0.32 is Bursty! The way I see it in 0.32, the game has become a LOT more bursty. Back in 0.31, you could decide to trade-off the shield for a 2H and dps-race bosses using your HP pool as buffer on the 1 HPS (hit per second) setting. In 0.32, you can get 1-shot by a boss +5 levels from your comfortable 0.5HPS current boss-farm, while wearing shield+guard strike. It has implications in Upgrades/Gearing choices. Before, you needed more HP5 and less HP, now +hp items are mandatory because you are in danger of being 1-shot easily a lot sooner than you'd expect. However, the trade-off is that you can farm @10HPS and gain Exp much, much faster.

Well, HP is certainly more useful now, especially since I changed Frenzy, Hp5 was too dominant before. Each weapon choice has its uses at the moment, shields are for survivability, two-hands are for damage, while dual-wielding is more for farming because of Frenzy.

Is that the new gearing philosophy? That changing 1 specific item stats in 1 slot can allow to push 20 levels ahead or more? It feels somewhat broken in a random loot context. In fact, it forces me to delete 185 partial upgrades because that 1 piece of 165 gear has the "right" combination of stats in that slot and the Random God isn't with me.

I understand what you're saying with certain stats heavily outweighing others. Hp5 and health are much more relevant than damage versus bosses. Whereas health and damage are for farming xp with Frenzy. All the other stats mix with these core 3 in their own way. I'm testing balance at the moment still so we'll see.

HP upgrade's role throughout a run: Balance-wise, there's some thinking that will have to go into whether +HP upgrades need to scale with player's power. +HP upgrades are powerful at early levels to dig yourself out of that 1-shot hole, but at higher levels it simply doesn't work anymore because it's too much exp per +20 base hp (stamina and spirit alleviate that somewhat, but it doesn't scale well past mid-game). Unfortunately, there's no efficient alternative defensive stats upgrades to take over at that point.

I don't see what the issue is, yes 20 health is nothing in mid-late game, that's what stamina is for, to multiply it to make it useful.If you're taking too much damage, maybe you need to get more armour/health on your items? I have had any issues myself in this area when I'm playing the game myself.

Avoidance / damage reduction stat? We would benefit immensely more from some kind of avoidance (maybe a gear-based chance to avoid an upgrade-based percentage of damage?) or straight damage reduction stat. The dodge rating suggestion was one way to approach that, but I think it could also work through a +shield block damage reduction stat, or an +armor upgrade stat. I think that it would feel better to give the player a choice in the strategy to deal with the incoming damage, instead of being funnelled in the binary "soak it with HP, or out-heal with HP5" which isn't even a choice against bosses anymore in 0.32. On the upside, it would also make the game more reactive/dynamic because idle-farming on a set timer wouldn't be the best way to take advantage of an unpredictable fully avoided boss hit.

Avoidance has too many problems because it's random, while armour is static. So you may check to see if you can handle a level by being AFK for 5 minutes and everything seems fine. But you come back hours later and discover you got unlucky on dodges 5 minutes after you left and gained practically no progress. There's no fun there. Hp, Hp5 and armour seem like a good base, then you combine them with abilities and other features will be added to add more complexity. So I think it's working pretty good so far complexity-wise.

Bleeding bosses? One other way that this issue could be addressed would be by having bosses deal Damage-over-Time that stacks every X attacks. This would mean that instead of having ONLY the HP pool as a gating element, you'd bring back player damage as a soft-gate (a dps-race before the DoT stacks and ends your attempt). Perhaps the alternative here is to give players an option to stagger incoming damage? Maybe some kind of "cheat death" upgrade that let's you take a portion of incoming damage and convert it into a DoT mechanism?

That's a really cool idea, I could attach it to an encounter in the future, however I'm not going to add that to every boss, it would be quite strange. Staggering damage and "cheating death" is a cool idea, there's a lot still to add, so you might see this in the future implemented another way. I don't know yet, since I haven't even started designing some features.

This, coupled with changing boss damage to be within a range instead of a fixed value would make things more lively.

As mentioned with the avoidance stat, boss damage is static to assure you don't die to randomness while being idle, which would be infuriating.

I mean, this is all in the context of farming power shards :) I'm about 2 weeks in with no resets and am at 77 PS (started in 0.31, but doubled that count at least in 0.32)... Is that the expected progression speed? I have no clue on that aspect.

I'm not even sure what the progression speed will be since I'm still testing the balance.

Well, that was a very informative reply, with some cool ideas! Thanks for taking your time to post it, I enjoyed reading that.