June 22 play test update!

Hey hunters! We had a great turn out to our play test last Saturday, and we wanted to share some of the things we learned with you! Firstly, I'd like to share a special thank you to all of you who came to play Quest Forged Arena in person. It's such a blast to get to hang out with you guys and hear your opinions about our game. Zeni and MarkyMarkk from our discord deserve their own shout out for coming and hanging out all day to help us paint Kai (WIP shown above) and run tests. You guys are awesome, and we appreciate all of your time!

Some suggestions we received from our awesome play testers!

• Add a Beast Master character
• Add a Druid character
• Add a Block Break attack type - we played with the ideas of: piercing a block, dealing damage directly to an opponent's health; dealing damage to the enemy for the amount of Block Tokens stacked; not dealing any damage to health, but removing all Block Tokens. We'll likely see all of these come to fruition in some way.
• Bethany's Core Ability, 'Drink' needs a bit of a rework.
• The way it is currently worded, we're providing the opposite buff than we intended for each attack. Bethany uses this ability to switch between two modes: Drunk and "Sober". When she swaps modes, it changes the actions on her items and provides her a buff for her next turn. We agree that we can strengthen Bethany's fantasy and her mechanical strength by swapping the buffs from her Core Ability to better align with the items. We also need to add a range to her Core Ability.
• All of Minato's power is coming from his Core Ability, 'Jet Pack'.
• We are looking to introduce verticality into Quest Forged Arena for some of our future planned game modes. Minato is helping us to find issues in this process. The way he currently plays is the same as Bethany above, though he swaps between "Air Support" and "Ground Support" modes. When he's an "Air Support", he is very difficult to play against when you have a melee assault champion, and he provides almost no benefit against ranged enemies. We think instead of making him cost an additional range to target, we force the opposing player to further commit to targeting him. That is going to increase the base number of action dice you have to use in order for your ability to hit him.
• Questions to Answer about Verticality (adding hills, trees, and climbing to the game):
• How is AOE affected?
• Does Blight King's corruption stick to the ground?
• How do we track how high up a character is?
• Kenji's Repeater Rifle includes extraneous text. We are going to take advantage of the next few weeks to shorten and simplify ability text. We'd also like to add pictures of tokens on the card and make the heart amounts more clear. We think color coding all actions is going to help improve the UI and make learning the game easier.
• Sparx and Eva don't feel like they take advantage of one-another's set up. Both of them require a lot of planning to execute, but they don't fully feel like a duo champion. We plan to make their items work in tighter synchronicity so they really feel like they are empowered when you pick them together. We plan to accomplish this by adding effects when you get more successes.
• Auriell's 'Katana' item is being greatly outshined by her 'Greatsword' item. We wanted to provide an option with stronger utility, but the loss in damage and effect is too great. We're moving this away from being a Versatile Attack toward being another AOE Attack, and we're going to increase the base range. In exchange, we're removing the added range per success, and allowing Auriell to place a Taunt Token on a damaged enemy.
• Blight King's 'Ring of Haunting' has an incorrect range and a typo. 
• We also had another idea for an item for Blight King. We think it's going to be strong and really play into his character fantasy. We may add a third item for him, or we may remove the worst performing item we currently have. We'll update you when we make a decision!
• Morren's 'Short Sword' item needs to increase the amount of damage per success, and only place a single Taunt Token.
• Additional issues we found with Taunt Tokens:
• Multiple Taunt Tokens placed in the same turn cause confusion.
• Which champion attacks first?
• What if I don't have an attack available on one champion, but I do on another?
• How to Taunt Tokens interact with Delilah's Skeletons?
• We should be more clear when we're play testing to draw people to our table, and we should shout it out earlier so people can plan to attend. We hear you loud and clear, and we'll work on both planning further ahead, as well as attending/hosting more events to allow more opportunities for people to play.

Overall, we're incredibly happy with the implementation of Items. They help us track cooldowns more easily and effectively. They provide more player choice and comp customization. If you're playing with "kitchen table" rules, it is incredibly fun to have access to all items. We do believe that "Tournament" rules will only allow the selection of one item, as it forces you to make difficult and impactful decisions that make each game unique. We're really happy with how unique each of our new characters feel, and they've helped us to limit test where we can go from here. We're planning to test new maps, more comps, and a tournament bracket in the near future. Stay tuned for tournament information!

Thanks again for hanging out with us and reading our blog! Have fun and stay safe, I hope to hop into the Arena with you all soon!

-Quest Master Kayden