2 – It is intended that they reanimate at the start of the next round, and I don’t think it makes the game too difficult considering they can only reanimate back into rabble or militia. There are quite a few more abilities that will remove corpses, and most likely you’ll have at least one class at your disposal that can do so.
I wasn’t trying to say that the mechanic is too hard. It just feels a bit inconsistent to let some skeleton live just so you can kill it the round after and don’t have to deal with it’s reanimated corpse because the end of the fight also removes those corpses. Thus way you’re abusing the clean up step of combat to avoid a specific monster mechanic which feels inconsistent. All other combat effects (bleeds, blights, debuffs, stuns, regular corpses) persist past the end of the fight in a way that makes sense: either they remain for the rest of their duration (blights, bleeds, debuffs) or they can be expected to be removed by the heroes in a single round (waiting for a stun to fade or dealing with corpses) which is only omitted because it would be tedious for no good reason to do it manually. But following the same logic it would mean that the skeletal corpses either don’t reanimate at the end of combat (why?) or that they would reanimate at the end of combat and then the heroes would casually dispatch said reanimated skeletons without the player having to do anything. Which feels a bit too much for the ‘automatic clean up after the fight’.
But dunno. I like the overall mechanic and maybe you just have to have this little inconsistency to be able to have the overall mechanic.
3 – ‘Holy Lance’ exhaustion is to prevent the back-to-back spamming of the skill, and it accomplishes the goal well. The debuff could be adjusted a bit, and it will be in update 4.81, though it will apply the debuff even on a miss because he is still performing the feat.
No no, I’m fine with the debuff from Holy Lance. Ignore my whining. I was just using it as an example of how abilities that have a negative side effect apply said effect all the time (even on a miss) whereas abilities with a positive side effect only apply it on a hit. The debuff on Holy Lance itself seems to be in line with the ones on the Helion’s abilities.
Something else: is the Surprise Chance working as intended? I haven’t counted, but it feels like I’m surprising my enemies in over half of the battles without using any sort of buff/item/ability. I’m mostly running at full or close to full light, but starting 2/3 of my fights with a Surprise Round seems a bit much.
How do Maggot-infested Corpses work? I’ve run into them on two occasions now and both times I spent my first action on something non-combat related (heal or stress heal) and the corpse just vanished. Do I need to attack it for it to spawn something? And if I don’t attack it, it just goes away? Is that intended?
And for my current run: I’ve hit the begrudged grind wall again D: after I had Apprentice Dungeons on farm at the end of Week 7, I have now roughly 200 heirlooms to farm to get to 4/4/4 upgrades. That takes so long and is rather boring :/ I guess I might try to run a 3/3/3 setup into the Ruins to see if that works, but the images of the train wreck that was last time are still in my head.
Could you introduce a bonus system? When I finish a dungeon with all my heroes in perfect condition, I receive some extra heirlooms at the end so I don’t have to run as many of these dungeons which I apparently outlevel anyway? Or some sort of bounty mission system that allows me to upgrade the difficulty of a specific mission for increased rewards? That way the grind would be shortened and I wouldn’t be bored with all the low level missions that are required for the upgrades of the hamlet