[Darkest Dungeon] The Innocent - Class Feedback - Creator Response

@Macrosis
A pretty solid review overall! (https://pastebin.com/pi4dBgTN)
It was very interesting reading through your thoughts. However, there are a few things I'd like to point out in counterpoint:

  1. The swap chance on Hide Me! is 60% not because I want it to be, but because it *has* to be. I would *love* for it to be 100, but there's no way to code it ;P. I decided to at least leave it in as some bonus utility, as unreliable as it may be.

  2. A lot of her skills are somewhat underwhelming by themselves... by design, actually. The tricky thing about balancing a base 25 Dodge character is incentivizing *not* putting +20 Dodge in in her trinket slot, which means a *lot* of her power has to be offloaded onto her trinkets... which your review didn't touch ;P. As an example...
  2b. Let's use "Some Tea?", especially since it got hit so hard in your review. She has one trinket, "Auntie's Fine China", which adds +0~3 HP healed which, since it's not obvious, I made a note on that it's *doubled by any healing%*. So equip her with that and a Chirgeon's charm, and all of a sudden her Antiquarian heals are hitting for 5-12 while still being able to stress heal and hit like a HWM if she needs to. She's a jack-of-all-trades with a focus on support, actually, not damage.

  3. And, finally, you are absolutely correct in stating that she doesn't fit the current metagame of DD. In fact, that's one of the first things that I point out on this mod page: She's designed around the overly defensive play that I enjoy. She requires careful setup on all fronts, but can be used as any tool I need her to, while offensively stress healing my party down to 0 when I can afford it. If you're just looking for raw damage alpha striking, then yes! most definitely look elsewhere. The tools the Innocent brings to the table are aggressive stress healing, combo potential, and raw versatility, so you take her when you want those.



Everything past here is more or less the reasoning behind a lot of the more peculiar or off downsides or features in no particular order, that I thought you might enjoy knowing ^-^

Each of her moves has a themed launch position (and punctuation, to help identify!):
  "A Lullaby~"/"SING~" both are her only skills that move her, and they each are unusable in their furthest "forward" rank. "A Lullaby~" builds up her excitement (drawing her closer to the fight), while "SING~" tires her out (locking our her other moves), unless you use other heroes to 'dance' her around.
  "Some Tea?"/"Biscuit?" both are her heavily restrictive moves, that show she's more or less been locked into one playstle (without outside support, that is). I personally like the interaction between "Biscuit?" and "SING~", since it's a direct choice between utility or offense... *unless* you plan ahead for it. "Some Tea?" has that particular range because she can slide into and out of that position with relative ease, and because she can only reach so far with her widdle arms ,_, how she suppossa reach rank 1 from 4 and vise versa? Lol
  "Hide Me!"/"Seek!" both are her freely usable, moreso "in-a-pinch" moves that are always available if you didn't plan for her falling into a bad position.
  "Playtime!" is usable only when she's in the thick of battle, able to lose her grip on herself and just have fun.

And I'm sure that now that I'm pointing it out, you can see some of the other similarities between the moves ^-^

"Playtime!" (Play) is a little underwhelming, yes. Since she essentially always gets to open against a marked target, I had a hard time balancing it to be still usable, but not preferable over ""Biscuit?", and while keeping in line with the extra bonuses against marked as a theme for all offensive moves, where it is now is where it ended up. Okay in any situation more or less, but never really ideal, as opposed to her more niche offensive skills, so it usually doesn't get used unless you screwed up in the planning or execution.

"Some Tea?" has the +% Healing received to herself as a bit of an homage to earlier designs for the skill, as well as a thematic "I gave you some, so now you give some to me!". In the original design of the skill, she couldn't actually target herself with it (also for thematic reasons, for example healing others while Prim, herself while Play), but I finally gave in to reason right before launch. And considering that any healing% will add at minimum a +1 to healing she gets, considering the size of her health bar it's a rather sizeable effect. Its long duration is to allow her to benefit herself with it, if she manages to follow it up with Biscuit, partly for thematic reasons as well, or allow her to spend less time healing herself after focusing on allies for a bit.

"SEEK!" doesn't break guard or stealth partially for thematic reasons, and partially because I feel adding that onto a damaging mark move would be way too much utility. Instead, the skill has a few separate lines of utility: First, as a quick finisher for an enemy that barely managed to escape your grasp, second, as a post-transformation aggressive mark (which, if you use her as a mark bot, is kinda gross, even with the short duration), and thirdly as a utility pull that can be *built into*. She has two trinkets with this skill in mind, Gaudium Vincula boosting her pull chance, and Papa's Monocle boosting its Damage and Crit to absolutely devilish levels for a mark skill, whilst completely avoiding the trinket's downside by reapplying Mark *after* it's cleared.