Going to add some more thoughts here:
Illustrating how impactful tying Dao progress to floors and rebirths is
- In my first run, I hit my 2nd Dao after my 6th or 8th Rebirth. My 3rd Dao after the initial 10 Rebirths.
- In my second run, I hit my 2nd Dao after my 1st Rebirth. My 3rd Dao is coming up right now after 3 Rebirths.
- The difference on my 2nd Dao is over 1k floors because I also get access to the Dao XP pill. The difference on my 3rd Dao is also going to be 1.5k floors worth of XP. Doubled if I wait for the Dao XP pills before progressing floors of course.
That's a massive difference for the content that is currently available, and extrapolating from the gap for the 3rd Dao compared to the second I'm expecting it to snowball more and more.
Essences
Overall, I think the Essences are good but some builds have very few to use right now (either because they have no use-case or their power is too weak) while others feel like 8 slots is too little. For example:
- In my initial playthrough (Crit Hits + Regen), I was using Damage bonuses, Hit & Crit bonuses, Attack Speed and Dodge Chance bonuses, Regen bonuses, Flat Armor bonuses and they all synergized.
- In my second playthrough (Burning + Damage Reduction), I was using Damage bonuses, Hit bonuses, Attack speed bonus, Regen bonus - and that's about it. Either things didn't have synergy (Crit, Dodge), were actively anti-synergistic (Flat Armor) or were so weak they aren't worth the space they take on screen (Spirit Lynx and Jade Tiger both gave less damage than a T1 Forest Wolf)
It's probably just a result of limited content, but I did notice a bit of disappointment at my options on the second playthrough.
The Void Pavillon is probably not a good way of providing currently unreachable Essences.
Damage Reduction & Armor:
A classic problem, there is anti-synergy between these two due to the order of operations (these are assumptions based on the damage numbers - there could also be something else funky going on with the damage/defense formula). First you apply the Flat Armor and then you apply the Damage Reduction. So you are essentially reducing your Flat Armor by your Damage Reduction in terms of effectiveness. That means you never want to focus on both. This could be intentional, in which you can ignore this portion.
On top of that, a good amount of damage completely ignores this system. DoT effects seem to ignore it (and it is already highly dangerous), True damage obviously ignores it. This can be fine, but it might be a bit too prevalent.
Another strange part is how Flat Armor is applied before the Critical Hit, but Damage Reduction happens after if I'm not mistaken? This seems odd because you are splitting up your damage formula. I am assuming you did something like (Damage - Armor) * (1 + IsCritHit*CritDamage%) * (1 - Damage Reduction). That's really obtuse for the player. Since you are pushing the player forwards in order to progress faster, you shouldn't worry too much about the extreme end of players not taking damage at all. If they do invest into that, then they will progress more slowly even if they never die than someone who invested into a balance since they should kill enemies significantly faster.
Just some additional general advice, especially because you are adding Dao effects to enemies.
"For the player to fail, they must die once. For the player to succeed, they must always win (aka kill thousands of enemies)."
In other words, the player has to have significantly more potential in the moment than the enemy they are fighting (excluding bosses). Taking the example of CoreDisciples again with their Void Dao. Their Daos seem to be max level, while a normal player won't even have their first Dao maxed. Adding two defensive Daos together (Void + Blind) means the player has to be extremely strong in comparison to the rest. Void itself is a 80% uptime immunity if I'm not mistaken and Blind reduces my hit chance from 94.5% down to 44.5%. So 52.9% additional dodge chance (separate from their innate dodge chance). So compared to an enemy without Dao, I need over 10 times the damage output. Put in other words, they are not recovering 100 hp per second as you would initially think. They are recovering over 1000 HP per second. They don't have 3k HP, they have 30k HP. And that's just the Dao effects, not their damage reduction and their own dodge chance.
Adjacent to that, I would also suggest to keep in mind that players have feelings, while PvE enemies do not. I'm not saying you didn't keep that in mind, I just know it is often something forgotten.
Suggestions:
Homogenize Dao XP either by:
- Making it a pool for all (and implementing a level system for them);
- Changing how Dao XP is calculated (maybe it should just look at highest floor reached).
Change the order of operations on your Damage formula:
- Separate Damage and Defenses. First deal with all the Damage modifiers, then apply the Defense modifiers.
- If something affects the stat of the attacking entity directly such as Roar, that should be handled at the entity level rather than the OnHit event (which I think you are doing for Roar).
- Try to avoid anti-synergy such as Flat Armor being negatively affected by your Damage Reduction. Roar and Flat Armor do have synergy because of order of operations.