Hi everyone! First of all I want to start of with a big thank you! I'm quite overwhelmed by both the insane amount of positivity and also the incredibly constructive and helpful feedback!
Over the last days, I've been reading all of your feedback and opinions and have condensed them into 3 general points that I plan to address with this patch at least in some capacity:
Item variety & loosing half of your Knowledge Points on Death
A lot of loot in this game is upgrade materials. Since you get your Combat Arts from enemies, there is only Clothing, Scrolls and Consumables left to spice up the loot-pool. While there still need to be a bunch of upgrade materials, I think I underutilized the Consumable aspect. In this patch I place an additional 7 of each consumable type throughout the game. These replace item locations that were inks before, and the inks that are replaced have just been stacked together with some other ink location. This will hopefully not just make looting a little more interesting, but also reduce the frustration of loosing your Knowledge Points. While you get far enough to upgrade you Combat Arts, you now get a lot more Mask Shards which will give Knowledge Points when broken and are not lost on death.
Gank fights in the land of Hope
I went a little overboard with these. In this patch, I remove a lot of the ganky enemy placements in the land of Hope. You can find a detailed list of what enemies have been removed in the detailed patchnotes below.
Inflated enemy health pools
This is the hardest point for me to address. I think it comes down to a mixture of some enemies actually having too much health and the intended playstyle not being conveyed well enough. Bosses will feel painfully tanky if you only wait for openings and then perform a single slow attack, but if you fully focus on playing around the stagger system and stunlocking enemies with combos, you can deplete healthbars rather quickly. I decided to reduce the health of some bosses, but especially of small enemies in the land of Hope. Those were definitely overtuned, fighting against 2 enemies at the same time that each have a health bar balanced around 1v1 fighting is just not fun.
There's still more things that I want to address in the future, but I wanted to get this first patch out rather quickly. Thank you so much for playing, I'm incredibly grateful for all of your feedback!
Detailed patchnotes
Balancing
Enemies
Reduced Shroomhead poise from 150 to 110
Reduced Disposed Sacrifice health from 100 to 80
Reduced Headless Angel health from 140 to 100
Reduced Cross Carrying Villager health from 220 to 200
Reduced Whip Villager health from 60 to 50
Reduced Crawling Villager health from 170 to 140
Reduced Crawling Villager poise from 250 to 220
Reduced Annihilation Unit tracking during gun attack
Bosses
Reduced Decay poise from 1000 to 700
Reduced Decay poise regen-speed from 40 to 30
Reduced Decay health from 990 to 900
Increased Decay wait time between attacks
Removed Decay combo where the boss moves away and then explodes into an AOE
Reduced Sacrificial Mound Minion health from 100 to 50
Reduced Watcher & True Angel projectile tracking
Reduced Traitorous Child of Birth health from 107 to 96
Reduced Apostle of Death health from 808 to 770
Reduced Traitorous Child & Apostle of Death poise from 360 to 340
Reduced Passion damage for light attacks from 45 to 33
Removed the following enemies to reduce the amount of gank fights in the land of Hope:
2 Headless Sacrifices in the villa in the Decrepit Village
1 Flail Priest in the Decrepit Village backside
1 Crawling Villager at the Noble Cookhouse
1 Crawling Villager & 2 Disposed Sacrifices in the Skyward Chamber area
1 Headless Angel in the room with the first Summoner enemy
1 Whip Villagers on the hanging bridges
1 Cross Carrying Villager & 1 Disposed Sacrifice in the bathhouse
2 Flail Villagers, 1 Crawling Villager & 1 Headless Angel at the top of Hopes temple
3 Crawling Villagers & 1 Flail Villager in the hidden village
Controls
Slowed down horizontal camera movement speed when looking directly up or down
Bug fixes
Fixed a bug where the turning towers in the Temple of Birth would no longer open their gates when reloading a savefile while they are in their reset position
Fixed a bug where a game crash right after a cutscene could break a savefile (For example crashing right after getting the Wings of Hope would cause the player to not have the wings but also not be able to start the cutscene anymore)
Rewrote the camera lock-on system to make locking on less inconsistent when not directly looking at the enemy
Fixed a bug where the Tentacle door in the land of Passion could be opened without defeating Passion
Fixed a bug where you could get stuck in a hole in the lower swamps of Birth
Fixed a bug where you could get stuck in a piece of rubble in the Decrepit Village
Fixed a bug where you could get stuck in a one sided wall in the hallway leading to the land of Hope
Misc
Distributed additional consumable items throughout the game to slightly boost item variety
Removed distracting line-indicators for Vine levers & Wind Points
Removed distracting wind tunnel effect for Wind Points when not using them
Lowered intensity of windmill particle effects to make them less distracting
