v1.1.64
New skill - (F)ire Elemental - the tier 3 fire skill, summons a ranged fire attacker to help you out on your adventure. You can only have one elemental under your control at a time. Grows in power as the hero does, based primarily on Intelligence.
Worked on a MAJOR retooling of the combat system, though it will largely be invisible to the player. Originally, armor played a factor in whether you hit an enemy or not - meaning, your damage had to overcome the enemies armor rating to do meaningful damage (with a little bit of random fate added in as far as your damage and their damage reduction per hit.) A 'miss' simply occurred when your damage was less than their armor (and vice versa). I ended up disliking this for several reasons. First, weapons were far more important in landing a hit than they should be, and second, you get into sort of an 'arms race', where armor HAD to increase on a monster to make it more challenging, and monsters damage had to massively increase to hit the player at higher levels. As a result, low armor classes would take massive damage, and always get hit.
The new system has been reworked with the player and creatures actually having attack and defense(evade) rating. Now, whether you hit or miss is largely a matter of your level and your skill. You ALWAYS have a chance to hit, and there is ALWAYS a chance you will miss, the hit/miss ratio actually being a comparison of the attackers skill to the defenders skill. So while a creature may be 10 levels below you, there is always at least an infintessimal chance it will hit, or you will miss.
Armor, now actually serves it's intended purpose - damage reduction. If an attack hits, the damage it does is reduced in a linear fashion by your armor rating. However, a hit is always a hit, and will do a minimum of 1 point of damage.
Added a 'miss' animation to the graphics. When you hit a target, you'll see a red slash appear across them; now, you will also see a blue swipe appear when you miss the target. If you actually hit, but their armor absorbs all the damage, you will get a message, but no animation.
Removed 'Miss' messages from the message log. If you don't like this change, PLEASE let me know - it will take 2 secs to reinstate it.
On a different note, added more information to the player screen. Pets/summons were slightly tweaked due to the change in the combat system.
Please bear with me, as the difficulty due to the changes is still only a day old, and will take me a while to get it balanced, but on the whole I feel a lot better about it.
Sorry there wasn't more fun, transparent stuff added today, but this work had needed to be done for a while, and had always been sitting in the back of my head as I mulled over how I wanted to do it.
Thanks for your time and patience,
B