Stoneshard Update – Changes to Mechanics

Aside from a heap of new content, the upcoming City of Gold update for Ink Stains Games’ turn-based RPG Stoneshard is going to overhaul many of the game’s basic mechanics, like armor values, accuracy, blocking and dodging. And if you wouldn’t mind knowing what to expect from the game after the update goes live, you should check this out:

Hello everyone!

The City of Gold update is going to be the largest one yet not only in terms of content, but also the overall mechanics. The introduction of the global map will greatly affect the progression and will be the first step in making it work as originally intended – and that’s where tweaks to the mechanics come into play. Today we’ll address some of them in this devlog and tell you about every important change to the combat system.

Splitting Protection

Let’s start with the most important change: splitting the Protection stat between different body parts. The current Protection system is a remnant of those times when Stoneshard was envisioned as a simpler and shorter game. Every piece of armor increased the unified Protection stat by a certain amount, affecting all incoming strikes and allowing, say, plated boots to protect the entire body.

This resulted in a number of issues: the stacking of resistances and heavy armor was way too effective, allowing to almost entirely shrug off most enemies’ attacks. We decided to abandon this system: Protection, as well as Damage and Bleed Resistances, granted by each individual piece of armor, now affect only their designated body parts. Helmets only protect the head, cuirasses – the torso, and gloves – just the hands.

This makes middle and late game combat noticeably deadlier, strengthens the role of individual pieces of equipment, and allows more flexibility in armor progression – before the City of Gold, heavy helmets only granted 2-3 more Protection than the mail coif, but now the difference is quite substantial.

Finding the balance between the offensive and defensive playstyles will become more important than ever: the heavy plate is safer, but takes a toll on Energy; on the flip side, light and medium armors provide less defense, but allow using skills more liberally.

Protection, just like Block Power, now also affects the incoming Magic and Nature damage, but only with 50% effectiveness: you’ll need 20 Protection to fully soak 10 Fire Damage.

Changes to Block

As you may have guessed, the Blocking mechanic was affected as well, gaining some extra depth. Meet the new stat: Block Power Recovery.

Before the rework, it didn’t really matter how hard or how many times you got hit on the shield: if your Block Power was high enough, you were completely invulnerable to enemy attacks. Now, however, Block Power is expended by blocking, representing the exertion and the loss of balance, and then slowly being recovered each turn.

Let’s say you have 25 Block Power and 20% Block Power Recovery. An enemy strikes you for 25 Damage: you block it, spending 25 Block Power, so you’re left with zero. After that, 20% Block Power Recovery replenishes you 5 Block Power: if you block another attack during the next turn, you’ll receive 20 Damage.

This way prolonged fights, especially against multiple opponents, will quickly drain your Block Power, so you’ll have to use your resources more strategically or rely on specialized skills.

Naturally, shields were affected by this change the most. They lost their innate Protection and gained higher Block Chance and Block Power to compensate for it. Other than that, shields were roughly split in three categories: light, medium, and heavy.

The shown numbers are subject to change.

• Light shields have the lowest Block Chance and Power, boasting a large bonus to Block Power Recovery instead: they block limited amounts of damage, but they do so with reliable effectiveness. Certain Shield skills also grant them additional bonuses.
• Medium shields are a jack of all trades: they have decent Block Chance and Power, but lack the bonus to Recovery, making them a balanced choice for defensive playstyles.
• Heavy shields have a huge bonus to Block Chance and Power and can withstand some of the most devastating attacks. But woe to you if you run out of Block Power in the middle of a fight – heavy shields Recover incredibly slowly, so unless you invest into the specialized skill tree, you risk handicapping yourself with an unwieldy, heavy piece of equipment.

Accuracy Calculation

In the current version of the game, the hit chance formula is very simple:

Hit Chance, % = The attacker’s Accuracy – The target’s Dodge Chance

We decided to change it by splitting dodges and misses into two distinct categories: there’ll be two independent checks for the attacker’s chance to hit (depends on their Accuracy) and the target’s chance to perform a dodge.

At the same time, Accuracy over 100% still reduces the target’s Dodge Chance, and the negative Dodge Chance contributes to the attacker’s Accuracy.

Changes to Dodge

Now to the next important change – the new Dodge system.

Initially, Dodge Chance was a completely secondary stat, and we didn’t plan making dedicated Dodge builds a thing. This changed with the introduction of the Dual Wielding skill tree, when we tried adding some dodge-focused gear and the “Berserk Tradition” passive that granted a huge Dodge bonus to characters without armor.

That experiment wasn’t very successful. The issue with its current implementation lies in the “all or nothing” conundrum: you either take no damage or you take it all. Dodge builds revolve entirely around stacking Dodge Chance, running a very thin line between invulnerability and being borderline unplayable: sometimes it’s possible to consistently avoid all damage only to have your character annihilated by a single instance of bad luck..

To sum it up: Dodge builds ignored a large portion of available gear, mindlessly stacked a single stat, and were overly reliant on two key skills (Elusiveness and Berserk Tradition) – none of it worked with the rest of the game.

That’s why we listened to our community and changed Dodge in accordance with the suggestion made on our Discord server by @WatcherOfArabia, that was also supported by other players: instead of simply negating all damage, performing a dodge turns successful attacks into fumbles, and fumbled attacks into misses.

This way Dodge becomes more nuanced, functioning as an important stat with numerous applications. It can be combined with light and medium armors (their lower Protection is more manageable with the 50% Damage penalty on fumbled attacks) or with more aggressive playstyles that focus on applying Stagger and Fumble Chance debuffs with skills, passives, or certain consumables.

The “Berserk Tradition” passive was remade as well – it no longer requires you wearing no armor and has different mechanics and bonuses associated with it.

Other Changes

The rest of the changes aren’t that massive, but they are still worth mentioning:

• Most conditions and injuries were rebalanced to make them more distinct and to increase the influence they have on gameplay.
• Being knocked back into an occupied tile now applies Daze instead of Stun. This was done to prevent stunlocks and counteract the strategy of abusing doorways and corners, which is way too effective in the current version of the game. Stun now grants a significant bonus to Control Resistance, which should also make stunlocks much less frequent.
• Some effects received a rework: Wetness, for instance, now has stacks that depend on the overall duration of the debuff. The longer you stay under the rain, the stronger the effect. Rain now also causes metal items to slowly degrade 🙂
• Skill trees received short descriptions with keywords, meant to help new players to quickly understand their theme and possible synergies..
• There were also some changes to main Attributes, but more about them later…

That’s all for now! Stay tuned: we’ll begin revealing the upcoming update’s content starting with the next devlog.