WISDOM. JUSTICE. LOVE.

What's up, folks? Another round of balance changes this week regarding another companion! This week, Clarke is up! She's got some fun stuff to toy around with, if I do say so myself. Afterwards, we'll talk about the road ahead.

Ephemeral Tale 1.9.3 Changelog

• Another balance pass to the tutorial experience
• Updated the turn counter to better fit the new UI elements that have been added over the past several weeks
• Supreme hits are now referred to as critical hits (since they, y’know, are)
• Escape is no longer in its own menu, and now sits w/ it’s big brothers and sisters in the normal battle menu
• The new player protection is now enabled for longer than before
• Jelly drop rates have been upped slightly
• Merlin’s base Attack value has been raised by ~43%
• Clarke’s base Attack value has been raised by ~50%
• Siegfried’s base Attack value has been raised by ~8%
• Clarke has been given a significant adjustment pass:
• At Lv. 15, she will learn Rejuvenation, a skill that applies a Heal-Over-Time effect to the entire party
• At Lv. 25, she will learn Revive, a skill that will revive a fallen ally from the deep beyond
• At Lv. 40, she will learn Confluence, a skill that will cause all allies to generate MP for several turns
• Enemies of the Occluded Oasis have received a balance pass as well:
• Enemies of the Occluded Oasis are now weaker to their weakest elements (Shock, Spirit) by an additional 20%, bringing the weakness to a total of 40%
• Vanilla Fish has been weakened slightly across the board
• Merman now slaps slightly harder w/ his increased Attack and lowered Defense
• Kame is now significantly harder, literally. Shell. Defense up
• Jellados is now more resistant to Magical attacks, and weaker to normal attacks
• Slugger is now more resistant to normal attacks, and weaker to Magical attacks
• Grumptoad is now more resistant to normal attacks, and weaker to Magical attacks
• Scorpeon, is now more resistant to Magical attacks, and weaker to normal attacks

This is another big week of changes for the tutorial experience. Over the course of the next few weeks, there's going to be more focused improvements to the balance of the remaining areas. There's more tutorial experience changes coming as well, but for now let's talk about the road ahead, and the next steps we're taking to improve Ephemeral Tale.

Last week we spoke about difficulty spikes in the game, but never really delved into why these spikes occur, on a systemic level. One of the problems with the approach taken with the initial balance rework in Major Update #1 is in how I decided to tackle the balance of enemies. As we've talked about in previous Pupdates, most enemies in the game fall within a certain range of stats behind the scenes-- so if the base enemy template has 100HP and 20 Defense, then a beefier kind of enemy is probably at most sitting at 130HP and 25 Defense. It's currently about a range of 30% (give or take), between the base amount and the high/low amounts. To keep the game engaging, enemies scale (to some degree) to match you, but this scaling was frankly, not aggressive enough. If the player was getting a hypothetical +5 in every stat every level, enemies were getting +3. So as that level differential grew, you inevitably became a murdering machine that could tear through enemies with graceful ease.

On the flip-side of this, if you were able to store your Power for long enough, you could eventually hit a point where when you leveled up you weren't just leveling once, but several times (even up to 5-10 times, in some cases)! So now your enemies were significantly stronger, but most of your strength was still assumed to be coming from gear (which hadn't changed in any meaningful way from the leveling process). Result? You got clapped, and hard. Thanks due to some discussions I've had with some fellow developers, the trusted inner circle, and some of you guys on our Discord server, there's a plan in place to address these things. We'll be talking more about that next week, as if we did it here this would be one LONG Pupdate.

Until next time, stay safe and have fun!

-- Ryan