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Long Term Balance Supplement

This mod attempts to extend long term playability of the game by changing how some elements scale. The goal is to keep the game from becoming either impossible or too easy at higher NPG levels and thereby maintain fun and challenge. The biggest culprit for making the game too easy at high ngp is blood rite stacking. Therefor, many of these changes involve blood rites. On the other hand, without blood rite stacking, the game quickly becomes impossible due to compounding armor and resist penalities. The idea here is to offload some of the things that blood rite stacking used to do to arena, which is a well developed, but underutilized, system (in my opinion). Since most people use blood rites to build up their armor and reistance, this mod focuses on these elements. I’m still playtesting this mod, and the game will probably still be broken at high power levels, so I expect to have to make more changes later.

This mod is included in Clever Merge Mod and many of the other mods in the merge mod complement the features of this mod.

What’s included:
Blood Altars/Blood Rites:
- Blood rite stacking has been limited. Whether an altar appears (or can be used) is determined by how many rites you currently have active and the NGP level of the current run. No altars appear on NG0. The first altars will appear on NG1 if you have no rites currently active. A second rite cannot be added until NG3 or higher, and then every odd NGP after adds another to the max number of rites. If you die and lose your rites, then altars will start appearing at lower NGP levels as appropriate to your current number of rites. It’s still possible to build up large numbers of blood rites, but now they are more spread out.
- The NGP scaling element of blood rites has been removed. Each blood rite now only adds its base bonus with no increase for NGP. It’s still possible to get levels of armor and resistance from blood rites that far outstrip NGP penalities, but now you have to keep adding rites for that to happen rather than coasting on their NGP bonuses.
- Blood altar rewards are now determined at the start of a run, rather than when an altar is activated.
on the other hand...
- When you die, you lose only 3 blood rites at random rather than all of them. The other problem with blood rites is that a high level character cannot be allowed to die because they are unable to handle their current NGP level without their blood rites, and restoring a huge stack of rites after a death takes way too long. This aims to reduce some of that pressure.

To balance these nerfs...
Arena:
- Price scaling for purchasing stat bonuses from swords has been reduced from linear to an exponent of 0.77. This should make costs of spending swords much much more affordable at high levels. (This growth rate also now matchs the growth in the NGP penalty to armor and resist.)
- Swords spent on armor and resist now give 0.75 points rather then 0.5
- Note that the Bauble Shop mod has an augment that gives 10 extra arena swords per level of the augment to all members of your guild.
-Remember that Bauble Shop also has ways to increase your gold gain and your tax midpoint to help you afford to spend all of those swords.

So, I guess the strategy now is to get a few blood rites while adding to armor and resistance using arena swords and class titles. As before, the armor/res penalities are very steep at first, but then level off. You can try to get through the steep part by using attuned items which are then double attuned using Enhanced Attunements. If you can survive to NG15 or so, I believe that the resist bonuses just from swords and class titles will be enough to cover the NGP penalities. Later for armor.