Dev Update #3 – Monsters, Champions and Elites

Until last week, the monsters in the Karst stood where they spawned and waited for you. Not anymore. They wander, roam and rush now, the stronger ones come as champion packs and named elites, and every species changes shape as you go deeper. Here is how it all works.

How do monsters hunt in Ponor?

Each of the Karst's three species from the bestiary now has a way of its own to spend its time:

• The Mrtvac stands where it slumped. The dead are patient.
• The Drekavac crawls around its post, a few meters each way, pausing now and then.
• The Vukodlak is new on the floors, from floor 3 on. It hunts alone and roams from chamber to chamber, up to two galleries from its home. So it can come at you from any side, even in the middle of another fight. It never walks into the chamber with the stairs up, though; that one stays safe.

The Vukodlak's real trick is the rush. When it sees you between 4 and 10 meters away, it rears up for a moment and then charges in a straight line at 12 meters per second, hitting twice as hard as its normal blow. That moment is your warning: step out of the line and it runs past you and stands winded for a second, open to a free hit or two. A wall ends the rush the same way.

A monster that loses you walks back home at its own pace and picks up its routine there. Outrunning something buys you a breather, nothing more.

The dead in the ossuaries

The bone rooms of the Karst have always held Mrtvaci. Now they lie among the bones until something wakes them: you, their pack or a blow. Then they get up one by one, each a little after the last, and it takes them three seconds. While they rise they cannot swing, but they can be hit. Strike first or back off; the choice is yours.

What are champions and elites?

Diablo II players will know these two. Every pack on a floor now rolls once, with the floor:

• Champion packs (blue names), from floor 2: three to five monsters with three times the life, half again the damage and one modifier they all share.
• Elites (yellow names), from floor 3: one leader with four times the life and its own generated name, like Mrtvokost the Hungry, with three to six ordinary minions of its kind. An elite has one modifier until floor 20, and more the deeper you go, up to six.

A Vukodlak still hunts alone, so it shows up as a lone champion or a lone elite instead. Both tiers glow in their color at their feet, give three and five times the experience, drop better loot and now and then a Thunderstone Chip for sealing.

There are eight modifiers. Extra Fast, Extra Strong and Stone Skin do what they say. Teleporting monsters vanish when you get away and reappear right next to you. The four Enchanted (Fire, Cold, Lightning and Poison) add their element to every blow, wear a woven mark at their feet, and each has a signature:

• Fire bursts half a second after it dies. Step back.
• Cold dies in a frost nova that chills you, slowing your steps and your swings.
• Lightning throws wandering sparks whenever you hit it.
• Poison leaves a cloud where it dies. More on poison in the next update.

Every signature draws its reach on the floor before it goes off, as a ring woven in the same interlace as the interface, so you can always see what is about to hit you.

Do monsters change deeper in the Karst?

Yes. Each species now has three forms, nine in all, and every two or three floors something new turns up. The forms overlap by a couple of floors, so the change creeps in rather than flipping at a floor:

• The dead: the Mrtvac (floors 1–7), the Tenac (6–13) and the Upir (12 and deeper)
• The screamers: the Drekavac (1–9), the Kreštavac (8–15) and the Vrebač (14 and deeper)
• The wolves: the Vukodlak (3–10), the Mrkulj (9–16) and the Bjesnik (15 and deeper)

A form is the same body with a new size, a muted tint and new numbers, and each one plays a little differently. The Tenac, a spirit that walks in a corpse, doesn't stand still anymore.

The Upir, the oldest South Slavic word for the risen dead, carries a sickle, and its blow is half again cold and chills you. The Kreštavac is faster and comes in bigger packs, and the Vrebač lies in wait and pounces. The Mrkulj roams farther and wears a broken trap's jaw on its ankle, and the Bjesnik is born Extra Fast. Tenac and Upir come from the old stories; the other four I made from Croatian roots.

The floors also get fuller as you go down: about a third more monsters by floor 10, twice as many by floor 100. Before I raised the numbers, I measured the worst case, floor 400 with about 270 monsters. It ran at 38 milliseconds a frame, far too slow. Most of that went into keeping bodies on the ground that nobody could see; now only the visible ones get that care, and the same floor runs in under 9 milliseconds at the High preset.

What does a level-up look like now?

A level-up used to be a puff of square placeholder particles. Now a ring of the interface's interlace gathers gold on the floor under your hero, and on the peak of the sound a pillar of light goes up while a woven ring spreads across the floor and embers drift away. Two seconds, then it's gone.

It comes with a sound of its own, so Settings → Audio now has an Effects volume next to the music's, and M mutes both.

What comes next?

The next update is about items again: every damage type the game knows now actually lands, poison works, and the first unique items built for the classes are in. Right after that come the statuses, such as bleeding, slows and terror, and then the guardians waiting at the end of every tenth floor.

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