We’re squeezing out another patch for the Dragon’s Vow. A slew of bugs have been addressed, as well as fixes for some regression issues brought up from the last patch. Highlights include balancing some overly-powerful builds introduced with Skill Crits, and the missing SFX for Ladon that we couldn’t get in time for release. We’re hoping this puts the Dragon’s Vow in a stable enough spot to allow us to shift focus back to game content.
- The Cellar Door Games Team
GAMEPLAY CHANGES/ADDITIONS
The Dragon’s Vow introduced big changes to combat through Skill Crits, which unavoidably put our balance numbers into a bit of disarray. After a couple of weeks of feedback we've found a few issues and we'll be fixing them over the next little while. We'll have more balance changes coming in the next major patch, but for now we’re knocking down some of the low-hanging fruit.
- Folding Rune: Reducing maximum Armor Block cap from 5% to 4%.
- Quenching Rune: Reducing total Armor from 10% to 8%.
- Retaliation Rune: Defeating enemies with Retaliation damage no longer grants Lifesteal or increments relic kill counters.
- Armor Unity Set 3: Armor bonus down from 50% to 40%.
- Sporeburst Spell: Base damage down from 200% to 170% (we forgot to reduce base damage after giving the explosion crit damage).
- Sporeburst Spell: Runes that extend Status Effect durations no longer apply to Sporeburst as it extended the time before the explosion, effectively nerfing the ability.
- Freeze Strike Spell: Removed the knockback defense reduction when freezing enemies.
- Dreamcatcher Relic: Now grants a Mana boost when defeating enemies via hazards, in addition to direct attacks and status effects.
- Hypercoagulation Trait: Now only triggers if the player takes damage, not if the player gets hit. Fixes issue where perfect blocking would still trigger the Max HP loss.
- Added brief grace period to Nightmares so they don't immediately attack you if you enter a room while using Hephaestus' Hammer.
- You now receive XP, Lifesteal, and increments to your relic kill counters as soon as an enemy's health reaches 0, instead of when they explode (most noticeable with Mimic Chests and bosses).
- Enemy HP and Strength now scale with your NG+ level, as opposed to only scaling based on their increased levels.
- Added a bunch of new sound effects, including updating the sounds for Tubal and adding the missing ones for Ladon’s cutscene.
- The Skeleton bosses, Namaah, and Tubal now have different music for each of their phases.
- Adjusted timing for when boss music starts playing for Lamech, Skeletons, and Namaah.
- Added option to disable player HUD fading in the Game Settings.
- Added new dialogue to Ladon if you complete his objective before ever speaking to him.
- Resource display in the player info card now divide by 1000 with a 'K' added if the number gets too big.
- Defeating a Mimic Chest and exiting the room before they explode now triggers them as defeated if you re-enter the room.
- Added health loss and gain animations for Enemy HUD to make it clear whether the enemy was losing or gaining health.
BUG FIXES
99% of the bugs listed were brought up by the community, so we won’t bother tagging them as such.
- Fixed bug where Knuts were sometimes not hooking to ceilings.
- Fixed bug where Knuts would sometimes spawn on top of spikes.
- Fixed bug where Knuts were firing projectiles from the center of their body, instead of from their mouth.
- Fixed bug where Risen enemies would have a limb visible during their summon animation in challenge arenas.
- Fixed exception bug caused by killing a Defentry, leaving the biome, and returning to the room where the Defentry was killed.
- Fixed bug where using the Ivy Platform talent would cause a bubbling sound effect to loop endlessly.
- Attempted fix for bug where you could sometimes slide on the floor while holding the Free Look button on the keyboard.
- Fixed bug where you could sometimes fall through heirloom water.
- Fixed bug where entering/exiting the Cave’s boss room would play the standard boss door open/close effects and SFX.
- Fixed bug where the Cave key relic rooms were not playing relic room audio.
- Fixed bug where cooldown SFX did not play if you attacked while out of ammo.
- Fixed bug where Scar music would keep playing in the background if you talked to Geras immediately when returning from failing a Scar.
- Fixed bug where a "hit" sound effect would play whenever you entered the Drift House if you failed a Scar.
- Attempted fix for some awkward music transitions between biomes.
- Updated a number of rooms to clean up bad props and missing enemies.
- Fixed Journal room in Tower still dropping items from breakables.
- Fixed several rooms that had 'spiked' ground that was smaller than the horizontal ground raycast distance of enemies, resulting in enemies launching into the sky if they hit them.
- Fixed Cosmic Insight using an incorrect icon style.
- Fixed bug where player could go through ceilings if knocking up a Rocket Box with the Boxer's uppercut while standing on top of it.
- Fixed bug where projectiles would sometimes go through Wind Wall and other spells.
- Fixed bug where resolve costs were not being displayed correctly in the Gear info page if the player stacked relics.
- Fixed bug where hitting enemies with doors was applying relic effects.
- Fixed regression bug where entering an upper room with Icarus Wings would sometimes make the player not reach the ground platform due to the recently added vertical velocity capping when entering a new room.
- Fixed jump modifiers affecting how the player jumped onto a global teleporter (they wouldn't even be able to reach it if they had Icarus Wings).
- Fixed not being able to walk on a slanted one way in a unique room in the Cave.
- Fixed bug where players would sometimes not take damage from side spikes after bouncing off a resonant orb.
- Fixed bug where critical effects on weapons would only appear on one weapon if the player had multiple weapons.
- Fixed bug where enemies could still spawn as commanders in easy rooms if the easy room merged.
- Fixed bug where Map Updated text on the tuning fork would stay stuck there if you exited the room while it was animating.
- Fixed bug where you could constantly run into the tuning fork in the boss entrance of the cave and it would keep ringing.
- Set RimBias and RimScale properties to 0 when tinting characters. This fixes issue where enemies that are tinted (black or otherwise) would still have lighting effects on them.
- Fixed bug where unseen spells in the Mage's talent slot would be revealed in the Lineage scene.
- Fixed bug where obtaining a spell through the Mage's talent slot was not setting it to its seen state.
- Fixed issue with Boss Defeated HUD misaligned text.
- Fixed bug where the IIB trait was triggering the high jump VFX whenever the player bounced off things.
- Fixed bug where summoned enemies could still be Commanders if the Enemy Adaptation burden was active.
- Fixed bug where aiming an ability while flying would shoot the projectile in the direction you were facing, rather than where you were aiming.
- Fixed bug where some enemies could not go down slopes (e.g. Tier 3 Spear Maidens).
- Fixed bug where Amaterasu's Sun was not applying to Cook's passive burn.
- Fixed bug where Ranger's arrow would hit the ceiling if the Ranger was aiming down and their head was pressed against the ceiling.
- Attempted fix of bug where player would bounce into the air if they tried to drop down a one-way platform on the same frame they transitioned from solid ground to the one-way.
- Fixed bug where pressing against a door and shooting the GroundBow would result in the door explosion coming out the wrong direction.
- Fixed bug where Magic 8-ball would sometimes deal very little damage.
- Fixed bug where miniboss entrance rooms would play their closing state animations again if you generated a new world and entered the room.
- Fixed bug where a certain room had a missing chest icon.
- Fixed bug where the Lineage scene would sometimes show button glyph text (like “SPACE”) without the glyph.
- Attempted fix of bug where player is able to knockout an enemy, but their DeathDelay status effect would not stop. This results in an unhittable enemy that dumbly stands there.
- Fixed bug where the Architect's gold mod was not affecting Diogenes's Bargain.
- Fixed exception when knocking out an enemy with a killing blow and exiting the room before they exploded.
- Fixed bug where Lance would stick to slopes if you dashed over a slope while on the ground.
- Fixed bug where air-jumping while in front of a large one-way platform like a barrel would register as a ground jump instead of an air jump.