using now, but it could still use some adjustment.

• It's Luck is outstripped by Lucky Streak and Curse of Greed. When debating opportunity cost, Gambler's Gift loses.

• While spiking the Luck bonus further is one avenue, consider adding Resourcefulness as well, so Gambler's Gift increases all yields from chests.

• The description mentions chests exploding, but it was a letdown when said explosion does not harm the player.

• A bit excessive effort for one effect, but if you want to go the extra mile: add random negative outcomes to Gambler's Gift. Receiving max stacks of a random status, spawning enemies, teleporting the player, etc.

[delicate yarrow]

Something to consider now that modifiers and augments stack:

A character screen where you can see your overall stats. Total modifiers, base damage after applying constant bonuses, other miscellaneous stats.

While some modifiers are easy to calculate the cumulative bonus of, others include a base value or have non-linear scaling that complicates things.

[delicate yarrow]

I notice each enemy has their own vision cone. AI tends to be the most resource intensive part of any game, so it may help to condense detection checks.

Enemies are generally clustered in such a way that when one is aggroed, all of them aggro. It is possible to pull them off one at a time, but requires precision. Enemies also don't mill around far from their spawn points either.

Their detection model could be simplified to a group based one. As in an abstract point at the center of the group performs detection checks, then shares that information with all enemies within the group. Then instead of X number of enemies each with their own vision cones, you just have 1 detection radius per group. This would effectively simulate the mass detection we have now but be more performant.

The idea still has some parts to figure out, however.

How should disengaging be handled? Is it when the player leaves the detection zone, all enemies cease combat? What about stringing along enemies far from their spawn -- what would dictate them disengaging in a believable manner?

How should the central detection origin be determined? Is it a fixed point placed on the map data, or is it a constantly calculated average position of all enemies within a group?

I can see pros and cons to both, but I think I'm leaning towards hand placed detection origins. It would be more performant, yes, but it may create scenarios where you are standing close to an enemy and it doesn't react (if said enemy wandered near the edge of the detection zone). However, you can tie enemies to multiple detection zones and set up choreographed encounters and ambushes. For example, a group of spitters can be activated by 2 detection zones: 1 on their position (so they react to the player approaching) and 1 on a spot their group is overlooking (so they engage from a distance). You could make the detection zones custom shapes, a rectangle for example, so berzerkers will rush down a corridor. Combat encounters can get fairly creative with hand placed detection zones.

It still leaves the problem of what the disengage rules are.

[delicate yarrow]

Having made more builds now, I can say the issue is primarily, if not exclusively, second order effects.

We've gone from 1 augment + 1 modifer/augment to 3 augments + 3 modifiers. Stacking modifiers can lead to relatively high multipliers (e.g. +90% Lightning damage), paired with higher base values on some augments and uncapped Sharpened stacks, it's a lot clearer why some augments can hit so hard so easily.

[delicate yarrow]

With the new itemization system you have embraced power creep. As such, it's time for the enemies to receive a glow up. With a fully fleshed build, 666 foes die in 1-2 hits.

You could rescale the difficulty so 111 stays as it is, 666 is rebalanced for the new power ceiling, and difficulties in between are adjusted to make a smooth transition. This would primarily affect Toughness.

Or you could add more settings above 666.

Tools of War may also bring the challenge back with its world events.

For reference, expect a fully fleshed build to deal 1000 - 6000 damage per hit. Normal hits, not the fancy hits like kick boosts and setups.

[delicate yarrow]

Returning to the attack speed complain I had:

For light/heavy attacks, weapon speed has a small impact. It's rather difficult to discern a difference between adjacent speeds (e.g. Average vs Fast).

However, that's only for basic attacks. As attack speed also influences power speed, the categories are immediately and significantly different in how fast they activate powers.

Attack speed buffs, however, show dramatic changes in attack and power speed.

I do see a flaw in the current itemization system:
What if I want to use the same item across multiple loadouts but with different modifiers/augments?

I have to "dismantle" a build or make do with sub-optimal effects.

The new system has highlighted how much more love weapons get, too.

[delicate yarrow]

With runes now working as intended, there is merit to the comment about the current HUD displaying only the first augment's charges. There's limited space to work with while also being readable, so the attached screenshot is my proposal for the redesign.

The red and blue lines are where the second and third augments will be displayed.

I considered the back of the blade, but as we can see with the Iron Claymore, that's non-visible during idle.

I considered "extending" the runes currently present, but that doesn't account for very long runes like Panacea. Secondary and tertiary augments could easily go off screen. Not to mention they'd quickly leave the weapon in the case of daggers.

I still feel there should be a better place to put the runes for additional augments, but the above proposition is a starting point.

Feedback after 500h in

[delicate yarrow]

Death Spiral combo past the point of 100% crit chance does not yeild any benefits (it does yeild bragging rights, though). A couple remixes on the same suggestion to address this:

Every 10 combo provides X% crit power.

Every 10% critical chance beyond 100% provides X% crit power.

Given the infinite scaling of Death Spiral's combo, I'd err on the very low side of increases, such as +1.8% crit power at +18.

[delicate yarrow]

Winter's Heart is a weird sword. It has a defensive cold augment, high physical damage, lightning powers, and fast attack speed.

It has the qualities to do well as a fire weapon, poison weapon, crit weapon, phys weapon, lightning weapon, and cold weapon.

It's weird because there's no clear best path to go down.
As much as this confuses me, good job?

[delicate yarrow]

The cost of restarting the arena is fine at 100k. I understand the sticker shock of 100k, I had a similar but smaller reaction, but after restarting it many times, it's not that big of a deal.

With an ichor focused build, you can recoup the cost from the arena itself. More importantly, killing the enemies of the Other Side nets 200k-300k. At that point, the cost is a non-factor.

[delicate yarrow]

You've seen the clips, you know how effortless it is to use powers now. Influx is a must pick for damage purposes, which is most purposes.

It currently scales both damage percent and stack duration with rank. Maybe make one of those values static?

[torpid ore]

Yeah, the rework of lesser augments is long overdue.

[delicate yarrow]

Alright, time to make builds without Influx until it gets nerfed.

I feel like I mentioned this before, but want to be sure it gets captured:

Introduce a version string to save files. Then your update/conversion scripts can simply check for "save version != game version".

[delicate yarrow]

if you can't put in an activation delay for Ice Age, it may be worthwhile introducing a cooldown afterall.
-# That stutter isn't the video buffering.

[delicate yarrow]

I think Mortal Heart is due for a nerf. Not Unyielding Spirit, but Mortal Heart. 5 HP makes it the best pick for augments that scale with HP, missing or otherwise.

For example, Roiling Power +18 gets 3.0% over +16, for +12% over another 4 HP heart. But a single HP more nets +17% from +16.

My gut tells me to reduce Mortal Heart to 3 HP, but my gut might be overcorrecting. I'd try 4 HP and see how that plays out.

[frozen talon]

I appreciate your dedication and good hearted motivation !
Ive been reading so much about your experiences all the way from January !
The dev sure is happy to have you around !

[normal crypt]

I actually think 3 hearts if fine for this if they do not nerf a bunch of other stuff. Cause right now even with 3 hearts I feel like this is the top pick for any build that uses the Eternal Duty weapon, giving you 2.2 seconds of immunity, combining that with Unyielding Spirit and Insatiable Hunger makes me near immortal and if I get hit a few Ichor that's ignored.

So the chances of this setup taking more then 2 hearts of damage is rather slim if at all, it only really happens cause I'm no-brain mashing lol

[delicate yarrow]

Hadn't noticed this chest yet. This is along the lines of locations I've recommended to hide things in.

[delicate yarrow]

Gambler's Guillotine still feels like too good of a deal. While it does negate the Crit Chance lesser augment, prime augments appear to be applied after the soulfruit's -100% crit chance is applied and clamped to 0%.

Perfect Strike +18 here has +50% crit chance. While I expect some crits due to Weak Link and Overwhelming Butchering, every hit of the heavy attack is a crit here, which shouldn't be possible.

I can't really think of a singular way to rebalance Gambler's Guillotine.

There is just turning crits off entirely, which would restrict item choice.

There's making the +28% only apply to physical damage, so it only needs compete with crit rate and crit power.

Then there's keeping the +28% as +All but reducing the magnitude, as only physical damage can crit, making this fruit a straight bonus with no downsides to non-physical damage types.

There's even my old suggestion of having it reduce crit power instead of crit chance, allowing mechanical crits while reducing damage to as-if no crits.

Maybe you think the point cost is enough to balance out the loaded deal this soulfruit offers.

[delicate yarrow]

Now that I'm Lv42 I have some wiggle room to experiment with soulfruits without unequipping my favorites.

And I have to say it was a good decision to make Pulsing Sacrifice not be capable of killing you. 40% cooldown does a lot for power uptime and being able to die by spamming abilities would make it quite the tricky fruit to justify.

Well, there would be ways to build around it. Piezoelectricity, Regenerating Crystal, Refraction Shell, Blood Rapture, only using powers while under i-frames... There's really quite a few methods to counteract the heart loss. So not really a dealbraker if you decide to make the self damage lethal anyways.

Though the soulfruit does deal 2 hearts instead of 1. The dagger buff also deals 2, too. Might be a similar bug to Runes but with Hearts... I'll check on a fresh save.

Though if intentional, that's fine too. There's quite a few ways now to become pseudo immortal.

[delicate yarrow]

OK, 2 bugs found.

The first clip is a fresh character. All +1 items, never entered the Molten Cathedral.

The second clip is my main save, Lv42, +16 items, yada yada.

The dagger's heart stab deals 2 damage in the latter, and 1 in the former.

[delicate yarrow]

2nd bug
#1434042129495097474 message

So putting augments on items does not cause the heart stab to deal 2 damage, so that theory's out.

[delicate yarrow]

Same deal with Pulsing Sacrifice. Deals 1 heart of damage on new save, 2 hearts on the advanced save.

[south thicket]

its the same with poison if u have a temporal hearth it just dmgs one instead of 2 for me atleast

[delicate yarrow]

It's not soulfruits. This warrants a bug thread.

[delicate yarrow]

https://discord.com/channels/1110558998639411221/1434052717395054602

[delicate yarrow]

I notice the ground based movement powers disable gravity. That might be why they so easily get people out of bounds.

[delicate yarrow]

Didn't notice it till today: parry increases attack speed for the riposte.

Noticed from Twin Hammer Burial swinging faster than normal.

[delicate yarrow]

Throwing this idea out before I forgor:

Tie combat music to the same logic as Duelist's Muse. Higher rank, more intense track. Constantly measure the player's performance and play combat music instead of showing a rank / boosting XP.

The biggest design consideration is at what rank music starts, followed by the vibe each rank gets.

After that, the biggest hurdle is commissioning/composing all the tracks.

[delicate yarrow]

I'm noticing a throughline in new player feedback of only blocking, never dodging. The stuff about cluttered VFX, while valid, isn't much of an issue while dashing due to the generous nature of perfect dashes.

Introducing unparryable attacks should help condition new players to dash more often. Unparryable as in literally; attempting to parry the blow results in a block. It's the same vein as undodgeable attacks: they can be dodged by simply getting out of the way, but they can't be perfect dashed.

[delicate yarrow]

I do have to acknowledge Influx is a large reason why 666 is so easy right now. However, I still do stand by my earlier sentiment of 6 toughness not being tough enough. Even using builds without Influx or Head Hunting, it's still normal to quickly kill enemies.

As for the estimate of 1000-6000 damage per hit from a full build earlier, I'll amend that to 500-3000 for without Influx. This is with critical hits and heavies but no kick boosts or spikes (such as Panacea or shatter).

Didn't think I'd have to correct myself so soon, but 6000 crits are somewhat regular on a crit focused build. Even 11000 crits are possible.

[delicate yarrow]

When a section has a lot of items, it can get tedious unlocking augments as you acquire newer ones. It'd be good QoL to introduce an auto-unlock button that spends the augment points for you. Unlock order could be sequential or random.

[delicate yarrow]

I wouldn't be surprised if this is a bug, but I haven't tested if the math looks right, so it's in this feedback thread instead.

Conjure Inferno, especially the physical portion, seems to deal a lot more damage than expected. Like how Shared Pain did. I dunno if it needs a patch or a nerf, but it can singlehandedly carry a build in much the same way as Influx.

Also (definitely a bug, and an obvious one at that but no one's called it out yet), the meteors spawn on the ground instead of in the air. Same with the poison rain projectiles from tier 3 Spitters. But the icicle rain from frozen Vipers properly falls from the sky.

I'll admit, the poison rain spawning on the floor makes it more clearly telegraphed and therefore easier to avoid.

[delicate yarrow]

My favorite thing about the new power level is I get to kill Leapers with a simple kick.

I still do want Toughness to scale HP higher, but it is funny and cathartic that I can simply punt these little bastards now.

[delicate yarrow]

Perfect Strike vs Perfect Butchering could use a look at.

At +16:

• Perfect Strike
  +130% phys
  +40% crit chance

• Perfect Butchering
  x2.1 phys
  Force crit

Phrased another way, this is 130%/40% vs 110%/100%. While Perfect Strike does have a higher ceiling, it's practically a rounding error compared to 60% more crit chance.

[delicate yarrow]

I noticed Soulfruit of the Golden Whispers does not emit a sound for the respawning secret chests. That might be a clue as to why they're respawning.

[oblique sparrow]

I feel like given the existence of certain builds, the enemy health options would need to scale all the way up to 9 or so given the current increase per notch, just for it to reach the point of those builds having an actual challenge to kill stuff. Being able to basically one shot bosses at max difficulty is my main point about that

[delicate yarrow]

Poison the Blood could use another pass, as it's difficult to justify using it over Poison Vial Pendant or Viper Eye. The Snakes provide a reliable source of Poisoned now, as well.

I noticed the augment provides 23 stacks of Poisoned at +18, more than the cap of 20.

That oversight gave me an idea for how to make Poison the Blood more overtly useful:
Add the effect of increasing the Poisoned stack cap.

Then the 23 will be fully useful and the augment will benefit Ring of Rot and Panacea even further. I know the cap of 20 was introduced because of Ring of Rot, so I wouldn't make the stack increase drastic.

That, or I've still yet to see something you do in this augment.

[delicate yarrow]

I'm rather convinced this is the cause of clipping out of bounds. Hitting terrain with a low enough height causes you to ascend it, the new movement abilities disable gravity, so you keep ascending up the terrain -- even terrain you're not supposed to.

[delicate yarrow]

To open up level design more, it'd be prudent to force usage of Super Dash more frequently. Currently, there's always a road/path to each notable destination. While accommodating, it can lead to players not looking up as much as they should.

If the clearly signposted way forward had no anchor points and no path, forcing Super Dash, they'd be more likely to consider Super Dash as standard traversal. Imagine the final tutorial climb to the vanguard but without anchor points to teleport to.

[delicate yarrow]

A thought that just occurred to me:

What if instead of capping Poisoned at 20 stacks, you cap Festering Wounds?

Poisoned monsters take X poison damager per Poisoned stack with each hit*, up to X poison damage.*
-or-
Poisoned monsters take X poison damager per Poisoned stack with each hit*, up to X stacks.*

Well, I guess there's Panacea, too...

[delicate yarrow]

Given soulfruits can't be swapped out mid excursion, they're more playstyle defining than build defining.

Not to say they can't be built around, but since some soulfruits preclude certain builds, it's in general incentivized to pick the fruits that accent your established builds rather than the other way around.

Enemies being resistant to elements is a pretty good incentive to go multi-elemental, if not have a backup loadout of differing affinity(s).

The unfortunate part of the current implementation is there's no way of knowing an enemy's resistant unless you pay attention to damage numbers.

[delicate yarrow]

One thing I appreciate is ranged powers being very powerful per hit, akin to ranged attacks in real life.

[delicate yarrow]

I know you'll have a lot to go through once you get back, but I hope you get the time to just have a bugfixing/balancing update without having to worry about new content.

[delicate yarrow]

too real

[delicate yarrow]

To suggest a possible fix:

While there's improving collision checks, enabling gravity, and slowing down the movement, there's also slowing down the game. Activating slow motion for the duration of these fast advancing moves should give the game more frames to perform collision checks and the player more time to steer (when applicable).

[delicate yarrow]

On redoing the story in Grimmir Expanse, you should consider what's commonly called in-game cutscenes.

The NPC(s) will speak their dialogue, the Vindicator his. But during the entire exchange, the player is in full control of the Vindicator (bar speech).

As there's only camera angles to support the current cutscenes, not custom animations, it would elevate the experience if you don't rewrite the story completely.

The big thing to consider is the player wandering off mid-dialogue. While you could hem them in, somehow (arena walls, natural barriers, NPC follows, timing the dialogue so it finishes before the player leaves, etc.), you could also allow them to leave and implement consequences for it. Whether that be a simple snide remark or something more meaningful.

Same with allowing the player to attack NPCs. It's not as much a matter of allowing us to kill them, but for there to be consequences for attacking.

I'm sure you could get away with making NPCs untargetable (as they are now), but the dissonance of not being able to cut something will linger, however small.

As for technical implementation, you have already done in-game cutscenes before with Rogorog and Sedogor. All you'll need to figure out is how to make the Vindicator speak without taking away player control.

I'd also like to make you aware there is some sentiment the Vindicator should stay silent throughout the entire game. I think you wrote the Vindicator with the exact kind of personality I imagined he'd have, but I also see the merit in having the Vindicator speak only through actions.

Half-life pioneered ingame cutscenes and can be a good reference on how to do them well.

[delicate yarrow]

A possible & simple redesign to Death Spiral:

Higher crit chance per 10 combo, higher decay rate over time.

Something like losing 1 combo every 200ms (5 per second) while only needing 100 to reach 100% crit chance. Retain -10 combo on taking damage. Consider combo decay pause upon gaining combo, akin to status stacks.

Making Death Spiral's bonus decay quickly gives it a high likelihood of resetting between fights, while the lowered combo requirement ups the likelihood of reaching 100% crit rate within each fight. It becomes an augment that revs up over the course of a fight, instead of something built and sustained over a long period.

This has the added benefit of making Death Spiral more swap friendly: Building up to 100% crit chance should take tens of seconds at most, instead of minutes. Losing all combo on swap is no longer a big deal.

[delicate yarrow]

Auto-loot should default to ALL, under the new loot system. There isn't much of a reason to want to manually pick up items anymore.

Also consider extending the pickup range. It's a slight inconvenience to walk back over your recent massacre to hoover up all the ichor and items.

[delicate yarrow]

Upon refreshing myself with Iron Claymore, 50 combo seems like an appropriate low end for 100% crit chance.

The proposition of combo rapidly decaying may preclude use of Force Overcharge and Perfect series augments, so I shall also propose exponential combo decay as a consideration.

The goal of the redesign is to have Death Spiral more consistently reach high crit chance within a single fight, but just as consistently lose all combo between fights.

Or phrased another way:

The goal of the redesign is to make Death Spiral more immediately useful while minimizing the loss of effort on loadout swapping.

[delicate yarrow]

I assume it was missed in the rebalancing pass, but incase it wasn't:

Perfect Impact eclipses all other physical damage bonuses. At +16 it gives x2.6 or +160% on Dash, when other physical modifiers tend to cap at +150% at +18. Perfect Dash, something regularly accomplished, doubles this bonus to either x5.2 or x4.2, depending on the underlying math.

[delicate yarrow]

The more I delve into builds, less certain I am 6 Toughness needs a massive increase. An increase, yes, but there's enough damage boost outliers that the ceiling would come down considerably if they were just ironed out.

Whether it be bugs (Slashing Winds, Conjure Inferno taking physical boosts multiple times) or oversights (Perfect Impact, Influx), the often comically high damage output we're capable of reeks of unintentionality whenever I look beyond the surface.

[delicate yarrow]

A particularly egregious example

It may be worthwhile taking a page out of the Souls book and have ichor automatically added to the player's balance upon kill while playing a (now) purely cosmetic ichor pickup animation.

[delicate yarrow]

I see that 🤔 and will propose a couple broad possibilies:

Audio-visual cues.

Hit sounds are pretty distinct in VOIN: you can tell when you hit, and when you crit. If there's a sound for hitting an enemy with a resistant element, that could resolve it.

In the same vein, there's a lot of good visual feedback for hits. Adding VFX for hitting enemies with an element they're resistant to would also resolve the feedback issue.

[delicate yarrow]

I know Rolling Death applying to the entirety of Vortex without being consumed is a problem, and one you tried to fix before. That fix gutted the augment, making Momentum expire on the first hit, rather than end of swing.

Fortunately, it doesn't seem Rolling Vortex has become common knowledge.

Vortex (and other projectile attacks) should trigger an end-of-swing event upon ending, to consume Momentum. Then you get 1 Vortex with super damage, and have to build the stacks again.

[delicate yarrow]

Circle of Protection is an augment I considered boring, as it allows you to bypass the whole dance of combat. However, in leveling Guardian Heart I've come to realize and appreciate the counterplay towards it.

• Enemies attacking from range.
• Enemies forcing movement.
• Ceilings being too low to Lightning Strike.

These do well in negating Circle of Protection. While it does make the augment swing-y, it adds depth and reduces the painful boredom I'd otherwise have being invincible for tens of seconds.

[delicate yarrow]

To expound on this:

If the above solution is too technically difficult, I'd be OK with Momentum stacks expiring at the end of any attack, regardless of whether a hit occurred or not.

[delicate yarrow]

Since you're targeting a console release eventually, it'd be smart to start targeting their specs now. Their hardware is fixed, so you can optimize for an FPS target now and have the port work largely done by the time their release actually rears around.

It's also a good idea to consider the validation process for consoles, too. The main reason patches take so much longer to churn out for games with console versions is that each console's vendor has updates undergo a validation process to ensure minimal performance specs and stability (Sony's standards have been slipping lately, but still).

You could approach this as the PC/Steam version being a "beta" build where you can push patches daily until it's time to bring the consoles up to parity, or you could push an update out to all versions simultaneously. In the latter's case, you'd be looking at 1 update per quarter, max, going by other studios' output.

Digital Extreme (Warframe dev) has been a bit transparent about the validation process in their community communication, in which they've stated any code changes have to be validated, not script changes. If the change doesn't require recompiling the game, you can still push patches through quickly.

[delicate yarrow]

I've never read an explanation of the backup save system, so may just be suggesting how it's already implemented.

Try keeping the backup save 1 step behind the actual save.

The save process would look like:

• Save event triggered.
• Current save overwrites backup save.
• Current save serializes current game state.

With a special case for game exit:

• Quit to desktop / crash / exit event.
• Current save serializes current game state.

That special case will prevent the system from attempting to overwrite the backup save in event of unstable shutdown, such as power failure or BSOD.

An alternative implementation of the same concept is introducing autosaves that are triggered every X minutes. Current saves will serialize on save events while backups will serialize on a timer, isolating the two save types from each other. Then the special case of the above implementation is no longer necessary.

The one caveat to this is if the unstable shutdown occurs during the backup save's serialization. In that case, it'd be prudent to create multiple backups, like how Skyrim keeps multiple autosaves, each backup older than the last. Trim the oldest autosave to make room for the newest, keeping file size in check.

[delicate yarrow]

After reading your Steam post, there's one idea that quickly came to mind for Rogorog's redesign: health gating.

Health gating isn't always a good mechanic, nor a welcome one, but it may help achieve the experience you're aiming for.

Now, to actually define health gating:

Entering an invulnerability period after taking a certain amount of damage. It's similar to how the player gains invulnerability for a second after each hit taken, but where it differs is that it's not triggered by hits taken but damage taken. i.e. If the 1 second invulnerability triggered after every 1 heart lost, instead of every 1 hit taken.

To extrapolate this out to enemies, an invulnerability period can be triggered upon reaching 50% HP, guaranteeing the foe takes at least 2 hits to kill. Enemies can have multiple health gates, and they can be of varying durations. In Warframe, the Sentient Batalysts cannot take more than 20% of their total HP in damage from a single blow, requiring at minimum 5 hits to kill; there is effectively no invulnerability period here, but rather the damage dealt is capped.

Applying this to the new Rogorog may fix any concerns you have about players one-shotting him, skipping all the mechanics you designed. But on the flipside, health gating prevents one-shotting entirely, robbing players of the catharsis that comes with overwhelming a boss. Hence the caveat at the beginning: health gating may elevate Rogorog's fight, ensure all the mechanics are seen, or make him annoying to repeat, unable to truly flex your build's power.

In summary, consider health gating.

[delicate yarrow]

Further expanding on this with a hypothetical example based on the current implementation:

Let's say you use Aurelia's telepathy as a lampshade to have no maximum conversation distance. No matter how far the player travels, she'll keep yapping.

Upon first entering Grimmir Expanse, Aurelia starts communicating. She is standing in a location with direct line of sight on the entry portal.

The conversation concludes, the quest is started, and the player guided towards the colosseum to get Winter's Heart before finally approaching the Thousand Names Aetheneum.

BUT what if the player finds where Aurelia is and attacks her? During or after the conversation.

Aurelia teleports out with a remark about the player's hostility.

No quest is given to the player.

Aurelia can now be found in front of the Thousand Names Aetheneum, and she is hostile.

Defeating/killing her will open the gates.

The player can stumble upon the colosseum and talk to the Frost Matron, starting the Winter's Heart quest.

Alternatively, the player can stumble upon blizzard hearts, generating a quest about them. Notably, the quest does not mention what they are for or where to go if started via finding a heart.

Now there's some player agency and consequences, without locking the player out of Winter's Heart. The tricky part with pursuing this type of design is accounting for all the actions the player can take at any given point and implementing reactions.

It's simple enough for short stories, but the longer the narrative throughline, the more branching paths have to be accounted for. That's why the above "narrative bead" style approach is common: there's multiple paths leading to the same major plot point. Mass Effect is a good example of this style: you can choose paragon or renegade means towards the same end. When the player's story path is plotted out, it resembles a string of beads (hence the name). Each "chapter" is compartmentalized, making each section a self-contained short story with a reasonable number of branching points, and one forced plot point to interconnect sections. The downside to "narrative beads" is if the player realizes the trick, they'll realize their actions have no lasting consequences.

Just like I acknowledged before, you may have decided to scrap this story entirely and that's fine. I wanted to provide an example of how to implement consequences to the player's actions using existing material, so it's easier to imagine and reasonable to implement.

[short birch]

@delicate yarrow Can I ask you, given that you've played over 500 hours, what content are you re-playing? The gear for my build is maxed level 16, all the passives are +5, I completed all the content up to the wall you can't enter, and I want to keep playing because I love the game but there doesn't seem to be any replayable endgame content.. was wondering how you spent those 500 hours.

[delicate yarrow]

Trying different items

[short birch]

Don't you think the game needs some sort of replayable endgame?

[delicate yarrow]

A. Too early in the game's progression to consider that.
II. No.
3. It has one, tho. All the gear combinations.

4. The Veilrender Arena

[short birch]

4. is only replayable once though right?

100k not worth it