The recent lockdown has changed a lot of our lives, and mine has been no different. I know I haven't been as active  since the last few LPs, but that doesn't mean that progress isn't being made. A lot of my time recently has been spent reflecting on all of you who LPed Trailblazer, and seeing if there was any areas that could use refining or improvement. The one such place I've found could be updated to make the game more fun would be to find a way to make combat even more dynamic, and give players more ways to approach it. So after much deliberation, and playing around more in the engine, I've added a new layer to the combat strategy: A stagger system called "Pressure and Resolve".

All enemies now have a Resolve stat, shown next to their life bar. Hitting an enemy with their Weakness or with specific Feats will damage their Resolve. When an enemy's Resolve is broken, they'll enter a Pressured state, where they will receive an extra 25% damage from all attacks. Additionally, some weaknesses can only be exploited while an enemy is Pressured. Additional abilities have been added to some Feats to take advantage of this, most notably Shotguns which now have a number of ways to break enemy Resolve, and Rifles which now take advantage of enemies being in a Pressured state.

I was thinking a lot about this after watching a number of playthroughs where players would find an enemy's weakness, and then just spam the Skills that did that type of damage, oftentimes overlooking using their Feats altogether, which made the Skill Tree system was not nearly as useful in practice as I'd hoped.  People really liked the Skill Tree system, but one thing I don't want is for any system in the game to simply be a gimmick that's quickly forgotten about and the Skill Tree system was turning into that. So I played around with a number of different ideas, and the one that made the most sense would be to find a way to manipulate combat to incentivize using both Feats and Skills, giving more weight to the choices you make in which skills you learn in the Skill Tree. After much deliberation, a slightly altered Stagger system seemed like the best route, giving incentive to the player to use elemental Skills to Pressure the enemy, then take advantage of higher damaging Feats to take advantage of their Pressured state. 

Overall, this change seems to have added a lot more depth and versatility to the combat system. I understand that some players may think that this is a lot of things to keep track of in combat, which is why I spent so much time testing, balancing, retesting, and rebalancing all the skills and enemies. As the game stands right now, if a player ignores the Pressure system altogether, and simply plays the way I've seen in the LPs so far, then you should notice no difference in the difficulty of the game.  The rest of the combat is still in tact, and all the skills you had access to still work the way you're familiar with.

If you've already played and enjoyed the combat, I recommend picking the game back up and playing with this new system. The new addition make for a much more dynamic and enjoyable combat experience.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for playing! Stay safe out there everyone!

Patch Notes:

 Version 0.03.00
 - New Pressure and Resolve mechanics added
     - Enemies now have a visible level of Resolve next to their Health Bar
     - Hitting enemy weaknesses or using specific skills will damage their Resolve
     - When Resolve is depleted, enemies enter a Pressured State where they will take more damage
 - Hangin' Judge Parker will no longer revive fallen allies more than once per battle
 - Holy Water now guaranteed drop from South Pass Guitarista
 - Item on roof of South Pass General Store now Dreamcatcher to better align with dialog
 - Rebalanced skills to fit better with Pressure system
 - "Escape" SFX will no longer play when Conceding a Duel or when combat is aborted
 - Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when opening the treasure box on the overlook cliff in Deadwood
 - Fixed Virgil Skill Tree bug