Patch 0.10.3 Deployment Schedule and Other News!

We have published the details of more race events in the Season One Calendar. There are new event types:

• Multiproj: All ranged monsters have +4 projectiles. Enjoy the Submerged Passage!
• Ancestral: We're not revealing what properties this league type has until after people have played it. It's a lot of fun :D
• Blood Magic: All players are affected by the Blood Magic keystone - i.e. they spend life instead of mana for skills.

Each of these specialty events needs different skills and planning to succeed. We have a variety of other event types in development for the rest of this season also.

Turbo race events start tomorrow. We've removed the monster speed limit (it only affects Piety now). Turbo is far more dangerous than it was in Closed Beta.

I have been answering questions from the Community Q&A and expect to have them ready within a couple of days.

Thanks again for your continued support and feedback!

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Quakespeare wrote:

Great!

Here's to hoping that it'll be patched on time :)

At this stage there's only one known new problem, so yes, it's likely to.

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Solux wrote:

I'm hoping it's going to be a throwback to the Diablo 2 mod Ancestral Recall. That would mean the possibility of taking all the side dungeons and making a very nasty Megadungeon with them each act.

That meant you could choose whether you wanted to go the normal way through or risk the dangers of the megadungeon where you'd also get the required quest rewards for progression, but the monsters were unexpected new things.

That mod was also the first one I played where the devs dropped new crafting items in.

I know I'm intrigued.

I'll give a hint - it was no harder to add than the other two league types I mentioned in that post. It's not a super complex one, but is really fun.

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Forty2 wrote:

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mr48 wrote:

I would love to see another skill besides dual-strike that uses both weapons simultaneously when duel-wielding. Give us duel-wielders some love :(

Exaclty my thoughts. I don't understand why Cyclone alternates weapons. Just another useless skill for DW, really sad. :(

If you think not arbitrarily dealing double damage, only for dual wielders, on top of their 10% multiplicative bonus to attack speed, then yes, this skill is useless for dual wield.

By that logic, it's equally useless for two handed and for one-hand shield - they don't get to just double their damage with it either.

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Gruntzen wrote:

Well what is it then?
According to Mark_GGG dual wielding in cyclone does double damage.

No, I said that if Cyclone hit with both weapons, it would inherently deal double damage, and that is why it doesn't - because then we have to either balance around that, making it useless without dual wielding, or not balance around that and leave it broken with dual wielding.

Dual wielding means you alternate weapons, and this lets you attack faster. 10% multiplicative attack speed is a substantial bonus. That's what dual wielding is in this game. If we make specific skills hit with both weapons while dual wielding, those skills effectively have +100 multiplicative damage when dual wielding, and thus are either broken with dual wielding or useless without it.

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mr48 wrote:

Look I'm not complaining that this one skill happens to give a less substantial bonus to dual-wield builds than to others, I'm just expressing my wish to see a new skill tailored to dual-wielders in a future patch. Using dual-strike all the time just gets tedious after a while, even if its effective. I'm not asking for a dual-wielding buff, just more variety.

You currently have heaps of variety - you can use basically any skill and get the dual wielding beneift. Heavy strike benefits form dual wielding, as does every attack skill except double strike, leap slam and ground slam - and those do still get the 10% attack speed, despite only using one weapon.

Adding some skills which use both weapons, and thus have an arbitrary damage bonus while dual wielding reduces the variety of skills available because then all those other skills, which currently are just as effective dual wielded as any other setup, are considered 'sub-par' because they don't give arbitrary damage bonuses, and skills are split into those which are only worth it if dual wielding and those which never are, rather than having very nearly all attack skills usable both ways.
We've already seen that start to happen - which only hits with both weapons because the animations that got done didn't match how the skill worked, and the skill was easier to change - and as a result had to have a rather ugly damage penalty applied while dual wielding. And because that penalty is additive, and only for physical, it doesn't actually counter the doubled damage much at all for some builds, resulting in people claiming that dual wield only has one useful AoE skill - where if cleave worked like the others, all of them would be equally good for dual wield, and equally good dual wielding compared to any other setup.

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pneuma wrote:

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Mark_GGG wrote:

If we make specific skills hit with both weapons while dual wielding, those skills effectively have +100 multiplicative damage when dual wielding, and thus are either broken with dual wielding or useless without it.

When should we expect a change to Cleave, then?

A little reduced physical damage is hardly a dw penalty when the predominant form of damage is elemental, and has been many, many months.

I'm not in charge of such decisions, so I have no idea. Personally, while I understand the reasoning behind giving cleave a penalty which wasn't large enough to fully counter the damage increase, in making it interact differently with certain effects than other skills, I feel time has shown that the penalty should at least be more in line with the damage increase gained, as there have been negative side effects to build diversity and to perception of other skills that don't behave the same way. But that's my own opinion, and not any official GGG stance - I don't know how the others feel on this issue.