Not working today, but I do have a couple hours between dollar town and my evening engagement (play testing First Blood among other things), so here's an update on where First Blood is at. There has not been a huge amount of work done, as you may have seen I have been very taken up with project 8, that being said...
In my last update there was talk of an item shop. That items shop is terrible, RNG prone and slow moving. I have since overhauled the item system. Different hero's now have a different number of item slots. Skywrath has the fewest because I hate him (because he has the least gold gain and the most effective non-itemized kit) and Cait will have the most, shes not done yet but her auto attack damage will scale off item acquisition. Items are of three types: starting, minor and major. Starting items are 7 items you can choose to start with, they take up an item slot and cannot be bought through play. Minor items have their own shelf in the shop, meaning that 4 or 5 are visible and available for purchase at the start of the game. Major items have their own shelf that visible and available for purchase at the same time. Each shelf will show 1/4 1/5 the total deck (there are no real numbers in this post). Paying some small sum of gold will send the current visible set of an item type to the discard for that item type and restock the shelf of items that can be bought from the remain items in the deck. It'll cost a little more to move the major items than the minor.
Minor items tend to be items that have a fail state or make a trade off for a useful but often niche effect. Major items tend to have larger effects that just work. Minor items will be in a smaller cost range than Major items.
This system means that players are incentivized to take what is in front of them, it never forces a novice to consider all 44 items at once (oh right, the current item count is 44 and I think a few of them are real winners), but allows for players to access a particular item if they have the money to search for it. Having a build path is potentially viable, but a player should consider not throwing away money looking for a particular item. I'm getting closer to having gold matter.
Auto attacks are something that I have taken a look at. I think they are a great place to reflect the game plan of the hero instead of having them all do the same thing. Skywrath's auto attack is now the only auto attack that deal 1 damage and add +2 diff to OPP AGG. This matches with his game plan. He is all aggression, he should know how to avoid it. He is also a mage, he is weak, his auto attack is physical and thus should do little damage. Queen of Pain is about hitting towers, to reflect this I have decided to change her auto attack to deal one damage (fail deal 0), but removed its modifier as basic. Basic and magical attack cannot harm towers. This allows her to both be a mage, with 4 magical abilities, and still work the enemy tower as a victory condition. Vi's will probably make her OPP's diff lower but deal 2 damage, Cait's will probably net her gold even when she is being aggressive. The way that I was treating auto attacks before treated each hero as though they were all similarly trained in physical combat, that is just not the case and not what I should imply. Everything needs refining, but the goal with this change is to convey what each character is about in their opening hand and this is a decent start.
Alright, more soon following testing. For now, I'm out.