Greetings Travelers!
We hope you've enjoyed Pre-Patch Hype Week so far. Today's focus includes a glimpse at what Beneath Ancient Skies will bring in terms of Quality of Life features and more on August 21st.
If you recall our Season 3 trailer, you may have learned that the team has reworked some of the existing minions for Necromancer and Beastmaster. While we won't spoil everything here, we will give you a peek at what to expect with some of your favorite Beastmaster minions, along with their rework and AI improvements. If you are looking for Necromancer skills, be sure to visit yesterday’s post regarding Lich & Necromancer rework. Without Further ado, let’s begin!
Minion Changes
Minion AI
Who doesn’t love minions?! In Season 3, we’ll have some neat Minion behavior adjustments. The goal behind these minion changes is to make the Minion AI smarter with less management.
Toggle between two different minion behavior modes. By default, Minions have always been in a Protect mode, which made them prioritize staying quite near the player. This often caused annoyance when you wanted your minions to have a longer leash and target enemies instead. With Season 3, you'll now be able to toggle between the old protect mode and the new Assassinate mode with the press of a single key. The Assassinate mode will make your minions target enemies from further away, focusing on bosses and rare enemies. The current mode of your minions will be indicated by the icon beside the minions’ portrait.
Assassinate Mode & Protect Mode
Minion target prioritization is also more sticky, meaning that your minions now have a higher priority to continue attacking a target they're already attacking, and are less likely to bounce between targets. Again, this change is especially prominent in Assassinate mode or if the target is a boss or a rare enemy.
The purpose of these changes is to allow more variety in your minion playstyle while leaving control in your commanding hands.
Minion Improvements
The team has resolved the majority of common snapshotting issues, and we’ll continue addressing others whenever they appear. Minions should now correctly update their stats whenever nodes or equipment are swapped out, even if the minions were previously already summoned. Additionally, you now gain 0.8% minion power per character level (from 0.6%). This means that at level 100, your minions deal 60% more damage and take 60% less damage (from 45% for both). Further, the 50% less damage from dangerous enemy abilities has been increased to be 60% less damage instead.
Beastmaster Minions
If you take delight in summoning as a Beastmaster, we’ll have something here for you!
Multiple Beastmaster minions will be getting updates in Season 3. Again, while we won't go over each change, we'd love to give you a bite-sized preview.
Staying in theme with the additional Ancient Era content with Beneath Ancient Skies, the Raptor tree will see a few changes. One of the changes we wanted to highlight today was the Raptor's new Volcanic Adaptation node.
With this node, your Raptor becomes a Dragon Raptor. Not only does this sound cool, but this also allows your Raptor to deal fire damage alongside its new ability, Fire Breath. You can expect other fun nodes to follow this new conversion node—a perfect example of Evolution, at its finest.
Along with these changes, the Scorpion will now have the ability to cast Maelstrom alongside you with its new Frozen Winds node!
In a Similar fashion, your Bear will also have a new node that will allow it to use Earthquake. While the scaling will be based on your Bear’s stats and not yours, the Bear will be able to benefit from how you have specialized Earthquake! The new minion changes are going to give Beastmaster more options for their companions and expand their build options and potential.
Note: this node has since been adjusted to -50% Bear Earthquake Damage during balance passes
Merchant’s Guild
Another feature we are excited to share coming in Season 3 includes updates for the Merchant’s Guild. Now, whenever you filter by 1 specific unique, a new filter will appear to select min or max roll ranges for any of the modifiers on that unique. Additionally, we've added the ability to set filters from an item for easier price checking. Who doesn't enjoy easy shopping?
We are also adding new Tokens to allow purchasing items without paying favor or before you've unlocked the necessary rank to help improve the Merchant’s Guild's early game experience. This comes in the form of a Merchant's Token or a Black Market Token.
Merchant’s Token bypasses the favor cost when purchasing an item, while Black Market Token on top of bypassing the favor cost, also allows you to purchase items that would normally require a higher rank and sets the rank requirement to equip the item to be 1. You’ll get a Merchant’s Token at every rank up with the Faction, and one Black Market Token once you reach rank 6. They can also be found like normal items when slaying enemies, if you’re part of the Merchant’s Guild.
Offline Cosmetics
Last but certainly not least, with Season 3, cosmetics can now finally be equipped in the Offline Mode! A longtime request that we are finally ready to implement. Now, you will be able to access the Cosmetic store in-game during Offline play.
For those True Offline players, the game will require you to play once in either online or offline mode to set up offline cosmetics. When Season 3 goes live, you will have to re-equip your cosmetics. This means that if you play on PC and Steam Deck, you will have to re-equip for that platform.
Closing
Thank you for being the community that helps drive Last Epoch. Be sure to catch up on all of our previous Pre-Patch Hype Week Posts, covering this season’s new feature, Primal Hunt, Lich & Necromancer changes, and Ancient Era if you have not done so already. Also, a reminder to keep an eye out for patch notes dropping tomorrow. Season 3 will bring about another way to enjoy your favorite minions in Eterra, facing new foes, QoL improvements, and more.
Don’t forget to join this week’s Q&A Dev Stream, hosted by Mike over on our Twitch or Youtube Starting at 3 PM CST.
Until then, Travelers… stay out of the tall grass.