More improvements:
Stored Crits and Evades now appear. Crit DMG% is shown too.
Beginners section in the guidebook that encourages the player to interact and experiment with a variety of the game's mechanics
Nice! Thanks for that!
HP is no longer all about single digits, it's now x50 larger. Enemy attack has been raised by x10 to compensate. This in turn drastically changes the way combat feels and changes how a lot of different stats interact. The game is no longer about trying to only take '1' chip damage per turn, making defence far a more dynamic and useful stat. It also immediately makes every resistance and defensive upgrade far more meaningful.
I do really hope the heat scaling was also tweaked accordingly. IMO, atk on mob did scale way too fast (compared to their HP scaling that was kinda tame - and needing more hit ton kill a mob will always translate to more damage taken + it's the only moment when you can really try to do some elemental reactions & start thinking "ok, will I save some ressources by beating it that way?" - which is IMO the fun part)
On the 1 chip per turn & resistance, I'll wait and see, but I'm feeling conflicted about these changes:
- Having a few HP to track was pretty nice, actually ; "you can take 10 hit before you die" was not a bad change from the usual JRPG. And more importantly, I saw this game more of a "you have limited resources, try to use them the best way possible" ; which was pretty fun, but mean everything that did allows to gain resource faster than you loose them (healing node/passive/lot of evasion + 4.0 ice wall / dark art when you can one spell everything) did reduce that strategic aspect to the dust. In 5.0, more than a HP number issue ; it's a "too easy to enter in a loop when you can't run out of a ressource".
- Having small number of HP however did change the defense to a "minimum stat needed to not get destroyed / loose a single HP per turn" ; which was not that bad, but only encouraged player to buy def when they did take more than 1 damage (or when other stat did scale on defense (like old ice wall ; or having part of def be added on the attack)). If we can reach a high enough defense when mob start to deal very few HP, it will be just the same as before, with an enormous HP pool slapped on the player
(On that note, keeping a small amont of HP and tweaking the damage taken formula so damage would would increase slowly/ stagnate a bit at every damage value (like bonking some mob that deal 2 damage, then some more that deal 3, then...) instead of going from 1 damage to one shot would have worked super well IMO (something like
damage = ceil(atk / def)
; or in plain english "to dish one more damage, a mob need to gain as much attack as you have defense"
Of, if the formula is a
damage = max(1, atk - def)
; increasing damage by a +1 every time the heat increase would have a similar effect)
- I do see the game more of a puzzle/"figure out what to use to go further". % def resistance does not really fit neatly in that category ; and are not really fun stat to think about IMO ("increase everything as a bonus" or something). I'm not fond of them, but I don't hate them,
as long as it's easy to know how many damage you will take, which in that case pretty much mean "as long as the UI show clearly what will hapen when mob retaliate".
Or to told another way, it's not the amount of HP that does matter ; it's how you can manage and regain them.
Casting spells now advances the turn! You can no longer spam comet without the enemy retaliating. Furthermore, you can no longer cast spells if you're out of HP. In exchange for this change, enemies no longer deal damage on the turn they die. It remains to be seen whether enemies need to be given more HP to balance this out.
More mob HP may be nice, since it mean player can use more reactions.
I'm curious on how the change will play, but I do assume an early game strategy would be "just stack enough damage so the ennemy never retaliate".
In any way, it seem like the dungeon will be completely different in the next version ; I guess i'll have to restart a new run again :3
(and on a totally unrelated note: if heat is making a tantrum in the dungeon and having more mob curiously coming to bonk you, why you only see mob one by one as heat increase! Where is the litteral wave of mobs drowning the screen when you're at stupid high heat)