Hey everyone,
After a lot of testing and plenty of patches, our 19th update has arrived! What started as an attempt to balance the game ended up as a complete revamp of many of the more underwhelming mechanics and items, hopefully for the better...
Before we get stuck into the changes, anyone who prefers their news in video form can listen to our summary VLOG in the dulcet tones of our very own Steve Filby.
Also, we need to point out that some translations are missing from the update so sorry if that affects you, they'll be available very soon :)
Right, let's get into the changes!
Item/weapon revamp
Lots of items & weapons have been nerfed or boosted, with the goal of opening up a wider range of builds, while not sacrificing what made the previous meta builds fun. If you want to know exactly which items have been changed and how, check out the patchnotes (link at the end of the post).
The biggest change that we've made is that all the crossbows are now two-handed, have two separate attacks and are Survival only. This lets you take advantage of the bigger health pool to make up for their slower fire rate but hefty damage. We're going to add some survival mutations to support the crossbows, but we’re just waiting to see how they perform instead of rushing out mutations that will need to be changed right away.
The crossbow changes are:
Heavy Crossbow:
- Main fire not changed.
- Off-hand instantly reloads your crossbow with a volley of critical bolts
- The hook no longer pierce enemies, even with the "pierce enemies" affixes.
- The damage dealt by the volley of bolts is now capped by a boss’ damage cap.
Repeater Crossbow:
- Main hand fire rate has been reduced and now root every 4 bolts. No longer crit on rooted enemies.
- Off-hand fires a volley of bolts all at once that inflict critical damages to rooted enemies.
Ice Crossbow:
- Main hand fire has been mostly unchanged, except you can no longer charge a volley of critical bolts with it.
- Off-hand fires a long range, ultra-fast bolt with infinite piercing which crits on frozen enemies.
Explosive Crossbow:
- Main fire not changed.
- Off-hand is now a melee combo ... with a surprise.
We’ve also added a backpack that lets you hold a one-handed weapon (but not use it) while you're holding a two-handed weapon. This way you can change to a cool one-handed item that you find on your travels and you won't have a useless empty weapon slot.
Economy & merchant rework
There's been a few economy changes in this update too, in short, we wanted to make pricing easier to understand and to allow players at higher difficulties to still be able to change their gear at merchants without spending all their money in one go.
While everything seemed to be fine at low difficulty levels, it got worse and worse in the higher BCs, where if you wanted to buy healing you would have to basically never spend any gold on anything else.
Now, those players will be able to change their approach in the middle of a run without worrying too much about being able to afford health later.
Summary of changes:
- Removed gold scaling. Yes, it’s less impressive to have 4,500 gold instead of 45,000, but it makes it easier for us to work with and for people to assess how much gold they can spend or save
- To replace gold scaling, gear price now goes up with item level
- Refining and affix reroll costs have been changed
- Shop categories are now stats instead of equipment type
- Shop reroll is now free, but it makes the items on sale pricier
- A decent amount of items had their price changed
++ & S weapon scroll removal
We’ve removed scrolls from ++ and S weapons, but to compensate for this we've added more scrolls to the early biomes, enemy damage has been reduced and gear damage has been increased.
This change was made to give gear level more importance again, and in tandem with the economy re-balance it will give you more opportunities (and an incentive) to switch gears during your run.
Damage over time effects
Damage over time effects were getting a bit of a bad rap for being indistinguishable or underwhelming, so we decided to try and give each of them a unique identity and in the process we added a fourth one, ‘shocked’. Most electric weapons and items will inflict this new shock DoT.
- Shocked: deals damage over time to the target and all nearby targets, but it doesn’t spread on death like poison does.
- Bleed rework: Stack enough bleed status on a target and the damage left is instantaneously dealt at once.
- Poison rework: Upon an affected enemy's death, spread the poison status with reduced damage and only for the remaining duration.
- Fire non-rework: Untouched, because fire was already perfect ;)
Difficulty progression
The difficulty curve between Boss Cells has been smoothed out, so difficulty spikes should be less of a problem. Yes, 2BC shouldn’t beat you up and take your lunch money anymore, well, not as much anyway.
We’ve also tried to make 0BC more challenging so new players learn more of the combat styles and to let them collect more gear/runes before progressing to the next difficulty level. Basically we want to stop them beating the 'tutorial' too quickly and then just getting smashed.
Damage mutation rework
Damage mutations (those who give a bonus DPS to your attacks) suffered from poor scaling, making them extremely useful at low difficulties while being less and less useful as you progress through the game.
To remedy that, we changed their effect from a bonus DPS to a bonus % of damages. This means that everything that boosts your attack (item level, item rarity, affixes, etc.) will synergize with those mutations.
For example, the Combo mutation used to work like this
And now it works like THIS
And finally, maybe the most important change of all:
- Added an option to display or hide the Seed information above your minimap.
The full list of patchnotes is here, just be warned that it is pretty long so maybe get a snack before you dive in!
Thanks for the continued support and please leave any feedback in the comments here or over on our various channels like Discord or Reddit, the links are just below if you're interested :)
Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT
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