We are currently redesigning the pathfinder map system and want to invite you the chance to playtest the new system before the update 0.9.1 get released. This will give us the chance to gather valuable feedback to get the most out of the new pathfinder system.
To access the public playest simply go to the game on steam -> right click preferences -> betas -> select playtest.
As this is a public playtest you are allowed to stream and share your experience with the new system. Please share your experience with us here on steam forums or our discord.. We will also jump into livestreams and check out how the progress looks in actual runs to get better insights for balancing the new system.
Make sure you only play on the new playtest 0.9.1 online safe file and refrain from using the season 11 safe file. Playtest has its own leaderboards.
New Features:
Pathfinder Redesign
The pathfinder system got some major changes to not only make it easier for new players to get into but also to make runs less dependent on farming map shards. Shard of Augmentation and Shard of Mitigation have been completely removed. Maps now have a fixed amount of sockets which can be used to socked map modifiers into your maps. Starting from map tier 1 with two empty mod socket each increased map tier will add one additional socket to the map. Therefore the overall amount of spawned map modifiers has been drastically reduced.
This now limits the additional bonus exp you can get per maps and prevents runs where you could have >1000% bonus exp in one single map if you had enough farmed map shards, which then lead to outscaling the whole game. This now also allows us to lower the enemy HP scaling and also the amount of map modifiers that spawn on maps by default. This change will overall lead to much more accurate balancing opportunities as we do not have to cater towards these special cases. Also the difficulty curve is much flatter now so you should not experience "hitting a wall" quite as hard and early as currently.
Since we also reduced the amount of map mods that spawn on maps by default we can also much earlier spawn higher map tiers that allows you to challenge the Awakened Gatekeepers on much earlier levels.
For the endgame scaling we target that even the highest maps only have half of the available modifier sockets filled with modifiers. So no longer there will be infinite more map mods stacked on top of each other. So for example a map tier XV map would have 15 available map modifier sockets but only 7 of them will be filled by default with random modifiers on an end-end game run.
Difficulty Scaling
We did major changes to the difficulty scaling during the run. Enemy hp scaling for normal enemies and bosses has been drastically decreased which should make the run progression to much more gradually increase in difficulty as it currently had.
Higher game difficulties now not add additional map modifiers to your maps as they have previously. They will now simply add some more enemy HP and increase the elite enemy spawn rate.
We want to thank you for your ongoing support! If you want to stay up to date with the ongoing development and chat with fellow players you are invited to join our discord.