Traits and Puzzles
More subtle spoiling of a certain new trait, for any who want to try to piece it together.
Alright, as promised this update is quite a bit less monumental, but for those who do their math it should be pretty helpful. Put as simply as possible, we’ve rewritten the interactions for all four of the EE damage-related traits (unstable, corrupting aura, frostbite, and riposte). The good news is, they are a LOT simpler and no longer cause Tikki Tooki to go ballistic at the drop of a hat. The bad news is that they are a bit nastier than they were previously. Here’s an in-depth breakdown:
Unstable and Corrupting Aura: Both of these effectively received the same two changes. First, they are now separate damage sources from the main attack. The upshot of this is that they now horribly murder you through your death protection. If the monster’s main attack breaks your DP, its aura or explosion can and will finish you off. Of course, if the monster’s main attack does not break your DP then Unstable/Corrupting Aura will do the job instead, per normal. Fortunately, we’ve adjusted the predictor to handle all of this, so no need to double check yourself when it comes to living or dying. The second main change is that they no longer technically deal damage. Instead, they remove health from you. While this may sound like a semantic thing, what it translates to is irreducible damage. No matter how much resist/DR/corrosion/frostbite you have, the unstable/corrupting aura portion of the damage will always be unmodified. Additionally, as unstable/corrupting aura aren’t attacks anymore, they do not piss off Tikki Tooki, cannot be dodged, do not remove frostbite, do not inflict status effects/death gaze, etc. They just remove health. Pure, simple, unavoidable, and cruel.
Riposte: Riposte falls a bit in-between the original versions and the new versions of Unstable and Corrupting Aura. It has been separated into two damage sources (so no ignoring it with DP), it cannot be dodged (trying to work dodge prediction with two separate strikes proved to be too much of a mess), and it is not counted as a hit (looking at you, Tikki Tooki). Beyond this, it is like a standard monster attack: Its type is the monster’s damage type (and can thus be reduced), it can inflict status effects (meaning it nails you twice with stackable status effects on physical attacks), it can trigger death gaze (so if its original hit puts you under the death gaze threshold, the riposte will kill you), and it does remove frostbite.
Frostbite: The changes here are far more straightforward. For simplicity’s sake, Frostibite’s damage adding effect basically works like corrosion now, instead of stacking a separate magic damage attack on top of the enemy damage. So if you have enough DR, you can clear your frostbite without actually getting damaged by it, but otherwise it will always deal its full number’s worth of damage.
TL;DR? Don’t worry. The puzzle pack in this expansion is Trait Tutoring. Trait Tutoring is a sort of Agbaar’s Academy for all EE monster traits. And the puzzle difficulty has been bumped down from masochist level to your standard base game puzzle fare. These puzzles are designed more to let you know about the nuances of the traits than to challenge you (although that doesn’t mean they will be easy). Furthermore, this pack will be updated as more traits are added in future releases. So yep, that’s it for this week! Progress inches slowly closer to a releasable product, so, in the mean time, feel free to stress about how much harder things will be without DP as an easy way out strategy.
