Greetings everyone!
As promised in last week's post, today's patch contains some rather significant improvements to player progression and game performance, as well as several general housekeeping fixes.
Check out the patch notes below for details on the changes that were made!
Weapons and Trinkets
Players can now add up to two trinkets to their player and swap between them using the "Y" key as a default. There are now four weapon slots available for players. These may be swapped using the "G" key as a default, by scrolling with the mouse wheel, or by using the new hotkeys 1, 2, 3, and 4 to swap between respective slots. This will allow players to have a more diverse weapon and spell set readily available.
Complete Controller Support
Players who prefer to use a controller over mouse-and-keyboard should find our newly implemented controller support ideal. If you do use a controller and find any issues or have any recommendations, we would like to hear your feedback.
There are now hotkey icons added to the player's UI to help remind them which buttons to press to perform actions. There are some currently missing, such as in the ability bar UI and dismounting UI, which will be added in a future update.
Player Progression
We have heard from many players that the early game can feel a bit punishing and the late game often felt a bit underwhelming. We took a look at the XP thresholds for players to see if there were ways we could address both issues. The leveling progression seemed a bit too linear, so we have emphasized the shape of the curve in this update.
Players will now notice that it's easier to level up at low levels and more difficult at higher levels. When the old and new progression curves are plotted against each other, the crossover point occurs around level 40. Therefore players now require less XP to level up until about level 40, and will require more XP to level up thereafter.
Structure Adjustments
Turrets: There were reports that turrets were firing at friendly house members. It seems they were sometimes failing to recognize who they were owned by, depending on the order of variables such as house creation, throne placement, and/or turret placement. A fix for this issue is included in this update.
Souda Stone: The Souda Stone was found to drain mana at a quicker rate than intended. As a result, the following changes have been made:
- Increased effective radius from 10m to 20m
- Increased functional check-delay from 2 seconds to 3 seconds
- Decreased mana consumption from 10 to 5 per check
- Increased mana capacity from 400 to 1000 so it lasts 10 minutes unpowered
The changes made will reduce mana drain per hour (within the 20m radius) from 18000/hour to 6000/hour. One full mana generator (50 rune - 25000 mana) can now supply it for over 4 hours. Its practicality has also been buffed, from +20 armor*100% to +100 armor*25%, which will give it a more effective buff for those with lower armor stats.
The buff volume provided by the Souda Stone was blocking players from dismounting their NPCs within its effective radius. This has been fixed as well.
Rune Recycler: The rune recycler has experienced some adjustments as well: it now provides players with flawless rune gems. To compensate for the increased return, its tick rate has been increased from 1 second to 5 seconds, which makes it 5x lighter on server performance. No changes have been made to how much return common/procedural/epic items provide, however uncommon items now provide a bit less return and rare items provide a bit more return.
Other:
- Widened Ornate door colliders slightly for collision and pathing purposes
- Fixed a bug for flag collision
Spell Adjustments
Phoenix Rising:
- Reduced charges to curb some unintended/griefable functionality
- Increased mana cost from 20 to 200
- Increased energy cost from 40 to 200
Pacify:
- Updated description in attempt to provide more clarity for players
NPC Adjustments
Self-Healing: There were several NPCs which did not have any auto-heal abilities configured, now all NPCs should have a slight amount of self-healing and mana regeneration.
Deathweavers: There were navigation issues with Deathweavers in Lythyk Cave so they have been swapped for undead casters.
NPC Pathing: The acceptance radii for NPC pathing has been increased to a minimum of 100 to try smooth NPC behavior and hopefully reduce instances of NPCs spinning in place.
Item Adjustments
Black Hellebore: Consuming Black Hellebore now properly removes 10 health from the player (sometimes 9 due to rounding issues). Snap dragon is set up to do the same for mana, but isn't quite functioning correctly yet. Will be further addressed in a future update.
Demonic Eye: Has been changed from a common item to a rare item as was originally intended. Its magic find buff has been increased from 30 seconds to 3 minutes to make it more practical.
Wood and Stone Rune Recipes: Have been adjusted to previous levels and a background functionality adjustment was made so that their custom weight values can be used.
Special resources: Special Resources such as amethyst, obsidian, and irisite, have had their crafting recipes adjusted such that they now require 5 precious stone and 3 essences.
Soul Binding Scroll VI: Was not functioning as intended so it has been removed from the game until further notice.
Miscellaneous Fixes
Loading Screen Tooltips: To provide more clarity and guidance to new players, we have reduced the number of loading screen tooltips from about 90 to 24. The remaining 24 have been reworded in attempt to provide more clear direction.
Environmental Effects: Lots of our environmental effects were not properly configured to adjust detail or cull at reasonable distances. They have been adjusted which should provide decent performance gains with hopefully minimal aesthetic impact.
Asset Adjustments: A vast quantity of assets have had adjustments to their collisions, in quantity, size, and shape. This was done to drastically reduce the time the sever requires to generate object collisions. The most noticeable of these will likely be trees, which have had their collider counts halved and the radius around the trunks increased a bit to compensate. The tree collider radius increase will be in a future update.
Farming System: We are always looking for ways to improve various systems in the game so we have made some adjustments which hopefully help make farms easier to manage. The vision for the farming mechanic is to require a moderate amount of time and resources to get it running, and require smaller amounts of maintenance thereafter.
To get closer to this vision, the Hobart's Growth Solution recipe has been adjusted from requiring 2 faery dust to 1, which should help on the maintenance side. As a further rebalance, we have removed bones from deer loot and added bones to bear, wolf, boar loot. This should make the maintenance phase of farming a bit less burdensome.
Other Fixes:
- Standalone mode for playing with only 1 player now has improved performance
- Some fixes have been implemented for some griefable rocks and terrain issues
- Other various world performance improvements
We hope you take a moment to look over the notes while you wait for the servers to come back up with the latest version of the game. We look forward to hearing your reports after you’ve had a chance to get your hands on the update!