The Fellowship team has been returning from vacation, and we’re getting back into bug-fixing mode this first week. We wanted to address some of the most commonly raised issues for the community at present, and from there look at revisiting or rebalancing the experience over the next few weeks.
Eternal Rewards
We’ve been reading through the feedback on the Eternal experience for high-level players, and we’re not happy with where the focus is with fine-tuning the items. The two major points of friction that are coming through are the availability and usefulness of the crafting materials used to help players ‘complete their loadouts’.
Legendary Dust
The limited availability of Legendary Dust and the ‘chance’ element of the reroll are negatively compounding each other, and that is something we want to fix. Adjusting the Slot Reroll crafting system is a larger amount of work that we still need to align on the solution for. In the short-term, though, we are adjusting the availability of Legendary Dust to push things in the right direction. We’ll be keeping an eye on the Dust discussions and, based on feedback, will make further changes to these values as time goes on, as well as working on the crafting process for rerolling slots.
Bloodstones
When we first set out Bloodstones as a one-time reward for completing the Pinnacle dungeon, the intention was to provide a powerful but not ‘mandatory’ prize for participating. We wanted to avoid a repeat of the ‘Quickplay’ experience where players felt forced into farming a mode they didn’t want to play because the reward incentives were too good to pass up. Pinnacle runs were always intended to be an optional challenge to participate in, so we’ve been cautious to adjust its rewards too much, as we don’t want to push players to ‘hate-play’ the mode. Our intention at the time was to use Pinnacle as an assist, to help players get the final set of items they needed for higher Eternal climbs to Regal level, or Eternal experimentation within the same hero.
As it stands, the players competing for Pinnacle are now coming in with already maxed-out Regal items; therefore, many see the rewards as ‘too little, too late’ to have the desired effect we were hoping for.
We’d been resistant to using Bloodstones to power alts, as we didn’t want to rob lower leagues of much-needed players to populate queues. In reality, though, the players with Bloodstones to burn are using their friends to boost them through anyway, so the loss to lower leagues would be negligible. This restriction has indirectly led to a reluctance to build up their alts due to excessive time investment.
We’re going to keep the once-per-week unlock limit, though each alt can unlock the same Bloodstone; this should help alt-building and hopefully prevent the ‘hate-playing’ of Pinnacle to farm. We’ll be watching the sentiment around both the uptake of alts and how active Pinnacles are to see if this is a positive step forward or if more alteration is needed.
Added Legendary Dust as a purchasable item from the Resource Vendor, at an introductory cost of 2,500 Gold.
Increased Legendary Dust drop chance by 3%.
Bloodstones now shared across the account, rather than per-hero inventories. This affects both existing and newly dropped Bloodstones.
GENERAL
Added Steam ‘Rich Presence’ which displays player state information, to show your friends what you are up to!
Fixed a memory leak on [Malgut The Fetid] in [Everdawn Grove]
Fixed an issue where Blessings would not re-apply after death.
[Dark Prophecy set] bonus can no longer be triggered by mounting up or dancing.
Fixed an issue causing [The Heretic] blessing to not stack properly.
Fixed damage buffs being logged as negative absorb, buffs now update the raw damage value instead.
Fixed an issue where the [Xul, the Blood Monolith] mastery banner was not dropping.
Eternal matchmaking's tier select now supports finding parties up to difficulty 70.
Talents that made your hero start with spirit points in the dungeon can no longer be abused by disconnecting and reconnecting.
HEROES
Meiko
[Serenity] can now critically hit and will be affected by her expertise.
Meiko's combos [Fighting Techniques] should no longer grey out and be unusable when having a combo ready.
[Serenity] now adds another [Stone Shield] if the [Stone Guard] talent is active. This [Stone Shield] will start with as much health as the remaining heal from [Serenity].
Tweaks to Spirit Refund: Meiko now gets a full stone's worth of health towards [Stone Shield] when a Spirit Refund is triggered. Previously, she got one full [Stone Shield] plus the remaining health of the current [Stone Shield].
[Spirited Vortex] is now correctly affected by [The Sinister] Blessing.
[Shattering Obelisk] updated its tooltip to match the behaviour and added a fix to the final pulse damage to deal the correct amount of damage.
Sylvie
[Fluttercall Jubilee] target filter added (you can no longer target mobs across the dungeon with [Fluttercall Jubilee] to trigger them.)
[Shroomsplosion] and [Prickly Vines] now correctly work with [The Sinister] Blessing.
Fixed an issue causing the talent [Rowdy Rootsap] to apply 33% and not 50% slow on attack speed and movement speed.
Mara
Fixed an issue where [Macabre Stratagem] was missing the MAJOR text in ability UI.
Fixed an issue where Mara's [Backstab] and [Skittering Strikes] weren’t correctly applying [Core] blessings when used during [Brooding Shadows]
Fixed an issue where Mara's [Queen’s Fang] and [Arachnid Assault] didn’t scale up correctly with The Mystic blessing.
Ardeos
[Detonate] will now be affected by the [The Mystic] blessing.
Updated Tooltip on legendary cloak [Exquisite Flaming Toad Cloak] to match the actual damage output.
Fixed an issue causing [Agonizing Blaze] Talent to only grant 36% increased damage instead of the intended 40%
Fixed an issue where [Reign of Fire] talent stopped proccing when at max [Fire Ball] charges.
Helena
Fixed an issue causing [Shield Slam] to incorrectly benefit from an old, disabled talent, we've adjusted its base numbers to offset this, so there's no net damage loss.
Elarion
Fixed an issue where [Heartseeker's Barrage]'s [Erupt] proc chance was 20% instead of the intended 25% as stated in the tooltip. (The proc chance has been updated to match the tooltip.)
Fixed an issue where [Erupt] could consume a [Lunarlight Mark] and trigger [Lunarlight Salvo] on a different enemy hit by the [Erupt], instead of the intended primary target.
Tariq
Fixed an issue where the AoE damage of [Face Breaker] did not scale correctly with the target cap of 12 enemies.
Gems
Fixed an issue where [Blessing of the Deathdealer II] was increasing the critical strike chance slightly less than intended when used in combination with other critical strike chance multipliers.
DUNGEONS
Xul, the Blood Monolith
Vel’Korath - The enrage buff on [Vel’Korath], that gets applied if there is only a single player in combat with it, can now only be applied after 8 seconds into the fight. This prevents the tank from getting slammed during the first few seconds if no other party members have engaged [Vel’Korath] yet.
Xul’Vorith - Edict of Isolation beams now disappear if one of the two players linked dies.
Urrak Markets
Fixed a reset issue with the bosses [Drazhul] and [Brull] where it was possible to only reset one of them.
Scryer’s Peak
Fixed an issue where [Blood Orbs] from [Overlord Varux] couldn’t be picked up if they passed through Meiko’s Clone.
Woodland Glade
Wolf bleeds now get removed upon death.
Dungeon Curses
Fixed an issue where [Anomalous Orbs] sometimes could spawn twice during boss fights.
UI/UX
Added a confirmation window to the scrapper.
Fixed an issue where Profile Banners were not scaling correctly in the friends list.
Updated loading screen texts.
Tooltips
Updated Gunde’s [Rupture] debuff-tooltip to correctly correspond to its function. (Only affecting [Slaughter], not [Rend])
The Blessing [The Intrepid] now shows correct % in the buff tooltip, regarding stacks of the buff and stacks of the blessing on items the player has.
Updated tooltip of [The Philosopher] Blessing to clarify that the buff only scales up to a maximum of 50% spirit.
Audio
Added Blacksmith’s hammer sound to Ambient sound (So it can be turned down in the audio settings in Ambient volume).