Skill Changes

As Don't Die, Collect Loot has evolved, so have the individual abilities players use to kill enemies. The game has gone from a simple heavily-resource dependent system to a more open system that supports a wide variety of skill behaviors and autocasting. As these changes progressed, some skills started to outshine others.

My general balance philosophy is to make every skill feel extremely powerful, and to make the player feel like they're getting incrementally stronger with each ingame level up, each item found, and each skill point spent.

To that end, there was one core problem with the game, certain skills just completely dominated others. There also wasn't much of a reason to bring more than one active skill into a run. The "meta" usually involved one active skill and two support skills, usually defensive ones. I'd like to try to make that a bit more flexible. To that end, some systems have changed. As always, this is a playtest, so let me know if this made things more or less fun for you!

Level Up Events

Whenever you leveled up in a run, you'd receive three upgrades to choose from. The center was always related to a skill you had equipped, the left was offensive, and the right was defensive. Certain "global" effects like +Experience Earned could also show up in the left or right slots.

The main issue with this system was that offensive skills took a while to max out, and you'd only get one skill for one of your abilities per level up. Players worked to avoid selecting abilities that had large skill pools.

After this patch, every third level up will include 3 skills related to your abilities to choose from. This will hopefully increase the number of relevant upgrades per run!

The Upgrade Event

Throughout the run you'd encounter the mysterious (and often angry) green-haired NPC. She would offer you a choice of 3 "uber" gamechanging skills to match your abilities. Prior to this update, that pool was entirely random.

After this update, you'll always receive one choice related to each skill you have equipped. For example, if you have Shield Toss, Be the Lion, and Shockwave equipped, the left upgrade will always relate to Shield Toss, the center to Be the Lion, and the right to Shockwave. If there are no remaining upgrades for an ability, that slot will have a random upgrade from the remaining abilities.

The idea here is to make sure you always can select an upgrade for the ability you want to upgrade, instead of hoping that you'll get lucky!

Cooldowns

Certain abilities, like Shockwave, completely dominate the game currently. If you're playing Adventurer, you feel compelled to pick this skill. It's fast, has huge range, and deals a lot of damage. With this equipped, why would you use anything else?

After this patch, stronger abilities have longer cooldowns. The major ones have gone from 1-1.5 seconds to 2-2.5 seconds. This will hopefully encourage mixing and matching multiple skills.

However, this game is all about the power curve and feeling your character grow stronger. To that end, a number of cooldown reduction abilities have appeared on both the skill tree and in the upgrade pool. It's still very possible to get Shockwave, for example, back down to a .1s cooldown. You're just going to get that power level later in your progression now.

Other Changes

• Made Shockwave and Hunting Shuriken behave better at higher scroll speeds
  
• Nerfed Shockwave's blade radius. This can be upgraded back to its insane normal levels using area of effect scaling
  
• Removed warcry cooldowns from the in-run skill pool. They were useless anyways!
  
• Fixed a bug with Shield Toss bounces
  
• Removed leech from Night's Hunger and replaced with with increased damage
  
• Improved Hunting Shuriken's general arcing behavior
  
• Pets no longer drop things when they die