Nope. Didn't like it.

2 weeks ago, I finished redesigning the pathos/currency mechanics. I’ve playtested the game in the meantime and I got to admit:

I didn’t like it.

While it was obviously better than before, particularly in giving the player more choices in the shop, there still too many things bothering me.

1. There were still too many useless choices in non-ordeal encounters. When a pathos type leveling up gives you just 1 mastery (which affords a half a card removal), getting an option to increase it by 50% is not exactly exciting. That just made a lot of the choices given to the player downright boring.
2. It was still too much information for no exciting benefit. I was thinking maybe I can use the pathos levels for some purpose, but I just couldn’t figure out anything specific.

I then went back to the drawing board and tried to figure out a way, any way, to make released pathos or pathos leveling useful or exciting. After a few days of brainstorming and coming up with basically nothing, I finally capitulated.

Torment (i.e. Enemies) now give pathos masteries and you use pathos masteries to buy stuff in the stop. Elite Torments give more masteries than Normal Torments, and Boss give even more. That’s it. No more levels, no more released pathos. It functions identical to the Gold in StS, but you get an order of magnitude less, so that the player doesn’t have to do 3-digit calculations.

It’s not novel and I wish I could come up with anything more interesting but it’s time to move on and this started seriously sapping my motivation for development. I need to start working on more content instead of trying for months to come up with game design ideas about an aspect that is not even the core gameplay loop.

The mechanics for pathos leveling, and released still exist in the background, but they’re disconnected from the game mechanically. Perhaps in the future I’ll come up with a better idea and I’ll reactivate them, or maybe they would work better in a different theme, like a fantasy game.