Zombasite More Mod!

[Destro*]

Alpha v0.0.7 Patch

Mana Overhaul:

Large changes have been made to mana to make mana a more balanced and reasonable system. A lot of the time, if you get flat mana, you don't really get rewarded with the regeneration necessary to sustain that larger mana pool. And this, combined with the inherently poor mana regeneration system in combat, makes it very hard to sustain mana without mana potions. While, now I agree that mana should not be an infinite resource, it should also not be absolutely mandatory that one use mana potions or a powerful mana regeneration skill to sustain their mana pool. If anything, a mana regeneration skill should be a luxury or extra boost to push one's ability to sustain their mana to the limit.

- Mana on hit affix now gives 1/5th of what it did before.
- Mana regeneration in combat is now 100%. Thief mana regeneration skill is still in place and gives 100%. (Thief reworks later)
- Base mana regeneration of 4.0 is now 0.0. No more free mana regeneration!
- Base regeneration per int/spirit is .06 now. (50% buff)
- Mana Regen Bonus passives now give .02 mana per point of relevant stat. (100% buff)
- Deep Mind now gives 1.2 mana regeneration per point.
- Mana regen spell now gives 2 bonus mana per level on active portion. (up from 1)
- Regeneration now has a third of its power set as passive, like Mana Regen. (Not mana related, but inspired by mana changes).

New Skills:

- New Magician Skill: Arcane Might! Grants 10% spell damage per level. Base of 6 points.
- New Magicial Skill: Magical Physique: Grants ability to wear leather for 15 points.

Vendor Changes:

New Vendors: Magician & Archmage - Two new vendors may appear that sell only wands.
- Vendors now carry more items on average.

Monster Balance:

After getting smashed repeatedly in normal difficulty by demigods and other high ranked mobs.... I decided to elevate the priority of my monster rank rebalancing. So, yeah. Higher ranked mobs won't start spawning until later than ever. Normal is meant to be 'easy', and serve as a warmup before you die later on. Champion will be when the difficulty really starts to ramp up. And, elite is when your build needs to be really good to survive. At level 40, your build will need to be very strong both offensively and defensively.

The scaling: Normal = 0, Common = 1, Uncommon = 2, Rare = 3, VeryRare = 4, Unique = 5, Unique2 = 8, Unique3 = 12, Unique4 = 15, Unique5 = 19, Unique6 = 22, Unique7 = 26, Unique8 = 29, Unique9 = 32, Unique10 = 36, Unique11 = 40

Also, normal difficutly ends at 20, champ starts at 20, champ ends at 40, elite starts at 40, etc. Gives more time to get strong.

Last, there is a small typo in the base game. Unique6 monsters (warboss rank) have 1.0 times health multiplier instead of 11. While irrelevant in the base game, it is a big deal for this mod. Currently, you can just go to a level 22 zone and farm them for easy easy experience. This typo is pretty much the only reason I am even releasing 0.0.7 right now.

Item Balance:

- Scavanging is now twice as rewarding as before. (I overnerfed it a bit too hard).

----

Comments: Still working on more changes incrementally as I playtest other classes. Need to do a lot more experimenting.
Edit: I did a silent patch that just cleans up some of the in-combat mana scripting a bit, so that there isn't any confusion. I'm thinking for v8 I'm going to include three difficulties. (Vanilla, Hard, Elite). This way, all types of players can enjoy the mod. Right now, it's just elite. And, I don't want to make the mod too exclusive to a particular type of player.

Edit 2: What happens when you try to farm an area 10 levels above yours?: http://i.imgur.com/zJ1w1UJ.jpg

Not even a crit... LOL. I'm glad I'm testing on non-hardcore. I'm definitely going to need to make resistance skills more accessible. I had 62 resist and ~950 effective hp and that thing 1-shot me with ease. I'll probably add more generic passives. We'll see.

[Destro*]

Alpha v0.0.8 Patch

So, I did a lot of changes to classes in this patch. And by a lot... I mean easily 100+ edits (maybe 200-300, don't know). Because there was so many small ones and I was pretty much making them on the fly, I didn't record them all down. And, again, that's because there are so many, but also its because you can just see all the changes in game. I'll write things down more specifically once again once the mod gets more finalized. (GETTIN THERE)

So, I'm going to describe most of the bigger changes, themes and concepts behind the changes I made. And, I'll also list the more specific/important/less obvious changes ofc.

Buff Revamps:

Self-Cast Buffs now work in an entirely different way now. They all last forever (yay!), but they now drain mana over time. This makes it so that you may actually need to turn them off to cast spells. There doesn't seem to be a way to have buffs turn themselves off when you run out of mana (I think I'd need a new EffectType for the status effects. (Maybe ManaCancel? idk)), so you will just have to turn them off yourself *shrug*. The does also have the consequence of me having to make all buff spells free to cast, so consider that a small plus I suppose.

The exception to what I just said above is that the Dark Templar has health drain now instead of mana reservation for buffs. This also let me buff Unholy Vitality up a bit again. Very Flavorful!

Class Revamps:

Again, way more were made than listed. But, here are some.

- Enrage has a 20% greater aoe.
- Trickster now has teleport and thief has concentration. Reduced nova strike attack cast time (I missed it) to .66 as well.
- Shaman now has champion. Champion has been appropriately nerfed. Removed the blessing system because in the past it would most likely be super overpowered. But, now that I have made all blessings appropriately balanced, the buffs are still good, just not super op. (Also merged ele resist skills, yaddy yaddy)
- Sorcerer is now Lightning Mage. Swapped it with Magician tree. Added skill lightning armor to lightning mage and kept gaseous form on magician tree, but renamed it to ethereal form.
- Regeneration has been changed to be permanent as well with buff revamps. But, the value will not show properly due to a long-standing bug. Just know it does 3 base and +3 per level health regeneration. Very useful skill!
- The circle skills all have pretty dramatic effects that create a lot of lag when multiple units are caught up in them. I highly recommend turning down Effects Detail in settings if you play warden/demonologist and are experiencing lag.

Monster Enhancement Line Changes:

Stoneskin 3 = 300% now. (down from 375%) (Going to omit % signs from now on).
Berserker = 100/200/300
Warior = 75/150/225
Wealth = 200/500/1000
Slayer = 50 dmg, 5 crit / 10 dmg, 20 crit / 150 dmg, 15 crit
Stalker = .125 ms / .25 / .5
Ancient = 250 hp and phys (down from 350% to both)
Executioner = Has 50% chance to critically hit. 50% base damage buff (down from 125%).
Arch-Nem = Buffed all around by just a tad.

General/Misc:

- Recruits now always have 8 skills (Ok, very rarely they have 7... don't know why but still, close enough. Also, beware... this makes enemy clans harder as well!).
- Monsters lower than rank 10 now grow in size at a much slower rate while rank 11+ monsters become bigger faster than before. And, wind up with a much bigger size (so you can identify them as serious threats!)
- Selling to vendors has been buffed substantially. Though, it's still far better to sell to clans. Still looking into how to reduce value of player offers in trades.
- Combat experience mod on items starts at 20% and scales up to 100% now. (No combat exp is just too painful, especially ever since I made exp requirements higher at levels 40/60/80. Quests still work, but I felt forced to do only quests for exp. And, honestly, I felt heavily incentivized to cheese quests (like pull high level mobs into clans to get quest completion). This is for the best.)
- Different regions now spawn higher tier mobs at different rates. Plains = Low, Tropics/Forest = Medium, Desert = High, Dungeon = Godly. I also fixed some formatting errors with my spawn file that I don't know how I missed. And, last, the 'higher end' high tier mobs (rank 13-15) now taper off on spawn rate a bit, so they are rarer in plains and there is more rank diversity in dungeons. As for tropics/desert, they are inbetween. GL!

Patch Comments:

While playing a couple of characters up to level 20, the gameplay felt very smooth. I feel like the balance is getting very close to what I want. There is a lot of strategic decision making for players to make regarding threats to face versus avoid. The damage on monster enhancements is more level, espcially the warrior and slayer enchants which were both kind of nuts. These will help a lot with slowing down the multiplicative damage stacking on higher tier mobs by a lot. Though, there are still plenty of deadly combinations that can spawn and kill you face. The larger size of higher tier mobs will help a lot with identifying threats.

I was tempted to go overboard and recreate subclasses to a greater extent like I did with Super Hero, but decided against it until the expansion. Or, maybe I'll just wait until the next game. I'm starting to feel pretty damn content with the mod. Each playthrough is turning out to be quite a lot of fun and the number of hybrid class combinations that I want to try to get to level 100 is really exciting.

We'll see what the future holds. Gonna do more playtesting tomorrow.

[( Tchey )]

Originally Posted by Destro*

Alpha v0.0.8 Patch

Buff Revamps:

Self-Cast Buffs now work in an entirely different way now. They all last forever (yay!), but they now drain mana over time.

What about "reserved mana" instead of a drain ?

You cast your buff and you spend mana for it, it's not free.

Then your mana pool is reduced by % not flat amount (ie -20% max mana).

Then the buff last until you die.

So, maybe at first, the buff needs 30%, and when you invest point into it, it's less : 29, 28, 27... until minimum 10% reserved mana. Or even have a new passive to reduce this.

[Destro*]

@( Tchey )

I think percent mana reservation would be great. But, as far as I'm aware, there is no % mana reservation variable. The only mana reservation variable that I see is the flat version that Dark Templar has.

And, having a passive to reduce mana reservation as a whole would entail making mana reservation its own stat (like status effect duration, etc.). It would be an interesting system, but would be a suggestion nonetheless. And, I try to avoid making 'benefit my mod only' type suggestions.

Maybe in the next game it will make an appearance though! For now, I'll still be brainstorming. The current system works well enough. Even though they don't auto-cancel, you pretty much have to cancel them or you can't use skills. Unless you're an auto-attacker only (like a shapeshifted creature).

Edit:

Alpha v0.0.9 Patch

A small hotfix patch.

- Areas were a 'tad' too peaceful, so I made higher ranks spawn a bit more frequently again. (I think it's a lot better now... again... :>)
- Also, I made the posession transformation skill non-permanent again. Ideally, I'd like them to be permanent and cost mana to sustain like other self-buffs, because right now you just cast them and then log off and back on to cancel out the effect (Again, I want to minimize cheesy tactics). But, since you can't cancel the transformation by recasting the skill, this won't work. And, that's because of the 'can't use other skills' flag. I could set that flag to false, but then they would be OP and I think nerfing them a bit so that I could actually take off that flag would water the transformations down.
- After playing with item prices again for about 30 minutes or so, I gave up and set prices back to vanilla. In the end, the changes that I thought was making were just making the game easier. I can't seem to find a way to change the way clans percieve value or create a disparity in price between cheaper and more expensive items no matter how much I try. Even making items worth less overall is a problem because of how that ties to vendor and quest system. So... yeah. Economic updates will have to be on hold until round 3.
- Cleaned up a couple of files.

[Destro*]

Just a small announcement.

I plan to have maybe 1-2 more alpha releases. Then, I'll do the beta release and then the final release. Hopefully, the final release is finished by this weekend. But, if not, I intend to have it out next weekend.

I feel that I've got a pretty firm grasp of the changes that I want and made most of them already. I could go continue to add changes (like maybe add some quests), but I kind of want to wait for the expansion to come up and perhaps let this mod gain some popularity before continuing on it. (I know that frequent changes can make 'diving in' to the mod difficult.)

My last alpha releases will be focused on class changes once again. And, there will be a much heavier focus on fine-tuning damage and defenses.

As much as I hate to say it, the 3.5 damage multiplier in champion difficulty is too high *sob*. I do think that the 1.5 multiplier is too low, so I will need to tweak the value rigorously. I haven't experimented with damage taken vs. damage dealt very seriously because everything was being experimented on. But, I will be doing that for many hours this weekend. (Essentially I'll be testing various builds at level 20, 40, 60 and 80 to see how strong they are with bad/good/great and perfect gear).

Soooo yeah. Good progress coming ahead with some cool innovations as we head into release.

edit: 5/14/2017: Just want to note that an update probably won't be coming out this weekend. But, I can guarantee that the next update will be the biggest update as of yet with the most edits and the most major game changes. It will be exciting to release for sure.

edit: 5/20/2017: No patch again this weekend. Damage testing and rebalancing is a lot more time and effort than I expected. Thankfully, I've managed to setup a test mod file by this point that lets me change key variables pretty quickly to really speed up my test speed. Armor/Resist/Accuracy are practically done being calculated now. I have just have Defense to do and then I can actually start working on Life/Mana and finally Damage rebalancing. After that, I just have to do some final balanced on gems/relics and then rebalance prices for the newly changed mods. I'm also going to do some testing on adding a few new potions as well, which could be a huge way to incentivize not logging out to cheese since you would lose their effects. These potions won't be cheap... they will be expensive and rare (that value mult flag is going way up!)! We'll see how that works out!

(Also using console for a change (who knew) and a few other tools to assist in testing).

edit: 5/29/2017 (Morning): No patch this weekend. I finished up all of the balance of res/def/accuracy/defense, etc. Took a long time and a lot of testing to get right. But, I did it! Now, I'm just going through all the classes and applying my 'class rework' document. It's quite a daunting task, but I'm getting through it. I finally finished Warrior and Rouge reworks. And now I just have to do the Priest rework. The other classes won't be reworked as heavily as these three are being, so once I get done with Priest, that's the bulk of my work. (Warrior/Rouge just needed love to be viable. As for Priest, I'm reworking it cause it'll be cool/fun )

edit: 5/29/2017 (Evening): WHEW! Finally finished priest. Talk about a monster... but it was so worth it! I really can't wait to play around with the monk class. Suppression seems so good... Probably will be an actual patch next weekend.

edit: 6/3/2017: Well. Did it! Managed to get pretty much all major class changes completed. I just have to do my sweep on health/damage and mana costs and then, well, that's it for class balance. The rest of the stuff that I'll have to do will be much more simple. Though, I might end up getting held up by art.

edit: 6/3/2017 (Evening): It's almost hard to believe, but, "Alpha 2.0" (if you will) l is almost ready. The last three items on my check list are:

- Choose art, animations and effects of all new skills.
- Add more new potions.
- Play test balance.

I do want to make some more unique & artifact items. But, I'm going to wait until the expansion first and see how that goes.

I can say with 99% confidence that my update is being released tomorrow. Look forward to it! Lots of really exciting stuff coming with it.

[Destro*]

Alpha v0.0.10 is out now! GO PLAY AND HAVE FUN!

Patch Notes are here: https://pastebin.com/UrSmyKWD
(They are too big to post on forum, so yeah).

Download link is on the front page as usual.

Edit: I forgot to spell check my patch notes. So, I did a re-upload with spell checked patch notes. Pastebin patch notes will be not spell checked though. *shrug*. And, I never did test balance of spells again. But, well, it's probably fine. Spells were pretty reasonable in the past. I doubt they are suddenly crappy or overpowered. I'll have that tested for beta anyway. Need to do more testing all around anyway. (Always testing)

[( Tchey )]

Impressive work. I didn't play it yet, but reading the note was already fun !

[Destro*]

Thanks for the positive feedback.

There are still a few big issues with balance. But, I don't think I can really ever deal with them. So, I'm going to have to settle for a lot of things in the end.

Mage vs. melee dps itemization is... rough.
Minions having multiplicative scaling from item mods is... very rough. Minion aggro control is kind of op too.

I don't think that I can ever really balance these things without some more extreme changes or a few requests to Shadow. But, well, I'm pretty satisfied with the results so far. My play throughs feel really fun and difficult. At least, the difficult part exists when I don't play a summon based build, haha.

In any case, once I get to beta, I'll probably post on the Steam Forums as well.

[Destro*]

Release v1.0 is now out.

Full patch notes are in the download and also: https://pastebin.com/Mey1WdcH

Here is a preview:

Zombasite More Mod - An Overhaul Mod
Release Version 1.0

We did it! At long last, this mod is finally finished!

This mod is the result of probably somewhere between 100-150 hours of development and playtesting over the course of 2 months. A small project for me, but one with big results!

The changes in this release patch specifically are the culmination of my testing of the game over the past couple of weeks. I made it a goal to play every class until I felt confident in knowing its true power. And, I also made it a goal to use every skill in the game at least once.

The results of this were incredible. Skills that I thought were useless actually have really strong mechanics. Combined with the changes I had made while modding, some turned out to be nuts. For example, Death Rune is actually nuts. Huge AoE damage that goes through walls. It’s actually bonkers. Same goes for Stealth. It gives so much bonus physical damage per point invested... and its damage buff lingers. Really strong. These skills were just overlooked by me historically since I hate rouges and didn't think that that the Reaper sub-class was that good. But now that I've tried out a lot of these niche skills and combos on chars, I've managed to get a taste for the true power level of all classes.

All of the classes will now feel really good to play to the extent that almost every random hybrid combination should feel very solid and entirely playable. And, if you have a need that a skill can meet, then it will almost always feel really good to invest into that skill and acquire it. There are now hundreds of new builds to play that are competitive and hardcore-viable; which is an extremely big deal for hardcore enthusiasts as there is really only one competitive and hardcore-viable build in the vanilla game; Conjurer. Now, you can easily make a build with another class that is as good as or in some cases even better than a Conjurer, which is something that really can't even happen in the vanilla game. Again, the goal was to make it so that you could feel good about playing pretty much any random hybrid combination at the character creation screen, so the power levels between classes have been brought way closer together while letting their individual strengths shine.

So, I end my introductions with this. If you enjoy Zombasite or if you don't. If you have complaints with the base game or just want to try something different. Regardless of the reason, I highly recommend checking out this mod at least once and seeing how it plays. It's a brand-new experience, one that you likely won't regret.

[....]

[( Tchey )]

Great job, i enjoyed following your progress reports.

Now i only need time to play it.

I guess you will update it when Zombasite expands ?