HoT Update 2023-10-30

Hello Adventurers!

Our work on the next playable stage goes on. To bridge the time until its release, we wanted to bring you some new items and ability upgrades. Naturally, those also come with a slew of bugfixes and minor balancing tweaks.

The most notable change is an adjustment in the Agony mechanic. You’ll notice that the agony rank will increase faster. This might feel more difficult at first if you don’t pay closer attention to what the changes actually entail. Previously killing monsters was the way of increasing your Agony score, while the number of monsters that are still alive contributed to how fast this score was decaying. In some cases this led to some overly dramatic rubber-banding. In order to gain more control over the Agony dynamic, the score is increased over time independent of how many kills you make. However, the Agony decay is still in place. So killing monsters fast will reduce the decay and as such contribute to the overall score increase. The score fluctuations are just not as steep as they were before.

This change will most probably require some tweaks after the fact. Let us know what you think, and we will see how we can improve it for a better experience.

There are a lot more things we have fixed and adjusted in this update. For the list of all changes, see the change log below:

Change Log | 2023-10-30

Items

• New item: Gorgon Mask (Head)
  • Slows down enemies in front of you.
  • Deals damage based on slow stacks.
  • Unlocked by quest: Viaduct Survivor III (Viaduct)

• New item: Mask of Madness (Head)
  • Take damage in regular intervals.
  • On each interval you get a permanent buff in exchange.
  • Unlocked by quest: Mark of Madness (Warlock)

• New item: Broker’s Cape (Body)
  • Selects a random debuff from an enemy.
  • Tries to apply the selected debuff to all enemies in range.
  • Unlocked by quest: Broken Body (Cleric)

• Item Rework: Rat Ring (Ring)
  • Rats now attack the closest enemy that they’ve not attacked yet.
  • If rats can’t find a new target, they wait and then attack the previous enemy again.
  • Rats deal 20 physical damage to enemies they touch.
  • Rat Ring is now affected by summon count.
  • Amount of debuffs applied is now affected by Multistrike.
  • New uncommon variants.

• Monsters can now have slow resistance and limits on how slow they can be.
  • Resistance: champion (25%), elite (50%), boss (66%), lord (80%)
  • Limit: champion (30%), elite, boss, lord (50%)

• It’s more likely now to get uncommon variants of items that the character has equipped.
  • The probability factor is distributed equally among all equipped items.
  • The probability factor considers the amount of unlocked items and is increased accordingly.

• Polish: Ring summons are now listed below the item stats.
  
• Polish: Summon rings now have better icons in the info area.
  
• Bugfix: Ring summons will now despawn when rings are unequipped.
  
• Bugfix: Ring summons now have correct summon count limits on re-equipping.
  
• Bugfix: Summoned skeleton mage attacks now also count towards summon damage.
  
• Bugfix: Certain summon counts were not accounted for.
  

Abilities

• New ability upgrade: Phantom Fetter (Phantom Needles)
  • Unlocked by new quest: Phantom Needles Specialist (Viaduct)
  • Quest requirement: 10 000 double crits in a run with Phantom Needles
  • Slows enemies on hit.
  • Gets additional crit chance based on the slow stacks on the hit enemy.

• New ability upgrade: Orbital Shift (Astronomer’s Orbs)
  • Unlocked by new quest: Astronomer’s Orbs Specialist (Viaduct)
  • Quest requirement: Hit 40 000 enemies in a run with Astronomer’s Orbs
  • Orbs change distance from the player, forming a rotating ellipse.
  • Orbs deal damage based on the relative distance to the player.

• New ability upgrade: Amputation (Transfixion)
  • Unlocked by new quest: Transfixion Specialist (Archer)
  • Quest requirement: Apply 150 000 debuff stacks with Transfixion
  • Enemies take 10% bonus damage per debuff stack on them.
  • Adds an additional Transfixion emitter.

• Transfixion balancing:
  • Reduced base damage from 80 to 70.
  • Increased the multiplier for multi enemy hits from 66% to 75%.
  • Decreased the base damage from deadliness trait from 15 to 10.

• New trait: Crippling Strikes
  • Increases slow chance by 15%
  • 3 levels (10, 20, 35)
  • Unlocks with the new quest “Crippling Strikes” on the Viaduct quest board

• Polish: Swapped places of quests on the Viaduct quest board.
  

Agony

• Agony decay from monsters now starts after a delay.
  • Default delay is 10s. Stronger enemies or enemies that spawn further away have a higher delay.
  • Enables slower starting builds or builds that need monsters closer to not lose Agony as long as they can keep up with the normal spawn rate.

• Agony is now generated over time instead of killing monsters.
  • Earliest possibly Agony rank ups are every 4 minutes with Agony 5 being achievable at 20 minutes in.
  • Each Agony rank now requires the same amount of points to reach.
  • There is a small buffer beyond Agony 5 to not directly fall below Agony 5 if the killing speed dips for a moment.

• Agony still decreases on revive, a revive now decreases Agony by 1 rank.
  
• Agony scaling has been adjusted so that Agony 5 difficulty is similar on each stage.
  • Adding damage scaling for all stages (stronger on lower stages) -> 2.5% - 10% per Agony level
  • Increased monster health scaling on lower Agony ranks.
  • Increased XP and gold drop scaling on lower Agony ranks.

Bugfixes

• Auto aim now works for all characters on most of the visible screen space.
• Fixed name of Reverberant Bottle item (wrongly labeled Memorizing Bottle)
• Uncommon Firewalker Boots now give 1.0m/s base speed increase (previously 0.5m/s)
• Profile restoration is performed at game start when a corrupted profile has been detected.
• Adjusted ability descriptions
• Ring of Frost description stated wrong frost chance on hit (it’s 15% not 10%)
• Meteor Strike main projectiles were not affected by most Meteor Strike upgrades
• Hailstorm changes:
  • Traits now properly display they are associated with Hailstorm.
  • Increased satellite drop base damage from 200 to 500.
  • Increased satellite drop direct damage area radius from 3m to 4m.
  • Increased movement speed factor from x0.2 to x0.3.
  • Increased trigger distance of vortex and spikes from 2m to 2.5m.
  • Reduced base force of vortex from 100 to 75.
  • Reduced emit count from “Eyes” trait from +0.33 base to +0.3 base.
  • Added a movement speed factor reduction of base x0.05 to the “Wind” trait.
  • Changed “Updraft” trait base damage from flat +40 to 30%.
    • This means 40 -> 150 for the satellite drops
    • This means 40 -> 30 for the spikes

Performance

• We’ve done some under-the-hood performance optimizations. There’s still room for improvement and we’ll keep on working on that front.

What's Next?

We will continue improving the game'S performance while our work on the next stage and other additional content goes on. We also plan to release further smaller item-based updates to slowly fill your stash with interesting ways to customize your characters and playstyles. So stay tuned for the next one!

Take care! 🥕
- Chasing Carrots