Hello Talented Gamers!

We’ve been hard at work fleshing out the Bandit Class that we announced in the previous devlog! I have a few more details to share, including a couple of his brand spanking new Talents and Abilities but first I want to take some time to address a few of our most common pieces of feedback.

Advanced warning that this will be a fairly systems heavy devlog, so if you’re more interested in concrete features I won’t be offended if you skip the next two sections!

Trial and Error

We’ve been made very aware that our difficulty scaling is harsh to the point of being unfair, beginning around Mastery 10 and doubling down at Mastery 20.

It was never our goal to make Talented about restarting runs until you find a combination of enemies and Talents that let’s you finally scrape your way past the first 10 Nights and sail your way to the end. So we’re making some substantial changes to the Mastery system with 2 goals in mind:

– Make Mastery 10 – 25 more achievable with a higher number of builds
– Move more of the difficulty of Mastery 10 – 25 into the later portion of the game (Nights 10 – 20)

And how will we achieve this?… (Spoilers for Mastery Levels ahead)

– Replaced the Mastery 10 penalty that increased the cost of Rare, Epic and Ability Talents with one that adds a new Enemy Type at Night 10 and Night 15
– Replaced the Mastery 20 penalty that added an extra enemy per wave with one that increases the power of Elite Enemies (+25% HP, +10% Speed)
– The Mastery 25 penalty now only gives double enemy upgrades from Night 5 onwards
– Reduced the chance of Mystery Talents by 5% per Mastery Penalty (from 10%)
– Reduced the vision range cap by 5% per Mastery Penalty (from 10%)
– All per-night Mastery Penalties from Mastery 11 onwards only come into effect after Night 10 (e.g. “Enemies gain 1% movement speed each night” >> “After Night 10, Enemies gain 1% movement speed each night”

As well as making the game generally a lot fairer, this should push a very significant portion of the challenge into the final 10 Nights – allowing you to establish a build before the difficulty really ramps up.

Our plan is to add the Mastery changes to a Hotfix for 0.10, so you won’t need until 0.11 to get these. They should be live in the coming days!

Taking a Chance

Since the early days the Common that appeared on the tree were pulled completely at random from the pool of available Talented. Sometimes this worked in your favor (I’ve seen screenshots of people with 10 Damage on Archer on Night 3!), but often it can lead to situations where you simply cannot find the Talents you need.

To help solve this issue we’ve moved to a random pooling system.

When the Talent Tree is created at the start of a run Common Talents fill a pool and whenever a Common Talent is placed on the tree it is removed from the pool. Only when the pool is empty does it refill completely again.

Note: Some Common Talents appear multiple times in the pool and others don’t. For example,
the [Attack Speed Up] talent appears in the pool 4 times for Archer but the [Damage Up] talent only appears once.

This means that all possible Common Talents will be more evenly spread throughout the tree, and you should have more consistent access to whatever you’re looking for.

Several other areas of the game have benefited from this system too. Rare Talents, Abilities, Enemy Spawns and even Enemy Wave Sizes all use the pooling system. We hope this will lead to more consistent and fairer feeling runs.

The Fun Stuff

Thank you for indulging us by reading the, slightly more dry, balance talk above! Let’s reveal some Bandit Abilities!

I mentioned last time that some Talents would allow you to fire more bullets. Something worth noting is, Bandit will not have access to the [Damage Up] talent so you’d better stack up those shots!

Bullets won’t be the only thing you’re firing, Fireworks can provide some useful crowd-control for tanky enemies that you can’t finish off without reloading.

Now you’ve stuffed your gun full of extra shots, challenge an entire lane to a duel while the others look on in awe.

Phew! That was a lot to talk about, so I won’t keep you any longer. I can’t say too much about the next devlog, but it will be… Legendary…

Stay Talented