Post by Lievven in Holder of Place comments

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There's a couple of bugs with the Mirroring Raven (deal 4 random damage when a follower gains faith):

It doesn't work with the unit that gains an extra faith whenever a follower gains faith.
Copying a "gain faith at the start of combat" unit will still only proc this effect once.
Adding a "gain 1 faith at the start of combat" buff onto the same unit will also not trigger it a second time.
Nor will the "gain 2 faith on death" unit trigger Mirroring Raven twice if it's enchanted with "gain 1 faith when damaged" (unless of course it survives the hit)
What will work however is the unit that gains faith on each attack. Make it attack 4 times and Mirroring Raven is gonna blast 4x as well.

I don't know if these interactions may be intended, but they should probably all work given they're nothing special. Except the "gain 1 more faith" unit (after all one might argue it just increases the faith gain) but I think that one especially should work since it's pretty bad.

Another notion on endless mode: I'm not sure how good it is to have random Doppelgangers, Barricades, Firework Masters, and Black Knights in there. They're hard counters to certain strategies (e.g. hyper-buffing a single unit) which leads to fewer strategies being viable there, exactly the reason why you hesitated implementing endless in the first place. I'd rather see enemy units with a lot of stats in the first place, and from there focus on softer effects like multiple attacks, revives, or not taking more than 25% of their HP in one hit.

Zitta14 days ago(+1)

These raven interactions are all intended. How it works is that everything that happened simultaneously are considered the same effect. Therefore initiate + emissary will only proc raven once, while Initiate + obelisk will proc raven twice. Huntress and lightkeeper follows the same rule. I made it this way so that trigger effects will be easier to balance and for player to predict, but I guess if this rule turns out to be unintuitive for too many people, the alternative will be to have them based on numeric value (like deal 2 random damage for each point of faith gained)

I agree with the comments on endless mode. My intention is not to just brick some builds completely, but rather that player will need to identify and mitigate the weakness of their build rather than keep using the same strategy. It is probably a good idea to have some endless mode exclusive mobs with weaker version of those hunt mechanics.

Lievven14 days ago

Especially with Emissary, that interaction is actually not literal to the wording. As Emissary says "whenever faith is gained by another follower, gain 1 faith", which suggests that the Emissary is the one gaining faith (and thus should trigger Raven again). So as you've intended, the Emissary's wording should change to "when another follower gains faith, that amount is increased by 1". Although personally I'd recommend Emissary to be its own instance and trigger Raven an extra time since it's sort of a really subpar unit as long as Supplicant isn't nerfed and also doesn't scale well in general.

Overall though, I'd probably carefully recommend to make separate instances their own triggers. As it stands, triggers are unintuitive and also don't prevent abuse, as one effect still works while just one or two others don't. It's just a knowledge check, plus a bit more RNG involved.

On top of that the units in question don't really scale as well. They are harder to scale multiplicatively than just a stat-based strategy and they don't scale at all with stats gained inbetween rounds. Compare that to an Adaptive Familiar next to another Adaptive unit together with some permabuffs and you can easily gain +8+8 per round or more.

Ultimately, as far as balancing concerns go, I think you might actually be able to achieve the opposite with some clever wording. In permitting multiple triggers by default, you can then easily nerf overtuned units by making those triggers happen only "once per attack", or instead of being two separate effects, you can make the second effect increase the value of the first one, etc.

On endless, I also just noticed another soft-nerf option, which would be to put most of the special units in one of the first two spots so countered builds have the chance to kill them quickly. Except the Barricade, which should obviously be further towards the end.

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