Welcome to the patch notes! We're continuing with our Friday night playtests this week. ICYMI, we shared a summary of the feedback we've been hearing lately, our thoughts, and what comes next. Check it out here!

Changes marked with ⭐ were inspired by your feedback.
Changes marked with 🛠 are prototypes. These features are still in early development and may be buggy and/or missing key elements!

Patch Highlights

• Introducing lobby chat, friends lists, and DMs! 🤝
• Gear power is reduced by ~50% 📉
• Ancient Veil has a temporary gear cap of 500 CR 🎩
• Laid the foundation for the item system overhaul 🧱
• Experience now drops in shiny bubbles 🔵
• All basic abilities are unlocked at level 1 🤺
• Bosses and named creatures have gear checks 💪
• Extractors now have three “cores” that reset the extractor if destroyed 🏃‍♀️
• Loads of UI/UX improvements ✨

⭐ Introducing lobby chat, friends lists, and DMs

This patch brings a bunch of new social features, with more to come! Note that all of the art and UI is work-in-progress, and we should have a cleaner interface next patch.

• You can now chat with your teammates in the lobby! Simply hit enter to open the chat window and chatter away.
• You can view a basic friends list by clicking on the people icon near your party list on the lower-left of the lobby
• You can right-click on someone’s name in chat to add them to your friend’s list
• You can start a private DM with a friend with `/whisper + username` or by clicking on the message icon for your friend in the friends list
• You can respond to a friend’s private DM with `/r + username`

⭐The Great Gear Squish

One of the most common things we’ve been hearing is that gear feels like it has too much of an impact on teamfights and overall power, so we’re doing a big gear squish to reduce the total power you can get from gear in roughly half.

This means if you’re fully kitted out, your overall power level will be ~50% of what it was before. This power squish is evenly divided between all gear levels, so greens are half as strong as before, blues are half as strong, etc.

For now, your challenge rating will look the same as before, but the amount of power you have will be lower. 📣 PSA: There’s an issue with how CR is calculated this patch, which is resulting in bigger numbers than intended. In other words, a set of blues will look like a bigger number, but it’s actually inflated and the gear is half as powerful as before. This should be fixed in the following patch.

Since CR is currently inflated, we had to temporarily adjust the CR cap on Blooming Grove to 300 to compensate. This cap will be readjusted once the CR calculation is fixed.

⭐Ancient Veil now has a gear cap (for now)

It can be daunting as a new player to queue up for Ancient Veil and see players with 750+ CR. Some of this hesitation is well-founded (see above), and we hope the reduction in overall gear power helps games feel more competitive than before.

That said, we don’t have a lot of levers to pull to give new players more space in Ancient Veil (e.g. matchmaking newbies together), so we’re adding a temporary gear score cap of 500 CR. We expect this number to change during closed beta, and we’ll eventually go back to having a completely uncapped queue.

To all the veterans–thanks for being patient as we invite new people to learn the game 🙌 And we hope we have more for you to chase in the future too, which brings us to…

Item system update, phase 1

We talked a lot about itemization in this week’s Playtest Pulse, which you should definitely go read if you missed it. Lots of juicy stuff about the feedback we’ve been hearing and what comes next.

To quickly recap, we’re working on updates to the item system that will give gear less deep raw power and more breadth of choices and opportunities. This means we’re moving most of the power gear provides away from base items and into customizing your builds through things like passive gems, gear sets, and crafting options.

The tl;dr of what we’re aiming for is…

1. Items should matter,
2. Items should give you choices,
3. Items should let you express mastery, and
4. Items should be a point of achievement and pride.

These item system changes will be dropping over multiple patches, so it’ll be a minute before all the pieces come together. This first patch is all about laying the foundation for what’s to come, with things like more gear sets, gem and socket changes, salvaging, and crafting upgrades coming in the future.

Basic items have fewer stats
In addition to reducing the amount of power in basic items, this change also makes it easier to compare basic gear–you’re now guaranteed more power just by equipping a better item.

• There are now two primary stats, Defense and Attack. Defense grants Physical and Magical Defense, and Attack grants Physical and Magical Attack. You can still get Physical and Magical Attack/Defense, but only on gems and on Epic and higher gear.
• You’ll get Attack from all weapons for your Seeker, and Defense on all helms, boots, and body armor. You don’t have to worry about finding basic gear with the “right” kind of attack or defense–every piece has the “right” stat for you.
• Accessories don’t have Attack or Defense, but they do have more specialized stats, like Crit Chance and Health. You’ll have more choices to make when it comes to Accessories to pick the stat that’s right for you.
• At the Rare quality level, gear also gets a second stat, specific to each slot. Helms will give you Crit Chance, boots will give you Move Speed, and so on.
• Once you get to Epic quality gear, you’ll start to see more specialized, interesting stats. That’s where you’ll find things like Tenacity, Magic Find, Health Regen.
• Keep in mind you can find all of these stats on gems, so if you need a specific stat for your Seeker, look for it on gems!

Introducing gear sets
Gear sets grant special passives if you have two or four of a kind. There are three Epic gear sets to find with this patch, more coming soon!

• The Salvation Set, for light armor wearers
• The Murderer’s Set, for medium armor wearers
• The Implacable Set, for heavy armor wearers

Gems and sockets
We have more changes planned for gems and sockets, but in the meantime, we’re happy to say we’ve made gems easier (and cheaper) to slot!

• You can now drag-and-drop gems into sockets during the match
• You can now drag-and-drop gems into sockets in your lobby stash
• If you happen to use Bijou to do this, don’t worry… he won’t charge you any more for adding gems (what a pal)

Reduced crafting recipes
Crafting recipes have been significantly reduced while we’re working on these changes. You’ll be able to craft a basic set of gear for each rarity and armor weight, gems with stats and passives, and the resource material conversions.

Experience now drops as collectable bubbles

The most important reward from defeating regular creatures is the experience you gain, which helps you level up and grow stronger. We want to make that reward more tangible and satisfying, so all creatures now drop experience bubbles! Experience works the same as before, which means you can’t pick up (or even see) other people’s bubbles. And you can’t miss a drop–if you move off-screen, all the bubbles will zoom over to you.

Ability Points

We’re laying the foundation for an update to our ability system, which should make leveling feel more impactful and give you more choices in how you want to play your Seeker.

• ⭐You start with all three basic abilities unlocked at level 1
• Ultimate is unlocked at level 5
• Maximum in-game level is now 10 (previously 12)
• Removed ability point distribution restrictions (you can dump the first three points into a single ability if you want)

Named creatures and bosses now have gear checks

Gone are the days of the naked Boop Snoot runs. Starting this patch, unique and boss enemies will do a “gear check” to see if you’re strong enough to take them on. This helps emphasize that gearing up helps you progress through not only PvP, but also the PvE on the map too. Gotta have some good stuff to get better stuff, and better stuff to get excellent stuff.

If you don’t pass a gear check, your damage will be reduced to one per hit, and they’ll wallop you to bits. You can see the minimum CR required for any creature on the map tooltips.

Extractor changes

We liked some aspects of the “king of the hill” extractors we introduced last patch, but the various ownership states were difficult to convey and manage. So we’re trying another method for contesting extraction.

Activating an extractor will now spawn three “cores,” which you’ll need to protect to successfully extract. If an enemy team is able to destroy all three cores before the countdown stops, it’ll fully reset the extractor, and anyone can channel it again. This means you can ambush escaping teams and commandeer their extractor for yourself. There’s lots we can do to tune this new design, and we’ll be on the lookout for your feedback.

p.s. Want to read more about our thoughts on extractors? Check out yesterday’s Playtest Pulse!

⭐Combat spaces and art updates

We’re continuing our quest to add more nuance and unique theming to areas across the map, which includes things like walls, brush, entrance/exit obstacles, and other thematic details. We’re also decreasing the number of dead ends on the map.

Expect more to come in the next few patches!

No more dead end around the back of Castle del Rey

Updated art for Lonely Oak Island

New wishing well art

Creature corner

• Boomerascal's Boomerang Throw hits slightly later to better match the projectiles whooshing by.
• Increased Blue's CR from 480 to 600 and Berry's CR from 465 to 500, to be more in line with other unique creatures guarding Epic chests
• Replaced the extra Lunar Assassin and in the Blue & Berry comp with a couple of Apprentice Casters, for less teleport-y chaos and a more interesting challenge

UI/UX improvements

We’ve got some awesome new people on the team who are helping improve a bunch of our UI and UX. Notable changes this patch includes…

• ⭐ Added match objectives to the HUD. This widget will eventually call attention to important things you can do during a match. For now, you’ll always start with a “find an extractor” main objective.
• ⭐ Revamped and less frequent quest progress notifications
• ⭐ Map pings show offscreen indicators in their direction
• ⭐ Updated HUD icons to better call out how to ping, open the map, etc.
• ⭐ Clarity improvements to the map selector and how/when you unlock new maps
• ⭐ Improved game menus
• ⭐ Continued clarity improvements to the in-game map
• ⭐ The toggleable mini-map is now smaller and square

Bug fixes

• ⭐ Game audio will no longer completely shut off via entering the escape menu during a match
• ⭐ Fixed a bug where you could drop the bridge near Wishing Well from the wrong side