Final 0.9.4 Patch Notes

Version 0.9.4

Notes:

• We have refunded all passive skill points because of substantial changes to the passive skill tree and the attribute requirements system. They will need to be reallocated before you can use your items/skills. Note that your item requirements are now different! Many items require substantially higher values than before, so you must invest in more attributes on the passive tree. Please take care when reallocating your passives so that you don't make your character unusable.

Features:

• Added the ability to manually level a skill gem up. They don't level up by themselves anymore, but instead notify you when they've gained enough experience. Click on the appropriate + icon in the HUD or inventory screen to level it up. This should allow players greater control over what level their gems are and will prevent the situation where gems automatically levelled to have requirements that prevented you from removing items.
• Improved the look and feel of the character selection screen.
• Restored the Quartermaster voice intro that plays when creating a character.
• Added an outline to the hovered character class in the character creation screen.
• Improved the Upper Prison and added some monsters to fight before Brutus. They're useful for corpses.
• Swapped the locations of Oozeback Bloom and Plague Vomit unique monsters.
• The character screen now shows an estimate for average damage reduction due to armour. Note that smaller hits are reduced more and larger hits are reduced less.
• Made it clear that Shield Charge cannot be used with wands currently.
• Made the quest status notifications prettier.
• Removed the fake aura effect from the Medicine Chest boss.
• Continued to incrementally improve the art, effects, environments and sound.

Passive Skill Tree Changes:

• Reduced the density of attribute nodes on the passive skill tree's "attribute highways". It's now faster to travel around the tree.
• Added 12 Keystone passives! There's no limit to how many you can take, but they have very large permanent effects on your character, so plan carefully before picking any. The keystones are listed below.
• Replaced bow accuracy nodes with more damage.
• Added accuracy to early Marauder and Templar areas of the tree.
• Changed the structure of the centre of the tree to allow faster travel across the tree and to make the item passives optional.
• Reduced early Witch mana-on-kill passives.
• Changed description of the Area of Effect passives to make it clear that they affect skills, not just spells.
• Added some early "splash" attribute nodes close to the start position of each class.

Keystone Passives:

• Minion Instability: Minions explode when reduced to low life, dealing 200% of their maximum life as fire damage to surrounding enemies.
• Hex Master: Curses you cast never expire.
• Conduit: Party members gain endurance/frenzy/power charges whenever you do.
• Acrobatics: 20% chance to dodge all enemy attacks. Removes all armour. Removes all energy shield.
• Iron Reflexes: Converts all evasion rating to armour.
• Resolute Technique: Never get critical strikes. Always hit.
• Avatar of Fire: Converts all physical damage to fire damage.
• Unwavering Stance: You cannot be stunned. You cannot evade enemy attacks.
• Armour Master: Ignore all movement penalties from armour.
• Chaos Innoculation: 20% increased maximum energy shield. Provides immunity to chaos damage. Maximum life becomes 1.
• Eldritch Battery: Converts all energy shield to mana.
• Blood Magic: Removes all mana. Spends life instead of mana for skills.

Balance:

• Changed the attribute requirements system substantially. Weapons now have more meaningful requirements that encourage players to make stronger item/passive skill decisions. The requirements of other item classes are lower than weapons: body armours are at 80% of weapons, shields at 70%, skill gems/helmets at 60%, boots at 50% and gloves/support gems at 40%.
• Removed the bonus of one free attribute point of each type per level.
• Increased the base damage progression of weapon types throughout the game. No longer is it mandatory to have a +100% damage weapon in order to be able to kill monsters at a reasonable speed.
• Scaled monster life and player weapon/spell damage values down in order to prevent numerical inflation caused by the above change. Note that this means that the weapon values are now exactly the same as before, but all the other damage/monster life values are lower. This is not a nerf to spellcasters because the monster life was reduced at the same time as their spell damage.
• Rebalanced the mana cost of many skills to better reflect their function in combat. Most weapon skills now start at a slightly higher mana cost then before (so that resources are constrained at low levels) but flatten off so that they can be used constantly at higher levels.
• Reduced the number of armour base types in the game in order to prevent the spam of hundreds of confusingly similar items. Your old armour pieces still exist but many cannot be found any more.
• Further biased equipment drops in favour of higher level items. You're now substantially more likely to find items close to the level of the area you're playing in. This scaling now applies to Flasks also.
• Modified the drop rates of bosses (magic and above) so that there is less item spam but so that you still stand a good chance of getting magic, rare and unique items.
• There's now a limit of one curse per enemy. The most recently cast one overwrites any existing ones. This is necessary because curses are very powerful and their abuse was making most high level play too easy. There will be ways soon to increase this per-monster limit.
• Changed the way that stuns are calculated so that it's harder to stun a target. The thresholds of damage dealt per hit (associated with various stun probabilities) are now higher than before. This should help melee characters who were frequently being stunlocked. Characters that rely on stunning enemies may have to get additional Stun Threshold Reduction.
• Reduced the chance of Energy Shield neutralising stun from 90% to 50%.
• Increased the default run speed of characters but made body armours and shields slow them down depending on their type. Most characters should notice little difference.
• Widened the "safe zone" in the experience penalty at higher levels, but made the falloff harsher.
• Removed the bonus accuracy that was built into dexterity weapons. It comes from dexterity now.
• The knockback from a Flask of Fending now only applies to melee attacks.
• Raise Spectre can now only raise one Spectre by default at all levels. Minion passives must be sought to raise this limit.
• Changed the quality stat of Ground Slam to Stun Duration (rather than Reduced Stun Threshold).
• Increased the damage of Viper Strike, Poison Arrow, Explosive Arrow.
• Reduced the damage of Discharge.
• Reduced the duration of Immortal Call granted per Endurance Charge but added a 0.2 second base duration.
• Reduced the duration of Temporal Chains.
• Increased the duration of Blood Rage at all levels.
• Shield Charge now provides no damage bonus if used at minimum range, because it's fast and doesn't miss. It still provides the same damage bonus at longer ranges.

Bug Fixes:

• Increased the run speed of Ghost monsters to match their animation.
• Fixed a bug where shift-attacks performed on out-of-range enemies were not able to hit in-range enemies.
• Fixed a bug that caused some quest status messages to appear delayed.
• Fixed a bug where Frost Wall could damage non-hostile bandit leaders.
• Fixed discharge not granting charges for hitting/killing enemies.
• Fixed rain of Arrows being incorrectly treated as a projectile skill.
• Fixed a bug with using ctrl+enter to reply to whispers where it'd only put the @ symbol and no name.
• Fixed various errors in NPC text.
• Fixed a bug where the Tidal Island was unavailable on Cruel difficulty.
• Fixed a bug where players could skip act two.
• Fixed a bug where skill gems linked in chat would show with zero experience.
• Fixed bugs related to life being shown incorrectly after adding/removing items that granted life.
• Caustic flasks no longer interrupt energy shield recharge.
• Caustic the wrong mods spawning on some hybrid flasks.
• Fixed a bug where some quest items would not drop if there was no room.
• Fixed a bug where you were able to use an item that you didn't meet the requirements for if you swapped into it.

Item Mod Changes:

• We tidied up item mods substantially to help clarify the function of each item slot. None of the following changes modify existing items.
• Prevented life and life regeneration mods from spawning on weapons.
• Added a new tier of attack speed mod for gloves.
• Reduced the maximum attack speed tier that can spawn on rings.
• Doubled the values of "all attributes" mods that spawn as explicit amulet mods.
• Prevented cast speed mods spawning on gloves.
• Rings can only get one tier of cast speed mod now.
• Amulets can only get 3 tiers of cast speed mods now.
• Allowed elemental damage increase percentage mods to spawn on sceptres.
• Prevented elemental damage increase percentage mods from spawning on armour pieces and belts.
• Reduced the number of tiers of elemental damage mods on rings (two) and amulets (three).
• Prevented strength mods from spawning on items other than rings, amulets, belts, strength armour pieces and strength weapons.
• Prevented dexterity mods from spawning on items other than rings, amulets, gloves, quivers, dexterity armour pieces and dexterity weapons.
• Prevented intelligence mods from spawning on items other than rings, amulets, helmets, intelligence armour pieces and intelligence weapons.
• Prevented spell damage and spell critical strike chance mods from spawning on non-intelligence weapons.
• Fixed the chance that spell damage mods will spawn on amulets.
• The "all resistances" mods now only on shields, rings, and amulets (removed from belt, weapons and other armour pieces)
• Prevented stun recovery mods from spawning on weapons and gloves.
• Prevented stun duration mods from spawning on armour pieces.
• Prevented projectile speed mods from spawning on anything except ranged weapons and quivers.
• Critical strike chance and multiplier mods now only spawn on weapons, quivers and amulets.
• Stun threshold reduction mods can now only spawn on belts and strength weapons.
• Mana and mana regeneration mods can now only spawn on rings, amulets, intelligence armours and intelligence weapons.
• Prevented mana/life leech mods from spawning on belts. Added to gloves.
• Prevented mana/life gain on hit/enemy death mods from spawning on belts and armour pieces.
• Prevented accuracy mods from spawning on armour pieces and belts.
• Prevented all energy shield regeneration speed mods from spawning.
• Prevented the whole-character armour type increase mods from spawning on all items except amulets.
• Prevented the static armour mods from spawning on amulets and rings.
• Prevented the static evasion mods from spawning on amulets and belts.
• Dramatically increased the chances of getting elemental damage mods on weapons, rings, amulets and gloves.
• Prevented elemental damage mods from spawing on belts.

"

konfeta wrote:

"

Minion Instability: Minions explode when reduced to low life, dealing 200% of their maximum life as fire damage to surrounding enemies.

Won't this result in easy 10k fire damage hits at higher levels? IIRC, it's very easy to stack up base 5k HP per Zombie, and that's not counting Spectres.

Please test it and let us know if it's broken :)

"

OnmyojiOmn wrote:

My initial thought when I read the list of keystone passives was, "This is really stupid." I realize that's not very useful feedback, but I feel like the entire game is cheapened by these gimmicks. They don't mesh well with anything else; most of them don't even seem like a part of the same game. The exploding minions should really be a part of the existing skill gem system, maybe as a frenzy -> explode buff you cast on them.

I'm very interested to see what your feedback is after you've had a chance to play with them. One of the primary goals with the keystones was to provide alternate ways of playing each class that are not necessarily strictly more powerful (due to generally having a drawback).

"

OnmyojiOmn wrote:

I'm disappointed in the removal of crit mods from most items, because I feel that crit is something that you specialize for in the same way that you'd look for things like damage and health everywhere you can get it, depending on your build.

There are plenty of additional ways to get crit currently (and planned). I understand that a specialist wants the mod on every slot, but the health of the item system has to come first. Plus, some of the crit builds got way too much of it from items.

"

konfeta wrote:

"

Blood Magic doesn't convert the mana pool into life. You just use whatever life you had.

Oh. That's.... profoundly boring and useless for Witches, then. Where on the tree is this passive?

In our testing, it's really powerful and we're keeping an eye on whether it needs to be nerfed. It gives you a massive bonus to the speed that you can recover your casting resource (as it's much easier to get life back), letting you use substantially larger spells.

"

konfeta wrote:

Are there more keystone passives coming into the future?

Yes, for sure.

"

konfeta wrote:

Oh ya, need another wipe lol.

Unless they want to see what an economy looks like with people trading supremely rare, overpowered legacy gear.

I am pretty much remaking my Witch because of this, I will have to drop all of my gear for it to even be remotely similar to what the game is intended to be like.

We are interested in seeing what will happen in the economy (as it simulates what will occur when item changes happen after the game's release). If we feel that overpowered gear is distorting testing, then we will create an additional league for pure testing of the most recent patch (the whole Legacy vs Default idea). This isn't planned for 0.9.4 or 0.9.5 though.

"

Lonexs wrote:

Well great to see some patch notes, though if I'm honest those keystones are a bit of a let down. Nothing really stands out to me, I expected somthing a little more defining I guess.

We'd love to hear your suggestions for more keystones. We have plenty more planned for the future, and the system is literally mostly untested, which is what you beta testers are for! If it causes problems, we can easily change it. I'm sure there will be many iterations to each.

"

Lonexs wrote:

Also as far as I can see this is only going to be a minor buff to weapons at best and bows are still left without a static mod which seems odd. I'm also dreading the change to knockback on flasks, thats really gonna suck for rangers. I guess 9.4 will still be witchs > everyone else for the time being.

Bows are buffed just as much as other weapons in this patch. Also, the stun changes do make quite a large difference now.

The static mod that bows have is "is a bow". It's factored into their damage, like axes. Some bows are faster than others and some have larger/tighter damage ranges. The family itself doesn't have an implicit mod (other than doing good damage at a distance) because then that'd be forced on all bow users. They can choose. If we had different families of bows eventually, they could have their own characteristics.

Our goal was not to nerf witches into oblivion. People have fun playing their witches. Other than a few specific changes (critical strike mods moving around and the curse change), we've tried to leave witches alone while increasing the damage/kill speed/survivability of the other classes to raise their fun.

"

Lonexs wrote:

Edit:When you mention the keystones, is that just a brief description and theres more to them or do they just work as posted in the notes?

That's basically what they say on the character screen.

"

konfeta wrote:

"

Our goal was not to nerf witches into oblivion.

Well, it's not exactly a "few specific" changes. That's a ton of damage and CC lost (coupled with Fending removal).

What damage do you refer to being? The extra critical strike damage? It was never our intention that it would be possible to get that much from items - instead there are passives, curses, support gems, etc to dip into as well.

It is important than when witches check their spell damage after 0.9.4, they note that the reduced value is because we also reduced the value of the monster life across the board. Their relative spell kill speed should be unmodified.

"

taekvideo wrote:

Wait... fending worked for witches?
I thought they had a knockback built into nova or something?

Until we fixed it to only work on melee attacks in 0.9.4, yes.

"

OnmyojiOmn wrote:

Axes and bows should show their automods in the tooltip, even if they are the same for the entire item family. Multiple families for bows is really a no-brainer IMO. If you can have sub-families for dex/int shields, you can certainly manage some bow families. :)

It did show the increased damage in hover, but this was removed due to almost unanimous feedback that it was spammy (considering the damage is already shown at the top of the item). Item-hover real estate is of prime value because we want to communicate quickly and easily what an item does with as little text as possible. In the cases of axes and bows, they say exactly what their correct damage is in the damage line.

"

Deathtiny2266 wrote:

so with the removal of 1 str/int/dex per level we have to spent like 6 or 7 nodes into the other trees to get our gems going again ?

Many gems have pretty low attribute requirements. You will have to take these into account when re-spending your passives (don't just go get all the old passives you had before or go straight for keystones). The requirements game actually matters a lot more now and we've had great feedback on it being more fun.

"

Lonexs wrote:

I only mentioned the static mod as every weapon seems to have one apart from bows. Even wands come with spell damage for example. I just hope the damage increase is a enough, rangers dps can be fairly erratic as it is. I was also at a bit off a loss reading those stun changes, how does that help bow users?

The stun changes help melee players more than bow users, but they will prevent the stunlock that occurs when a bow user is retreating through monsters. I play a Ranger myself in hardcore, so I feel how dangerous this was in 0.9.3.

"

Lonexs wrote:

Also I would never dream of nerfing witchs, in my opinion they are the most fun class to play at the moment. It's just everyone else needs to be brought up to that level.

I completely agree. I really hope 0.9.4 achieves this (and so far in testing people seem to appreciate the improvements there with their weapon-based characters). If we get it wrong, we can just keep trying until everyone's having as much fun as the witches were :)

"

konfeta wrote:

Intention or not, but I will lose almost 250% critical chance from items if I change up the legacy gear. That's actually a massive nerf. Perhaps the point reduction will let me make up the difference with passives, but I strongly doubt it.

On the bright side, I can update most of my gear with basic +spell damage and cast speed; but honestly, that doesn't feel as interesting. I had fun with the crit focus, where regular attacks barely scratched enemies but crits ended them.

I guess I shouldn't call it a "nerf" but more of an enforced playstyle change.

What do you do if you're designing a game and you find that one build is insanely overpowered and much stronger than you intended? The people who used that build (in this case, stacking spell crit chance to that level) are going to complain if you remove it, but you need to think about the long term health of the product. The purpose of the beta test is to find things like this and make sure they're not outside the bounds of what is intended. There was a large discrepancy between witches and other classes in 0.9.3, and I'm really trying to avoid just reducing spell damage (because that hurts players who didn't use that best build).

It being an enforced playstyle choice is not the end of the world :) You'll still be able to stack crit chance in other ways, and we hope to bring even more variety to the table in the future, but perhaps not as easily as it was through item mods in 0.9.3.

"

FaceLicker wrote:

"

Chris wrote:

[li]Added some early "splash" attribute nodes close to the start position of each class.[/li]

huh? do we already have splash nodes? because I have no idea what this means. Is it new? Related to effects like detonate dead/infernal blow?

It's using a term from MTG - a "splash" passive skill node in this case is using one from another attribute. I.e. having Intelligence nodes near the Strength starting location.

"

FaceLicker wrote:

"

Chris wrote:

[li]Conduit: Party members gain endurance/frenzy/power charges whenever you do.[/li]

Does this mean the other charge sharing nodes will work? Or were they removed in favor of the keystone?

The old ones weren't meant to be on the tree and have been removed, I believe.

"

FaceLicker wrote:

"

Chris wrote:

[li]Acrobatics: 20% chance to dodge all enemy attacks. Removes all armour. Removes all energy shield.[/li]

This is ridiculous. 20% chance to dodge with zero armor and zero ES. Who in their right mind would take this? You'll never see it in HC. Does evasion work seperate from this or does it stack? Or is evasion removed too?

It's a separate (and additional) roll before evasion. If you don't have armour or ES (why would you if you're pure dexterity?) then it's pure bonus all the way.

"

FaceLicker wrote:

"

Chris wrote:

[li]Fixed discharge not granting charges for hitting/killing enemies.[/li]

This was a bug? I know this patch reduces discharge damage, but you just set it up for perma-discharge. I hope the reduction is enough to offset that.

I'm keen for feedback on this when someone has tested it.

"

FaceLicker wrote:

"

Chris wrote:

[li]Prevented projectile speed mods from spawning on anything except ranged weapons and quivers.[/li]

What about spells that have projectiles? You're gonna make a witch carry around a bow and quiver?

Wands are ranged weapons, they have one or two of those. Also, this was a pretty junky mod!

"

FaceLicker wrote:

Generally, I like most of the other changes or reserve opinion until I've been able to test. I do have a question though.. How are unique items affected by all the mod shuffling? Will they now spawn with 'proper' mods or same as before? I'd prefer to keep them the same, it makes them even more unique and desirable.

None of the uniques were modified - they're intentionally set up with strange mods to push their uniqueness.

"

markus7 wrote:

How can someone who has "Avatar of Fire" deal with Reflect Elemental Damage Aura enemies?

They'll probably have to avoid them or they will die, and that should be considered before taking the passive. We'll have more physical spells for this situation in the future.

"

Wijis wrote:

Will wands ever be allowed with shield charge?

I hope so.

"

Wijis wrote:

When minions explode will characters take damage from auras?

Nope!