As the year closes, Hildie's crew finally reaches its true potential thanks to the Runic Update -- a large content patch introducing new rune abilities to find and incorporate into your builds, as well as challenges to match this newfound power!
NEW RUNE ABILITIES
Update 0.9.6 brings a set of new runes for each character! Some open up completely new item abilities aimed at covering hero's previous limitations, allowing for more flexibility in team building, while others facilitate more focused builds by heavily raising some attributes at the cost of others.
This addition finally closes all the content we've had planned regarding character customisation, ticking another box off our Road-to-1.0 list!
EVEN MORE ENDGAME QUESTS
Late-game parties now get the chance to pass even more difficult journey quests to reach the highest tier of areas, gaining access to a plethora of new Ultimate difficulty activities. These will challenge even completely maxed out heroes and require impeccable execution and preparation in order to reap their enticing rewards.
True to its name, the Runic Update also introduces two new quests related to the Runesmith. All we're gonna say is better come prepared.
FULL PATCH NOTES:
NEW CONTENT:
- New Brave runes: Juggernaut and Vengeance.
- New Blastmancer runes: Supporter Pack and Blast Beads.
- New Reverend runes: Martial Artist and Sucker Punch.
- New Pyra runes: Engineer and Zapper.
- New Assassin runes: Slasher and Secret Formula.
- New Countess runes: Unholy Power and Blood Ritual.
- Ultimate difficulty journey and corresponding area tier.
- Two new story quests with the Runesmith
- Five new endgame challenge quests.
- Five new highly rewarding errands for endgame areas.
- Several new encounter types to find on Ultimate quests.
- New hero barks.
Dev Note: Existing late-game save files likely already qualify for both Runesmith quests, meaning they'll appear one after the other. That obviously won't be the case for fresh playthroughs.
Dev Note #2: The new Ultimate-tier encounters also increase the potential difficulty of Endless and Gauntlet runs.
BALANCE:
- Nadia's Insta-kill chance is reduced by half on bosses.
- Dark Feast's attack power increased from 200% to 250%.
- Dark Feast's buff power increased from 100% to 120%.
Dev Note: As you can probably deduce from the small amount of changes, we feel gameplay balance is in a pretty good spot right now. We're however looking for all kinds of feedback on the new rune abilities, as they do shake things up more than a bit.
GAMEPLAY & QOL:
- You can now click through post-quest tally to skip the animations.
- Enemies now wait for effects like poison and burn to fully proc before acting for more visual clarity.
- Wording for Skull Seed now clearly mentions that only one skeleton can be summoned at a time.
Dev Note: Skipping the tally currently only works in quests. Errand reward screen can't be skipped yet as it's waiting for a general rework.
COSMETICS:
- Hex debuff now features much nicer visuals and FX.
- Improved visuals for the Blast Prism rune ability.
- Improved visuals for the Nexus ability.
- Improved visuals for the Boost ability.
- Improved visuals for the Pure Force rune ability.
- Improved visuals for the Magnetic Field rune ability.
- Improved the look of shockwaves created by several abilities.
- Added new visuals signifying actor's debuff immunity.
- Sunny weather has been improved on mountain areas.
- Some high level encounters now trigger boss music.
- Added more variety to wind sounds.
- Fixed and improved rune upgrade effects and visuals.
- Fixes to stun effect showing incorrectly in some cases.
- Proper sound effect for food consumption.
- Improved experience bar sound effects.
- Fixed and improved boss death animation.
BUG FIXES & MISC STUFF:
- Max health regeneration granted by skills now won't heal above wounded level.
- Heroism skill now correctly increases damage to minibosses.
- Fixed several typos in hero barks and dialogue.
- Some changes to texture packaging that should result in smoother loading at the cost of slightly larger file size.
- Coin collecting sequence has been heavily optimised.
- Rune tooltips now correctly update during upgrading.
- Fixed an issue with Erzsie's rejoin scene being tied to a wrong character.
- Enemies found sometimes in Trader/Master/Runesmith quests now correctly reflect the stage of the game.
FUTURE PLANS:
Just like after previous major updates, we're going into rapid hotfix mode to address any immediate bugs or balance issues you might have as quickly as possible.
As for the next big thing, we're currently working on adding the next character along with their runes and storyline as well as a general revamp of the travel and survival systems. While this work happens simultaneously, we'll likely split it into two separate updates.
As always, thank you for your continued patience and support! If you encounter any issues, would like to check our current development roadmap or make any suggestions, feel free to drop by our community forums. You can also follow me on Twitter or join MoaCube's Discord server for more frequent updates. Oh, and Happy Holidays!
-Tom