New character: Meri, the Mystic


Placeholder art, featuring bright blue footie pajamas:


Meri is a Mystic, a Fighter class whose attacks deal damage twice; the first hit is Physical damage, and the second hit is Magic damage.

Compared to Lalli, a Soldier, she attacks at half the speed to balance out her double hits, and she has lower Atk as well; her raw DPS is lower than Lalli's (16 vs. Lalli's 20), but half of her attacks being Magic damage lets her handle higher Def targets much more effectively, and she has drastically higher raw DPS than pure mages such as Antero (who deals a paltry 7.5 DPS).

Defensively, she has lower Def than Lalli, but much higher HP and with it stronger HP regeneration; this means she endures the slow, strong attacks of elite enemies more effectively, but can be more easily overwhelmed by crowds offskill.

Her passive, Flowing Water, accumulates Atk buffs with each magic attack she lands; this synergises with her active, Surging Tide, which briefly enhances her attack speed and expands her magic attacks into AoE blasts, letting her rapidly accrue passive stacks for explosive damage and build momentum which lasts even after the skill ends.

I also took this opportunity to rebalance Magic and Psychic damage a bit; Magic damage now ignores 50% of defense instead of 75%, and Psychic damage is now reduced by Def 1.5x as much instead of 2x as much. I found that Magic damage nearly ignoring Def meant that characters such as Meri and Antero that deal Magic damage needed to have deceptively bad raw numbers to not be overpowered, which makes them look much worse than they are at a glance, and also lead to awkward design constraints such as Magic attackers needing ludicrously long attack intervals. On the other hand, Psychic damage being so harshly affected by Def combined with its high minimum damage meant that Def debuffs wouldn't really matter for increasing their damage unless it was nearly a full strip, which limits team interactivity.

Antero's attack rate has been increased to make up for this nerf to his damage type; Ajatta remains unchanged, as the value of the Psychic buff remains purely hypothetical in the game as it exists (there aren't actually any ways to debuff Defense yet!).

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