Hey folks,
As you might imagine, we spent the entire time today analyzing what's going on and addressing some concerns that came up for the Breach Update.
Our goal was initially to get this hotfix out tonight still, but we've been working on quite a lot of things at the same time until now and we'd like to still have our Quality Assurance team test the hotfix before we release it - so we'll release it tomorrow instead, probably around 5pm CEST.
I wanted to summarize some of the changes that we've made based on the data we're seeing. The goal here as always is not to dumb down Wicked or to appeal to one crowd or the other. Instead, we're doing what Early Access is for: We're carefully evaluating all data and are making changes based on actual telemetry to ensure that people get the experience we're after!
So here goes:
1) For now we'll remove the interval we have on weapons and armors. What that means is that if an item had a base value of 10, there was a 30% chance that the item could drop from 7-10. We wanted to remove this for quite some time and instead introduce 'superior' items at some point anyway, but given that people reported issues with weapon damage and armor, we decided that we're changing this now already. With that, any weapon and armor you find will be exactly what the designer intended it to be :)
2) We've also made adjustments to the 'gear score' system, so there's gonna be a higher chance that a REALLY nice item drops for you every once in a while.
3) For Breach, we tried to do something smart that would encourage players to put armor into all equipment slots, but that's backfired since a lot of you apparently want to run around without pants. Fine then, we reverted this to what we had on the previous LIVE build. That should fix the issues people reported about getting killed too easily.
4) A lot of you were bothered about archer builds using focus again for their arrow skill instead of stamina. I tweaked this stuff today so that the arrow skill is quite a lot cheaper now. Please try it and leave feedback if this alleviated your concerns! On a side-note, we will definitely put a LOT of love into Archer builds within the upcoming Combat Update!
5) We saw that you folks are often starved of the earlier herbs, so we increased the drop rates on Artemisia Herbs.
6) We fixed an issue reg. elemental damage affixes on enemies. Some of you tried to make builds around elemental damage and it didn't fire the way you expected and the way it should've worked, so that's fixed now.
7) There was a bug that snuck in that didn't allow players to backstab enemies while they were in certain states. We fixed that and also adjusted the backstab angle to be a bit more forgiving again. We also made the backstab icon appear and disappear more rapidly so that players get clearer feedback.
8) We fixed that silly Blade Oil Description bug :D
9) We increased drop rates on rarer enemy spawns like Sirens and Wolves.
10) We adjusted the parry window a bit. We even had a slew of our non-parry players internally try it and even they felt it was 'challenging, but good!'
11) There was a poise issue with Witches and the Pickaxe Nith enemies. They'll now be instantly interruptible with any weapon, as originally intended.
12) We added some text on the main menu for now to clarify to everyone what's going on with their legacy saves.
13) We fixed the issue where people couldn't exalt items anymore with items locked in their house chests.
14) We removed the XP Cap on higher level enemies. We saw some of you just absolutely determined to beat enemies that are at a far higher level than yourselves and if you manage to do that, that should be properly rewarded!
15) We had an initialEnemyLevel mistake in Nameless Pass that resulted in too high of a difficulty spike once you went from the Pass to the Quarry - Now enemies in the Quarry will be Level12 instead of Level15 to allow for a smoother progression.
16) Medium Roll got a few extra iframes. Keep rolling, rolling, rolling!
17) We lowered the level increase in the later Orban Glades areas a bit so that the difficulty jump for Darak and the enemies in that zone isn't as abrupt.
18) There was a bug that artificially increased the Enemy Levels after the Servant of God and Of Rats and Raiders Quests were completed. We fixed that now.
19) There was another bug that made the enemies in the Prologue too tough to beat. They needed 11 hits or so, which wasn't intentional. Now they're fairly weak again as they should be for the tutorial :)
20) We saw that a lot of you like the Fallen Embers and what they can do for you, but you're using the system a LOT and run out of embers a tad too quickly. Thus, we increased the drop rate of Fallen Embers accordingly.
21) There was an issue with the drop rates of weapon and armor shards that's now fixed.
22) We decreased the drop rate of Plagued Items a bit since for Breach, they were balanced to be more advanced weapons for advanced players that like the challenge of making an entire build around them. Try to be creative with them, don't immediately dismiss an item if you don't immediately like the negative enchantment that's on it - you might just be able to get something out of it ;)
23) We also drastically increased the effects of conditional enchantments. If an enchantment requires you to perform a backstab, a parry or has any other condition like that, the reward should be significant, so that's adjusted now.
And that's just a few of the changes - There's quite a bit more being discussed and we'll have more detailed patch notes for you tomorrow!
And lastly, let me apologize that the Breach Launch might not have went as smoothly as we all wanted it to be. No Rest for the Wicked is an enormously complex project and we tried to squeeze as much new stuff as possible into it, which ultimately meant that some late-stage testing that should've happened didn't happen anymore since we ran out of time.
But we're very carefully listening to all your feedback, we're constantly watching streams, we're looking at all social media channels and we'll be fixing things as fast as humanly possible. We are listening, so please keep sending your feedback our way and we'll promise we'll try to make the perfect ARPG experience for all of you out there!
- Thomas Mahler