More Cleric Work! | Patreon Weekly #294 (Patreon)

Hey Patrons, in this fairly lengthy weekly I’m going to share more final designs for the Paladin and Trinity! Trinity ended up taking longer than expected, so I’m shifting slightly to releasing the Paladin first.

Firstly, here are the results from Patreon Poll #61:
66%: Releasing The Cleric
41%: Warrior Improvements
27%: Misc. Improvements
69%: City Quest
24%: Hero Lore
31%: 3rd Caves Quest
22%: In-Game Art
25%: Halls Quest
49%: More Subclasses
39%: Endless Mode
37%: Alt Paths?
17%: Something New?
Not a lot to say here, the results line up almost exactly with my expectations. People are more excited for new content, and generally more excited for things that are higher up the list or more precisely defined. I’m pretty happy with the order I’ve laid things out in: a nice mix of smaller detailed improvements in between high-demand heavy-hitter updates. I will say that the pixel art improvements are a bit lower than I expected, but you guys have also been getting a lot of details on that over here for a while now.

There’s also a new Shattered Secrets this week. In this Shattered Secrets I’m going to go into some more detail about the rough plans I have for Warrior changes!

Finally, there’ll be an audio Q&A next week! Jeez how is the month mostly over already? You can ask questions here or in the Patreon discord.

Paladin

Firstly, the Paladin is just around the corner, and I’ve got all their abilities pretty much finalized! Here’s a quick little runthrough. Firstly the innate abilities:

• Holy Weapon and Ward: the direct effect of these spells is tripled, they no longer override enchants/glyphs, and casting other spells extends the duration of these ones by 10 turns per charge spent.

• Smite (2 charges): The Paladin infuses a melee strike with righteous destructive power. In addition to dealing normal melee damage, smite is guaranteed to hit, has +300% enchantment power, and deals 5+lvl/2 to 10+lvl bonus magic damage. Smite will always deal maximum bonus magic damage against undead or demonic foes.

And the three talent spells:

• Lay on Hands (1 charge): The Paladin channels holy energy through their hands, healing or protecting whatever they touch. The Paladin can cast this spell on any adjacent character to instantly give them 10/15/20 healing, or on themselves to instantly gain 10/15/20 shielding. Excess healing from this spell is converted into shielding.

• Aura of Protection (2 charges): The Paladin begins radiating protective energy in a sparkling aura around themselves for 20 turns. Any ally within 2 tiles of the Paladin (including themselves) takes 15/23/30% less damage, and gains the effect of the Paladin's armor glyph at +50/75/100% power.

• Wall of Light (3 charges): The Paladin creates a wall of solid light directly in front of themselves that's 1 tile thick, 3/5/7 tiles wide, and lasts for 20 turns. This wall blocks movement and ranged attacks, but can be seen through. Enemies that are caught in the wall when its created will be pushed back if possible.

Expect to see the Paladin in the beta very soon, maybe even tomorrow.

Trinity

I’ve spent more time on trinity and while it’s not implemented yet I have a final design! Trinity is now focused on setting one of three different ‘modes’ using spells, and triggering the effect itself (potentially multiple times) from the hero armor. It has sort of become one supremely flexible armor ability, instead of three separate ones.

The spells let you swap between ‘body form’, ‘mind form’, and ‘spirit form’, which each focus on replicating the functionality of different types of items you have previously identified in your run, even if you no longer have that item. Body form temporarily gives you the effect of an enchant/glyph, Mind lets you use the effect of a wand or thrown weapon, and spirit temporarily gives you a ring’s effect or lets you use the ability of an artifact. The specific item is chosen when swapping the form, and then using trinity itself will let you trigger that item’s effect as many times as you want (charge permitting of course). All of these work on fixed levels that vary based on the item type and talent level.

As you can probably guess, this kind of effect is a nightmare to program, which is why Trinity has been delayed. It’s such a cool effect though so I have to go with it. Hopefully after the Paladin is done I can get working on this properly.