Hex: combat and balance changes in v0.0.5

I'm making a few balance changes to hopefully make Hex just a little tougher in v0.0.5. Notably, I'm not touching deflection yet, but I do plan to make early deflections a little less OP in the future, but for now I don't want to change too much at once.

Here's an explanation of some of the changes and my thought process behind them. These changes will be listed in a much shorter form in the changelog when I release the update later on this month, so you can see a TL;DR version then if the goals and design considerations don't interest you that much.

Wounds

Design goals:

As a damage-over-time effect, wounds are intended to lower the opportunity cost of setting up big damage combos while also helping black magic stand out as a school focused on consistent damage, with the capacity to trade in that consistency for big bursts of damage to end fights or transition to a different strategy.

If wounds deal too much damage, players will be discouraged from setting up big combos or trading in the DoT of wounds for a burst of damage. Right now, wounds have a higher damage-to-MP ratio than converting them to damage via Cleave does, and that means building up large wound stacks and just letting them tick down is sometimes more efficient than using them for burst damage.

Since wounds also ignore defense and deal fixed semi-random damage, this has the knock-on effect of making player attack power and enemy defense less important, meaning auras like afterglow are not useful if wounds are used as a primary damage source. This issue will probably be mitigated at higher levels as stats grow but wound damage doesn't, but that's a problem for later. I need to balance what's in front of us for right now.

To fix this, the DoT of wounds needs to be reduced without impacting the damage conversion from Cleave.

Wounds are being nerfed in the following ways:

• Wound stacks now have breakpoints where stacking past 20, 40, and 60 causes each wound stack to deal less damage. 
• Conversion to burst damage via Cleave is not affected by these breakpoints. I'm not buffing the conversion, it's just not getting nerfed with the DoT.
• Additional wound damage from expertise levels has been nerfed (now a roughly ~20% damage increase instead of ~50%).

Kinesis

Design goals:

Kinesis is intended to allow the player to fight for longer, granting MP regen over time, giving the player more MP to work with to set up combos or to push through tough fights. Kinesis is powerful because it can regenerate a decent amount of MP without the opportunity cost of needing to waste an entire turn on a potion, in exchange for getting that MP doled out over a longer period of time. When you gain the kinesis effect from a potion, those potions restore a moderate amount of MP up front, then grant MP regen over time, making the over-time nature even easier to deal with.

MP balance is combat balance. Players need to feel some pressure to be efficient with their MP for combat to be interesting. I wound up hitting kinesis pretty hard, but I think this is a necessary evil.

Kinesis is being nerfed in the following ways:

• Like wounds, kinesis now has break points at 20, 40, and 60.
• The base MP regen and MP regen per stack of kinesis have both been reduced by about 25% before accounting for the breakpoints listed above.
• Everything that grants kinesis now just grants fewer kinesis stacks. This includes abilities like "quick shlick" and all potions that grant kinesis.

Lust

Design goals:

Lust is similar to madness in that it prevents enemy action, but the effect is a little weaker overall and also comes with the downside of not being paired with a spell that deals damage. Lust and madness do "stack" giving the player two chances to stop enemy actions, so can actually be good together, and lust leads to afterglow, a powerful defense shred aura. Now that wounds are a little weaker, I hope afterglow will be more attractive as a way to create high-damage combos.

Still, while I think lust and madness work okay together, they are obviously a bit redundant. To help make the two feel a little more distinct, I'm nerfing lust by a small amount. I want madness to be the go-to aura for preventing enemy actions (this effect is called flinch), and lust to be more about stacking into afterglow with the flinch effect being a bonus along the way.

Lust is being nerfed in the following ways:

• Small reduction in base chance and chance per stack to cause flinch. The overall reduction here is small overall, but should be noticeable.

Sky Magic

Version 0.0.5 will see the release of sky magic! Sky magic allows the user to make use of the imbued aura. Imbued is similar to kinesis in that it grants MP regen, but it also grants physical and magical (non-elemental) damage resistance, and when it's raining, the character has a chance to create arcs of lightning that inflict wounds on nearby enemies.

Damage-dealing sky magic spells are capable of starting brief rain storms, temporarily overriding the local whether and empowering all sky magic spells. Additionally, with a certain spell, you can instantly convert your imbued stacks into MP while potentially inflicting wounds on enemies.

Design goals:

Sky magic is intended to provide a lot of utility through damage reduction, MP regen, and wound generation. While wound generation probably makes you instantly think of pairing it with black magic, and that is a good combo, sky magic can also offset the high MP cost of lunar magic spells, and will also mix very well with some later schools that have not been released yet (primal magic, thought there are both pros and cons here, and especially holy magic).

I'm very excited to release this spell school as I think it's very unique and the weather manipulation is fun, imo.

New Succubus Spells and Embarrassment

You'll be able to purchase two new succubus spells for SP in v0.0.5. A couple of new passives will also be available, and if I have time I also want to add a third spell, but this is what I have so far:

• Vicis: This spell transforms humans. Human NPCs and combatants can be transformed into the opposite sex! For some reason, their clothes also vanish! This spell only works on normal humans, so it doesn't have any effect on the player character or non-human enemies or on bosses. In combat, the change also inflicts embarrassment. The change is temporary (probably). Very high MP cost.
• Shearing Wind: This spell deals no damage but has a high chance to blow the target's clothes clean off! Strips enemy combatants naked and inflicts embarrassment. High MP cost, but maybe worth it for a peek...

The new aura embarrassment reduces the damage output of enemies. This damage reduction scales up with some breakpoints in a similar way to wounds and kinesis, with the first 20 stacks granting around 10% damage reduction which scales up to ~25% at 99 stacks.

Embarrassment is a fun ability, and I intend to add some interplay with lust, orgasming, and afterglow in the future to sort of tie the three together.

Combined with other effects, like lust and madness, embarrassment can be used to seriously mitigate enemy damage.

Nude males will also now visibly change between flaccid and erect states when manipulating lust stacks on them in combat. ;)