I know it’s early in dev and most people are focused on the fap aspects, but does anyone have some takeaways from the gameplay? I’ve noticed enemies seem to hit really, really fucking hard and the only viable strategy seems to be leaning heavily on spell rotation and healing item spam. Farming the essence for that is pretty boring and not fun, and out leveling enemies doesn’t seem to help because I don’t think any stat gives damage reduction, just avoidance or padding max hp. I was mostly focusing on agility builds and that cold spell that slows enemies combo’s with faerie fire. I was level 6 when I got my ass kicked by the bandit leader.
Pretty much none of the enemies did sexy time attacks either, they always got angry right away and just beat the shit out of me. I was pretty surprised when I lost to the bandit leader and it just went straight into rape at 0 corruption, I would’ve thought there’d be some working up to that like in Karryn’s Prison or something.
In terms of "fighting to win," so to speak, my experience was relatively similar to yours—heavy focus on spell rotation (the spell that slows them is a great asset and means you'll be able to refresh the DOT from Faerie Fire more "on time") and defense (Restoration and Shield are must-haves, especially for Roughmen).
There's also a Tier 3 Holy ability that automatically restores HP every turn. Once you have that and some decent levels under your belt, at that point the pendulum swings
hard, to the point that you can't lose even if you want to unless you damage
yourself (yes, you can cast damage-dealing spells on yourself, and healing spells on opponents).
By default, Cibelle does little damage with her physical attacks, and attacking (whether physically or with spells) too often frequently angers opponents and causes them to prioritize damage-dealing over lewd actions. Early on, when your options are limited and Cibelle is more fragile, I generally avoided casting a spell
and attacking in the same turn, in order to avoid the anger trigger.
All that said, the combat in general does feel like it'll need a major balance pass at some point—right now it feels very skewed, and can swing wildly from one extreme to the other.
As far as the other issue, it feels like right now there isn't any connection between Cibelle's corruption and/or desire and how certain loss scenes (Roughman and Bandit Boss) play out, which it'd be
nice to see change at some point so that there's more build-up over time, but I think the entire corruption / desire / heat mechanic is another of those "will need a significant balance update in the long run" things, and right now it's just kind of there as proof-of-concept.