Note: As this demo is also being used to test game balance and fun, nothing that happens is set in stone. Don't like something I changed? Let me know!
Nightmare Scaling Updates
With the fixes to monster life, Nightmare runs go deeper than ever before. I love that everyone is having a ton of fun playing the game for long sessions, and don't intend to discourage that.
However, I do want to also incentivize play for people who prefer shorter, but more challenging runs as well. These changes are designed to help encourage pushing deeper into the Endless Nightmare's tiers as well.
NM Unique Drop Rate Scaling
Currently the optimal strategy is to pick NM 1-3 and just push as deep into the game as possible. You've probably seen some folks on the news feed pushing to depth 800+ and just raining T0 uniques. This will always be a somewhat viable strategy, but two changes are being made to encourage other playstyles:
The base unique drop quality bonus from Nightmare has quintupled. It just wasn't big enough before. Now higher NM levels are much stronger
The Cursed Shrines that gave flat Unique chance now give 3% Unique Item Drop Chance per Difficulty and Nightmare Level. This means that on NM15, this shrine will give a whopping 45% increased Unique drop rate, giving higher NM runners an incentive to push difficulties
NM Monster Scaling
Nightmare monster levels aren't strongly felt by most builds until very high Nightmare values. I've doubled the effect of Nightmare on monster stats. This is a flat bonus per Nightmare difficulty level, not an exponential one. As always, it's tough to tune this game to every possible build, so let me know how this feels for you!
Other Patch Notes:
- Greatly optimized the Fire Attunement skill
- Greatly optimized the cost of Skill Tree Change announcements. You shouldn't see lag when selecting upgrades in-run anymore
- Moderately optimized the CPU and memory usage of dropping items
- Added two missing Weapon modifiers
- Reduced some unnecessary memory usage relating to animations
- Added some additional instrumentation around performance in hopes of being able to identify more bottlenecks in the future
- Reduced the spawn rate of Divinities in half