HTD Day 22

First I wanted to point out that Fire skills have been temporarily removed due to some technical issues that couldn't be resolved before this small update but we have the Shadow skills ready for you guys to try out and decided to just throw those in for now. Don't worry, they'll be back ASAP (probably next update). :)

What's New:

-Fire skills temporarily removed

-Added Wand Weapon (Currently only used when casting the Shadow Bomb skills)

-Added beacon graphics for showing current hero and currently focused target selection

-Added Shadow Skills. You'll probably notice the graphics for the effects and icons are just recolored versions of the Fire graphics, these are just placeholders for now.

The Shadow Skills work a bit differently than the Fire Skills. I'll give a description of the current three skills for each element as we release them so you guys know what they do (eventually there will be descriptions in-game). I'll just provide a brief description for now because the actual damage values and such will be changing a lot as we tweak them. You'll be able to see them in the future though.

Key Terms:

Direct Damage (DD) - Causes full damage instantly

Damage over Time (DoT) - Causes continuous damage over a period of time

Damage after Time (DaT) - Causes damage after a period of time has passed

Here are descriptions for the Fire and Shadow skills:

Fire:

Burn (Native Elemental - DoT - Fire Burning Man Icon) - Sets your target on fire causing it to take continuous damage. Stacks up to five times. Grants the caster a Fire Charge that increases their Fire Damage. A character can hold up to five charges at a time.

Flame Strike (Tier 1 Physical Elemental - DD - Fiery Sword Icon) - Attacks with your weapon ignited in flames.

FireBall (Tier 1 Magical Elemental - DD - Fireball Icon) - Hurls a fireball at your target

Shadow:

Infliction (Native Elemental - DOT - Shadow Burning Man Icon) - Inflicts your target with shadow decreasing it's Physical and Magical Defense. Stacks up to five times. Grants the caster a Shadow Charge that increases their Shadow Damage. A character can hold up to five charges at a time.

Dark Strike (Tier 1 Physical Elemental - DD + DaT - Shadowy Sword Icon) - Attacks with your weapon engulfed in shadow, does additional damage after timer runs out.

Shadow Bomb (Tier 1 Magical Elemental - DD + DaT - Shadow Bolt Icon) - Casts a shadowy bolt at your target that fills it with darkness till it explodes, does additional damage after timer runs out.

Something you may have noticed is that these Tier 1 skills are a bit similar to eachother. This is because there isn't a general auto-attack. Your characters are always doing a skill of some kind and with five different elements we needed a way to simply let you do JUST a melee/ranged Shadow Physical attack (Dark Strike) or JUST a Fire Magical attack (Fireball). I've mentioned in the past that we want all the skills to be viable in most situations as opposed to having a higher tier skill that just trumps all previous skills thus causing you to only ever want to use that one single skill. So with Tier 2+ skills you'll start to seeing the skills differentiate from eachother based on how each element's strengths and weaknesses start to come into play.

Currently in the Works:


 * Re-implementing Fire Skills
 * Revised Human Male
 * Water/Nature/Light Elemental Skills
 * Character Selection
 * Character Customization
 * Character Skill Selection
 * Interface Additions
 * And More!

Kevin currently has a poll going on his blog, KXN @ HTD for determing what order we'll be adding each elemental skills in (Ignore the The Second Element title, he's just extending the time and it won't let him change it). Shadow was winning originally so we did that as the second element already.

Let us know what you guys think and what we can do to improve HTD in the comments, thanks!

-Dan