Thanks, the update sounds good! I am intrigued by the idea of character classes, each class could start the game with a specific skill or upgraded attribute or piece of gear. Perhaps a Wizard could start the game with the Fireball spell, with a possible penalty of no access to "sword" spells or lower starting shield rating. Personally I would tweak the Fireball and Slash spells as aimed instead of random and have Slash take out one row and one column.perhaps have high level boss monsters be damaged instead of destroyed so the spells are not overpowered. Also worth considering is tweaking the lower powered one turn spells to last 2 or 3 turns...gives someone an incentive to pick it up. I don't know if this would totally destroy game balance but how about the ability ( either innate or class specific) to "forget" a spell to clear the spot so that another random spell can be memorized! I would put a heavy penalty in place (such as no spell can be relearned for X number of levels or turns or that NO spells can be used until a new one is memorized) to keep it fair. Heck you could even introduce an amnesia monster that would erase a random skill if not destroyed within X number of turns. Having your Dazzle taken away would be a nightmare!
First, I don't think we need a 5th skill. I do think that skills need to level up though with enhanced features like we have talked about before though. Here is my take on most of the skills based on hardest level play Banish - good Big Game Hunter - you could never give up a slot on hardest for this even if you wanted to for some reason Boost Armor - Solid consideration if you are going for a defensive strategy. Not usually a first choice, but I am not upset to take it. Boost Damage - I would rather have magic sword usually Boost Gold - waste of a slot Boost health - I usually take a few points of luck. I have never actually tried this instead. Seems limited though to me. Counterattack - Although interesting in concept, why would you take this over disarm? If you were up to level 5 or 6 and had nothing to sweep the board yet, maybe Dazzle - Still one of my favorites Disarm - Another one of the best skills Earthquake - waste of a slot. Enchant - still a great skill Exorcise - Would rather have banish, but this works Explosive Armor - Similar to counterattack, and probably not as powerful later in the game. Explosive Potions - Potions are best for health or EXP. Blowing them up is a waste of a good potion. Fireball - worthless without the ability to target it. Freeze - It can buy you one turn, but in most situations where you would use this, there are a few other skills you would want. I think this should be like a % chance to break the freeze each turn. So freeze all skulls, and each turn each skull rolls a 50% to unfreeze? Or maybe a 3 turn freeze. Golden Touch - lol Heal - Good skill. I think it should start at 15 turn CD, but no big deal. Magic Sword - I like this skill. it is often limited, but pairs really nicely with either Dazzle or Disarm. I generally won't take it before I have one of those. Mana Potion - Kind of like explosive potion, you need potions for either health or exp. Repair - Good skill. Like Heal I think it should start at 15 turn CD. Scavenge - I don't ever want to convert swords to anything. They are just fine being swords. Maybe early game this might be helpful, but that locks up a spell slot that you need for late game when this is worthless. Shatter - I want to like this. Every once in a while I try it...but generally wish I had something else. Skill Elixer - I like this, but I find I really need to get to about 5-6 luck if I have this. So good balance, can often be the death of me. Slash - lol lol Steal - no need for this Teleport - One of the big three with Disarm and Dazzle. If you have all three you are golden Trap - ummmm, what if no skulls fall? You just wasted a slot and 20 turns. Treasure - If this comes up and I don't have dazzle, I will take it, You need to have a way to sweep coins. Treasure Chamber - I generally want to clear coins. Here is my idea for a new skill - Deal with a Dwarf - All coins are randomly changed into swords and shields.
I'd agree with everything that's been said, particularly about the fifth slot. I still wouldn't take a skill like say Earthquake which I really like and might have saved me in some games because at the moment I often aim for Enchant, Teleport, Skill Elixir then either Dazzle or Disarm (maybe Banish if I was recently burned by a Spiky boss or a Mage, hehe). So given one extra slot, I'll still only take one of the ones on my top list rather than something further down. Given eight slots, I probably still wouldn't take Slash! (Poor Slash...) This is a bit of a rough idea, but what about having skills grouped into tiers? Only one Tier 1 ability from the likes of Earthquake, Slash etc., one Tier 2 ability from...hmm, Shatter, Repair, Explosive Armour maybe, one Tier 3 from things like Mana Potion, Magic Sword, Banish, and one Tier 4 from Teleport, Dazzle, Enchant etc. I know, I'm scared at the thought of only having one of the best abilities! The game isn't really balanced for it. Maybe not, it's a rough thought, but might make comparing skills a bit more interesting...the thing is Earthquake is so situational, so random, I'd use it once as a once-off if I had it on a scroll or something in the hopes it'd save me, but hard to give up a slot for it. Someone brought up replacing skills, which is interesting. I'd even take Slash to push me along a bit at Level 1 if I thought I could replace it with something better later. More on Earthquake, because I'm obssessed with that skill for some reason, it'd be really powerful if it grouped all the like tiles together. Could set up some awesome combos with it. After nitpicking so much, have to mention at the end how much I love this game, it's great!
Weird potential Earthquake ideas! It could have a really short time out time and even damage baddies IF it also damaged the player when used! The idea here is that one of the main effects of leveling it up could be not so much a reduction in cool-down time but reducing the player's own damage when using the skill so at higher levels the player takes minimal damage and it hits monsters harder. I know this might just make a niche power even less useful but I love the concept of trade-offs (lots of good should have a slight annoying side-effect).
I'm in the middle of my first game (level 110 so far) and I gotta say: this game is amazing. Just fun and fantastic and so, so smart. A couple comments, based on not even yet having finished a game! 1) Spiky skulls seem too hard They're the only ones I fear. Right now, nothing can possibly kill me except for these buggers. Maybe it should be 50% of the damage you deal? Or 75%? Or maybe it's capped and won't reduce your life below a certain level? 2) Bonus gold is so, so terrible 3) Dazzle is so, so good 4) It looks as if having maxed out your skills, then enchanting an item with Quick does nothing. As in, doesn't further decrease the cooldown. Is this the case? 5) At least 30% of the time or so, it's not really worth upgrading. Seems a little odd to me. 6) The game was really easy for the first 20 levels or so, then quite hard for a long while. Then, around level 60 or so, it got absurdly easy (this is all on normal). Currently, I don't think I can die. I haven't used Teleport in something like 70 levels. 7) All the level up choices now are basically useless except for +life/vit and +str/dmg. Most of the rest of CHA, Dex/shield, etc are either max or no longer provide even incremental benefit. I resorted to (gasp!) maxxing out Bonus Gold. Gah! 8) And consequently, I'm bored of the current game. I'm anxious to start another, but I don't want to quit my first game partway through. 9) I love the range and uniqueness of the tough-guy skulls. Or whatever you'd call the ones that aren't just normal neck hats.
Just start a new game at a higher difficulty level. Its not abandoning a game, its moving on to a more challenging one now that your current game has gone stale.
Haha. I did what you advised, and, even on normal difficulty, can't get past level 10. Tried a half dozen times. How embarrassing. I think being so bulked up in my first game lulled me into not thinking more strategically about which icons I was clearing. I do have to say, though, that based on the spells I've seen so far...there are some pretty weak ones. Some of them are straight up weaker versions of others, too. (Freeze vs Counterattack for example, unless I'm missing something)
I'd agree with that comment about the spiky skulls, they're so difficult to deal with. I'll banish them or teleport away if I can...otherwise, you can try to chip away, hit a bit, heal up, hit again, but that's not always possible. Possibly the best strategy is to fight fire with fire and use your own spikes to kill him (can be a slow process) or use blunting to reduce his damage to 1 (since the spike damage seems to be connected to his attack value). Or a combination of the two. Can be a long time to have a hard hitting boss on the board though. Mages can be deadly if they catch you at the wrong time. The one that converts swords to skulls, if you can't get him right away, can be hard to recover from. A Corrosive boss caught me out once when I was relying on spikes and blunting a lot in one game, but they're usually okay. (Random thought, I wonder if it'd be useful to keep a Thief boss around to clear coins out for you, hehe)
Given up on harder...300 turns and your done. Now hard...have a game where LITERALLY EVERYTHING HAS GONE RIGHT and at level 34 I am still tense as *&^! and have had several CLOSE calls. I have teleport down to an 11 turn cooldown, 95% armor durability, enchant, disarm and potions to XP. Potions to XP is no longer routinely usable, wish I could trade it out, but it made a big difference in getting me where I am. I figure it I can survive to level 50-60 I'll have teleport down to 5 or 6, which should make survival fairly trivial. But getting there is going to be TENSE. Edit: Nope, died on 39. Got a little behind on the damage curve, 3 swords to kill normal skulls. With no damage doubler, bosses became almost impossible to kill. So I needed to routinely burn my teleport to get rid of harder bosses...it was only a matter of time before a bad drop gave me more bosses then I could handle. I probably could have played a little more conservatively and maybe lived, dont know. I still think that if I could have gotten teleport to 6 or so I might have been able to play infinitely, but I'm not sure about that.
Help I just recently purchased this game after reading the reviews. I am happy with it, however, I am not able to survive near as long as others on this board. My highest level is 8 on hard. I was wondering if anyone could provide tips to help me get higher. For example, what stat/item should I upgrade first and is +STR or +HP more important. I know the spells that seem to be more important than others, but they rarely occur for me. Also, are some stats/spells currently broken? It seems some upgrades provide no effect, such as leeching and repair. Thanks for any help.
Yes, I have no idea how people survive way past me. I always die with a score around 3.5k. Maybe it's the difficulty setting?
I'm sure you'll get lots of different feedback but I'll tell you what I aim for, may not be the best idea but a place to start! Someone earlier was pointing out that the difficulty curve seems to be based on turns, so especially early on it's worth doing the biggest matches you can, even leaving weak skulls around for a bit or matching more swords than you need to keep the fresh stuff rolling in. Item upgrades are tricky...I think my number one pick is item durability, then spikes or blunting...can't remember what else there is, maybe I need to mock up a list of them too! Strength is great, +1 damage and more XP rolled into one. As a rule, I'll take damage upgrades whenever I can, have to keep ahead of the damage curve. Because of that I tend to avoid enchanting my weapon as it has the highest turnover (and the item trade-in is hardly ever fair >.<). And because of that, I haven't taken life leech much. I think it might look like nothing is happening because a 5% enchant would mean you'd get 1 life for a hit of 20 damage, so you'd see no benefit at low levels and almost no benefit later...it's usually a powerful ability in other games, healing yourself while doing damage...maybe if you could stack it to say 20% it would really kick in, but it only seems to appear on weapons, which is a pain. I'm a big fan of the percentages, I'll take Vitality's +5 HP, +5% potion chance over +10 HP for example. I think the percents are worth more in the long run and probably key to pushing yourself over and above the curve. So life leech should be an awesome upgrade in that it's self-scaling. With spikes you're constantly having to build them higher to get the sam effect, but life leech as percenter does that for you...just lacks some punch. I'm inspired to have a go at stacking that now! Anyway there's just some random thoughts, may come back with more later!
I agree with at least 95% of what Anthem said. The single most important thing is making the biggest possible matches when the game is still in the easy early turns, even if that means ignoring skulls for a while. Basically, the more tiles you cycle, the more skulls you will be killing (and coins and shields collected) before the game reaches a turn number where its hard. Upgrades/enchants: Weapon dps > anything except durability and possibly, at times, blunting. Strength is a poor substitute for weapon dps, doing half the damage as an upgrade in dps in a typical 2 sword attack. Of course, strength does even less against bosses. Durability is awesome in the middle game because it makes your armor really mean something. 60 or 70% durability wont help you all that much, but with 95% durability (the max), your armor points will never fall much. Because durability seems to always appear on chest armor, I plan on almost never trading my chest armor in at the store, and stack any useful enchants I can get on it. I do the same with my shield, and freely trade helmet and weapon at the store. 95% durability on normal might allow infinite play. On hard, it helps a lot, for a while, but eventually stops being enough. Once you get to level 35 or so on hard, bosses are hitting for 50+ health a turn, so the fact that your 25-35 points of armor are mostly all there isnt the massive thing it is on normal. Blunting is really really good once you have enough armor and durability -- it only works when you have at least 1 point of armor. Each point of blunting reduces the skulls attack value by that much each turn. Its an important part of achieving infinite play on normal. Again, on hard, its just not really enough once bosses are hitting for 50+ to reduce its attack value by 5 or so every turn. Sure, it helps, its important, but its not enough. I *always* take blunting on chest or shield and never give blunting points away via store trade ins. Spikes: Good, but not great, particularly on hard or harder. For example, in my recent lvl 39 hard game, it was totally impossible to kill 300+ health bosses with 4-5 spikes. What spikes mostly do is provide help when your in the grey zone where normal skulls cant be killed with 2 swords. If your falling behind the dps curve, spikes definitely can help. But I'd max durability and take weapon dps and blunting before spikes. Poison: Obviously inferior to spikes. To add insult to injury, it only appears on your weapon, and the store currently still screws you on upgrades. Thus its way down on the list. Life Leach: Would be great if the store didnt screw you on upgrades. As it is, take any of the good upgrades over this. Armor Piercing: Not entirely and totally useless, but it would be my absolute last choice. You want to kill normal skulls in one attack XP per skull, upgrades per shield and gold per coin upgrades: Until the store is fixed, avoid the gold per coin one. I do like to collect some up per shield (I prefer this to xp per skull but its close), but it takes a while to get you even a single addtional upgrade, and you wont likely be playing long enough on harder to even break even. On hard you might be able to play long enough for this to be profitable, and on normal they will really help you pull ahead of the curve in the long run. Repair: Once durability is high enough, you dont need high repair. Its important to get repair up from 1 asap, but dont over do it. Eventually, you'll get all the repair you need at level up, its better to not take it via the store or upgrades. Luck: Important to get more health per potion. Initial upgrades to luck are vital as the difference between 1 and 3 is HUGE. The difference between 6 and 7 is not quite as big, so the importance of luck varies. Nonetheless, its important. Changes to %'s: What's 5%? There are almost always better things to take that help you survive more, except sometimes at level up. Health: You need a certain amount to survive as DPS increases. However, you cant ignore defense and blunting, or no amount of health will save you. If you consider health a middle of the road choice, you'll probably get enough health. For skill choices, you need skills from 2 classes: upgrade boosters and survability boosters, and there are a few misc that can help. Upgrade Boosters: potions into xp, enchanting and double shield turn in value all have their advantages. Potions to XP stops being safe to use on "hard" after a while, whereas enchanting and double shield turn in stay useful. I assume/believe double shield stacks with +up per shield. You want at least one from this category, and 2 is also reasonable, if not necessarily better. Three would most likely be too many. Survival Boosters: teleport > all. The one that totally gets rid of bosses is good. The skill that totally gets rid of skulls is also very good. None of the others are good enough to take -- I'd wait. Preferably I'd have two from this category, although teleport + say dazzle (see below) would also be ok. Misc Useful: double damage is pretty good, as is the 5x sword damage. Dazzle is very very good at helping you survive once you fall off the damage curve or against powerful bosses. I've taken double healing potions, but would not rank it with the others.
While some skills will just ALWAYS be more handy than others, I do sure hope FireFlame figures out a way to make many of the seemingly less useful (aka Freeze or Thief) into something viable. Even if it means that the skills START in their present forms but, via sufficient leveling, will eventually acquire useful little side-effects (like with Freeze making it where the monsters don't thaw out the next turn 100% of the time but only have a chance of thawing each turn which, early on, might be 100%, but with sufficient leveling could be brought down to 50% or less).
It might also be interesting to allow one to swap skills at the expense of using a level up choice on picking the replacement skill. This might make certain skills that are currently aweful viable for a time with no improvement, or viable with a more modest improvement then would otherwise be necessary. For example, probably no one is going to want the drop extra 1 hp skulls skill or the spawn boss skill in the long run, and they would need a massive bump to even be tempting as permanent skill choices. But give em a bit of a tweak, and they might be a tempting rental if they come up very early. There would be some strategy changes/enhancements even with good skills. For example, potions for XP doesnt have long term viability at hard or harder.
Okay, I've now played many dozens of games. Mostly on normal, but plenty on hard and harder (which is absurdly difficult...so much so that I often don't fill all four skill slots!) I wanted to share a few thoughts / ideas re: skills. First of all, Teleport and Dazzle are so far beyond the other skills, it's not even funny. As in, I won't even make it onto my high score list without at least one of those two. The benefits of Teleport are multifoliate. But the thing that, to me, makes them the two strongest spells is that both create swords. This is huge, imo. Eventually, unless you screw up and die early, you'll fall behind the damage curve. You'll need two, then three or more swords to kill a normal skull. That's the beginning of the end. So creating swords is a huge advantage, especially when doing so also clears either skulls (teleport) or coins (dazzle). Disarm is great for the same reason: it creates swords. But: don't you dare nerf these. These are great examples of what all the skills' power level should be. Many of the skills available feel like fun little perks. Cantrips and level 0 spells and whotnot. They're handy, but they're not going to shape the game in a truly meaningful way except in very specific circumstances. What I love about Puzzle Quest is that so many of the spells have a huge effect on the battlefield. This makes for some really dramatic moments, some memorable moves, and a real sense of empowerment. So: do more of that! Anyway, rather than talk through some bullshit theories, I wanted to suggest a few skills that exemplify what I'm talking about: Vengeance: Clears all coins, potions and shields. (as opposed to 'collects') Paranoia: Converts all coins and potions to shields. Hyperinflation: No coins spawn for five turns (15 turn cooldown, upgradable to 5) The Red Button: Collects the board. (collects all icons, but skulls aren't weeded out from the replacement spawns) Soulless: Collects all skulls. You lose half your life. Transmute: (short cooldown) Converts potions and shields to coins. (Dazzle combo! ) Wither: All skulls lose their armor and HP. Hellmouth: All new tiles are skulls or swords (3 turns). (To set up huge XP chains) MacGyver: Any one icon type can be used, as if it were a sword, to clear skulls (3 turns). Blink: (long cooldown) Take an extra turn. Rest: (longish cooldown) Refills armor and life. Rage: Triples base damage (3 turns). Enslave: The strongest skull attacks each other skull on the board while sparing you (3 turns). Barricade: (20 cooldown) All tiles spawn as shields (3 turns). Violence: Converts potions to skulls and shields to swords. Pacifism: Converts skulls to shields and swords to potions. In general: I think the dev should strongly consider more longer duration skills. They make for interesting combos!
Great post! ^ Teleport and Dazzle (and I love banish) are incredibly useful. I sometimes just quit if I don't get them early on. And THAT shows a slightly skewed game design if you ask me. Hopefully the developer can modify the game and get rid of less useful perks!
I dont think Dazzle is so clearly better than enchanting, shield up, potions per xp, or the skills that get rid of all skulls or a boss. Plus, a "nerf" to Dazzle is coming via the promised fix to the store, making coins more valuable.
