Greetings Defenders,
Content Update 1 arrived last week, and with it came a wealth of new questions from all of you. We sat down with Live Producer Ben Craven to discuss some of your biggest post-CU1 feedback.
There seems to be more lag after CU1. Any updates on this?
Ben Craven, Live Producer: “We put out a patch earlier today that should hopefully alleviate the issue. According to our investigation, the cause of the lag was due to large amounts of network traffic from high-stat builds with the latest gear.
The hotfix has lessened a lot of the lag on most maps, but we're not done yet. We are committed to resolving these lag issues. (A special thank you to Zeroxs for providing some valuable information on the matter.)”
Why is Corrupted/Divine armor so common in Nightmare?
Craven: “When bringing Nightmare mode over to DDE, we wanted it to be more about min/maxing than struggling to find the new gear. Because of that, we made it common to find these new armor sets once you enter Nightmare mode. I’d love to know your opinion to this question: Would you prefer Corrupted/Divine armor be harder to find and have a smaller range of stats, or be easier to find with a larger range (the way it is right now)?”
When are players going to get Nightmare Survival? Will it be more difficult than Campaign Nightmare?
Craven: “We don’t have a release date for Nightmare Survival yet. A lot of the decisions we are making about Nightmare Survival are based off of your feedback from Nightmare mode. When we get closer to release of Nightmare Survival and have solidified more of these decisions, we will let you know.
As for the difficulty, we are watching your feedback and in-game progression and are considering how much pain this should bring. What do you think?”
In the patch notes for Content Update 1, you mentioned that you were looking for feedback on the Huntress Invisibility change. Have you come to a conclusion?
Craven: “Yes, we have. Isom compiled all of the feedback about the change and we have decided we will be reverting this ability back to its original functionality in a future patch. Thanks for your feedback.”
Players have made a few suggestions on how to improve looting in DDE. What are your thoughts?
Craven: “There will definitely be future changes coming to make looting more fun for all of you and less like Vacuum Simulator 2014. We are looking into the feasibility of several fantastic ideas presented to us by the community on ways to improve loot gathering. We like what we’ve heard so far.
Right now, we have a question we’d like to ask you about loot priority. We would like to implement a system similar to DD1 where loot despawns based on quality. Currently, loot will despawn by priority based on proximity to the player, and then despawns based on how long an item has been in the world. If we were to implement a quality-despawn system, would you still want this position-based priority system in place, would you prefer we remove it, or would you prefer it becomes an option?”
Players have also made suggestions on how to improve the defenses for several heroes. What are your thoughts on these suggestions?
Craven: “We understand that many heroes' defenses are currently weak in DDE's endgame compared to a select few. We are evaluating a number of possibilities to these heroes. Before we commit to any changes, we will present our desired changes to the community for your feedback.”
Will you be doing something to make it more rewarding to fight bosses in Nightmare mode?
Craven: “We will be looking over Nightmare mode boss rewards and ways to improve them over the coming weeks.”
When a player leaves a match, the player takes the mana with him/her. Is this intended?
Craven: “We know this has been an issue for many of you and have a few ideas to fix it in a future patch. How would you feel if, upon leaving the level, a player’s mana dropped to the ground. Similarly, upon leaving a level, a player’s remaining mana in a chest would drop as well?”
When are we going to get Content Update 2?
Craven: “We are working studiously on CU2, and we hope to pass it off to QA next week. No more release date promises, but we’ll have more news soon.”
Do you have any other questions? Ask us in the comments below, and we’ll answer as many as we can in our next Dev Discussion post!
Previous Dev Discussions:
- Campaign Nightmare Mode: Completed
- Improved Loot Progression Per Map Quality: Completed
- Persistent Forge in Survival: Completed; Patch 3.6
- Dark Elf Warriors: Completed; Patch 3.4
- Boss Difficulty: Completed; Patch 3.4
- Server Downtime Warning: Completed
- Hide Cosmetic Armor: Completed; CU1
- Loot Despawning: Improved in Patch 3.6; Continuing Investigation
- Active Sessions: Improved in Patch 3.4; Continuing Investigation
- Summoner: Improved in Patch 3.4, CU1; Continuing Investigation
- Save Data Wipes: Improved in Patch 3.4; Continuing Investigation
- Launcher Issues: Improved in Multiple Patches; Continuing Investigation
- Linux Issues: Improved in Multiples Patches; Continuing Investigation
- Missing Rewards for Maps: In Progress
- DD1 Content: In Progress
- Server Stability: In Progress
- Challenge XP: Investigating
- Waiting for Match Timer Solution: Investigating
- Challenge Rewards: Investigating
- Offline Mode: Investigating
- Mixed Mode: Investigating
- Hardcore Mode: Investigating
- Barbarian: Investigating
- Rotating Map Rewards: Investigating
- User Interface: Investigating