This round of balancing focused on understanding where most deaths actually come from, rather than simply making the bosses harder: the middle stages were being more dangerous than expected. I investigated two of the biggest offenders, the Spear Knights and Skull Totems, and made a change to how the latter telegraph their attacks.

The overall win rate is now 79%, above our 70% target, so there’s still some tuning to do. Rather than weakening bosses or arbitrarily reducing enemy damage, I want to explore making enemy progression more demanding.

One possibility is increasing the per-level HP scaling, from 0.07 to around 0.12. Enemies would take longer to kill, exposing the player to more attacks. This leaves early-stage damage unchanged and has a stronger effect in the later stages, particularly around level 10 and beyond.

Another possibility is increasing the damage scaling, from 0.25 to 0.30. This would make mistakes more punishing, but could also make the middle stages considerably more dangerous, precisely where Spear Knights have already been causing trouble.

I’ll start with HP scaling and measure the results before touching damage. The goal is to bring the success rate closer to 70% without making individual enemies feel unfair or turning the middle stages into a sudden difficulty spike.

I’ll also start measuring the curve of deaths per level in addition to just the success rate, since that tells more of the story we want (game getting harder as you progress, not linear!)

About bosses, the Vampire Lord seemed fundamentally sound already, so I didn’t change much of the behavior