A WORD ON BALANCING:

Balance in Mortal Rite is tricky: Melee combat, Abilities, and a growing list of items with the most potent items still to come make balance tricky.       

What is the goal for balance in Mortal Rite? 

 

The goal is that regardless of which character a player chooses to play, the world of Mortal Rite feels like a challenge that can be overcome as the game mechanics are learned, that specific character's abilities are learned, and items are used to augment that character's strengths and make up for their weaknesses.

Mortal Rite is composed of a world of floors that need to be conquered. Each 3rd floor is boss floor. Difficulty spikes after boss floors will be larger than other floors. Every so often there will also be major bosses that pose a more significant challenge than the non-major bosses.

A new floor should feel like you are at a disadvantage until you fight your way through some enemies and gain abilities, ability modifiers, items or change your strategy by learning from encounters with enemies. The power arc for a floor should feel like you start at a disadvantage, but by the end of the floor you feel at level with the enemies or more powerful than the enemies if you make it through the level. This floor-arc should repeat each floor.        

Bosses should be difficulty spikes that players need to put forth their best to defeat. Boss rewards should also reflect the challenge of defeating them.           

Balancing is a work in progress; positive and negative feedback is welcome!

Character Balancing & Difficulty:

Characters and enemies have been balanced so that the game is more difficult. See the specific character section for specifics on each character's changes.

Attributes

Bases for stats have now been reduced significantly so that attributes make up most of each character's stats. The goal is to incentivize players to get more items and want to upgrade those items. Also, because base values are so low, debuffs matter a lot. Previously, having 0 Endurance would still allow a character to dodge or attack so many times that it wasn't noticeable. An example of debuffs mattering is that having a character's endurance debuffed to 0 will now result in the character being unable to attack... At all.                      

Attribute scaling should always be positive, so gaining any amount of an attribute will increase the character’s power, but there are diminishing returns. Stacking a single stat should be viable but not the optimal building method.



Example: +1 strength is always an increase to attack power, but +1 strength turns into a lower amount of strength rating as you get more strength. The diminishing returns on attributes start reasonably high, so it's possible that most people won't run into them unless they stack a specific attribute above all others.

Weapon Damage

Base weapon damage has been removed in favor of melee damage scaling better with character attributes.

New Attributes

Added Precision Attribute and Mastery Attribute.                      

Precision contributes to attack power for quick attacks, while Strength contributes to brute force attacks. Each character is now designated as a Precision Combatant or a Strength Combatant: Fia is an Agile Combatant; Shold is a Strength Combatant. Fia will receive most of her attack power from Agility, and Shold will receive most of his attack power from Strength.

Intelligence contributes to offensive ability's power, while Mastery contributes to overall ability power, specifically non-offensive abilities. Separating out ability power into two stats allows characters to specialize into offense ability power (damage) or non-offensive ability power (defense and/or utility). Each ability will scale at different rates for Intelligence and Mastery. All abilities will benefit some amount from both Intelligence and Mastery.                           

Abilities are categorized based on how offensive and defensive they are and how much utility they provide. Pure offensive abilities will scale best off Intelligence. Offensive abilities that provide some level of defense or utility won't scale as well off Intelligence but will scale more off Mastery. Pure defense or utility abilities will scale the best from Mastery.

In a future update, not this one, all abilities will show how well they scale off each of the four attributes: Strength, Precision, Intelligence, and Mastery.                      

The goal for the new attributes and the attributes overall is to incentivize characters to get all attributes and not just stack a single attribute. Even if a character scales best off Strength for a long time, there will be a time when Precision will end up scaling better for them and likewise for Intelligence and Mastery.

ATTRIBUTES

Attributes now all scale up to at least 200 with proper diminishing returns. Unless I’ve messed up somewhere, getting above +140 in any single attribute won't be easy.

Character Starting Attributes

The starting attributes of the characters have been updated to use Precision and Mastery and to account for the removal of base weapon damage and base attributes.

Added New Items

Added a lot of new items. It's much more fun to find them than to list them here. :>                   

How many items are there in total? If you include recipes for crafting items, around 200 now.                          

Recipes?

Yes, instead of starting with all 150+ craftable items unlocked, better items are locked behind Recipes that can be found in chests, and by killing things. Recipes should not ever drop duplicated so that every recipe drop that a player gets should be useful to them. Recipes are also tradable, so if you group with someone and get a recipe that you don’t want or could benefit the other player more, you can trade it.    

NOTEWORTHY CHANGES

Fix for bug that caused Teleporters to be unlocked when showing that they are locked
Call of the Refuge no longer resets Floor Count and no longer makes you drop your items.
Floor Count is now properly persisted between play sessions.
Abilities are no longer lost on death.
Ability Slot protection has been removed since it is no longer needed.
ITEMS: Killing an enemy that drops loot now has a loot drop for each player rather than a single global drop. This means that to get loot, each player must loot their items.

COMBAT

• When Heavy attacking, stamina cost is now 1.5x.
  
• When charge attacking, stamina cost is now 3x.
  
• Perfect block can now receive poise and stamina damage.
  
• Taking damage while blocking now damages stamina.
  
• Perfect block will now reduce incoming poise damage instead of taking a flat amount.
  

LEVELS

• Two(2) new levels that no one has ever seen have been added.
  
• Outpost has been updated a bit.
  
• "Proceeding Forward" after finishing a level increases the drop rate by 5% up to 25% maximum increase until returning to the Refuge.
  

CHARACTERS: DAWKSIN

• Now has a FULL SET of Ability Mods to try out
  
• Now starts with 1 Posture, 8 Strength, 14 Precision, 18 Intelligence, 6 Mastery, 10 Endurance, 13 Vitality, 1 Luck, 20 Armor and 20 Ability Resistance.
  
• Removed Weapon Sharpness Mechanic because it was too much to juggle with everything else that Dawksin had going on.
  
• Updated grappling hook animation to be a bit more consistent, but more research is needed for a smoother swing.
  
• Grappling hook requires holding the button down, as releasing it will release the hook.
  
• Hunters Assault Homing mod was reworked to strike a second target instead of the traversal mechanic it had before.
  

CHARACTERS: FIA

• Now starts with 1 Posture, 5 Strength, 13 Precision, 20 Intelligence, 8 Mastery, 10 Endurance, 13 Vitality, 1 Luck, 20 Armor, and 20 Ability Resistance.
  
• Fia Fireball Charge bug fixed that properly sets the damage scaling. Before, Fia would receive charged Fireball damage multiplier for non-instant cast preparation animation time rather than just for the charge time.
  
• Adjusted the length of some of Fia's attack animations.
  
• Fia's Fireball now starts from her hand.
  
• Added fireball trail.
  
• Updated Fire Pillar to use intelligence scaling, and Fire Pulse was updated to include a fire DOT.
  
• Removed the Chasing Wall mod from Fire Sword and replaced it with Fire Dagger.
  
• Updated Flame Crescent on Flame Sword to successfully time out and gave it intelligence scaling. 
  

CHARACTERS: INITIATE

• Now starts with 1 Posture, 10 Strength, 10 Precision, 10 Intelligence, 10 Mastery, 10 Endurance, 10 Vitality, 10 Luck, 20 Armor and 20 Ability Resistance.
  
• Now has a second ability.
  
• New attack animations.
  

CHARACTERS: SHOLD

• Now starts with 2 Posture, 15 Strength, 5 Precision, 5 Intelligence, 10 Mastery, 13 Endurance, 20 Vitality, 1 Luck, 20 Armor, and 20 Ability Resistance.
  
• Breach should no longer cause animations from the wrong weapon set to be used.
  
• Sprinting Heavy does more Poise Damage.
  
• Adjusted all of Shold's light attack animations and rotation rates.
  
• The Quick Wall and Great Wall should be much more forgiving and should more reliably spawn in most cases.
  
• Updated weapon swap base ability to prevent consuming resources when unequipping.
  

CRAFTING & ITEMS

• Added Icons for Vortex Stone and Timebound Barrier.
  
• Focus Flask is no longer infinite use and should no longer remain in an active slot with quantity 0.
  
• Second Chance should no longer trigger in PVE Arena, PVP Arena or Refuge.
  
• Fervor is now a lower tier item, should consume a charge on each use, and should no longer take up an active item slot when quantity reaches 0.
  
• Item quantity in inventory has been increased to 20 for all items that had an inventory cap less than 20.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused loot drop percentage overrides not to work correctly. The result of this fix should be individual map drop percentages should be their intended drop percentage instead of the global fallback percentage. The global fallback percentage is lower than individual map drop rates, so this should increase loot if all other settings are equal (they're not, though).
  
• A new passive item type, "Relic," was added.
  
• The amount of loot that can drop from bosses, chests, and enemies has been capped, but the quality and quantity of each item that drops will increase to use up the bounty from the entity dropping the loot.
  
• Health Vials will no longer drop. Instead, Health Flasks will have a chance to drop.
  
• Shiv now affects Strength due to a situation involving armor penetration.
  
• All item effects have been updated for a better reason to upgrade items. There should now be a reason to craft gems, use gems to craft jewels, and use jewels to craft higher-tier items. Crafting costs have been reduced from Tier-based and Rarity-based amounts to material-based amounts so that the cost of crafting an item should be the cost of the item's crafting materials and a small crafting fee. Crafting an item without any of the materials will cost as much as all the materials for all the requirements for crafting the item plus the item's crafting fee. Crafting an item with multiple requirements will only cost the missing requirements and the crafting fee.
  
• Balanced all item tiers and rarity so that loot was more distributed across tiers, balanced material costs, and crafting requirements. The cost for items should be much more straightforward, and it should be easy to see how the cost of crafting items is determined.
  

ENEMIES

• All Enemies have been re-balanced with new attributes considered.
  
• All enemies now have sounds!
  

ENEMIES: CULTIST ARCHER

• Higher Floor Cultist Archers have learned how to shoot fire arrows. 
  

ENEMIES: AXE KNIGHT

• Charge animation should no longer get stuck before a whirlwind-like attack.
  

ENEMIES: SWORD KNIGHT:

• Sword Knight deals enough poise damage with a gap lunge attack and kicks to break the perfect block.
  

 

ENEMIES: SWORD CULTIST

• Higher Floor Sword Cultists have learned how to enchant their swords with electricity.
  

ENEMIES: CULTIST KNIGHT

• New enemy has been added that should be on par with the Sword Knight.
  

SYSTEMS

• Damage and Poise Handling updated to allow for hit reaction deaths to work again.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused Enemies not to dodge and not use their light melee attacks because they thought they were out of stamina.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused loot rules to always fail for Item Count comparisons.
  

UI & INPUTS

• Inventory now defaults to the Equipment Tab.
  
• Credits have been updated with Patreon supporters! Thanks again!
  
• Added 'Shadow Scale' slider under video options to attempt a fix for shadow issues that some users were experiencing.
  
• Added segments to the stamina bar to help with readability.
  
• Added Weapon Damage Stat to the items menu so you can see how your scalings relate to weapon damage.
  
• Fixed a bug with the strength rating; it now displays correctly on the UI.
  
• Crafting Shop: Recipe Grid will update dynamically and sort recipes from the current lowest to the highest cost.
  
• Inventory is sorted by item type so that materials are not on top.
  
• Crafting Inventory is sorted by item type so that materials are on top.
  
• Storage Inventory should only show items that can be put in storage.