Some miscellaneous stuff that's coming in the Hex update this month

While I'm working on the next "Ranbol Travel Guide" preview, which will be covering the city's historic red light district 😌, I want to cover a few more minor things coming in the update.

Mantras

Mantras are a new piece of "equipment" (or at least they behave like equipment), and grant powerful passive abilities. You'll find and learn new mantras from story events, tomes, and as quest rewards, similar to spell schools, and you can equip one at a time. Each mantra "reserves" a portion of you MP in exchange for granting a powerful passive ability.

For example, "Swara" reserves 20% of your MP and causes perfect deflections to inflict wound stacks on enemies, "Yantra" boosts spell critical hit rates, but causes casting spells to damage the player's HP while reserving 35% of your MP, and "Shakti" reserves 30% of your MP and grants madness and lust auras inflicted by the player to shred enemy defense.

Reserved MP can still be used to cast spells. Edited: I changed the way this works to simplify it. When you cast a spell using reserved MP there's a now just a set chance (it's around 15%-35% based on a few factors) you'll proc manableed. The number of manableed stacks is lightly randomized, but is based on the same factors as the odds of procing it. Before there was an extra aura called reprise that served as a middleman here, but it was too complex, imo.

Manableed isn't all bad though, as it actually enhances spell damage and there's a chance for the player's attack spells to "go out of control" and use a massive amount of MP in exchange for a huge damage multiplier. In the future, I intend to make manableed something you can build characters around by adding a specific mantra and other abilities that lean into making it a viable playstyle to remain in the manableed state as much as possible.

You also don't have to have a mantra equipped, and that will be a viable choice as well, allowing you to maximize your whole MP bar in exchange for not having any specialized passives.

New Spell Schools and Other Combat Options

I plan to add at least two new spell schools, but one is of particular note, and that's holy magic. Holy magic gives players access to the sanction aura, a key aura for dealing with enemy spellcasters. In addition to increasing enemy MP costs and weakening non-physical damage, the sanction aura allows the player to cast "counter spells" dispelling enemy magic attacks. When targeted by an enemy spell while the enemy has the sanction aura, Iris can get a read on the spell being cast and unmake it before it can cause damage.

If you played the Halloween event, you've already seen the counter spell interaction. You will see a sequence of three, four, or five symbols, and then will have to quickly repeat the shown sequence to perform the counter. Like with other defenses, you can fail, partially succeed, or perfectly counter the attack. Perfect countering grants some kinesis stacks and restores a small amount of MP. Partially countering a spell reduces its base damage output significantly, but all other spell effects occur as normal.

I also plan to add new daggers and usable items, and maybe a few new slutty special abilities as well.

New Voicework and Audio Improvements

In combat, Iris will already sometimes cry out when taking damage from enemy attacks, but I've also added sassy taunts to perfect deflections, grunts and kiyaps to dagger attacks, and some assorted one-liners to spell casts. Most of these have relatively low odds of happening, since while there are several variations for each type, they'd still get old if they happen too much.

Erotic scenes are also getting more sounds. I've enhanced and added new sounds to most encounter types. There are also now some hentai-style sound effects for when male partners orgasm, complete with variations for internal, external, and oral shots. Also, after orgasming, the ongoing sex sounds will now stop until a new option is selected, to help simulate the characters taking a breather and to prevent the audio channel from being oversaturated with that stuff in addition to all the moaning and cum sound effects.

And more...

Of course, there's also a ton of smaller and larger things coming in the update, I just wanted to cover a few of the things I felt were large enough to specifically call out but not big enough to make a whole post about.