Devlog #26 - Mastery Comes at a Cost

Hello High Cost Talents!

After a very, very productive few weeks on Talented I'm here to drop some news on the direction of the core combat, difficulty system and some changes to features that have been in the game for over a year! First up:

Mastery 2.0

Last week saw the crazy achievement of beating mastery 15 by one of our best players "B Bobert Bobbingson (The first of his name)" (RJW in Discord). Here's part my personal favourite clip:

Of course we don't take this insult to our difficulty system lying down so we've completely reworked our Masteries from the ground up and added 10 brand new levels. This increases the Mastery Cap to 25!

We've reworked some of the existing Mastery Upgrades to make them a little less frontloading - giving a smoother early part of the run and easing some of the more painful/unfun penalties.

• More Elites now increases the chance of elite enemies by 1% per day instead of a flat 5%
• Enemy HP Up now increases enemy HP by 5% per day instead of a flat 25%
• Blank Talents are now Mystery Talents that still grant a bonus but hide themselves instead of purchased

Also some notable additions:

• Mastery 8, 15 and 22 will now reduce your Vision Range on the Talent Tree.
• Mastery 20 now makes Skelebobs spawn from the very start of the run
• Mastery 10 now increases the cost of all non-common Talents by 1.

THAT REMINDS ME!

Talent Costs

While downsides for epic talents open up some interesting design space - they don't always fit and are often forgotten about as the bonus from the talent itself is so enticing. 

Instead we've decided to try increasing the cost of Epic Talents and Abilities to 2 Talent Points each and removing downsides from the majority of Epic Talents. (With a few exceptions such as Blood Pact and The One Ring which have been buffed)

You'll also notice we've brought the Ability Tooltips that appear when you hover over your equipped abilities into the talent tree. You can see cooldown, charges and even scaled ability damage before you even buy the ability now!

Wait.. THAT REMINDS ME!

Abilities Reworks

Abilities are a big focus of ours in the 0.8 update. Many of the abilities in the game currently have been unchanged since Talented's first build over a year ago - we want to review their balance, visual appeal and place in the game.

We'll start off with some balance changes to abilities that were pushing other strategies out of the game:

Hail of Arrows was simply the best choice for Archer's starting ability. Instead of trying to balance it by nerfing the cooldown we've moved it our of the traits system and made it an ability on the tree. To bring it up to the power level of other tree abilities we've given it a decent range increase.

We want traps to become a core part of Archer's identity - so we've moved Land Mine into the trait system, allowing you to access it from day 1. This is coupled with a recognisable damage nerf, but we think this is easily offset by the number of mines you can place in the first few days that are unlikely to be exploded!

Cyclone has had a significant range reduction to make it less of an auto-pick in the Trait system.

Blast Nova has also seen a range nerf, and should be less likely to be at the centre of every Wizard build!

Well! That's all for this time, looking forward to sharing even more progress on Status Effects, New Traits and New VFX in the very near future.

As always we'd love to hear any feedback you have on our Discord!