QCF Design Community

Discussion - First!

Glad to see the change that reduces APHEELSIK to 5 mana. I think that'll be about where it belongs.

But I'm not happy with the Gorgon change. It's better at higher levels, but terrible at lower ones. And the ability to kill a level 3/4 monster at level 1 is the only thing that kept the Gorgon as a decent class. Even with this change, she's still clearly the worst class.

Liking the update, looking forward to getting on with my playthrough

Not really a patch comment but I always enjoy reading the news/blog posts

Might start using APHEELSIK more often with this change. I like how it works with assassin, useful for monk, other than that, felt bit on the expensive side. Assassins lightfoot change... bummer, but makes sense.

Well, poison is still horrible for low-level characters. I'll give APHEELSIK another shot, but I somehow doubt this will rescue it from the "convert on sight" status it had as of the last version. I still say the glyph needs some heavy front-loading so it's useful for low-level characters.

On-attack poison looks like it's balanced on the presumption that you're a Monk. I can't see non-monks getting any use out of numbers this low. The Gorgon's current numbers look like a bare minimum low-ball. If she keeps these low numbers, she'll need to lose her attack bonus penalty.

Also you'll need to buff mystic balance now, since it affects too few glyphs. It only benefitted five glyphs (two of which it only has half-effect on), and you just removed one of them. In fact, APHEELSIK arguably had the strongest synergy with this boon of any glyph to begin with, so that's a pretty significant reduction in its utility. Mystic Balance was already borderline underpowered to begin with, so it definitely needs help now.

Finally, please don't let the Transmuter fall through the cracks. Stacking strength bonus was a core class feature and he needs a counter-buff now that you've taken it away.

If we compare poison to fireball, we have poison winning out when fighting enemies when you have tiles to explore. If you are the same level and you try to out regenerate an enemy, you will get a 1:1 ratio on poison (you explore 5 tiles and get back the mana you spent just as poison runs out) vs fireball with a 2:3 ratio plus the healing debuff (you spend 6 mana to do 4x damage while 2x is recovered by the time you finish exploring before the healing debuff). Ultimatly I guess the healing debuff and burning effect cause fireball to win out most times.

Some suggestions:
Remove the healing debuff from fireball, it is complex enough without it, and it ends up being too similar to poison.
Although I haven't played in a while I assume poison is still binary resist. If you make it partiality resistant instead it may help things out. E.g. with 40% resist, a monster only receives 3 stacks of poison per level instead of 5.

Fireball is already useful is most situations, I don't really think it needs to be more powerful than other glyph in most of those. Wizard already got a buff it damage anyways. Fireball has burst, while poison should be better for taking out strong enemies at the expense of having to explore more tiles. If fireball would need a buff it could be something like: 3 mana for 2 damage per level (although this would mess up various puzzles, and be a nerf to counter-fireball abilities). That would put first strike as the ultimate burst glyph (seeing as you really can only use it once pre fight).