JUDE'S PROFILE

Yes, you heal more as you level up. Right now I am working on some scaling via Excel--coming up with a method that allows scaling for all abilities. I hate the idea of scaling not being a universal thing so I am working on a method that works, keeping earlier skill tiers low-cost for the most part.

I agree about Reclaimer, but I haven't looked at it aggressively yet. I do want something in the Power-line to have a healing bonus, because that style is very Fury-starved as it implements the only direct-damage spells in the game and is very "get Fury, spend Fury" while doing lots of damage in the meantime. I smoothed it out by making his abilities generate quite a bit on their own. But that is a bridge far away at the moment. Balance overall is a big reason I haven't made a demo, because things are in flux with every new tier of enemies. Getting the battles sorted out is like designing an entire game itself.

Unsure about making it Skilled a turn speed boost, since I do like the idea of making a skill a free turn, but I will work on those numbers soon enough. A 6/6/6 build still forces you to sacrifice a second high level skill and ability, so I want it to be pretty meaningful to get Skilled III.

author=Crystalgate

author=Jude
Skills are basically the game's spells. They are the Fury-consuming techniques. Essentially, if you have all three Skilled perks then using a Skill gives you a free turn.

That sounds rather powerful, assuming Marcus have good skills. However, getting Skilled II and III seems rather inconvenient, since normally, if you get 3 or 5 in any mastery, you want to raise that mastery one step further ASAP. I guess it evens out.

Come to think of it, not getting the Courage perks is also inconvenient.

Anyway, this games seem to call for at least two play-troughs once/if it's released, one to learn what all skills and finishers does and then one to use the knowledge to create an overpowered build.

These perks are going to force me rebalance a lot of things. For example, if you do go straight down the Courage/Skilled line, you can potentially have 400 Brave. This is enough for you to alternate between Slash and Smash and use a healing skill every turn, which could get kind of stupid if you also used your tier 5 on Reclaimer (double healing).

Here is a progression chart I just made. Now that the mechanics are in place I am doing some theory testing. The chart compares a balanced path to a pure one. This will help me identify key choices and combinations.


It also just helped me identify a fatal flaw that now I have to work out.

Going to stop bracketing the tiers by level and instead by points. The last two in the balanced chart are a hypothetical. Updated the chart... This makes Tier 6 and Tier 8 the new clutch tiers for balanced progression. While it funks some things up, I think it will gel better... trying something. I may nix the raw stats perks and nix the balance-style perks, integrating Skilled and Radiant into existing specializations.

Ha. I'd never seen the music video. Unfortunately I know all of the songs because my room was adjacent to my sister's, growing up. However, I counter your Backstreet Boys with some Tracy Morgan:

I feel like I'm reaching a point in Necropolis where I'll have enough content for testers to pick apart. Volunteering now doesn't mean you'll have a product in your hands tomorrow, or even in a week, but I want to start looking now so that once testing begins I will already have a list of goals that we can work on together.

I am looking for people who have tested RMN games before or have completed a game or lengthy demo of their own. I am looking for only three testers who specialize in one or more of the following: writing and cutscenes, dungeon design, and game balance/difficulty.

author=Crystalgate
So does Cleave now has a 100 attack power modifier?

How often do you encounter enemies of mixed elements? For example, if you were to encounter one nature type enemy and two water type enemies, 2x FireSwd + 1x Rend + 1x LeafGust finisher sounds awesome. Cleave + Rend + Lacerate + Leafgust Finisher also seem like a good way to deal with a two water type enemies + one non water type enemy setup, assuming the non water type enemy is vulnerable to bleed.

Yes. I overtuned Cleave against three unarmored targets initially. Since the only other ability that would set Marcus into the Finesse stance was a top tier ability, I felt like Cleave needed a slight boost in damage. It is already taking a big enough Fury-generation hit against small groups or a single enemy, so to make the damage impotent as well was kind of shitty. Numbers are likely to keep changing, but they are in a pretty good spot. I believe the list of changes since the blog posting on abilities are as follows:

-Parry Fury reduced to 3
-Retort Fury increased to 3 and stun added (I started seeing this as a counter/interrupt combo against multi-hit enemies)
-Cleave attack modifier increased to 100.

There is an area with mixed elements but I haven't even begun to map it yet (I previewed an ice/fire portion of the tile set). It is on the back-burner because it is an optional dungeon near endgame. But it basically will take advantage of some of combos you normally wouldn't use. Beyond this, there is a mixed element boss earlier in the game, and that is about it.