HUGE Balancing Rework for Alpha 0.85

Good day, dear traveller.

Today we're going to be looking over a significant overhaul of how damage is being calculated, how offensive skills are going to be replaced and more importantly, how the heck we're going to take a step towards *not* one-cycling every single enemy in the game!

KEEP IN MIND THAT I WILL BE MENTIONING SKILLS THAT AREN'T EVEN POSSIBLE TO GET.  IF YOU WANT A SPOILER-FREE EXPERIENCE, DO SKIP THIS DEVLOG.

The Why

Let's face it - feeling powerful is fun! But if there's nothing in the entire game that can even stand up to you after your damage numbers are just above average through grinding for all the right skill shards and getting that equip perfectly optimised, eventually you might get bored. Also, you will often miss just what a boss has in store for you in the first place if you skip phase 2 & 3 of every boss altogether! Ultimately, I had one approach when I made the game's balancing final initially - just like with Astralon, the game should be as hard as you decide to make it for yourself. Sure, if you grind a little, grab some extra equipment here and there and hunt for secrets, the game *should* be easier! It's a welcome reward and makes it possible for casual players to enjoy the harder tidbits in the game.

The way I initially was going to balance this was as follows - every boss was balanced towards a below average equipped player at the minimum possible level that you could reach it with. This gives you a nice challenge if you breeze through the game, but if you end up grinding for *any* amount of time, or decide to, you know, actually equip the things you find out in the open, it wouldn't be easier - it would be a cakewalk. Any boss very quickly yields once you are just a couple levels higher than you "should" be. 

The Changes

First, what all changed for 0.8 in general? Here's a handy-dandy list for all your numeric needs. Not all of the skills are available through level up and progressions has been enhanced so there's rewards all the way up to level 50.

Before, we had three offensive skills. That's it. They were simple multipliers and incredibly boring & annoying to use, as you had to open the menu after *every, single, hit*. 

• Magic Infusion (Adds MAT to damage before multipliers) 
• THE Punch (Multiplies damage by x3)
• ???  (Multiplies damage by x25)

But how could I let that happen in the first place? For that, I'll have to talk a bit of background - the great survival, originally, was not an RPG series - stats didn't matter. Clicking once meant you did one point of damage and you could mash as much as you want (and had to, in fact). With that being said, I never thought the game would grow - these three skills were all conceptualised very early on. And it makes sense, too - simply adding multipliers means that you can achieve the same amount of button input without the mashing! But then I noticed that, using all of them in conjunction caused damage in the range of roughly 99.999+. With the highest boss having 1.5k health at the time, that seemed like a little much.

So what did I do? I had to streamline things. Skills weren't gonna be used *constantly*, most of them are toggled on or off. And the multipliers should, while still present, be capped to a limit. Bonus points for making the game more accessible to new or casual players, too. 

This brings us to the introduction of "Tension". As long as you don't take damage or deal damage, a hidden meter is going up in the background. This multiplies the damage you do up to x2, being reset to x1 when hit and reduced by 0.2 for every hit you make, slowly going up again afterwards. Let's take a look at what we got!

• Magic Infusion: Add MAT to damage before multipliers.
• Overdrive: Eliminate negative damage variance. Passive.
• Final Gambit: When activated, quickly drains health at 4% of MHP per second. Multiplies damage with up to 2x the closer to death you come.
• Intent to Kill: Doubles your critical hit chance when toggled, passively allows you to overcrit. (Crits above 100% chance have yet another chance to crit.)
• The Best Offense: Deals a small percentage of your current health with each hit. The higher your DEF / MDF, the higher that percentage.
• Tension: While not attacking, build a damage multiplier with a cap of x2. Lose all of it when getting hit. Each attack spends 0.2 of the multiplier. (x2.0, x1.8...) Passive.
• THE Punch: Adds a level of patience. Passively increases Patience cap to x3.
• Plus Ultra: Sets the minimum stack of Patience to x2 (from x1) and stops the hit decay entirely while active. Costs HP/MP over duration, can be toggled. Turns off at 1 HP / 0 MP.

These changes were introduced in version 0.8 - and to my surprise, they worked really well! For casual players. Not so much to solve my initial problem. Even with all the tuning down I did, I just ended up making the same playstyle easier to accomplish for casual players and my testers alike. Which I have to say, is hilarious in a way, but does bring me to having to rework the rework, so to speak.

The Changes, but better

So. all we've done is make the game more easy to break - even new players get a new taste of power, potentially without even knowing what's going on in the first place. How do we fix this?`I mentioned that the changes worked well - and they did! Gameplay shifted more towards what I envisioned it to be after the rework. However, ultimately, numbers are still way too high, even after minimal grinding. Thankfully, there are several solutions to this "problem", some easier, some harder to implement, most of 'em involving shifting a lot of before set-in-stone values around. So let's do just that! 

As for the changes you can expect with version 0.85, look no further!

BALANCING

• Tension Base Cap: 2.0 -> 1.5
• Tension Base Growth: 0.03 -> 0.025
• THE Punch Tension Increase: 1.0 -> 0.5
• NEW: Thrill of the Fight Tension Increase: 0.5
• NEW: Patience Tension Increase: 2.0
• Tension Base Decay (Attack): 0.2 -> 0.4
• Minimum Tension (Attacking): 1.0 -> 0.8
• Luck to Crit Ratio: 1.0 -> 0.75
• Magic Infusion: No longer adds ATK / MAT, but takes a weighted average. MAT Multiplier sits at x1.5
• Multiplier Hard Cap: 5.0
• Best Offense Base Damage: 0.02->0.01  (Still grows at 0.02 per fraction)
• Best Offense Fractions: 20.0 -> 30.0
• A new defense formula - low amounts of defense are more effective, but even when overstacking you will never fully negate an enemy attack.

CONTENT

• Achievements for all new skills added. 
• Speaking of which...
  • Neutralize: Eliminates a boss' weakness and strength when toggled.
  • Thrill of the Fight: Passively increases tension cap by 0.5
  • Energized: Slowly heals over the next 100 steps.
  • Patience: Tremendously increases tension cap, but only while not moving. Disables itself after 5 steps, resetting back to previous max
• Tension HUD (Frozen: Below 1.0, starts forming into big flames until it reaches current capacity.)