Hey everyone,
The Rules Design team reviewed your feedback, and I wanted to publicly address some specific feedback pertaining to some of the updates.
First off, I will address the updates to health. In the original inception of the current rulebook body was balanced based on both damage output, and the defensive ability of a class. Basically, the more damage a class was capable of the less health it had, and the more defensive a class was the more health it had. What we found through observation is that both compounded drastically make defensive classes over perform in combat offensively.
We weighed a few options but ultimately, we decided to leave the attack / defense skill as the remaining balance, and to rebalance body points based on how much a class finds itself in melee combat. Now, if your class expects you to be face to face with enemies most of the time that class was placed into the highest body point tier, if you by design try to avoid being in melee combat your body points were placed in the lowest tier, and everyone else fell into the middle.
In addition to that it was determined that a class having 20 body points per purchase also threw off the balance of body point scaling too much, so maximum body for a class was lowered to 15.
We apologize if this change disproportionately affects you, but we made sure that no class lost or gained more than 5 body points so that the change would not be too dramatic in either direction.
Secondly, I would like to talk about the update to the background Channel Essence (the skill of supernatural inclined races). In the versions of the rules before we reintroduced Positive damage we had placed Silver there as the representation of the supernatural ability of the Witch Hunter class. However, when we did add positive damage back into the game, we simply failed to update this background accordingly. This background was, and always is meant to allow players the chance to gain the feeling of the supernatural feel of class. In addition, the skill is by design meant to have benefit to those characters who do take those supernatural classes in such that it allows you to deal that damage for any attack and override the damage a lot of skills are meant to deal.
We do understand how much some players value positive damage, which is in no small part why it was reintroduced to the game, but it was never meant to be a single-most ideal damage type against the widest category of creatures at Knight Realms. In addition, Silver has been rebalanced to be the weakness of two very specialized types of chaotic creatures, as well as a natural material that felt inappropriate as part of the Supernatural feeling of a character's background.
The last thing we want to say on Backgrounds in general is that we hear the feedback on the high variance in value that a background skill has on impacting your gameplay experience, and we want to say that we feel the same. The only reason a more major change to backgrounds did not occur was because we wanted to devote an amount of effort to it that we also simply feel needs to take a backseat to finalizing Exalted Classes. Safe to say, in the future we wish to make all backgrounds as impactful as Channel Essence is considered to have on your character.
Thank you for your understanding, we hope you all enjoy this patch we prepare to insert some new exciting updates leaning into the major update of Exalted Classes.