No post yesterday due to my brother's birthday. No work today because I have been surprised by tickets to a Dodger game. Play testing went well, ish, I guess.
Skywrath as a character is wildly powerful right now but ends the game at about the right time commitment. I can certainly afford to limit his access to items rather severely. Sorted out a lot of rules surrounding blink, figuring out what is and isn't fair. It turns out blink needs to be as wildly powerful as possible for it to contest skywrath mage currently. The push and pull feels alright, the board positioning feels like it matters.
The shop that I cooked up does a good job of surfacing items without being overwhelming, but it doesn't do a great job of getting a second set of items in front of the players. Considering alternate ways of getting more items displayed that don't tax the player. The issue with requiring a player to pay to see more cards is that only one player is paying the price in a gamble that stands to benefit either player. I am considering making it such that when an item is bought the rest of the visible items cycle away and 5 new items appear. This would give incentive for players to rush toward items that are particularly good on them. As a less likely idea I'd like to test having a players offer a flat fee to see 5 items from the top of the deck, of which they select one that is now theirs.
Item power level is low currently and that won't stand. The variety is going to have to come from the items, they need to be worth getting. I'm making items less conditional as a result and removing cards that I designed for fun, to emulate items in other games. However, the root of the problem is that items simply do not come up very often in a game. By the time items are bought as the game stands, the deck is already fill itself out. For this reason I am considering cutting the max level of all spells down, from 3, to 2. This will make card counting easier (I'm considering this a bonus), it will give items more impact and visibility over a game and it means that abilities don't have to scale quite to so damn hard.
I am considering that change, making levels require 2 exp, last hits give 1 exp each, and then forcing the player to chose whether they want to last hit for gold or exp. The goal of this would be to slow down the leveling process. You can level 3 times or something insane before your first shuffle, so before you ever see you first spell. That is ridiculous.
In slowing down the leveling process and making spells max out at a lower effect while buffing items, I am hoping to make items a more attractive and essential part of the game, in the early game because they come quick, and in the late game because a third spell isn't necessary for the match up. If I divide exp from gold, I can chose when I cap the number of cards in my deck. A frustration both of us had was that once we had the two best spells for the match up, there was no point in grabbing the third marginal spell because it was fattening up the deck.
All these changes are pretty spicy, big changes. I'm interested to see what I can gleam from these new rules as they are a very harsh shift.