Hi! Just a quick heads-up that another Arms of God update has just gone live!
Here’s the full list of changes: What's New
This update focuses heavily on balance, performance, and build variety, with major changes to weapons, Prayers, explosions, projectiles, and Endless Mode.
Major Balance Update
I've rebalanced most weapons, Hero starting stats, Damage Prayers, and Resource Prayers to bring weaker options closer to the strongest builds and reduce some of the extreme scaling I've been seeing.
Balance changes:
Rebalanced most weapons.
Rebalanced Hero starting stats.
Rebalanced Damage Prayers.
Rebalanced Resource Prayers.
Damage bonuses now multiply all damage.
Resource bonuses are now capped at +300%.
Dodge to Damage and Armor to Damage conversions now grant 1%.
Removed the 10,000 damage cap.
Maximum Frost damage is now capped at 1,000.
Melee Attack Speed minimum interval changed from 0.4s to 0.2s.
Explosion Range and Range stats are now capped at 6000.
Bonuses against Burned, Electrocuted, and specific enemy types are now additive instead of multiplicative.
Increase attack speed from skill use from 3% to 4%
Since Damage is now a multiplier, the Damage on Skill perk has a maximum value of 50% instead of 100%
Make all weapons 5% faster
Skill damage gains 50% more damage from Crux Power
Remove Shrine from Endless Ascent last level
Added healing on level up.
Major Performance Improvements
Explosions, Burning Ground, and projectiles received significant optimization and refactoring.
One of the biggest changes is how explosions interact with AOE weapons. Projectiles will no longer create another explosion for every enemy hit by effects such as Aura Emitters and Lasers.
Projectiles still need one more major optimization in the future. It's a complex change that may take several weeks to complete, but it mainly affects extreme cases with exceptionally high projectile counts combined with Vortex Emitters.
Explosive Weapons Improvements
Mines, Grenade Launchers, Airstrikes, and other explosive weapons received several improvements:
Mines are now 2x faster.
Mine behavior has been improved - mines now wait for and seek enemies more effectively.
Mine and Grenade Launchers no longer have a minimum targeting range and can target enemies close to the player.
Multiple Grenade Launcher projectiles now spawn at different positions.
Updated Grenade Launcher projectile trajectory calculations.
Updated explosive missile projectile meshes.
Explosions can now generate Resources on Critical Hits.
Burning Ground now counts toward weapon damage and enemy kill statistics.
Explosions do not break enemy Shell by default.
Detonator, Devastator, Overdetonator, Annihilator, Tesloader, and Teslabringer start with a dedicated Break Shell perk that grants their explosions this ability.
Elemental & VFX Improvements
Merged elements now have their own visual effects across projectiles, explosions, and Burning Ground.
Flamethrowers also received separate effects for their normal elemental and merged elemental variants, making different elemental builds much easier to distinguish during combat.
Endless Mode Updates
Endless Mode continues to receive improvements:
Bosses now spawn randomly.
Changed how bosses spawn in Endless Mode after 900 seconds.
Fixed boss HP bars in Endless Mode.
Fixed incorrect values displayed for some Crux abilities in the Endless Mode Crux tab.
Added a teleport safety plane to Endless Mode levels in case the player falls through the map.
Performance during projectile-heavy and explosion-heavy builds has been improved.
UI, Codex & Quality of Life
There are also a number of smaller UI and quality-of-life improvements:
The Codex now displays locked elements
Added Rector to the Codex.
Added Critical Damage to the side stats panel.
Added a Quest Completed icon.
Added auto-scroll to HUB buildings when using a gamepad.
Added new HUD icons for Defy Death and Lazarus.
Updated button colors and hover colors in the customization menu.
Removed the Steam button.
Attack Speed values now display 2 decimal places.
Added a DPS tooltip and recalculated how DPS is displayed.
Upgraded and normal Blessings are now displayed as separate Blessings in each Hero's Blessing list.
Updated localization.
Update enemy spawn VFX.
Increase Synthar Drone VFX visibility
Fixes
Alongside the larger changes, this update includes a long list of fixes:
Enemy Wave ranged attacks cannot be blocked by Forcefields or environmental collisions.
Added a teleport safety plane to Azrael in case the player falls through the map.
Fixed explosions not correctly counting damage and kills in weapon statistics.
Fixed Bounce behavior on the Mine Launcher.
Fixed Blastfiend's AOE not exploding when colliding with the environment.
Fixed Primaris displaying an incorrect number of available Blessings in the UI.
Fixed multiple projectile VFX issues.
Fixed boss HP bars in Endless Mode.
Fixed incorrect values displayed for some Crux abilities in the Endless Mode Crux tab.
Fixed screen effects for Cursed Shards, Toxin, and Hero Damage.
Fixed switching between Codex and Settings in the HUB when using a gamepad.
Fixed input prompts appearing on non-tutorial levels after loading.
Input prompts are now correctly hidden on the Select Hero screen.
Fixed enemy Armor calculations involving the Crux debuff.
Fixed enemy Shell calculations.
Fixed spikes spawning outside the map.
Fixed Burning Ground effects triggered by melee hits. Shockwaves were unaffected.
Potential fix for a crash caused by an invalid projectile weapon reference.
Fixed the Auto In Cone decal appearing too low on some levels.
Fixed the game window changing position when applying settings.
Fixed upgraded and non-upgraded blessings were stacking together.
Fix damage and attack speed from skill use not respecting their limits
Fix the Damage over Time perk (Shockstring)
Fix damage and attack speed on skill use not being clamped, allowing unlimited values
New Music
I've also added 3 new music tracks to the game.
Leaderboard
I'm also introducing a new Leaderboard.
Because this update includes major balance changes and significant performance improvements, I've decided to start a new leaderboard season. Some of these changes were held back by the existing leaderboard, since they could have affected the fairness and comparability of previous results.
All scores from the previous leaderboard will be preserved permanently and will remain available in-game. Nothing will be deleted or lost. The new leaderboard will give everyone a fresh starting point under the updated balance and optimized systems, while the previous results will remain as a record of what was achieved before these changes.
I hope you enjoy the update! If you still want to play the crazier, less balanced version of the game, you can access it through Steam's Properties menu under Betas by selecting Previous Version.
Gamescom
If you’re heading to Gamescom, make sure to stop by the ASUS ROG booth, where you’ll be able to play a special event demo of Arms of God and grab some fun goodies while you’re there.
Also, I recently teamed up with Dark Point Games, a fellow Polish studio behind Achilles: Survivors. They’ve just released another DLC and the game is currently on a big sale, so it’s a great time to grab one or both of our games at a nice discount :)
Thanks for playing and see you in the next update!
- Dominik