Krongorka

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Sep 22, 2017
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It's hard to say what his plans are about NoR.
Engine update doesn't necessarily mean it will improve things. From things I saw in past there's a chance it might get worse, actually.
As for graphics, he used a very old spine runtime 3.4.02 which is prone to crashing. We made custom graphics stuff for NoR and we used 3.6/3.8.
 

JustAl

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Jan 28, 2022
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I found this part of his ci-en post interesting (google translated):
"I'm also thinking about moving Witch Night from Unity 5.6 to 2022, if not the latest version.
[...]
The system may have to be completely rebuilt, so it may not be possible."

If google translate's "Witch Night" is actually Night of Revenge, could it be that there's still hope for additional content for Night of Revenge? [...]
Yes, Witch Night is almost assuredly this game, because it's full name in production was "A Witch's Night of Revenge". However the requirement of rebuilding may prevent more content from arriving for the game unless potential of additional sales is significant enough that he'd re-release the game.
 
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JustAl

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What's the best weapon/build?
I played the game over way many times and I like to use too much equipment for fun.

Endgame is centric around sacred damage because of demons, including final boss phase 2.

I think for performance the best weapon is the sword you get from bringing the optional Wolf Boss's soul to Illusive's shop with 10k ideas. Its base damage is so high it's like holding a greatsword as a one-handed sword, and it has extra reach on ground attacks. It deals sacred and shock damage, which is great because sacred damage deals with the strongest enemies in the game while shock damage combos with the best spell in the game, which in turn combos with itself to nuke huge areas. Said spell also decimates the final boss. Upgrade it on the normal path and it does all of the above.

As a bonus, it scales with intelligence, which works well in NoREroMod because weapons that scale with intelligence also replenish magic per hit.

A budget awesome weapon is the very first sword you can find in the game -- the weathered sword in the Bandit Camp (tutorial level). You have to upgrade it on the ascended route that uses rare twinkling materials but it does a lot for being an early weapon with such low stamina cost. A nearly identical twin of this weapon in purpose is the Crusader's Sword (normal upgrade path) on the Path of Eternal Rest, which is functionally similar but requires more base stat investment to use, more stamina to swing, and is found near the end of the game so the cheaper upgrade path may not be worth it. Although if you go on the ascended path you can corrupt the sword to be the best darkness weapon in the game but darkness is only good against humans (early game), and maybe final boss phase 1 so bleh.

Then there's the Cross Yari that's the best effective healing weapon in the game. And there's the sacred staff found on the Path of Eternal Rest that's the best spellcaster weapon in the game because its ascended path stacks 2 multipliers on Sword of Praise, the best melee-range spell in the game. Candore's twin sword on normal upgrade path is the best parry weapon to use against crowds because it is the only weapon whose parries have splash damage and I think it hits extra times than expected. Etc, etc. Just have fun and play with every weapon. This game's very short and the fun is in the variety and art presentation.
 

Sum Gi

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Nov 10, 2017
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I played the game over way many times and I like to use too much equipment for fun.

Endgame is centric around sacred damage because of demons, including final boss phase 2.

I think for performance the best weapon is the sword you get from bringing the optional Wolf Boss's soul to Illusive's shop with 10k ideas. Its base damage is so high it's like holding a greatsword as a one-handed sword, and it has extra reach on ground attacks. It deals sacred and shock damage, which is great because sacred damage deals with the strongest enemies in the game while shock damage combos with the best spell in the game, which in turn combos with itself to nuke huge areas. Said spell also decimates the final boss. Upgrade it on the normal path and it does all of the above.

As a bonus, it scales with intelligence, which works well in NoREroMod because weapons that scale with intelligence also replenish magic per hit.

A budget awesome weapon is the very first sword you can find in the game -- the weathered sword in the Bandit Camp (tutorial level). You have to upgrade it on the ascended route that uses rare twinkling materials but it does a lot for being an early weapon with such low stamina cost. A nearly identical twin of this weapon in purpose is the Crusader's Sword (normal upgrade path) on the Path of Eternal Rest, which is functionally similar but requires more base stat investment to use, more stamina to swing, and is found near the end of the game so the cheaper upgrade path may not be worth it. Although if you go on the ascended path you can corrupt the sword to be the best darkness weapon in the game but darkness is only good against humans (early game), and maybe final boss phase 1 so bleh.

Then there's the Cross Yari that's the best effective healing weapon in the game. And there's the sacred staff found on the Path of Eternal Rest that's the best spellcaster weapon in the game because its ascended path stacks 2 multipliers on Sword of Praise, the best melee-range spell in the game. Candore's twin sword on normal upgrade path is the best parry weapon to use against crowds because it is the only weapon whose parries have splash damage and I think it hits extra times than expected. Etc, etc. Just have fun and play with every weapon. This game's very short and the fun is in the variety and art presentation.
I played on very hard and unfortunately found most of my effective strategies to be quite basic. Heavy weapons are utterly trash. They take forever to swing and barely do more damage than fast weapons, but have much higher stamina costs, resulting in more dangerous play and far lower dps. They have better block and revenge healing mostly, but you can just dodge everything. Magic as well I unfortunately seems quite weak. The spells with cast times are often so slow that you'd do more damage just spamming attack, with less vulnerability. The strongest build I found was either the starting weapon for most of the game was just the starting weapon since it's stamina cost is so comparatively low. Later on a dex built with the base katanas or the rapier.
 

JustAl

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I played on very hard and unfortunately found most of my effective strategies to be quite basic. Heavy weapons are utterly trash. They take forever to swing and barely do more damage than fast weapons, but have much higher stamina costs, resulting in more dangerous play and far lower dps. They have better block and revenge healing mostly, but you can just dodge everything. Magic as well I unfortunately seems quite weak. The spells with cast times are often so slow that you'd do more damage just spamming attack, with less vulnerability. The strongest build I found was either the starting weapon for most of the game was just the starting weapon since it's stamina cost is so comparatively low. Later on a dex built with the base katanas or the rapier.
I know what you're talking about. Let me elaborate.

Heavy weapons really are particularly bad in this game, and even the part about healing isn't true when referring to effective healing, which specifically means weapons that can actually access healing reliably enough to actually heal you. Hence why I recommended the Cross Yari, it's a dexterity weapon with high (but not max possible) heal rate, which also possesses good damage per hit, attack speed, and reach in such a combination that it simply is the best weapon for actually healing you.

Magic gets pretty strong with the right spells. Once you get Sword of Praise in the underground basilica you get a close-range spell that outperforms any weapon option in DPS, especially against enemies vulnerable to sacred art damage like endgame enemies and bosses. The lightning rod spell deals damage in such a way that it nukes most of your screen space. You charge it up by hitting the object with any source of shock damage (fast weapons ideally), and also itself so it chains into itself.

I played through the entire game flawlessly on Very Hard mode first before upgrading my difficulty via mods, first with BonedMod (and its infamous finisher-kill bosses), then I moved on to NoREroMod where I made stamina cost 100 points per dodge, upgraded enemies to move 30% faster and made enemies hit about twice as hard.

The cheapest good build is ascension path on the weathered sword, the best "melee" build is technically a sacred staff and spell combo, enabling me to cast a spell that hits for over 400 damage twice on top of a 3-spear volley (about 200 damage each IIRC) that hits simultaneously alongside the spell, hitting enemies a total of 5 times at once on the 2nd button press.

The spells you're referring to must be the ones you find early one like the storm (4 pulse shock), the basic lightning spell, the fireball, and maybe the fire ring. Those are heavily situational. For example the fireball is really bad most of the time except against the spider boss and final boss phase 2 because they have huge hitboxes and are weak to fire. The lightning bolt is niche, does well to nullify incoming projectiles suddenly but is really moreso meant to hit targets below you in an open area which is just too rare to justify. Then other spells like the fire ring are actually mostly useless. The cauldron is pretty good for healing and DPS as well as being the de-facto longest range projectile in the game due to how the projectile arcs with gravity.

The true best spells are Sword of Praise (basilica) and the lightning rod spell you find in the Elevated Path.

I found the katanas to be quite crappy considering my other options, but the rapier's moveset and scaling is nice. However ideally I wouldn't use it because the weathered sword is a rapier with sacred art damage and int scaling that combos well with my spellcasting focus and is overpowered against endgame. I'd even have it ascended before the Candore fight, but if you have the extra idea points to waste (not in my case since I downscale enemy point awards down to only 15% of their original value in NorEroMod), you can opt for the bone sword or rapier for an early weapon to decimate Candore with before having Vendetta reset your spent points if you're going for a different build after that fight. That was actually something to genuinely consider in BonedMod because you couldn't reliably escape from enemies with finisher kill grapple attacks and Candore was one of those. It's true to say that Candore is the hardest boss in the game before the final boss's 2nd phase.

Weird difficulty spike, not even the Succubus is that hard. The magic wall spell was meant to trivialize the succubus fight but spamming perfect blocks against the succubus's projectile storm is not only valid but extremely helpful, effectively making her battle the best fight to spam spells in because she grants you infinite magic refills if you bring a weapon that refills magic on perfect blocks. And of course, Sword of Praise slams her rapidly with good damage.

In a nutshell, Dex builds are nice via the Rapier and Cross Yari, but this game's best builds are really Int builds.

Does she has different costumes or only one yet?
Aradia can access 2 more costumes but they're just recolors and they're "illusory", which is a game-like way to warn you that scenes don't account for her costume at all.
 
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Krongorka

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Sep 22, 2017
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What programs are used to make such game animations?
Spine made by Esoteric Software. D-Lis used a specific version 3.4.02 which is old (devs nowadays mostly use 3.8.99 or 4.1).

PJL0RIGIN
“Krongorka time to work”
Hate to disappoint, but my hands are full right now. I’d like to give it a shot sometime though. I’m already learned a lot about spine due to working on other projects, so that might help.
 

Sum Gi

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Nov 10, 2017
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I know what you're talking about. Let me elaborate.

Heavy weapons really are particularly bad in this game, and even the part about healing isn't true when referring to effective healing, which specifically means weapons that can actually access healing reliably enough to actually heal you. Hence why I recommended the Cross Yari, it's a dexterity weapon with high (but not max possible) heal rate, which also possesses good damage per hit, attack speed, and reach in such a combination that it simply is the best weapon for actually healing you.

Magic gets pretty strong with the right spells. Once you get Sword of Praise in the underground basilica you get a close-range spell that outperforms any weapon option in DPS, especially against enemies vulnerable to sacred art damage like endgame enemies and bosses. The lightning rod spell deals damage in such a way that it nukes most of your screen space. You charge it up by hitting the object with any source of shock damage (fast weapons ideally), and also itself so it chains into itself.

I played through the entire game flawlessly on Very Hard mode first before upgrading my difficulty via mods, first with BonedMod (and its infamous finisher-kill bosses), then I moved on to NoREroMod where I made stamina cost 100 points per dodge, upgraded enemies to move 30% faster and made enemies hit about twice as hard.

The cheapest good build is ascension path on the weathered sword, the best "melee" build is technically a sacred staff and spell combo, enabling me to cast a spell that hits for over 400 damage twice on top of a 3-spear volley (about 200 damage each IIRC) that hits simultaneously alongside the spell, hitting enemies a total of 5 times at once on the 2nd button press.

The spells you're referring to must be the ones you find early one like the storm (4 pulse shock), the basic lightning spell, the fireball, and maybe the fire ring. Those are heavily situational. For example the fireball is really bad most of the time except against the spider boss and final boss phase 2 because they have huge hitboxes and are weak to fire. The lightning bolt is niche, does well to nullify incoming projectiles suddenly but is really moreso meant to hit targets below you in an open area which is just too rare to justify. Then other spells like the fire ring are actually mostly useless. The cauldron is pretty good for healing and DPS as well as being the de-facto longest range projectile in the game due to how the projectile arcs with gravity.

The true best spells are Sword of Praise (basilica) and the lightning rod spell you find in the Elevated Path.

I found the katanas to be quite crappy considering my other options, but the rapier's moveset and scaling is nice. However ideally I wouldn't use it because the weathered sword is a rapier with sacred art damage and int scaling that combos well with my spellcasting focus and is overpowered against endgame. I'd even have it ascended before the Candore fight, but if you have the extra idea points to waste (not in my case since I downscale enemy point awards down to only 15% of their original value in NorEroMod), you can opt for the bone sword or rapier for an early weapon to decimate Candore with before having Vendetta reset your spent points if you're going for a different build after that fight. That was actually something to genuinely consider in BonedMod because you couldn't reliably escape from enemies with finisher kill grapple attacks and Candore was one of those. It's true to say that Candore is the hardest boss in the game before the final boss's 2nd phase.

Weird difficulty spike, not even the Succubus is that hard. The magic wall spell was meant to trivialize the succubus fight but spamming perfect blocks against the succubus's projectile storm is not only valid but extremely helpful, effectively making her battle the best fight to spam spells in because she grants you infinite magic refills if you bring a weapon that refills magic on perfect blocks. And of course, Sword of Praise slams her rapidly with good damage.

In a nutshell, Dex builds are nice via the Rapier and Cross Yari, but this game's best builds are really Int builds.
Cross yari (called something like red spear crossing in my game, hurray mtl) is good but personally I didn't find healing to be useful since running out of potions was a very rare occurrence. Things are certainly different if you're playing with mods. Having mp restored on hit is going to change the balance quite a bit, and perfect block and long range weapons/spells are going to be more useful if you've made dodge suck. I used perfect block less since you can dodge out of an attack much sooner than block out of it and dodge can reset your combo.

In the base game the lightning pillar is only useful if the enemy stays put and you can hit them and charge it up simultaneously. If you nerfed dodging and made enemies more threatening, it would probably have utility for wiping out mobs from a distance. The only spells I found to be remotely useful were the instant cast melee ones, sword of praise and that other worse dark version. They're good against enemies that sit still, but having to put points into mp and find openings to chug 2 pots also slows down your dps. You could theoretically use witch's prayer to sustain your mp indefinitely if combined with a healing weapon, but it's cast time is very slow and yellow health sometimes disappears randomly before you can recover it (I wonder if it's just running on fixed interval timer, like every 5 seconds the game just erases yellow health if you have any, or maybe that was just something to do with the mannequin's code?).

Testing on the mannequin I could do much higher dps just spamming attack and resetting combo with dodge using the rapier than I could using the staff + sword of praise combo. In fact just spamming sword of praise did more damage, though you run out of mana much faster. It probably has the highest dps against a stationary enemy, though I'm not sure that holds up once you factor in mp management, or bosses that move around/have iframes like the final boss.

The dual swords are fun but stamina costs are too high. With the rapier's low stamina cost and low end lag across all hits in its combo you can just stick to a boss constantly. It also has high riposte damage and more built in crit. The nameless katana is good because it can glitch and hit enemies twice in one attack more consistently than most other weapons, if you're at the right distance. It also has low stamina costs and extremely low end lag, you can dodge after an attack almost instantly. I haven't done enough testing with the nightingale or karasuageha (god knows what mtl decided to call it) to know how they stack up to the rapier. I really really wish heavy weapons did enough damage to justify their god awful speed.

I tended to switch up my build a bunch to try out new weapons (being disappointed by heavy weapons over and over again), I tried out magic a few times, but since most of the spells sucked didn't have much incentive to pursue it, maybe I'll try magic only challenge run or something. I can see why your playstyle would be very different having dodge modded to cost 100 stamina. I also find it kinda funny how maxing out your karma just lets you end the game in an anticlimax.
 
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Krongorka

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Looking at how people are disappointed with Heavy weapons, I think I might take a look at animation frames and shorten them just for testing how it feels. I know that for enemies it makes a huge difference in reaction times and fighting in general.

Village boss test post (link with video)

To give you a better idea what I'm talking about, let's look at a big sword's first strike animation:

Default takes 143 frames:
BigSword143frames.gif
Same animation edited to 50 frames:

BigSword50frames.gif

Since game logic tied to spine animation frame length, you basically can strike 3 times by this same weapon instead of 1. Still consumes a lot of stamina, but I think it might be worth it.

And that's an length-edited "Full 6 Attack combo", which takes 338 frames total instead of 600+:
BigSword6AttackCombo.gif

You can see how it translates to a real combat in-game in my posts below:
 
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JustAl

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Jan 28, 2022
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Sum Gi, your perspectives are valid.

Karasuahega is a rapier you can ascend into electric which makes it combo excellently with the lightning rod. You won't see much difference between the rapier-type weapons overall effectiveness, bar the one you can craft from the spider boss that's more like an odd shotgun. Really, this weapon class is very blessed overall.

Enemies moving around is a factor to plan for. This game has odd difficulty in that respect, because Six-Arms from the town entrance is vastly more mobile than a lot of enemies later on, up until you get the Black Wings crow demon. Then there's the white-robed Senior Inquisitor. So my take on movement is it would be way more relevant if relevantly fast enemies were more frequent and essential to deal with.

Regenerating magic without potions is easy even without mods so long as you have a weapon that recovers magic on perfect block and the enemy attacks frequently enough. In this respect a modded run with more aggressive enemies makes this much easier to maintain than base game because every incoming attack blocked is free magic. That's also why the Succubus is a very trivial fight with this approach -- spam Sword of Praise with massive MP gains every time she does a projectile swarm or her triple-melee blitz.

Yeah, a decent weapon build should do at least 2.5k damage per 10 seconds. Rapiers, katanas, that weird bendy axe from the dungeon and such do that stuff well. It's really what to expect, although a gimmick build around the staff and Sword of Praise where your intelligence is as high as you make it has insane near 5k DPS in 10 seconds. It's funny but not practical. But my tests on this gimmick build showed it was way better than expected. But yeah, if you have freely available dodge then normal melee with fast weapons trumps much anything else.

Your take on weapons is valid, I use rapiers like that too and the dual sword is really unproductive though its gimmick on parry makes it more effective parrying than rapiers against both single and multiple enemies. It's just a weird behavior I found that's nifty. As for multiple hits, good that you caught the katana has a propensity to do that because I mostly neglected it for being rather boring. The fat guarding sword you get from a statue in town has a very high chance of double-hits, and the Zweihander does it so often that may as well be an intended feature. Another gimmick I noticed is the darkness staff that's mostly bad is unusually good in the Ranch, because you fight mostly normal human enemies there and if you're not close enough to hit twice per attack you'll often reflect or nullify projectiles thrown at you... which is super useful in an area uniquely made of projectile enemies and tight corridors.

Your points are all logical, I felt the exact same way on my modded playthroughs. I wish the game was bigger / had a DLC or sequel since the variety is awesome to play with but poorly utilized. It's the kind of game where you do not need any weapon besides your first yet there's so much to see and learn across a wide kit of options.


{{{ Krongorka's post is too long to quote , but see above. }}}

Krongorka, this is awesome! That really is how the weapons should have worked originally.

Relevant to a lot of what I said to Sum Gi and related to Krongorka's post as well, heavy weapons working well and as intended is always welcome. I remember playing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (the Castlevania-esque game that gamers rightfully speculated may have stolen appropriated the heroine's design from Night of Revenge into their heroine's design), and weapons in that game have a cheap gimmick where landing from a jump cancels all endlag... so the meta is big heavy weapons and jumping a lot. Feels jank and small weapons don't benefit from the exploit at all so most things that aren't greatswords or whips suck.
 
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Krongorka

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I'll also add that main moveset is just one file, which is in sharedassets89.assets (self correction: nope, multiple instances for earlier character/weapon iterations, 16 of them), so I'll give most animations same treatment. Basically, what I found is most animations have a lot of big gaps/empty frames. Which could've been fine, if player was able to interrupt them at will (edit: seems like it's possible to make it work that way, see posts below). There are some games I can tell does this, my favourite one in this regard is NieR Automata.

NoR doesn't do this, so my solution is to kinda "shrink" these gaps so animations could end up 2 or 3x times faster. Spell cast animations and deflect/stabs are main offenders. Of course, it will have a huge impact on player's mobility and fighting speed, but it also means all enemies should be given same treatment as well. I believe that some late added enemies were actually designed with that in mind. But old ones are basically a canon fodder, especially with this adjustment.

PS: Actually, don't consider video I posted above as a test (GIFs are fine, that's in-editor render). Turns out, I was editing wrong in-game skeleton whole time. Actual one will plays out a lot faster. Game archive here is surely a mess, 16 skeletons and non-numbered texture atlas'es.

It also proves to me, that this mod can be customized by... selecting different skins. Because he made a skeleton file for each of 3 skins, so it means one skin can have "shortened frames" and other one have standard frame length. Which is... kinda cool, I guess.
 
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Sum Gi

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Nov 10, 2017
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I remember playing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (the Castlevania-esque game that gamers rightfully speculated may have stolen appropriated the heroine's design from Night of Revenge into their heroine's design), and weapons in that game have a cheap gimmick where landing from a jump cancels all endlag... so the meta is big heavy weapons and jumping a lot. Feels jank and small weapons don't benefit from the exploit at all so most things that aren't greatswords or whips suck.
To be fair to Bloodstained, this game's protag is more a rip off of Shanoa in the first place haha. I ended up just using the swords that swing as fast as you mash the button when I played, plus that overpowered floating head thing before it was nerfed haha.

You can actually reach 2.5k damage in 5 secs pretty easily on a pure dex build with the rapier thanks to the lack of softcaps. Katana is more or less depending on rng. I'm definitely gonna try a magic only challenge run now. Maybe even with the melee spells banned...

I'll also add that main moveset is just one file, which is in sharedassets89.assets, so I'll give most animations same treatment.
I would absolutely love to see a version of this game where both the player and the enemies are sped up, or even a version where combat is even slower and more deliberate, though that's probably more effort than it's worth and would require extra balance changes...

Anyway you're a god. I think that either speeding up heavy weapons or just massively increasing their damage/stagger could work.

16 skeletons and non-numbered texture atlas'es.
It also proves to me, that this mod can be customized by... selecting different skins.
The blessings of spaghetti code haha
 
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