The Earthshaper content update is here together with the start of season 12 & a 48 h race event. The race event holds special prices for those streaming their full progress. More information on the race at: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1646790/view/3812920173355944610?l=english With the earthshaper content update we are not only adding earth-shaping weapons and trinkets to your arsenal but also reworking the pathfinder system, rebalancing difficulties and game progression as well as adding two new skill tree shards to give you even more possibilities in shaping your skilltree!

New Features:

New Weapons

• Earthshaper [Melee Weapon]: Each melee attack throws a stone boulder in a random direction piercing through all enemies and scaling with your melee damage.
• Woodweaver [Range Weapon]: Your light bird projectiles are swirling around the shooting direction.

New Trinket

• Earthwalker [Defensive Trinket]: Each of your attacks casts a stone boulder in a random direaction piercing through all enemies in that line. Scaling with your melee damage.

New Skilltree Shards

Shard of Exchange

A shard that holds the power to exchange all unused skillnodes of the same type by new random skills. The Shard of Exchange will let you exchange all unskilled nodes of the same type into new random skills. This opens up new possibilities for even stronger specialisations. You don't need any energy regeneration for your build at all? You can now exchange all energy regeneration nodes at once with new random skill nodes. And this is how it looks in action:

Shard of Renewal

A shard that holds the power to transform all unused skillnodes into new skillnodes but excludes the selected skill as well as all direct connected skills. The Shard of Renewal lets you reroll the entire skilltree at once (only unskilled nodes) while also giving you control over what skills you want to have excluded from the skill pool for this specific reroll. The selected skill as well as all directly connected skills will be excluded for the reroll. This opens up a new horizon of posibilities where you might want to form a cluster of skills that you want to have excluded first by using the Shard of Change and then connecting them by using the Shard of Conjunction. After you have formed a cluster of unwanted skills you can then apply the Shard of Renewal to it to reroll the entire skilltree of unskilled nodes with the exclusion of your selection. And here is the Shard of Renewal in action:
These new Skilltree Shards have been integrated to the Merchant, gambling recipes, arena rewards and all the available loot tables in the game. Some of the hardest challenges like the hideout boss encounters will have a high chance in receiving these new shards.

Pathfinder Redesign

The pathfinder system got some major changes to not only make it easier for new players to get into but also to make runs less dependent on farming map shards. Shard of Augmentation and Shard of Mitigation have been completely removed. Maps now have a fixed amount of sockets which can be used to socket map modifiers into your maps. Starting from map tier 1 with two empty mod socket each increased map tier will add one additional socket to the map. Therefore the overall amount of spawned map modifiers has been drastically reduced.
This now limits the additional bonus exp you can get per maps and prevents runs where you could have >1000% bonus exp in one single map if you had enough farmed map shards, which then lead to outscaling the whole game. This now also allows us to lower the enemy HP scaling and also the amount of map modifiers that spawn on maps by default. This change will overall lead to much more accurate balancing opportunities as we do not have to cater towards these special cases. Also the difficulty curve is much flatter now so you should not experience "hitting a wall" quite as hard and early as currently.
Since we also reduced the amount of map mods that spawn on maps by default we can also much earlier spawn higher map tiers that allows you to challenge the Awakened Gatekeepers on much earlier levels. For the endgame scaling we target that even the highest maps only have half of the available modifier sockets filled with modifiers. So no longer there will be infinite more map mods stacked on top of each other. So for example a map tier XV map would have 15 available map modifier sockets but only 7 of them will be filled by default with random modifiers on an end-end game run.

Reworked Difficulty Scaling

We did major changes to the difficulty scaling during the run. Enemy hp scaling for normal enemies and bosses has been drastically decreased which should make the run progression to much more gradually increase in difficulty as it currently had. Higher game difficulties now not add additional map modifiers to your maps as they have previously. They will now simply add some more enemy HP and increase the elite enemy spawn rate. We want to thank you for your ongoing support! If you want to stay up to date with the ongoing development and chat with fellow players you are invited to join our discord.

Major Changes and Improvements

• Skill tree node search now deactivates the highlights when ending search and clicking outside the search box.
• New tooltips for melee attack cost and endurance attack cost in the stats window.
• Tooltips in stats window and skill gems window are now displayed faster and have much much shorter delay. This should prevent new players hovering too fast over tooltips and missing out on the informations in stats window.
• Improved Woodweaver weapon icon.
• Reworked Enter Skill Tree Tutorial.
• Removed confusing Skill Type section on legendary effect tooltips.
• New and Improved Distortion Effects: Distortion effects have been reworked from scratch to fix artifacts and improve overall impact of skill effects.
• Improved fire breath of Serpent gatekeeper for clearer attack hitboxes. Sperpent abilities also got performance improvements.

Balancing

• [Character] Heleja now only has + 1 additional projectile multiplicator from the start (was 2 before) and the additional projectile damage is now +20% (was 50% before).
• [Skill Node] Projectile multiplicator now has an increased additional energy cost of 2 (was 1 before). Projectile multiplicator now also decreases projectile damage by -20%.
• [Skill Node] Increased projectile damage incrases projectile damage by +50% (was +100% before)
• [Condition Damage] Default starting condition damage was reduced to 5 (was 10 before)
• [Skill Node] Increased Condition Damage now increases condition damage by +5 (was +10 before)
• Explosive Potion now deals 1000 damage (was 500 before). Explosive Potion also scales with your melee and projectile damage.
• Twilight Quiver Rework: Twilight Quiver now shoots 3x12 Projectiles instead of only 12 projectiles. Twilight Quiver now also got it's own projectiles.
• All dodge skills now have reduced cost. Dodge skills now only reduce dodge regeneration by -10% was (-20%)
• Condition Damage decay has been reduced by 5% (now 60% of next tick will remain, was 55%)

Fixes

• Fixed minor Memory leaks for some melee skill effects.
• Fixed cyclic might leading to unusable attack patterns for bleeding star and amber melee weapons.
• Increased item drop de-acceleration to make them slide less.
• Removed confusing Skill Type section on legendary effect tooltips
• Fixed not being able to target items near tower in descent defence
• Fixed lost focus on gamepad when accessing the skillgem menu without containing skillgems
• Fixed ravaging companions not having getting grim reaper effect visually appearing
• Decreased tidal crab AoE hitbox size to prevent unfair player hits
• Fixed wrong audio bus for bloodstained chest sound effects
• Fixed wrong audio bus for corrupted merchant boss
• Controller input information is now on stats window and skill gem window is now hidden when now playing with controller
• Fixed missing tag for "Ascend" map mod
• Fixed unlock weapons/skills dialog being removed from unlock npcs in town which had to be re-triggered on activating introduction dialog
• Fixed descent expedition UI scaling on other language settings
• Fixed descent defense ending on scene switch and locking you into the descent when dying in softcore mode
• Fixed blocked progression (0.9.1.0a)

Information about the improved league and save file manager: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1646790/view/3846698443466679529?l=english We wish everyone a lot of fun in season 12 and the 48h race and want to thank you for your ongoing support ! We want to thank you for your ongoing support! If you found a bug or want to chat with fellow players about the game you are invited to join our discord.

[ 2023-11-24 16:38:34 CET ] [ Original post ]