Overview

Content Patch 0.7.4 focuses on the savagery of the Ancient Era. Dragons, dinosaurs, and... er... plants (they're carnivorous!) roam the world of Eterra. To help you survive this perilous time, the patch also brings powerful new skills, trees, and improvements for mastery classes. We aim to release Patch 0.7.4 during mid-November.

Highlights

Mastery System Overhaul Rather than being an event contained entirely within the user interface, mastery classes are now chosen during a quest available at the End of Time. Mastery classes now immediately grant an exclusive skill and powerful passive bonuses when chosen. Two examples of these passive bonuses include;

• Druid: When leaving a transformed state you gain 70% damage reduction for 2 seconds.
• Void Knight: Your Melee Attacks and Void Spells have a 10% chance to be repeated by an echo 0.5 seconds later (does not affect movement abilities).

Want to learn more? Check out our Developer Blog. Time Rifts Time Rifts further support Last Epochs time-travel centered theme by redefining the concept of side-zones - taking you to alternate versions of the level where the passage of time has resulted in changes to both the zone itself and its inhabitants. This grants Time Rifts greater scope to diverge from their adjoining zone - and they thus contribute to players encountering more diverse enemies. While this isn't coming in Patch 0.7.4, in future patches Time Rifts will also tie into the item hunt and other systems like Epochs Call, Lost Memories, and the Eternity Cache. Skills Multiple new skills are becoming available;

• The Spellblade skill Static and its specialisation tree are making their debut in Patch 0.7.4.
• The Sorcerer's Disintegrate and its tree are being added.
• The Primalist is getting Maelstrom and a stormy tree to go with it.
• The Beastmaster is acquiring Summon Raptor and a specialization tree for it.

Addtitionally, the following skills are also receiving specialisation trees;

• Enchant Weapon
• Judgement
• Manifest Armor

Enemies This patch introduces a significant number of additional enemies to the game. Dinosaurs

• Archyrean
• Chyrean
• Magma Gorn
• Oasiain Gorn

Dragons

• Primeval Dragon (unique)

Plants

• Orchirian the Rampant (unique)
• Hulking Overgrowth
• Skittering Undergrowth
• Vinewalker

Void

• Idol of Loathing (unique)
• Lost Eye
• Void Shifter
• Voidfire Growth

User Interface We have redesigned our tooltips. We will be gradually updating all specialisation tree and passive tooltips to benefit from these improvements across future patches.
Items

• Two unique items are being added; one helm, and one one-handed axe.
• Potions are being buffed and their affixes are being reworked.
  • Well be posting details of these changes before Patch 0.7.4 is released.

Optimisation

As with most updates, Patch 0.7.4 includes optimisations to improve performance. Shader improvements have resulted in an average increase of 5 - 10 FPS in most areas. This change was observed across minimum, average, and maximum framerates, on a system running Windows 10 with a Ryzen 5 1600, an 8GB RX 480, and 16 GB of RAM. We have rewritten the backend for our graphics pipeline. While primarily done to resolve bugs, we anticipate this resulting in improved framerates in some situations.

• We are aware that there is a bug affecting Vertical Sync, and this has not yet been addressed. The issue is on our radar and will be corrected in a future update.

A combination of code refactoring and visual effect optimisations have been implemented to improve the performance of the following skills;

• Avalanche
• Entangling Roots
• Meteor
• Ring of Shields
• Sacrifice

After This Patch

We're holding back the implementation of Minion Stances to a later patch as we would not have sufficient time to adequately QA it in time for the release of Patch 0.7.4. We are rewriting the code related to item storage, and in a future patch we will be adding search bars to stash tabs. This rewrite will also resolve several item-related bugs. We are preparing to update our game engine. This will take a significant amount of time to QA, however it will bring improvements of its own while also facilitating us making additional optimisations ourselves. We won't be releasing a demo until after this update, as subsequently updating the demo would otherwise require an excessive amount of work.