[i]The update can be accessed early by switching the game under "properties" -> "betas" to the experimental branch.[/i] [b]Experimental Update: 2024-05-10 Live Update: 2024-05-14[/b] [h1]Greetings Adventurers[/h1] It has been longer than usual since our last update. Aside from the work we’ve done for the 1.0 release, many of our team members were on leave for a longer period, slowing overall development down a bit. But now we’re back with the whole crew and ready to crack on! Please note, this update will contain some larger balancing changes. These changes mostly touch the basic character stats and both character specific and general traits. Many parts of the intended changes and upcoming complementary content are still to come. Further below we’ll touch on the subject in more detail. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments if you feel like something isn’t explained well enough. These changes work towards the 1.0 release and the upcoming post-game content including the “Shrine of Torment” which we’ll tell you more about in the future. Apart from that, there is a new quality of life feature: a quest tracker. There have been some performance improvements and there are three new items including some quests that unlock them. [h2]Patch Notes[/h2] [list] [*] Performance improvements across the board [*] Stability fixes (thanks for the crash reports!) [*] Quest Tracker to pin and track quests during a run. [*] Quest Board can now be opened during a run. [*] Fix: The XP curves in some halls were off. This led to vastly different XP level thresholds post level 100 between different halls. [*] Adjusted XP drops based on Agony to scale more similarly between all halls. [/list] [b]Items[/b] This update has been focusing on the headgear section of items. In the future we will also try to complement and add new items in other categories. Added the Frost Dragon Helmet that allows Frost on Melee attacks and emits frost waves. Added Vision Crown that increases Area or Range, depending on whether you are moving or standing still. [list] [*] Added Warchief’s Visor that scales Force based on dealt damage. [*] Windcrown rework: Attack Speed bonus is now uncapped. Added new uncommon variants. [*] Ruby Circlet reworked. Now it comes with an uncommon variant affecting all elemental damage. [*] Fighter’s Headband rebalanced and simplified. [*] Gorgon Mask balancing: especially damage has been increased. [*] Helmet and Hood have now new values, getting seriously better. [*] Mask of Madness now offers Damage and Crit in the base variant. One uncommon variant has changed to be Attack Speed and Multistrike centered. [*] Mask of Madness was clearly stronger than all other Headgear. So much so, that buffing everything else was not an option to fix the balance. [*] Warhorns balanced, and they can now be influenced by effect chance and area buffs. [*] Thunder Crown got a new physical variant and now partially scales with traits. [*] Wooden Ring has been changed to apply relative crit chance instead of base crit. [*] Copper Ring has been slightly improved. [/list] [b]Base Traits[/b] Base traits were adjusted with the base balancing. They were altered to fit better into the general progression of the game and to simplify things. We removed most “Base” values from most progressions with certain exceptions and changed most buffs to be either 6% or 10%. For more information check out the details after the patch notes! [list] [*] Channeling: 12% Force -> 10% Force [*] Collateral Damage: 10% Area -> 6% Area [*] Cunning Technique: 0.05 Base Crit Chance -> 10% Crit Chance [*] Long Fingers: 30% Pickup Range -> 20% Pickup Range (Note: Base range on chars has been increased from 3m to 4m) [*] Parry: 2 | 3 | 4 Base Block Strength -> 3 | 4 | 5 Base Block Strength [*] Quick Hands: 7% Attack Speed -> 6% Attack Speed [*] Swift Feet: 6% | 9% Movement Speed -> 0.2m/s | 0.3m/s Base Movement Speed [*] Thick Hide: 2 | 3 | 4 Base Defense-> 3 | 4 | 5 Base Defense [*] Vitality: 30 | 50 | 70 Base Health -> 30 | 40 | 50 Base Health [/list] [b]Elevated Traits[/b] Elevated Traits are now all changed to appear on level 15/30/60 in order to follow a pattern like most other traits. There are some minor exceptions to that rule. Elevated Traits were balanced to give a cumulative bonus of approximately 50% (30% for lower Multistrike/Attack Speed). Per individual trait this makes them better than the base traits, but added together they yield a similar total bonus. [list] [*] Demonic Exchange (Speed): Minor adjustments of values. [*] Elemental Surge: Increased required level from 30 to 50 and changed the chance from 10% to 5%. [*] Ethereal Shift A: Added “Equilibrium” option -> 10% Multistrike for Melee & Projectiles [*] Ethereal Shift B: Added “Equilibrium” option -> 20% Force for Magic & Physical [*] Ethereal Shift: changed Damage buffs from 200% to 100% and Attack Speed reduction from 50% to 30%, so doubling one of the traits will not to 0% Attack Speed for Abilities & Attacks. [*] Fire/Lightning/Ice Affinity: Changed to 10% Effect Chance and 10% Effect Strength bonus. [/list] [b]Blessings[/b] Blessings have been adjusted alongside base balancing to be more in line with the general progression. Most blessings were buffed, some were nerfed. In general a higher power level can be reached for a higher price. [list] [*] Health Blessing: 8% -> 10% | decreased cost [*] Regeneration Blessing: 0.15/s -> 10% | increased cost [*] Defense Blessing: 3 (Base) -> 10% | decreased cost [*] Block Blessing: 3 (Base) -> 10% | decreased cost [*] Speed Blessing: increased cost [*] Pick Up Range Blessing: decreased cost [*] Gold Gain Blessing: increased cost [*] Damage Blessing: 7% -> 10% | increased cost [*] Attack Speed Blessing: 4% -> 6% | increased cost [*] Multistrike Blessing: 4% -> 6% | decreased cost [*] Force Blessing: 8% -> 10% | slightly increased cost [*] Area Blessing: 7% -> 6% | slightly increased cost [*] Range Blessing: 7% -> 10% | increased cost [*] OnHit Chance Blessing: 5% -> 6% | slightly increased cost [*] Physical Damage Blessing: slightly decreased cost [*] Magic Damage Blessing: slightly decreased cost [*] Burn Damage Blessing: 7% -> 10% | increased cost [*] Electrify Damage Blessing: 7% -> 10% | slightly increased cost [*] Frost Damage Blessing: 7% -> 10% | decreased cost [*] Revive Blessing: increased cost [/list] [b]Characters[/b] The characters got many small adjustments. We’ll skip over every singular detail here and focus on the main changes. The goal was to equalize every character and make them all more viable to play, including their marks. The only character not touched in this update is the Sage. He will get a balancing pass as soon as all abilities have been adjusted for the latest balance changes. [list] [*] Almost all offensive base values have been removed from Main Weapon traits, this caused a lot of bugs that led to many crashes and performance issues in combination with the sage! [*] All characters have increased Crit Chance (5% - 33%) and Crit Bonus (100% - 400%) values. [*] All characters had their pickup range increased from 3m to 4m. [*] All characters have higher regeneration (usually 0.5, 1.0 or 1.5 per second, except the Warlock who is still at 0) [*] Base Health of all characters is now either 300, 400 or 500. [*] Base Defense & Block Strength have been balanced to be either 0, 10 or 20. [*] Movement Speed is still the same for all characters. [*] All Characters now have a general focus that is reflected mostly in the “Stance” traits. [*] Weapon Proficiency now is mainly for Main Weapon attacks [*] The doubling of stats in IV Traits has been removed for characters that had them. We’ll be adding V traits in a future update that are more specialized for the character. Those will be base value improvements! [*] Characters’ level up bonuses and Main Weapon traits have been adjusted for better damage scaling. [*] All level scaling now happens each level, removing the “every 10 levels” ones. [/list] [b]Character Details[/b] [list] [*] Swordsman is now the Melee specialist (sorry Shield Maiden, but you can still keep the defensive power). [*] Increased the base coverage of the Swordsman. He now also has a base Area & Range scaling when leveling up. [*] Swordsman Mark now offers 10 Base Damage and 10 Base Defense. [*] Archer lost many base value traits. (sorry, we know it’s fun - but it crashes the game) [*] Archer got more movement speed traits & base piercing scaling. [*] Archer mark is still adding base crit chance, defying the crit chance changes. [*] Cleric attacks faster and has a base attack speed scaling. But they got their multistrike reduced. [*] Cleric is the magic damage specialist and has the best options for debuffing enemies. [*] Cleric’s mark now adds a fragile/debuff chance to main weapons. [*] Exterminator still makes things burn but with lower base chance. In exchange he gets a bonus to burn with every level up. [*] Warlock deals more damage per hit and also starts with 2 summon projectiles. This should increase his starting damage. [*] Warlock's main weapon scales Multistrike with level ups. [*] The Warlock’s mark summons a skeleton mage shooting Warlock Summons. [*] Sorceress seriously dealt far more damage than most other classes without any buffs, so we had to reduce her damage output. [*] Sorceress now applies Electrify on crits (50% chance) instead of with normal hits. Her mark allows you to do the same. [*] Sorceress now has a base Crit Chance scaling on her Main Weapon. [*] Shield Maiden got her melee traits removed and got more defensive/block strength traits. [*] The shield bash is now manually triggered and is used after the mace attack. [*] The Mark of the Shield now adds % Block Strength as % Damage bonus (i.e. you get both, the Block Strength and the Damage bonus resulting from it). [*] The Norseman is now Ice based, the Beast Huntress is now Physical based. This might be confusing but the two tried to have too many things at once, so we sorted that out. [*] We’ve also removed the specialized traits for now, but they are likely to come back! [*] Norseman’s Frost Nova has now a 100% chance to Frost that scales with level ups, but no longer deals damage. This Frost Nova can be acquired on other characters with the Norseman’s mark. [*] Like the Swordsman, the Norseman’s Area and Range has been improved and also scales with level ups! [*] Norseman’s hits are far weaker now, but also occur far more often. Consider playing him with some base damage upgrades. [*] Beast Huntress is now faster in attacking, just as the hound, since they no longer deal Frost damage. [*] Beast Huntress can now scale Physical damage with her traits. [*] The Hound has a bigger range of freedom. He’s hitting faster and his bite attack scales better. His movement is faster as well. [*] The Hound needs someone to walk him out more often: Equipping the Mark of the Beast makes the Hound tag along. [*] Landsknecht’s grenades had to be redone entirely code-wise. They were the cause for a lot of lag and even crashes. They now trigger every 3 seconds and the damage is based on the damage of projectiles between those triggers. [*] Landsknecht’s grenades now only scale with Area and Multistrike. In exchange all other characters get access to the Grenade traits when Mark of the Grenadier is equipped. [*] Landsknecht had the base value improvements removed from her stances. [/list] [b]Elemental Effects[/b] There were some issues and even a bug that had unintended consequences for elemental effects that made them far stronger than anything else. We tried to adjust for that but we know that this will make a lot of overpowered elemental based builds much weaker than before. We will very likely adjust on the effects again after this update (most likely everything buffed) because the core changes are going to reduce late game damage numbers. [list] [*] Burn and Electrify used to trigger all applied stacks at once if a 21st stack was attempted to be applied. The calculated damage for this was higher than what it should be, causing damage spikes once the stack count reached 20. [*] The 21st stack will now deal a flat 500 Damage (is affected by buffs) instead of triggering all applied Burn or Electrify stacks. [*] Frost stacks would not be removed when triggered upon applying the 20th stack, this was not intended. (Also causing damage spikes as soon 20th stack could be achieved) [*] Burn duration has been reduced to 2 seconds and triggered every 0.2 seconds, making it apply the damage faster. [*] Electrify now has a base tick time of 2s. But now the duration decreases faster with more stacks ending in similar tick times with the 20th stack as before. This makes it easier to reach higher Electrify stack counts. [*] Base Damage adjustments: Burn 50, Electrify 100, Frost 50 [*] Frost Area now scales stronger in the lower numbers of stacks, but it has diminishing returns with higher stack counts. [/list] [b]Quests[/b] [list] [*] Arcane Rift is now unlocked by killing enemies in Frozen Depths. [*] Spirit Warriors are now a Beast Huntress unlock. [*] Hailstorm is now a Norseman unlock. [*] Changed Norseman damage quests from Physical to Ice. [*] Changed Beast Huntress damage quests from Ice to Physical. [*] Frost Damage quest (Permafrost) is now a Norseman quest. [*] Added a new level of the Frost Damage quest unlocking the Frost Dragon Helmet. [*] The “Don’t Move”-Quest (Tower) of Shield Maiden now unlocks the Warchief’s Visor [*] Adding monster type kill quests to the Chamber’s of Dissonance [*] The “Construct Slayer”-Quest now unlocks the new item Vision Crown [/list] [b]Bug Fixes[/b] [list] [*] Sage’s pickup range would not increase on level up. [*] Rifts would not unlock elemental traits. [*] Fixed a bug that made it possible to get all 3 Kugelblitz upgrades. [*] “Hellhound Slayer”-Quest had a wrong reward display. [*] The Dash of Spirit Warriors now counts as Magic damage. [*] Proficient stances of Sage and Exterminator used to be banished together. [*] Chain lighting no longer jumps across the screen. [/list] [h2]Balancing Talk[/h2] If you’ve made it this far, it means that you’re seriously interested in balancing. The following sections will try to shed some light on the reasoning behind all the changes listed above. [b]Overall Approach[/b] We are aware of the fact that rebalancing is not always received positively. Especially for players who are in the late game, who try to squeeze out the maximum damage, such balancing changes are disruptive. We are also aware that there are players who will complain about every nerf that happens. But those are things that need to happen so the overall game experience is fun and interesting for everyone. We want to offer a game where you can explore many options and are not bound to specific strategies to beat the game. While we mostly try to improve the abilities, characters, and items that are lacking, we also need to tone back where single entries are outperforming everything else. An issue of making everything just as OP as the strongest option is that new players in particular won’t get a proper progression and learning curve. Instead they would be directly thrown into the endgame. One of our design goals is that in the main game (i.e. everything that happens before the endgame part is reached) there should be a steady progression with meaningful difficulties to overcome. The current state of the game’s overall progression has become noticeably easier than it was a year ago, mostly because almost every element at the players’ disposal has become stronger. While it was a challenge to beat the 2nd boss in the Haunted Caverns in the early days without any meta progression, today even surviving 30 minutes isn’t that difficult anymore. This will require some adjustments in future patches, but not in this one. While we’re planning to reduce the strength of certain abilities, characters, or items, this doesn’t mean we want to get rid of “OP” builds. We understand that having the possibility to create insanely powerful combinations is part of the fun and we do not want to diminish that. The player characters constitute the foundation for all balancing. They need to be fairly even in their power distribution in order to serve that purpose well. To some degree this also applies to abilities and items. Ideally, overpowered builds should emerge from discovering the right combinations instead of just picking the strongest elements from the arsenal. We believe that the Shrine of Torment, which is planned for the 1.0 release, will provide a huge playground for players to develop powerful builds. Most of the current changes are aiming towards this version with the goal of making the game interesting in the long term. We want to make the Shrine of Torment in a way that the power ceiling is not determined by the character builds but by the difficulty that players can set for themselves. In other words, the Shrine of Torment should allow you to eventually reach a difficulty that cannot be beaten. Of course, we’d love to be surprised by diligent players who manage to break even this barrier ;) [b]Base Progression[/b] We wanted to have fewer variations in modifier values and have a more uniform scaling of traits, blessings, items etc. Each stat has a base scaling value which is 5%~, 10%, or 20%, depending on how impactful it is. Then, depending on the context the base scaling value is multiplied. For example, blessings and general traits get a x1 multiplier, specialized character traits get a x2 multiplier, and main weapon traits usually get a x3. If a trait affects multiple stats, these multipliers are distributed so they sum up to the target values. Items that increase stats aim for a x5 multiplier in common variants and a x10 multiplier in uncommon variants. Elevated traits usually aim to have a total multiplier between x5 and x6. [b]Changes in Crit Chance and Crit Bonus[/b] The changes in Critical Hit stats that you see in the patch notes have multiple reasons. First, we received regular feedback regarding the notation we used to indicate base Crit Chance values in which players considered them to be confusing or awkward to parse. All Crit related modifiers, with a few exceptions, are now percentage based. Second, we wanted different characters to benefit differently from base Crit values and have some diversity in use of the mechanic. Prior to this patch, the amount of base Crit Chance traits and buffs have led to a state in which it wouldn’t make a big difference if a character would start with 0% or 50% base Crit Chance. Now things should be simpler and it should be more obvious which skills and character profit most from Crit values. We’ve also increased the Crit Bonus base values and decreased the bonus per Trait to align the Crit scaling better with other scaling values. What’s still missing is to adjust the Abilities for this change as well. But since they are mostly only affected by Traits, we decided to take a little bit more time for this. In the future there will also be more sources for Crit upgrades, like blessings for example. So in case you feel like Crit is a bit underpowered, this might be the reason why. [b]Defensive Values[/b] We’ve changed the way you increase defensive stats in order for base values of characters and items to be more significant. In the future all items that increase Block or Defense stats will be more likely to increase the base values, while almost all other sources, except the base (weak/normal/strong) traits, will provide a percentage-based increase. Meaning, a character with lower defensive base values will scale slower in their defensive stats. This will render melee characters more useful, since they have better defensive base values. We believe this change will have an impact on early-to-mid games and when playing with the Shrine of Torment. For the current late game this change will probably have very little impact. [b]Character Scaling and Balancing[/b] Characters have been all over the place. The biggest reason for this is that during development we’ve learned a lot about what is fun and what isn’t. But now, since we have all the characters assembled, we’ve decided to touch them once more and roughly align them to each other. We had to remove the base value scaling from common available traits that can be accessed via marks because they gave us a lot of trouble, both in terms of balancing and performance. We’re planning to bring back some base value buffs with the still missing “V” Traits. As a consequence “IV” Traits won’t have their modifier values doubled compared to their predecessors. [b]Elemental Effects[/b] While looking through scores and playtesting ourselves, we found that the best strategies would always involve elemental status effects. After a deeper look into those mechanics we quickly found the reason for this. When looking at damage from Burn stacks, whenever the attempt to apply a 21st stack was made, the damage dealt was the Burn stacks’ Tick Damage x20 instead of the Tick Damage x10 (every Burn stack ticks 10 times). This led to all stacks beyond the 20th being significantly stronger skyrocketing the DPS caused by Burn. This was amplified by the fact that applying a 21st stack would skip the time for all Burn stacks to ticks, triggering them immediately. In order to balance this properly we had to set a fixed damage for the application of a 21st stack. This way applying elemental effects faster will still deal extra damage as intended, but it won’t cause a damage cascade like before. This damage spike was even worse for Frost and Electrify. In order not to just downgrade elemental effects we’ve buffed their base values to make them stronger in the early game. Burn is ticking down faster, Electrify stacks remain longer on enemies, and Frost has a better Area scaling. Surely this will affect many builds and we are aware that this change will require further adjustments after this patch. We consider elemental status effects to be a little bit underpowered in their current state and we’re planning on improving them in the future. [b]Items[/b] In the Items department this patch contains rather few balancing adjustments compared to other areas. We’ve decided that items that provide mostly flat stat increases had to be adjusted. Having a few items providing a significantly higher bonus than others makes other items in the same category seem useless. We’ll focus on adding more items in the future. In the past weeks we’ve made our own analysis to see what kind of items would be missing in the current pool, and how to offer more diverse build options. Still, in that regard we’d like to take more feedback from the community into account. [b]If you have any questions regarding this update, the balancing, or content, feel free to post them in the comments.[/b] [b]Small Update[/b] Lords would drop items that are intended for the Shrine of Torment, we disabled those drops. Thanks for letting us know! [b]Update 2024-05-13[/b] - Fixing that when clicking on lowest mark you would select saved loadouts instead - Changing the Health quest of Warlock to 500 - Norseman trait Storming IV requirement was level 25 and not 40 - Protection Trait of Sorceress would not properly work - Norseman had physical instead of melee tags working - Agony chest drops had their base rarity one level too high - Exterminator trait icons for stance and weapon proficiency were mixed up - Homunculi Slayer had the wrong quest ID and that would cause issues with the quest board - Beasthuntress no longer starts with Frost Affinity trait selectable, Norseman does - Forced March traits would display a bonus of 0.5% when it was 10% - Voltage trait of the sorceress has been base crit, should now be normal crit chance - Only the Piercing variant of the Windcrown could be found - Exterminator Weapon was falsely labelled as "Burn" - Hood (Boost) would increase Health instead of Defense - The default mapping of opening the questboard during a run would interfere with equipment interactions [b]Update 2024-05-14[/b] - Warlock and Sorceress had wrong character descriptions. - Demonic Exchange quest was configured to be below 250HP but should have been below 500 - Frost Avalanche was not considered 'Projectile' in a few cases. - Inner Orbit upgrade does now apply all Movement Speed bonus correctly. - Sorceress has now Base Multistrike of 2.5 (2.0 before) - Archers Attack Speed increased from 0.95/s to 1.0/s - Landsknecht Pierce increased to 4 - Fixed Landsknecht base pierce increase, was a too low multiplier before. - Norseman base range has been slightly reduced. - Swordsman and Norseman have slightly reduced range increase per level up. [h3]Stay Fresh 🥕 Chasing Carrots[/h3]