If you've missed the full release of
MidBoss, now's the time to pick it up if you were interested. Between August 7 and 14 it'll be 10% off on
Steam and
itch.io (DRM free).
There also was the first big quality of life changes patch, making the game a lot smoother of an experience.
QoL part 1 overviewThis new version contains many bugfixes, as well as quality of life features that were easier to implement to tide players over until the next patch. An exhaustive list of changes is available below, here we'll highlight the most important changes.
Possession and depossession changesWe've changed the way these skills work in two ways, to help encourage players to use imp form more often. Many players were not aware that the imp form can be stronger than any other form if equipped with optional mastered forms, as it gets the best stats of all forms that way.
The first thing we did is to add a prompt window to the depossess ability. This window calculates what mix of equipped, mastered forms would give you the best attribute multipliers as the imp, and shows you how your base stats would increase just like the possession prompt does. The prompt contains dropdown boxes so that you can play around with the equipped forms and immediately see how your stats would be affected, all of this without committing to actually depossessing your form before you know what the consequences will be.
This same prompt also automatically pops up when you master your current form, alerting you that your stats may improve if you depossess and equip it to your imp form. We have however added an option to disable this to the options menu.
Finally the possession prompt now contains a choice between possessing the creature you killed, or draining their soul. Soul drain is a new mechanic where instead of possessing you instead heal yourself by 10% of your max HP plus 10% of the creature's max HP. This means that to regain health as the imp you no longer have to possess and then depossess, which takes turns. Soul drain takes effect and heals you immediately.
To soul drain you do have to still cast possession on creatures. Soul drain is also available outside of imp form, to lessen the playerbase's impression of Life Leech as an absolutely crucial-to-have skill.
GUI changesThe depossession prompt is not the only way we've increased the player's ability to easily track changes. The equipment menu now contains a collapsible list of stats on the right side of the window, which update in real time as you change forms or equip different items.
We've also clarified in the tutorials that soul fatigue does not take effect until you close the window, and no matter how many times you swap forms while the window stays open you will only ever gain 1 stack of soul fatigue, and 0 if you roll back your changes. Combined with the stats on the equipment menu it is now much easier to track how changing equipped forms alters your stats while in imp form.
In fact, to aid with just this process, mastered forms in dropdowns now show a mastery star, so you can see at a glance which forms are mastered and which aren't.
We've also changed the names of three stats to make their function clearer to players. Power is now known as Sorcery, Focus is now known as Precision, and Force is now known as Affliction.
While there is no item hotbar in this version, we have made it so that items can be used or equipped from the ground by right clicking the item in question. If you try to equip an item from the ground and there isn't enough room for unequipped items, they'll be dropped to the floor instead.
Finally as part of the GUI improvements we've added several types of map markers. There are markers for stairs, the merchant, the cratefish king, all four types of shrines, and legendary and unique items on the map.
Damage reductionAll three armor types (plate, leather, and robes) as well as shields now come with an additional damage reduction quality. The value is random, though plate armor will reduce physical damage more, and robes will reduce magical damage more. Shields and leather armor have a balance between both.
This damage reduction is a percentage which is applied after the incoming damage has been reduced by toughness or resistance, which should help with late game damage mitigation for melee builds. This should help with the feedback that late game damage was too binary, either you take tons of damage, or you take no damage at all.
(Ghouls were also nerfed slightly because apparently fast zombies too stronk)
Destructible itemsWhile many players have told us smashing everything in sight is one of the more satisfying aspects of the game, we have heard those of you who feel it takes too long. To alleviate this, we've greatly sped up the hit animation on destructible static items.
Additionally, bookshelves are now destroyed in a single hit, and will randomly look either tidy or disheveled.
While not something you smash yourself, when the cratefish king's goodie crate breaks it will now spread items across more tiles, making it easier to sort through your loot.
QoL part 2 roadmapThe next patch is tentatively planned for September. Some of the planned changes include:
- Item throwing system. This means the Alchemist's Manual will finally have an effect.
- Inventory upgrades. These include a way to scrap unwanted items, turning them into a stackable scrap pile in your inventory that takes up a single slot, additional inventory slots, and stackable potions and tomes.
- Two brand new abilities. The first is Guard, which replaces Rust on the skeleton. This will be a toggle ability that drains your stamina over time but increases your damage reduction values. The second is Miasma, a ground targeted ability that will replace Life Leech on the warlock, inflicting a blind effect which causes a penalty to accuracy on anything that passes through it.
- New status effect qualities on weapons, giving some weapons a chance to proc blind, poison, burning, or slowing debuffs on hit.
- An item hotbar which lets you use items much like abilities, without having to go through the inventory, and item favoriting which prevents favorite items from being scrapped or showing up in the merchant's sell tab.
- An optional hand pixeled replacement font for the current default font, to address complaints of the font being blurry.
Keep in mind that this is not a full list of changes coming in the next patch, only an overview of the most important planned changes, and that this is subject to change.
Changes in v1.1.7: (savegame compatible with previous version)
[2017-08-03]
- Abilities
- Added soul drain. When the possession prompt pops up you have the option of draining the target's soul instead, healing yourself for 10% of their maximum HP + 10% of your maximum HP.
- Colossus splash damage is doubled. Splash damage now also pierces defense.
- Depossess now pulls up a depossession window that previews your stats as the imp, allowing you to mix and match forms and see how your stats would change with those forms equipped in imp form.
- Ethereal now also absorbs half of incoming magic damage.
- Staff Master ability now adds 30% of the magical damage bonus of equipped wands and staves to physical/melee damage.
- Accessibility
- The blips indicating entities on the minimap now change color when using different color blind profiles.
- Bug Fixes
- Added safeguards to prevent soft-locking on the final floor because of portcullises not opening correctly between stages.
- Added some code to prevent item duplication bugs from occurring when picking up items. Additionally the game should be more robust when dealing with duplicated items on load and should no longer crash.
- Fixed a bug causing walls to overlap objects or vice versa after changing resolutions while in game.
- Fixed a bug where an item's stack label was still visible in its slot while click-dragging it around the inventory.
- Fixed a bug where the minimap would disappear when opening the options menu if it was maximized.
- Fixed a bug where the spiked shield's damage bonus was not unidentified, but the flavor text describing it deals damage was.
- Fixed a bug which caused the header font in credits to not be high contrast when high contrast fonts were enabled.
- Fixed a bug which was causing a full crash if an error happened during save load instead of going back to the title screen and notifying the user of the save load error.
- Fixed a bug which was causing monsters to not use various certain skill tomes even when available to them.
- Fixed a bug with holy water that would mistakenly apply every uncursed bonus to the player, causing all sorts of weird effects.
- Fixed a bug with the minimap minimize/maximize button not updating its graphic if keyboard was used to toggle the size.
- Fixed a bug with using holy water on an item that had both a cursed version of an attribute bonus, and a normal version, where one of the bonuses would not apply after turning the cursed bonus into a positive.
- Fixed a crashing bug related to monsters that use skill tomes, causing certain tomes to crash the game when used.
- Fixed a rare crashing bug affecting Blink ability.
- When an ability kills a monster with the vessel condition as well as the player, and the player is not in imp form and possesses the monster, a redundant imp will no longer be left behind.
- Entities
- Flying creatures are no longer affected by pools of acid.
- Ghoul's violence attribute reduced slightly.
- Replaced Envenom ability on Hell Rat with Flame Strike.
- Environment
- Added map markers for stairs, merchant, cratefish king, shrines, and valuable items (legendary/unique).
- Bookshelves can now be destroyed in a single hit. Bookshelves now randomly use one of the two available sprites.
- Cratefish king rewards are now spread across multiple tiles when possible.
- Smashing object animation is now 40% faster.
- Stack now blesses all your items, instead of only your equipped items.
- General
- Added a "Form mastered!" sliding notification.
- Cratefish rewards now take 60 cratefish per reward (up from 50).
- Due to the way armor and shield damage reduction bonuses are generated, the merchant's inventory for any given seed will now be different than it was before.
- Focus attribute has been renamed Precision.
- Force attribute has been renamed Affliction.
- Game now remembers item labels toggle setting.
- Power attribute has been renamed Sorcery.
- GUI
- After mastering a form a window now pops up asking you if you would like to depossess to imp form. This window is like the depossession window and previews your stats as the imp with the best multipliers you could have.
- Discarding a death card now brings up a prompt that makes it clear the player is forfeiting their chance for grave goods.
- Mastered forms in the equipment window now show a mastery star in front of their names.
- Meta attribute value font is no longer blurry.
- Status effects at the bottom of the screen are now sorted by whether they are a buff or debuff, and by name.
- The equipment menu now has a collapsible sidebar showing an overview of your stats for convenient reference.
- The item select window that pops up when using an ID scroll or holy water will no longer be able to accidentally select an item instantly when double clicking to use.
- Titlescreen social widgets revamped. Now contains links to the wiki, and Kitsune Games Discord, Twitter, and website.
- You can now use and equip items from the floor. If your inventory is full when equipping an item, any unequipped items that won't fit in your inventory will be dropped on the floor.
- Items
- All armor and shields now come with damage reduction values. This damage reduction is applied after incoming damage is reduced by resistance or toughness, but before any other damage scaling status effects.
- Potions now have both a fixed value effect and a percentage based effect, in order to maintain their use in the late game.
- Retro potions now indicate when the mode is already unlocked in their tooltip.
- Options
- Added an option to change the fullscreen map opacity to the graphics section.
- Added an option to disable the depossession prompt upon mastering a form to the gameplay section of the options menu.
- Added drain soul keybind option.
- Tutorials
- Added an additional tutorial that explains that soul fatigue is not "locked in" until exiting the menus, allowing players to freely experiment with what forms they want to have equipped as long as they don't close the menus.
- Changed the soul fatigue tutorial and added an extra tutorial to make it clear that changing multiple forms at a time only incurs one stack of soul fatigue.
- Clarified wording on the grave goods explanation message.
- The low health tutorial and Mid reminders have been updated to mention the soul drain feature.
- There is now a tutorial message explaining the defense negating effects of piercing damage and criticals.
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I tried to make the rest of the game easier to get into for people who aren't used to roguelikes, so I guess this is what I get for my efforts. 
