Gameplay and Ability Feedback

[Cubeboy]

The devs asked for feedback and I haven't seen any thread or guides popping up that are providing that, so I made this thread. I am going to give my take on the gameplay loop and ability balance, along with some ideas to add interest to a few aspects of the system. I'll try to start broad with the map, and what a run looks like (meta), and finally discuss abilities and some items.


The map
1. The branching pathways of the nodes feels like it is hitting right where it needs to. I'd imagine most players in this genre will take a moment to more or less plan their entire route when they first hop into a new zone. There are a couple spots where you can hit an extra node or two, but these never feel like they are always better.
2. Areas of interest are usually interesting. That said, after you unlock both cores and all the spells, you actually have greatly reduced incentive to visit arcane nodes. I really enjoy the cat relic, and that can be a fun item to try to get, but otherwise the best ways to play the game actually push you away from arcane nodes a lot, and even away from cities a little.

[[[[[The combat meta- sharing here only because combat is the win condition of the game, so the rest of the game, like map movement, is all going to be based on maximizing your combat power.
1. The best meta in the game is stacking AP on leveled up abilities which you can spam. Wizard aoe with +1 AP, ranger 0 cost offensive reset, grail cd reset, with the triple attack and you can have 9 full power attacks before the enemy can even do anything. Ranger and Knight ability to mark an enemy and then give AP to their team on its death leads to absolutely broken scenarios where you just slaughter everything on the map. I have had nearly 0 damage Jerusalem fights because of this. Levels do much more than items because more levels = more abilities used per turn. You only need to get items for late game fights (assuming you have an ability or two to counter the behemoth).
2. Bleed/hp damage meta is possibly second.
3. Status effect/tank meta is third because slow does nothing vs abominations which are either range or melee with a jump. If it stopped them from using their jumps then it would be amazing (but I'd just use it to stall for a hyper ranger anyway).]]]]]

The macro meta game, and the map issues it creates
1. The most effective way to play the game is by far to go on the war path against every single enemy encounter you can find. My first couple runs I would avoid the corruption, but now I almost exclusively path to get more battles. More battles = more renown = more levels = more power = easier game.
1b. You never want to have to use mana. If I am max mana I may heal if I need it, or use a 1 mana ability to make the fight easier, but using mana usually means you are behind the curve and on the losing end of a run. Even if I wasn't the "save all my health potions and never use them" type of gamer (which is the genre this game is made for), I would pick a battle over a +1 mana node every time, because of the consistent reward (unless I am like 5 nodes away from Jerusalem and I'm not at 5).
1c. Single battle buffs are basically worthless. The most compelling choice for buffs this game has right now is a rare option to take health damage to get a buff that lasts to the end of the run. More lingering effects that have trade offs and choices like this would be great. Right now I'd rather have battles than random scenarios.

2. "Advance Corruption" is actually beneficial. If I am low food (which almost never happens), I might not want to advance corruption, but in every other case I'd rather have the fights.

3. The lower cost of food heavily incentivizes you to stock up early in the run. No random events to my knowledge take a percentage of your food or punish you for having too much food, and there are rarely enough challenges early to make you need to spend that gold on items. If you have tons, you may even hit a cash out where there is a famine area of 50 buy/sell, but even 25 nets you a profit. As much as I enjoy this cheese strat, you need a trade cap of like maximum 3 trades per city.
3b. Before you leave city #1, you are sometimes offered a blacksmith or food. You never want a blacksmith this early, especially when you are trading off gold value for it. Give me mana, food, random relic (possibly OP), or a random weapon/piece of armor.

How do you break the map meta? Just a few ideas
1. Remove as high rewards for the abomination fights. This would be anti-fun though.
2. Add a double timer which turns normal abomination nodes into elite nodes with much stronger enemies. This is an definite choice. Maybe this could be normal+ or hard+ only?
3. Add an FTL-like element where the cataclysm is catching up with you, and you gain no resources from going slow/face difficult battles instead of normal encounters by going slow.
4. Make you start out with 3-4 max mana and arcane nodes can increase the cap or make these nodes have an effect to delay the super corruption so you can get by.


Items

The grail
1. The current passive abilities on the grail feel bad, and I don't want them.
2. The +1 ap is second best, and is probably the power benchmark.
3. Reset cooldowns is by far the best, and it either needs some type of tradeoff for using it, or to be nerfed to -1 cooldowns.

Relics
I feel like the relics are really solid. There are definitely some cheap ones that are just "meh," but a lot (resistance on run, +2 if at range, +2 to abominations, aoe daze) feel really nice to have, I always check for them, and I miss it when I don't have them.


Classes
1. Ranger is the best. It is not necessarily OP, but if you get the right skills and relics it is definitely the strongest possible unit in the game. You kind of find yourself min-maxing the ranger while everyone else gets the scraps.
2. Wizard is either second best if it is getting the ranger over the tipping point of effectiveness, or it is just sub par.
3. Knight feels like it is in a great spot. I feel like the aoe bash made the knight a carry option, but it is just harder to do now. No matter how I build them I basically just throw them at one side of the enemies to stall for my ranger.

Knight abilities
Overall, they are honestly probably in the best spot of any class in terms of balance and how good it feels.
1. Cleave is probably the only "bad" ability. Abominations are the only "real" fights of the game as human enemies are always fodder. Most abominations punish melee damage, especially if I lose hp damage from a melee execute. Because I need to rely on other damage sources to provide those killing blows, I need utility from my knight instead of damage. Maybe with 1 knockback its ok, but it is just outshined by the other abilities.
2. Haste is really good because most knight combos need 3 AP.
3. The possibility of +4 AP from a mark and execute is too high.

Wizard abilities
Overall, these feel much more balanced now.
1. Hallow is very strong, and simply too good to pass up. It doesn't matter which upgrades you take- it is always good. I think it may be a bit too OP, especially when you combine it with a super ranger, but hallow itself is not broken, and the strategy it contributes to has a
"fix" I'll discuss in the ranger section.
2. Creating terrain feels bad because 1x1 is not enough and 3cd is too much to actually block any pathways. If you give this anything like stagger, ensnare, or a mark type effect I'd totally buy in. If you made it lower cd or like 2x2, I would consider it.
3. Being able to destroy terrain and even daze enemies feels really good to enable my ranger.
4. Singe usually feels like a wet noodle, but that is honestly ok for the class. Having keen on it was really amazing, but that just adds too much to an already full stack of buffing abilities.
5. Healing armor feels nice, but I'd much rather just kill everything before it can damage me. This is a balanced ability and still feels really nice to have sometimes.
6. AoE armor destruction is one of the most satisfying wizard abilities, and it has a good tradeoff because you often have to move and also be in danger to use it.

Ranger abilities
Ok. I enjoy the ranger, most people do. It is not that he is intrinsically broken, but you can just add and multiply and at a certain point you ascend to such heights that the difficulty is lost. It takes a lot of investment and some luck to get there, but even if you don't shoot to the moon, your diamond hands investment in your ranger always gives you enough to win.
0. You will make tradeoffs on the ranger depending on what abilities you get. Honestly, these tradeoffs almost always effect what I want to put on my other heroes. If I get bodkin arrow, I really want to get bleed/hp damage to finish the late game abominations. If I get mark, I really want to get enough buffs or armor shred that I get the execute same turn for the AP, and some method of cooldown reduction to have another volley of something ready.
1. Far shot with "low" damage for more range but still 1 AP is just too good. If there is a serious issue with the ranger, it is this- I will be spending all of my gold, all of my wizard abilities, and all of my best relics to get this guy as much +dmg as possible. It is not unusual to do 20 dmg with a single arrow (+power, +dmg against afflicted enemy, powerful, hallow, relic with +dmg, maybe a mark or vulnerable status on top also). If this was 2 AP for the extra distance (at least unless you make it a third level ability) it would be ok. Or if it was 50% effectiveness for dmg buffs, then the range tradeoff is actually a tradeoff.
2. Multishot. Low damage to multiple targets? Not a problem, because the damage isn't all coming from the ranger in the first place. The extra targets doubles the effect of my buffs, my equipment, my relics etc. A third attack triples these bonuses. A knight may be able to do similar damage with similar buffing, but only against grouped up enemies.
3. Mark with +AP. This is really solid, but when I can just drop the mark, drop the enemy, and suddenly my team effectively gets a double turn, I can kill 2-3 enemies a turn almost no matter what rng I had earlier in the run. This just synergizes too well with a cd reset built in to your kit already.
4. Bodkin arrow. 20+ hp damage? not enough for a lot of late game enemies by 4-5hp, so you need a second source of hp damage, but up until that point you will just 1 shot something every turn. Behemoths need some kind of 1 shot protection, because bodkins make behemoths say bye bye. With a grail reset or with your own kit aiming reset, you can double bodkin arrow which would still 1 turn execute basically anything in the game. The extra damage to unarmored targets or to armored ones part of this ability line is great.
5. Ensnare is fine. With bleed it can absolutely destroy early/mid game, but becomes almost pure utility late which is fine.
6. Everything else is honestly great. Great abilities, thematic, help with stuff, but I am 100% always going to try to make a stat stack on this guy and I'll pick whatever lets me do that.

How do you fix the Ranger?
We have a few culprits to the "problem" (if you even label it that way. I'd maybe use "preference" since I can make a super knight too), and some of them can be addressed while others cannot.
>Buffs from equipment, relics, and wizards? Do not touch them! Let me put my power where I want it.
>Tower defense mode where you sit salim in the back, build him a border wall (or leave a hole so he can just stab 1 shot for +1ap any enemy that comes close), let him shoot up 9+ arrows a turn and fill him with steroids? Fixable.

Note: I think if you try to fix all the +AP, you end up essentially killing the possibility of a dps carry knight.

The key to the rangers success is offensive cd resets, and being allowed to sit in 1 place. I propose only a couple changes to make that much harder to do.
1. Eliminate or nerf the cd reset in the rangers kit.
2. Give far shot more trade offs again
3. Make enemies more likely to use long range artillery skills against the ranger
4. Add some type of "arrow limit" to the ranger to prevent him from just spamming some gamebreaking amount of shots during his turn.

None of these changes will kill the ranger. In XCOM people choose between snapshot and squadsight snipers. The ranger in this game probably ought to be pushed a bit toward snapshot style, where instead of 0 counterplay shot spam, you have to reposition to unlock all of your damage. And if enemies are targeting the ranger a little bit more, suddenly it will feel even better to use a knight. Or maybe the wizard's terrain can block some of the long range charged enemy abilities. The encounters I run into where enemies start spamming more abilities while using cover usually turn into some of the more interesting battle experiences I have. And before I reach super mode on the ranger, I still need to play carefully to avoid losing.


Would be interesting to talk with anyone who had a really different take on this.

Devs, if you read this, you are doing great! Keep up the good work!

[Mat Farias]

Cubeboy, Hi! I'm Mat, one of the designers for the Hand of Merlin.

I wanted to thank you personally for this amazingly well written write-up! You touched on several points that we were aware, some we were not, and gave us a very interesting vocabulary to discuss during our design meetings going forward.

The Hand of Merlin's combat system attempted a slightly different approach to status effects and action management, and it takes some adjustment to get right. Our latest patches were made a little bit more successful due to feedback like this, and I think you just made the next few a bit better too, hopefully!

Looking forward to share some more updates with you, and the rest of the community!