Hey

So I just wanted to give a general update on the status of where devils are at and why what happened, happened.

The short story is we fixed a bug with them that's been around for awhile, while doing that we noticed a bunch of other stuff broken. However the thing is they've been 'broken' this way for a very long time, potentially ever since their inception.

This then shined a light on another bug that was preventing them from gaining morale in the way we intended them to. That part has now been fixed. So basically before, devils were gaining morale in ways they weren't supposed to, and not gaining morale in ways they were.

This creates a fun problem in that they've never really behaved as we designed them too. ...and the players have never seen that either so to your experience devils just saw HUGE changes. In this respect we may as well have redesigned them. We will need to keep an eye on things to make sure they're still balanced and make some tweaks as necessary. Without getting into specific numbers, here's how devils behave as of now:

- When a devil is conjured and bound, it will have no morale. Certain edges can boost this a bit.
- Devils will lose morale if they aren't fighting. Before devils would gain more by casting buffs on their master. This no longer happens. Some edges reduce the rate at which this happens.
- Devils will lose morale if you flee from combat.
- Devils gain morale from fighting. The higher level the target, the more morale you gain.
- Super low level targets won't increase morale but just keep the morale from falling further.
- The morale is gained as the devil fights. A longer fight? Bigger morale boost.
- After conjuration you have a reasonable amount of time to get into some action. However I would not at all recommend the devil be the first thing you conjure, or to conjure a devil just to hang out and wander around.

So right now devils ONLY gain morale from fighting targets of a certain level range from the devil. I'm not 100% on this threshold but it seemed fairly loose so it shouldn't be too tricky to find a fight to please the devil.

Just to make things clear you will not be able to play a devil exactly like you used to. The changes we are making will make some older tactics and strategies with devils unusable. You cannot linger nearly as long as you used to with a devil. However you shouldn't see situations where you bind a devil and it immediately turns on you. The flip side to this is there are now ways to get a devil happier, quicker. Before they'd only gain by casting buffs on you, which could take awhile to get them happy.

We are hopefully going to be getting some tracking in game so we'll be able to better keep an eye on situations when devil morale is hitting certain thresholds. This will help us keep an eye on the situation so we can assess if it's balanced after this change.

What I'd like to see from the players is bug posts with logs where they think a devil is doing something it shouldn't. IE: you feel it turned and attacked you very quickly in a situation you think it shouldn't have. We will review these and test these out to see what happens. Please use the bug forum for this and not the gameplay forum since this could get spammy very quickly depending on how many log snips we get.

We understand we just pulled the rug out from a number of you and we apologize for that. What turned into a few bug fixes has essentially become a redesign for devil behavior. (Well, not a redesign, just making our original design plan actually work as intended) Anyway, we'll keep an eye on things and hopefully keep things fun and interesting for devil conjies.