Update! Story!

The 1.30 update is pretty chunky. Its headline feature is the story! It’s admittedly coming in a bit late, but now you’ll bump into other characters as you descend the dungeon and glean a little bit more about them and their relationships. It also adds a lot more content through events, spells, badges, and keywords. As well as just little polish changes to make it clearer what is going on.

!! Warning !!

This update makes changes to how dungeons are generated, so any in-progress runs from the previous patch will be incompatible and not load. I can only apologise for this inconvenience. The good news is this might not happen again! See the bottom of the post for more information.

Story

Now there will be story sequences at certain points in the game, such as when resting at camps or visiting shops. I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but I think they’re fun and make everything feel more complete.

These story sequences were written by the talent npckc. And you should also check out her latest game, too!

https://npckc.itch.io/marrons-day

More Toys

There are just over 50 new spells, 15 new badges, an extra event shop per act, and a couple more events I won’t discuss here. All characters now have sixteen spells per act, which means a lot of these are concentrated on Blodeuwedd and Arawn who were lacking before, but even the main cast have gained a lot.

New Quests

Three new quests have been added that reward three new Badges. Two of these are blatantly just to encourage playing with Daily Challenges and the new conversations but that’s fine, right?

Pwca, Blodeuwedd and Arawn currently have quite cryptic unlock criteria. Completing the game (not “Victory?”) with 2/3/4 characters will now make these quests explicit.

Potions

These exist as part of the new events and modifiers. Once obtained these will sit on your board and persist between fights. Once quaffed they provide a big boost but are gone for good.

Modifiers, Rerolls and Collection

It might not be clear what’s going on with these changes. But I am trying to discourage players from restarting multiple times before each run, or trying to max out a very grindy collection screen. However, I have also added options to not only enable the previous behaviour, but make it much less tedious. So you no longer have to do a restart to get your rerolls back, you can just spin forever.

• By default, rerolls are reset when defeating a boss
• By default, modifiers just have one completion state, rather than per character
• In the options you can give yourself infinite rerolls
  • This will always give the sussy dagger on the victory screen
• Rerolling Modifiers will blacklist Modifiers you have previously seen.
  • Resets with your reroll count or, if you’re using infinite rerolls, after seeing every modifier once.
• In options you can choose to show modifier completion by character instead
• Added 4 new modifiers
• Modifiers that fully heal after fights used to hide camps. The camps now show anyway so you can see story sequences.
• +1 enemy damage modifier rank increased from 2 to 3
• “Half health but heal after each battle modifier” rank increased from 0 to 1

Note that modifier tracking is always per character under the hood, the default view is not denying you any completion progress if you decide to torture yourself later.

Clarity and Polish

• You can now completely skip your turn. This needs to be enabled in options as it’s a bit of a trap for new players, but it can be useful in some scenarios.
• Collection screen now shows if Spells are offensive or defensive.
• Collection screen shows if Badges are limited to certain characters (both locked and unlocked state)
  • This is only for one Badge, which was added this update
• The results screen background is lighter so the loading screen wipe is less weird looking.
• Quests that unlock Spell Sets and Badges will now show those Spells and Badges.
• Increased text size and spacing in some places. The default tight text is to try and fit a novella onto the tiny Spell widgets. Honestly, I kind of regret not just making Spell details a giant pop-up instead… but it’s too late to change that now. People would be rioting in the streets.
• The descent animation after finishing an act is quicker and can be skipped.
• In combat, if path entry is stopped because of the End Path keyword, this is now indicated above the mana bar. If it’s because the Paralyze Spell status added the keyword, then that is called out instead.
• In combat, the cross hatching that shows which stones cannot be accessed from the current path now takes into account any status effects that make cells inaccessible.
• If enemies have an innate status effect, the application VFX will play before the player’s turn.
• The Resilient status now only turns a health bar blue when maxed out and negating damage.
• The Empower status now correctly plays the correct purple VFX, rather than the green Strength one.
• Spell scaling effects (ex: deal +1 for each poison on enemies) are displayed in a different colour to Spell actions.
• Steel keyword has been removed and its effect is just inlined into the Spell like other scaling effects..
• Added additional decoration onto Spells purchased at Event Shops
• Manifold’s effect now fires the Copying Spell Particles™ from the spell and not the enemy target.
• The Muddled spell status now works by adding the Muddle keyword to Spells, making it more consistent.
• Bramble Badge renamed Briar to keep it legally distinct from the Spell of the same name
• Arawn’s Magic Shield has a yellow outline like Resilient. I guess this is the new visual language for conditional invincibility.
• [spoiler]Aspect of Arawn[/spoiler] is blue with some particles to try and clarify they are not the real deal

Balance Changes

• More enemy attacks have keywords like Aimless and Barrage.
• Morte never opens with their Hex attack.
• Stones added to the board can now go into empty space (they will still ignore the player path, this is mostly so you can add stones after Tabula Rasa)
• Spells with the Life Tap keyword no longer have weird hand-picked exceptions that let “attack spell only” badges work on them.
• Ceremonial Dagger Badge now applies a keyword called Simplify that reduces cast sequences by 1, rather than doing it directly, to play nice with the new Reagent keyword.
• Harpoon Badge now adds 2 damage rather than True Strike
• Soap Badge damage decreased to 1 damage per bubble with a damage cap of 10
• Arcane Retain (Patchouli Badge) now has a 50% chance to keep any stone, rather than a 100% chance to keep just regular stones.
• Grabber Badge has gained Longshot and 1 damage
• Harpoon Badge now has Cruel instead of Longshot
• Gladiator Helm damage modifier removed (previously -25%)
• Playing Card Badge increases damage by 25% rather than 150% and adds SuperFlux rather than Flux
• The keywords Flux and SuperFlux now add a random variance between plus or minus 3 from the current value (minimum 0) rather from 1 to the current value. SuperFlux still won’t apply to scaling values like “+X damage for each Spell cast.”
• Corrupted spells use Flux under the hood so their damage is in a tighter range
• Corrupted spells no longer have True Strike and can be mitigated entirely if hitting into Plate or an emptied Resilient

Spell Changes

• Gwen’s Fire Bolt Spell no longer exists.
• Gwen’s Sonic damage is now 3 rather than 5, and has Pierce, which will hit enemies behind
• Gwen’s Chaff deals 6 damage base rather than 4 and removes all Jammers
• Ceridwen’s Manifold’s effect, copying itself over exhausted Spells, will not consider the casting Spell as a target.
• Ceridwen’s Absorb spell now deals 5 damage instead of 3, has the Ally keyword (targets your summons only), and Mega Refresh keyword (defeating a target removes Cooldown and Exhaust from all Spells)
• Ceridwen’s Drain spell is now called Mercurial
• Ceridwen’s Mercurial spell no longer has DoubleCast (see SuperFlux changes)
• Ceridwen’s Reap no longer has a limit on Soul Gems
• Ceridwen’s Pact also adds 2 Power
• Ceridwen’s Rite no longer adds Power, but makes the next spell have Double Cast
• Ceridwen summons that appear behind her have their health raised to 5 (act 1) or 6
• Aerfen’s Berserk rage bonus x3 instead of x2
• Aerfen’s Violence rage bonus x3 instead of x2
• Aerfen’s Defiance has 4 base damage and Pierce
• Aerfen’s Tackle reworked to 3 damage, 4 stones, Haymaker and Pierce
• Blodeuwedd’s second starting spells have changed.
• Blodeuwedd’s Bramble and Synthesis both have one less stone.
• Blodeuwedd’s Spring now gives 1 Strength and Wild instead of Exhaust
• Blodeuwedd’s Thorned Rose and Bush spells both have Wild instead of Exhaust
• Blodeuwedd’s Thorned Rose and Bush summons heal 3 and 1 respectively each turn.
• Arawn’s Transmute has swapped a Corrupt Stone for a blue stone
• Arawn’s Chaos Bolt deals 2-8 damage rather than 1-8 (see Flux changes)
• Arawn’s Corruption has the Corrupt Stone placed at the front.
• Arawn’s Accord now has SuperFlux and gives 0-3 Power instead of 2
• Arawn’s Bleak has SuperFlux instead of Pain
• Arawn’s Humble lost a stone and is no longer 5 damage, Engage, Giantslayer. Instead it is 6 damage, AutoFirst, Barrage, Exhaust
• Arawn’s Famine is now 0-6 damage and 0-5 leech, rather than 1-6 and 1-4 (see SuperFlux changes)
• All spells that damage the caster have the new Stoic keyword, which prevents the damage value from being changed by status effects

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where the map could place the boss right next to the entrance on cramped maps
• Fixed a bug where hitting for zero damage with Lifetap caused a block icon to appear with no value.
• Fixed a bug where status effects were not factored into spells that use enemy damage (ex: Defiance)

Future Updates

With my previous games I didn’t really give any kind of formal indication I was stopping development so here it is: I can’t really justify spending even more time on this game. This patch is me trying to squeeze all the fun juice I can out of the concept (without too much re-coding anyway), so I can make my peace with it.

I know some people really enjoy Witching Stone and have sunk an incredible amount of hours into it, and that really does mean a lot to me. And if you’re this far down four pages of patch notes I’m probably talking to you. So, thank you so much.

Never say never, and I could come back for a 1.40 if it pops off or something, but I’d like to try making something different. I will continue to provide bug fixes, I’m sure it’ll need them, and I do have at least one more thing planned. Although I’m not allowed to talk about that here for at least two major reasons.