Greetings Wizards. Been a while, hasn't it?

A while ago I decided to stop updating Rift Wizard 1 to devote my full energies to Rift Wizard 2.

I did this because I wanted to try some things that would be wildly inappropriate for a patch- things that, in my opinion, have the potential to improve the game quite a bit.

RW2 started as a direct fork of RW1, but unlike in a patch, I had absolute creative freedom to go in any direction I pleased. I tried quite a few things. Some worked, some didn't. Those that worked, well, they are Rift Wizard 2. Its been a blast, and its nearly time to start sharing it with a wider audience.

The most significant new feature in Rift Wizard 2 is equipment. Random drops are a part of most roguelikes. Rift Wizard 1 plays around a bit with random drops in the form of shrines, but mostly emphasizes the non-random SP buyable skills, spells and upgrades. Rift Wizard 2 replaces shrines with equipment. You can hold a staff, wear a robe a hat and boots, and have any number of miscellaneous trinkets active. One article of equipment tends to be less powerful than a shrine, but applies to more than one spell, and can stack with other equipment.

Its much easier to design equipment than it is to design shrines, and thus, RW2 already has more equipment than RW1 had shrines. Equipment adds a flavor of chaos and randomness to the game that RW1 lacked, and gives each run a sense of uniqueness and gravity- permadeath + random drops is a powerful combination.

RW2 also contains many large balance changes. Potions are reduced in quantity, but a free refill is given at the end of each level. Spells can be upgraded only once (though generally with more powerful individual upgrades than they had in RW1). Realms 1-5 only grant 2SP, with realms 10+ granting 4+. Damage redeals no longer bypass resistances. Levels are bigger (well actually, the levels now scale with your monitor resolution, but the main supported size is bigger- 33x33 instead of 28x28). The game ends at level 21 instead of level 25.

One big balance goal of RW2 was to reduce the incentives pushing the player towards picking one 'carry' spell and ignoring everything else. I think the most fun situations in RW are the ones where the player has many viable choices about what to do with their turn, and this is much more common in runs where the player has 5-10 spells than 1-3.

Rift Wizard 2 also contains many new challenges to face. The old hand crafted variant system is replaced with a procedural one, many new enemy wizards are added, and the monster list is in the process of being revised.

Ultimately, Rift Wizard 2 is quite similar in many ways to Rift Wizard 1. Yet it is also quite different. Rift Wizard 2 embraces randomness to a degree that Rift Wizard 1 did not. It has higher variance between runs, meaning winning once is probably easier, but streaking is probably harder. Following guides and forcing builds is much, much harder. But the fundamental game is the same: spend SP to upgrade your wizard and guide said wizard turn by turn through a series of randomly generated levels.

Rift Wizard 2 will enter early access in January, which I expect to last a year, mostly devoted to content creation and balance.

Check out the screenshots and trailer (and follow/wishlist the game!) here.

Todays build is just to fix a few bugs:

Fixed an occasional crash in the spell shop
Fixed an occasional crash involving nightmare aura upgrades
Fixed volcanic eruption flow range upgrade not working
Fixed hollow flesh hp loss upgrade not working
Fixed poison debuff description in help screen
Fixed devour mind desc typo
Fixed devour mind gluttony upgrade not respecting max charge upgrades
Mushbooms can now apply their effects to non living enemies

Greetings Wizards! This patch focuses on making poison a more useful and reasonable mechanic in the game and correcting some longstanding balance issues. It also contains a few new high level challenges, and of course plenty of miscellaneous bug fixes. Full notes follow.


Skills and Balance:

Poison now disables healing in addition to dealing 1 damage per turn

Megavenom
New skill
Level 4 ND
Deals 4 additional poison damage to all poisoned enemies each turn

Acid Fumes
New Skill
Level 5 ND
Each turn a random enemy gets -100 poison resist

Voidflame Lantern
New Skill
Level 4 FA
Whenever you cast a fire or arcane spell, gain starcharged for a number of turns equal to the spells level. Starcharged deals Fire and Arcane damage to 2 separate random enemies in line of sight each turn it is active.

Essence Flux
New spell. Reverses the resistances of a group of enemies.

Void Beam level 4->3

All "Eye Of X" spells level 3->2

Floating Eyeball level 4->5

Fixed a bug where some monsters with imp swarm variants were summoning the wrong types of imps

Touch of Death
level 3->2
Fixed reapers gaining 2x minion bonuses

Bone Barrage
New 7SP upgrade: Shambler Assembly. Allows you to target an empty tile to make a bone shambler with hp = to the hp sacrificed.

Poison Sting
Range upgrade cost 2->1

Death Cleave
Now cascades only to targets that are valid cast targets (previously, it would only check line of sight and range, and both from the last target it cascaded to).
Now shows animation to indicate that the cascade is happening (or fizzling)
Cascade range 4->5
Cascade range upgrade 4 range for 3 SP -> 3 range for 4 SP

Spikeball Factory spikeballs no longer get double minion bonuses

Mercurize level 2->3

Amplify Poison
Removed (was bad, no one used it, is redundant and fights for design space with the new poison skills)

Melting Armor
Now also a Metal skill

Hunger
range 2->3
damage 5->7

Ghostfire
No longer works on allies

Fiery Judgement
level 6->7

Holy Thunder
level 6->7

Venom Spit
Now also effects living units

Holy Water
level 5->4
Max SH 3->5

Shatter Shards
level 4->6

SilkShifter
Stops spawning webs after all enemies are dead

Grey Bone Shrine spawns 2 bone shamblers instead of 4

Resistance decreases are now generally buff based. This means they will no longer persist through reincarnation. This includes Lightning Spire lightning resist reduction, Acidification (poison resistance reduction), and Melting Armor.

New high level enemies:
Idol of Slime - everything respawns as a slime when it dies
Crucible of Pain - furnace shrine for the enemy team
Idol of Fiery Vengeance - icy vengeance, but for the enemy, and with fire
Concussive Idol - all damage stuns
Vampiric Idol - all enemies lifesteal


General Changes:
The player now starts with a portal disruptor
Optimized many commonly used functions (thanks to community member Anotak for the ideas for these which came from his RiftOptimizer mod)
In particular, threat display (the t key) now goes much faster.
Added fast forward key. Defaults to backspace, sets speed to turbo for the current frame.
Fixed some bugs that came from trying to deal damage to dead targets
Fixed a bug where logging got doubled on reload.
Fixed crash that occurred when a Red Cyclops would bat a soul jar
Steam and discord overlays work in full-screen mode again (still cant work in native resolution mode)
Fixed Mordred song not playing if you reloaded a save file already at Mordred.
Fixed various tooltip typos and inconsistencies
Quakeport (the monster spell) can no longer render levels unnavigable
The game now waits until the save process has been completed to delete the old save
Fixed AI sometimes using breath weapons on tiles that did not hit their intended target

Enjoy!
-Dylan

One last experimental change I want to test on beta:

Poison now disables healing.
This applies to the Wizard as well, and healing potions cannot be used while poisoned.

In addition, this patch contains fixes to two longstanding moderately annoying bugs:

Dragons are now better at imagining where their breath weapons will actually hit, and will no longer 'miss' with them

Red Cyclopes batting soul jars will no longer crash the game.

-Dylan

A few small beta tweaks as we push towards a merge to main:

Fixed a bug where click to move sometimes failed to swap the wizard with his minions
Renamed Purple Flame Radiance to Voidflame Lantern (PFR was too long for the UI)
Adjusted the frequency of the new idols down to normal
Crucible of pain spawns furnace hounds every 500->300 damage

-Dylan

This weeks patch mostly deals with code optimization:

Optimized many commonly used functions
Optimized threat range calculation (threat range calculation is much faster in many cases now)

Pressing 't' should result in much smaller delays, and the game should be able to process slightly more stuff before incurring slowdown.

Also made a few changes to Purple Flame Radiance:
- is no longer sorcery tagged
- no longer wastes hits on immune enemies

Thanks to Anotak for help with the optimizations.

-Dylan

Purple Flame Battery revised to Purple Flame Radiance: Whenever you cast an arcane or fire spell, gain that many turns of starcharged. Starcharged deals 6 arcane and 6 fire damage to 2 random enemies in LOS each turn it is active.

Fixed Mordred music not playing when the Mordred level was reloaded

Fixed single enemy threat range display only working with mouse

Essence Flux charges 6->12

Added graphics for new idols

Actually fixed poison sting range upgrade, really for real for real this time.

Added fast forward feature: Press backspace to set the game speed to xturbo until the end of the current turn.
(I added this because I usually prefer to play on normal speed, but sometimes get into annoying situations especially with conjuration builds, and end up toggling back and forth which is awkward. Curious to hear how others feel about this feature, and game speed in general.)

-Dylan

Many updates this week to the beta, patchnotes follow.


Spells and skills:

New skill: Purple Flame Battery
Gain charge when you cast fire spells, which can be used to cast arcane spells for free.

New spell: Essence Flux
Swaps around all the resistances of a group of enemies

Nightmare Poison -> Megavenom
Now deals an extra 4 poison damage instead of 2 dark and 2 arcane (I'd rather have this skill be useful with other poison skills than feed back into the already crowded universe of cracklevoid/stormcaller tricks)

Touch of Death
Level 3->2
Reaper no longer gets 2x minion bonuses

Death Cleave
Cares about cascade range again (I vastly underestimated the potential for shenanigans with oculus and mystic vision here)
Shows the chain of cleaving graphically now

Melting Armor now has the metallic tag as well

Hunger
range 2->3
damage 5->7

Venom Spit
Now works on both nature units and living units

Holy Water
Max shields 3->5
Level 5->4


New Idols:

Slimesoul Idol - respawns enemies as slimes
Crucible of Pain - spawns furnace hounds based on how much total damage is dealt in the level
Idol of Fiery Vengeance - shoots a firebolt at a nearby enemy when an ally dies
Concussive Idol - all enemies stun their targets for 1 turn upon dealing damage
Idol of Vampirism - All allies get 50% lifesteal for all the damage they deal

These new idols have 4x the normal frequency on the beta branch to aid with balance and testing, they will be reverted to normal frequency at some point before the patch goes to main.
(Battlefield altering idols are some of the more interesting enemies, and I think they are worth exploring a bit further)


Misc:
Status effects on enemy units are now grouped in the same way they are grouped on the player (aka: print "Melted Armor x4" instead of printing "Melted Armor" 4 times on 4 lines)

Melting armor and Lightning Spire now apply debuffs rather than permanently reducing armor
Melting armor, Acidification, and Lightning Spire resistance debuff all have status icons now

Save files can now be moved from place to place without causing crashes on load (irrelevant for most players, but useful for debugging, and will help to debug some weird hard to trace crashes)

Enjoy! And as always let me know what you think, either here or on the official discord[discord.com].
-Dylan

Another small beta update, these will ramp up a bit next week. For now:

1) Death Cleave reworked a bit:
Now simply recasts the spell on another random valid enemy target, rather than doing a weird pseudo bounce thing.
No longer has any independent concept of cascade range- just uses the spell's range and the caster's location.
Now gives off a little dark cosmetic effect around where it fizzles out

Death Cleave was the source of much player confusion, and also sometimes ridiculously overpowered. Its also one of the coolest pieces of content in the game.

Hopefully these changes make it easier to understand, and less ridiculous with Death Touch.


2) If the game crashes while saving, the previous save file will not be overwritten with garbage

The most notorious crash on save bug- which seems to have something to do with mercurial vengeance + Xturbo- is still unfixed, but this should mitigate its damage somewhat.

-Dylan