Hello Sinners! I’d like to call this the ultimate polish and refinement update. After all the new content, I wanted to take a step back and evaluate the core game loop. I found there were quite a few tuning adjustments and reworks that would be necessary to make the game really sharp and replayable. Although there is no major new content on paper, I am extremely excited about this update because it makes the game so much more fun and smooth overall! Here is an overview of some major problems I wanted solve:

Combo Rewards
My number one issue was that Combo Shuffle was the only way for people to get rewards from comboing. It felt like playing with it off (as many do prefer), was playing at a disadvantage, and also locked people into predetermined combos that may not be appropriate for the situation. Combo Shuffle is still in the game and can help you vary your combos, but you can now play it off completely using the new free form Combo Meter!
Performing any combo will give points relative to the length of the combo and attack speed of your weapon. Performing the same combo over and over will still reward points, but less so each time. You can also perform weapon swaps, trap kills and parries to fill your meter! My goal is to encourage people to play the game skillfully in the most straightforward way possible. Although you can no longer get direct stat boosts from combos, you can get a significant amount of essence which can be spent in the starting area as before for Sin Levels, described in the next section.

Stat Bloat
Getting an absurd number of stat boosts through combo shuffle was too hard to balance, so I removed those completely. Additionally, the stat boost was a flat amount that was the same for every class, both invalidating items at high amounts and making the classes feel the same. Now it’s all been consolidated into a new stat, sin levels, which increase with each sinful essence you acquire. This new stat has a more modest scaling formula, and also factors in each class’ starting stats so a paladin at round 10 is still a lot more tanky than, say, a reaper at round 10.
Loot Bloat
It’s raining loot! When you’ve just finished wiping a room of 50 enemies, it can be kind of tedious to open and check every single box. Excess loot also makes each one you come across less exciting and meaningful. As such, I’ve removed almost all equipment drop chest drops (except for bosses in the main zones), and enemies will reliably drop essence now instead. Skill chests will still drop as normal, as they are less frequent and require way less thought.

Treasure rooms now have a lot more meaning as they are the primary source of finding new gear (especially since the main rooms also no longer have equipment). I’ve also upped the spawn rate of portal rooms to compensate, so you are greatly rewarded for going off the beaten path.

Cave Bloat
The cave was just too dang big, and it became a drag especially in the B and C variations. As such, I painstakingly redid every single room and arena to be more compact and closer to the other areas. Explore some new, never before seen layouts, and enjoy more consistent, fast paced cave spelunking.

Endless Runs
Later rounds had very uneven scaling and were very difficult to balance. The biggest changes to fix this are the stat boost rework mentioned above, removing curses and passive skills at the beginning of each round, and adjusting the scaling formula to be more linear keeping it in line with the experience going between areas in the first round. Additionally, I added a new currency item called the Sin Token!
These function as extra lives essentially and can only be dropped by the Embodiment of Sin. Going for the final trial has never been more rewarding, offering two tokens upon its completion that you can keep into the next round. Endless is a lot more consistently fun, challenging and balancing than ever before. So it’s never been a better time to go for those achievements!

I did have to wipe the old session saves though, sorry! The scaling is so different now that those old saves would break the game completely.

Movement Jank
The old movement code was ugly and inconsistent. It had various physics bugs, such as how it clipped through walls more often than I’d like, wouldn’t stick to the ground properly, and could not get over small rocks and stone debris for example. This new movement system solves all of those problems and works much more reliably than before.

See the full patch notes below!

Content

• Redid nearly every single cave room layout to be much smaller, closer to the size of the other levels. Cave should feel a lot more fun and fast now!
  
• Added a special new currency item: Sin Tokens! Sin Tokens are essentially extra lives, which bring you back to your last save if you die at the cost of one token. The only way to obtain them is to kill the Embodiment of Sin, who drops one. Completing the final trial will net you two, making it a more appealing risk vs reward proposition before going into the next round.
  
• Added a new combo meter reward system!
  
• You can freely combo and get rewards without having to use combo shuffle. Perform combos, trap kills, weapon swaps, parries and more to score combo points. Fill your meter to full to gain essence and short invincibility! Using the same combos over and over will have diminishing returns, rewarding less points than if you were to mix it up.
  
• The new combo meter factors in your weapon attack speed and awards more points appropriately. For example, a slow two hander will proportionally reward way more points for a combo than a faster weapon would for the same combo.
  
• Higher combo levels give a reward multiplier, up to 3x max (i.e. rewards 3 essence back to back). Higher levels have a shorter timer, making it more difficult to maintain.
  
• While combos have diminishing returns, kill bonuses are the opposite and increase the more enemies you can kill in a single action. Your kill bonus will reset if you perform any combo or technique after a kill. This is done to reward letting your full attack go, rather than forcing you to always cancel your action as soon as possible to do another technique.
  
• Redid the player movement code completely. The new system tracks the groundly more smoothly, whereas the old one would pop into the air going over inclines, and had various other issues. The new system should result in much less clipping through walls, smoother movement, and automatically steps over small debris such as rocks and stone plates in the cave. Also fixes weird physics issues when enemies would hit the player and teleport them.
  
• Added / reworked stat boost as a new stat, Sin Level. Sin Level can only be increased by consuming sinful essence. Combo Shuffle no longer rewards stat boosts because it was too hard to balance, so now you must acquire sinful essence from the sinful offering cross (by spending money), or various other rare places in the game.
  
• Sin level increases all of your stats by some flat amount, but also factors in a percentage of your class’ starting stats. This way, a paladin will consistently have more health and defense than a reaper for example, keeping the classes distinct in later rounds rather than making them the same generic blob of stats.
  
• Reworked the endless mode / later rounds. You will now lose all your curses and passive skills at the end of a round, but still keep your sin level and items. You still get tagged with one new curse at the start of each round (except Martyr starts with 6 as usual)
  
• Smoothed out the scaling of endless rounds so the difficulty is more even. Whereas rounds 1-10 were a victory lap before, and rounds after that were nearly impossible, the challenge is much more steady and consistent with the rounds now, making endless a lot more fun to play.
  
• Deleted old session saves. Sorry! I really didn’t want to do this, but the scaling is so different now that the old saves would break the game otherwise. Please give the new flow a shot, I am confident it’s a lot more fun and engaging now! And also, now the achievements are much more reasonable to get than before.

Balance

• In the spirit of keeping the pace of the game up, loot box drops have been reduced greatly, putting the emphasis on going off the beaten path to collect loot rather than being showered in boxes. This also makes maintaining your durability more important.
  
• Only bosses will drop loot boxes now, and only do so in normal areas (not the trial or maw)
  
• The dungeon, cave and forest main paths will only spawn breakables such as urns, crates and barrels now. These breakables can no longer drop boxes, and you must go into the side rooms to find weapons and armor.
  
• Dungeon, Cave and Forest treasure rooms will now start closed at first, and must be opened by pressing all the floor plates.
  
• Reworked the luck item rarity calculation to apply the critical strike percentage bonus to your initial item roll, rather than adding a flat amount that would eventually guarantee all items to be top quality in later rounds. This change should keep loot exciting and varied even way into later rounds.
  
• Enemies in the same room will always show up now regardless of distance (sometimes were hidden in large rooms). This means that enemies will always move slowly towards you and you don’t have to hunt and peck in a corner for a group you missed.
  
• All rare treasure rooms will guarantee at least one portal room now
  
• It should not happen as much anymore due to the movement rework, but if you fall off one of the main levels somehow, you will be automatically teleported to the last door rather than dying
  
• The max damage reduction from the defense stat is now 75%, down from 80%
  
• All enemies will do a little bit of health percent damage to the player based on their attack’s base damage. This bonus damage will not be added if the total exceeds 25% of the player’s health. The point of this change is to still appreciably damage super tanky characters even if they are loaded on health / defense, so they don’t trivialize the game, while minimally affecting the squishier builds.
  
• Nerf indomitable spirit invincibility time to .5 seconds, down from 1 second.

Polish

• Since essence is a lot more important now, I took time to polish picking them up. There’s now a fancy animation where the essence will lock to the screen and move towards the appropriate UI location. This makes picking up essence feel great
  
• Put a trigger zone around all breakable objects, which makes it much more forgiving to hit them with low range attacks (especially the smaller ones like the crates)
  
• Essence will always be picked up now, even if you are full on that resource type. Fixes an issue where a lingering essence could block using other interactables
  
• Added a new fancy main menu background that shows off the new dungeon levels
  
• Enemies can now knock over crates, barrels and urns rather than clipping through them
  
• Added a new portal effect sound
  
• Using the yellow Super Saiyan player color for invincibility now instead of the damage multiplier of old.
  
• All area effect indicators (slow, poison, toxic), now use the same radial indicator as the enemies.
  
• Added a new warning indicator for when you are standing in a scare circle.
  
• Added smoother animations for the 1 hand shield weapons such as morning star and scepter
  
• Update various tutorials and tooltips to reflect all the new changes

Optimization

• Optimized forest performance a bit by reducing poly count of various background models
  
• Lights and enemies in other rooms are disabled during an arena battle

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug with the Hunter’s Mark curse where it spawned the pursuer way too soon, ignoring the size of the level.
  
• Fixed a bug where starting a new floor plate arena even while one was already in progress would cancel the old one and open the doors in the room
  
• Fixed a bug where one of the cave end rooms would spawn treasure on top of each other
  
• Fixed a bug where reloading save with final trial would also have maw portal opened
  
• Fixed a bug where completing the final trial did not reward a burning star
  
• Fixed a bug where in portal rooms sometimes walls would overlap each other
  
• Fixed enemies in the forest sometimes spawning inside trees
  
• Fixed a bug where a regular, non toxic poison cloud would also damage equipment (now it only damages health)
  
• Fixed a bug where using an instant trigger ability during potion drinking animation would cause left hand to bug out
  
• Fixed a bug where kicking enemies into a guillotine trap did not kill them reliably

I spent a ton of time with this update playtesting, tweaking and reworking various aspects of the game. I believe it has made a big difference in my own experience, but please let me know what you think in the forum or discord. Thank you for the continued feedback and support, you all make it worth the effort!