Tainted Grail: Conquest - Patch v0.97 Adds the Necromancer
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The latest early access update for Awaken Realms Digital’s Arthurian RPG Tainted Grail: Conquest introduces the Necromancer class, the Wyrdness difficulty system, long-term progression, and more. And with that out of the way, the developers are now looking to overhaul the game’s combat and expand its story-related interactions.
Here's some additional information:
Hello everyone! It’s here! We managed to get our Patch 0.97 done in time and we’re really happy with everything we’ve accomplished for the past few weeks and can’t wait to share it with y’all – and hear your feedback!
The best thing about this patch, for us at least, is that it isn’t just a regular update – it’s an end of our “transition” period to new systems and approaches. We’ve been rebuilding, tweaking, changing a lot of invisible stuff in order to make the game better and it’s really paying off. We’ve made a lot of progress since the launch of Seeds of Corruption in October and even though there’s still an insane amount of work ahead of us… we’re really excited about the results of everything we’ve accomplished so far!
We’ve been sharing a lot of info about these changes in our updates throughout the past few months, so let’s go through the most recent changes and additions:
NECROMANCER
We’re ready to share the Necromancer with you. We feel that this class is a really nice addition to Moonring and we can’t wait for your feedback – as usual, expect some balancing issues, but please let us know what you think so that we can make proper adjustments!
Necromancers are somewhere between the Blood Mages and Summoners in terms of playstyles – their minions are automatically activated but don’t have limits on their promotion levels. However, in order to unlock their second set of abilities, you have to sacrifice them. They’ll turn into their ethereal forms then – and even though they’ll become more powerful, they won’t be targeted by enemies, making you the main target. Additionally, dead enemies can be resurrected as Ghouls which can help you on the battlefield.
The main treat, though, is that Necromancers charge their ultimate ability whenever something dies – and when they’re at full charge, they can transform into a Lich.
Lich form is powerful – but lasts only for one turn. Depending on the number of sacrificed minions in a turn, your passive skills, and reforges, the Lich’s playstyle can be adjusted to your liking. It can be used to deal massive amounts of damage to enemies or as a powerful debuffer who can change the flow of combat in your favor. This means, yes, new cards available only for the Lich[...]
WYRDNESS
Yes, finally! We’ve implemented the first iteration of systems that support one of the most important features of the game world. Now wyrdness makes sense gameplay-wise and isn’t just a visual trick! The most important thing we’ve changed is that wyrdness started to influence the map (only a bit for now, though) and – most importantly – combat.
Instead of working as a binary force – where you’re inside or outside of it – you’re now traversing through wyrdness constantly and the influence it has on your game is dependent on the burn stage of your wyrdcandle.
There are several stages of the brightness of your candles – and the less you have, the more dangerous the game becomes. Sometimes, if your candle’s out, you’ll be surprised by a combat encounter appearing out of nowhere. Sometimes, if it’s burning low, enemies might heal themselves at the end of their round. It’s up to you to decide what kinds of danger you’re able to face – It’s all about the risk you intend to take now.
In turn, if you don’t want to risk negative effects appearing during combat, you can burn more candles and make sure they won’t happen. Currently, Instead of just making candles last longer, using several of them makes the flames burn “brighter”. And this brings positive effects to your game and can affect your combat encounters in a positive way.
PASSIVE PROGRESSION
With this new patch, we’re also introducing our first iteration of passive progression systems bound to your character – meaning that you can grow in power over the course of your runs.
For this patch, we’ve decided to add these features to the NPCs you have in your village. We’ve separated them by category of progression upgrades and you can spend your hard-earned Wyrdstone to unlock certain things and boost certain options for your character.
So, currently, it works like this:
The Seamstress allows you to influence your character stats. For example, you can buy a permanent Damage or Armor boost, or a new point of Energy and start every combat encounter with 4 Energy points instead of 3.
The Candlemaker will now add boosts to exploration-related systems (for example: more XP or Wyrdstone earned), while the Blacksmith will allow you to permanently unlock runestone slots so that you can immediately start with more than two of them. The Ghost will allow you to upgrade your items: all consumables will start in their weaker forms, and you'll be able to boost their power over time.
Also, all of the deck management options in the village were moved to the Master-At-Arms so no more removing stuff from deck at the Lost Soul’s tent. Lst Soul, in turn, allows you to boost some healing options and pick a Quest Card at the start of your journey (also, healing mixtures were unified: there's only one type of HP potion in the game now and you can upgrade it's healing power at the Lost Soul).
We’ve also rebalanced a lot of interactions and changed various options here and there but there’s so much that we’ve touched these past weeks that it doesn’t even make sense to list all the changes here. Let us know what you think, how you feel about these changes, and so on.
QUALITY OF LIFE
This is another thing that we’ve been working on (and, again, we’re not done!), but we’re constantly trying to make the game more approachable and just more “fun” to play, in general.
One of the things we wanted to do was to streamline the character selection process and make sure that it’s understandable for all – we’ve reduced the amount of screens you have to go through and things you need to click in order to start playing. We hope you’re going to like this change.
Also, we’re not yet done with this, but we’ve made some improvements to the handling of runestones – we had to change their visuals (since there’s more of them now) so they’re now bigger, have different colors, and runestones you can combine are automatically highlighted in your inventory.
But one of the biggest quality of life improvements we’ve introduced is...
Improved Combat flow
We felt that battles in our game tend to be a bit sluggish and we didn’t like the fact that you have to wait for animations to finish before playing another card. That’s not the case anymore. You can spam cards as fast as you want now and that’s a game changer.
BALANCING, ADDITIONS
So we’ve made A LOT of changes and additions here and we’d have to make this post even bigger if we were to list them all here so let’s just say that
We’ve added around 10 new cards to Moonring/Children of Morrigan and a lot of new runestones. We’ve also changed a lot of rewards and costs in interactions with NPCs and Locations (some of them were absurd, some rewards were pointless, and so on). We’ve changed a lot of stuff within the village, and tweaked a lot of the numbers.
One change deserves a separate paragraph, though: it’s touching the Pathfinders – their Ultimate ability grants 1 Energy for every 6 charges instead of 3 (and it lost additional 1 bonus Energy for activating the Ultimate at min 9 charges).
Plans for the Future
So, as we’ve said in our roadmap and other posts, we’re going to take a holiday break now. Obviously you can expect a hotfix before the holidays in case something breaks, but we’re going to resume proper full-time work in January!
We’ll be reading your feedback, though, and it will allow us to plan better for the future. The things we do want to work on, currently, are:
Story-Related Interactions
We’re not really all that happy with the way NPCs and Locations work in the game and we want to improve these elements of the game. We’ve started working on this but it just wasn’t possible to implement pretty much anything related to the game’s storyline in this patch. And by story we mean everything that happens whenever you talk/interact with a character.
What you can expect in the future are character-related questlines. You can expect hidden interactions that will manifest after certain conditions are met. A lot of surprises in terms of narrative and fleshed-out characters whose stories are intertwined… And, yeah, since it’s a roguelike, there’s high chance you’d need to have a bit of luck in order to find everything!
Combat
We want to “modernize” the combat UI, improve the way crucial information are presented, and also improve plenty of things related to combat in general. In terms of visuals (new animations, new enemy models, getting rid of some ancient ones – we’ve deleted the Hydra-Wyrm and Kraken from the game in this patch, replaced them with Dullahan and Mistbearer!), general flow (speed-it-up!), and so on, and so on.
New Content
Yess, Falen Kamelot! New year, new faction to play with ;) But more info… soon.
This post got really long, sorry! So, have fun playing the new patch, let us know what you think, and – HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Take some time off, play games, spend time with your families… and let’s all hope that 2021 will be a better year! :D
