Hey guys, submitting patch 1.4 tonight. Here's the change log: New Character: Added 26th character - the Halfling Thief. A small but tenacious warrior armed with deadly throwing knives and excellent support skills. Enhancement: New team selection options that now include 4 pre-built teams with their own history and lore (in addition to the option of choosing your party from all characters). Enhancement: New voice clips for all player characters that play when key events occur such as critical hits, arrival of enemies, entering a dungeon, etc. Enhancement: New sound effects for all special effects and missiles. Enhancement: Added a game activity log that lists recent events such as hits, damage inflicted, skills performed, etc. Enhancement: Added audible footstep sounds to all units. Enhancement: Decreased loading times between levels. Bug Fix: Fixed bug that would sometimes cause player characters to not respond to user input at the start of a new level. Bug Fix: Removed exploit that would allow players to steal items from the vendor. Bug Fix: Mind Controlling the final enemy of a level and then killing him while mind controlled will no longer prevent the "Leave Area" button to appear at the end of a level. Bug Fix: Fixed bug where sometimes the vendor shop would not show up when clicking "enter shop". Balance: Reduced effectiveness of missile attacks (critical chance and hit chance). Balance: Increased melee hit chance of all player characters by 5 - 10%. Balance: Reduced melee and missile hit chance of some lower level enemy units by 5 - 10%. Balance: Removed all extra attack traits from missile equipment. Balance: Added unique equipment options for gnome, walking cannon, elf archer, centaur and elf ranger. Balance: Adjusted ability effects to reduce effectiveness of those that grant additional attacks to other units.
I'm a bit afraid that this update will nerf ranged characters too much. Between nerfing missile hit and crit chance removing even more attacks could be devastating to ranged classes. My Archer already got a HUGE nerf and went from 10 attacks to 3 in the latest patch, this patch would reduce her attacks to 2 making her pretty useless once she runs out of AP. My ranger would also have 2 attacks after this patch.
Possibly too far in the other direction? Might be right. I could perhaps leave the attack benefits on the magic bows and so on. One change I made though was that items that give extra attacks typically don't give much else. So players now have to choose between a magic sword that gives an extra attack vs. a magic sword that gives +5 damage and + 10% hit chance. Missile weapons lost the extra attacks but gained something else like greater hit chance, critical chance or something like that. I'm also creating some new item types (arrows, gun powder, etc.) that should boost missile damage stats that can be carried in the missile unit's other hand. I really want to tone down missile units heavily though because the game should be about movement and positioning. Missile units have a huge advantage in that they can target who they want to kill over a wide area. They can pick off the wizard in the back or deliver the killing blow to several wounded warriors in different parts of the battle. A melee fighter has to move and then kill whatever's he's in contact with ... it's a much more limiting scenario for them. However, what I'll do is go and add the new item types (magic arrows, gunpowder, etc.) and then add some more bow / gun variants that grant extra attacks too before this release hits. I want to reach a middle ground where missile attacks are useful but going entirely missile focussed would be a bad tactical choice and where one needs a mix of fighters and missile units to be most effective.
First of all, thank you again for the continued updates and support on your game. Two more suggestions that i have while playing the game : 1) Add a short message of what an ability does, and confirm to use it or cancel when you click on an ability and its target. - That way, you know instantly what it does and you dont use it by mistake. The lore can be in the character description Ie. instead of "archers have trained endlessly to ... ... causes 2-5 damage on all enemy targets within range" Just keep the last part, and add a confirm, use it or cancel after selecting target. 2) And most important, the reaction animations are off in timing, coming too slow. Ie. My character hits, misses or kills its target. The target hit miss or being killed animation comes 1-2 seconds later. I think it is jarring. Could you improve that? so it feels more like they are really fighting and less like a board game.
Hey guys .... any reports on whether iOS 9 breaks anything in the game? I don't have a testing device I can update at the moment with me as I'm travelling. Would love to know if anything breaks or not.
Thanks for the feedback, as always. I don't think I'll be changing anything here. A player should know what their abilities do after the first few times so I don't think you need to be reminded. It's a turn-based game so they can read what the item does from the tooltip that appears when you hold down the ability button before hand. I think the UI is mostly good enough and I need to focus on new content and other things like a better tutorial and better game balance. I think the death animation feels off because it plays the "get hit" animation first and then the death animation. Would probably be better to just play the death animation only if the attack is enough to kill the unit. I don't think the miss / parry animation is off personally ... seems fine to me.
Do you mind checking if you can create a new party property? I'm worried about the character screen being too heavy from a RAM perspective on 1GB devices under the new OS since I believe a lot has changed on the memory management side of things.
Created 4 different parties. Played quest, 1 or 2 moves. No issues. I'm on iPad Air, graphics settings all on.
THIS, THIS a thousand times THIS. While it might not be a problem on iPad it is SO easy to accidentally use abilities even on a 6+! It doesn't happen all the time but often enough to be REALLY frustrating and even forcing me to restart the whole encounter a few times. There really is no good reason to not implement this.
The problem is that I think some people who are used to it would just find it annoying to have one more step or button to click once they are used to it. I'm pretty I wouldn't enjoy adding another button press for every ability ... especially as I'm using 5 or 6 abilities a turn. Just so I understand, are you saying you'd want want a dialogue box to pop up that says "are you sure you want to preform X ability?" with a yes or no button every time you click an ability button or select a target for a targetable ability?
Yep, I hate the 'are you really sure' you want to do this dialog boxes. Best to make a optional item that you can either turn on or off.
Yes ... for now. I'm working on some new levels that will continue the story. Those will come via an update. Hopefully the next big patch ... v1.5. Version 1.4 patch is sitting with Apple at the moment. Can I get a confirmation that there is a bug in version 1.3 for the vendor? Apparently the vendor doesn't work anymore with the v1.3 patch? If so, I might ask Apple to rush the version 1.4 patch since that's a pretty big bug.
My first post is for you Wave Light. Love your game, love the way you interact with your players. Keep going!! I confirm that the shop is totally broken since version1.3 (I can't see what the vendor has to sell) and I am waiting impatiently for v1.4. Too bad you fixed the capability to steal from the vendor, I was cheating shamelessly Some feedbacks regarding treasures: - Drop from killed creatures should be more frequent. - Rewards at the end of each act should be in line with the class of the characters.
Can you please tell me what will be your perfect team? So far, I have: - the Dragon Slayer (strong and robust) - the Centaur (fast, can use sword and bow) - the Gnome (trap setting and sniper) - the Archer (my strongest character, she can kill anything so I only use her at last resort) - the Tree (can buff party, damage taker, but too slow) - the Healer (my weakest character so far). As the v1.4 will nerf archer, I am considering replacing the Archer with the Ranger (more versatile, can do melee and can heal). So with Dragon Slayer, Gnome, Centaur, Ranger I have 2 slots left. Any idea of class that could complement this party?
Yes thats exactly what I'm saying. Then make an option to turn it on or off in the options menu. Problem solved.
Okay, I'll take a look. It's in a pretty tricky section of code though so probably not an easy fix. I'll see what it might involve and see if it's feasible.
