@KamaniIncoming essay:Fire Beacon in Vor Pride was something I wanted to do for a long time, both story-wise and balance-wise.
Balance-wise: Vor Pride is a place where 50% of enemies you fight are Pyromancers-- HIGHLY ineffectual and hardly worth regarding if you are a fire dragon. The most dangerous thing they can do is Flameshock you and your drakelings-- But more often than not, their fire ends up killing nearby orcs-- Or worse: Their own selves. This said, the only dangerous thing about Vor Pride (to a fire dragon) are the Cryomancer. Ice magic, in general, is *already* highly disruptive, and definitely 3 times worse to suffer than any fire magic. If you get unlucky and there are 9 Cryomancers and only 2 Pyromancers at the door, they will *HAPPILY* push your stuff in and there is very little a Fire Drake can do about it (besides Tyrannic Aura, of course). As such, the zone could, at random, be terribly easy-- Or terribly frustrating. This was a good opportunity for the following:
Story-wise: As said in the reflection, there's an uncomfortable shifting of hot and cold there, which screw up the regulation of a fire dragon's body temperature. So, to give the zone's difficulty some consistency, I took the difficulty away from the random generator, and placed the burden more-so on your own stats (IE: Cold Res up, Max Stamina down). This effectively makes Cryomancers less deadly, but Pyromancers harder to get rid of. Particularly, it protects your Drakelings (somewhat) from being sniped out by unusually large bursts of cold damage-- A problem I noticed all too often there (for example, a sudden 900-damage "Freeze" from a single High Cryomancer).
As you can imagine,
when you create a class that can selectively become immune to one of the damage types in the game (or ALL of them, in the case of Multi-Hued Drake Scales), you gotta place some odd difficulty tweaks here or there throughout the game...
