Overview:
Damage passives have been reduced by around 20% across the board. With reduced enemy health scaling to compensate. This is to achieve two things.
First it will bring down the difference in power between a good build and a bad one as the game draws on. Because of the difference in scaling, it was reaching the point where you could either one shot Hyacinth or struggle to whittle down her health over an eternity. And impossible balance point for combat, and one that will get worse as the game gets longer. Broken builds are part of the fun in a roguelike like this, however I want to retain some of the boss fighty skill based elements deeper into the game.
Secondly I want to emphasize Weapon Upgrades and Engravings. Many passives were so good they outshined these much rarer upgrades, and a great deal of these weren’t the build-shifting hard to use passives with downsides, just raw stats.
Another big change is the tuning of buffs. Before I made the mistake of normalizing buff values more or less across all passives. That means a buff that can be triggered at most once every 2 seconds, gave the same benefit as one that can be triggered multiple times a second.
Shock has been changed significantly, and Burn has been tweaked. Finally cementing in the difference between the status effects.
And finally a staggering amount of important bugs have been fixed. Let's start with those status changes.
Status Effects:
The Eel engraving now only applies one shock at all levels. Instead increasing the damage Electrocute does by 60% (+15% with each additional level). Eel will be weaker than poison the moment you get it, but will hold higher potential. And rely a lot more on shocks gained via passives. Now that the Engraving bonus applies to ALL Electrocutes it can be used in unique Engraving setups similar to Hunter.
-Burn’s duration has increased to 6 seconds (from 4)
Major Passive Changes:
-Teeth of the Eel gives +1 damage for every 3 shocks (from 2) but also for every 10 burn and poison as well.
-Song of the Bell still applies an un-nerfed 3 shock on Bell ring, but the bell no longer deals its engraving hit damage.
-Core of the Stone doubles Engravings if you’ve charged for a second (Rather than charged for 2)
-Inspiration of the Tinkerer causes the Tinkerer clock engraving to no longer deal damage but increases damage taken by the target by 3% (From 1%) per damage it would have done.
-Skin of the Glutton Consumes 3 health (From 2) every time you heal. And heals for 7 every 7 Consumes.
-Gears of the Tinkerer causes Skill cooldown to be reduced by 35% (From 50%) skills do -35% damage (From 35%)
The rest of passive changes:
-Most damage values on nearly every passive have been reduced by 20%.
-Buffs created by Consumes or Engraving Hits have been brought down around 50%.
-Crit may feel especially nerfed. But this is due to a bug and the actual values are now in line with the advertised values.
-Enemy health scaling has been brought down around 20% to compensate.
Misc Changes:
Eruptive Rush Weapon Upgrade has its follow up damage buffed from 6 to 9 (Two hits)
Fleet Feet Weapon Upgrade gives a +6 damage buff (from +5) after crossing through an enemy with charge.
Fixes:
-Fixed “Smoke of the Salamander” which now consumes burns as a new one is about to replace like it advertises.
-Fixed bug that caused all crit chances to be doubled, Woops!
-Fixed Act 2 money amounts to be more sensical.
-Fixed bosses knowing if you’ve beat them in dialogue.
-Fixed it so Glutton Curse may now be consumed by all engraving hits.
-Fixed issues of Heals not persisting through screen transition, Double Woops!
-Fixed an issue with Candle’s dialogue never progressing.
-Protected against a bug that would cause enemies to be a 0 health with no hitable box. But still acting.