Hello everyone!
Several of you have asked me to reduce the levelling grind. This update does that — and fixes some rough parts of the progression curve at the same time.
⚡ LEVELLING
Portal clears now award substantially more experience, especially at higher levels.
The old progression curve had some surprisingly hard walls in it. Crossing level 80 could nearly double the number of portal clears required for a single level overnight, and there was a smaller version of the same problem around level 15.
Those sudden jumps are gone.
Progression now ramps smoothly from level 1 through 100, without arbitrary steps along the way.
In practical terms, reaching level 100 now takes a little under half as many portal clears as it did before. The final twenty levels used to account for almost half of the entire climb; now they're a much more reasonable part of it.
One thing worth explaining because the numbers may initially look strange:
The experience required for each level hasn't been reduced. Portal clears simply award more experience.
So you'll see larger XP rewards coming in rather than a smaller bar to fill.
Portal-clear XP also now varies by roughly ±10%. Two otherwise identical clears may give slightly different rewards.
That's intentional. The old perfectly identical reward made the underlying formula a little too obvious.
🔧 FIXES
Astral Infusion Elixir points are no longer lost when you Ascend.
The elixir promises permanent attribute points, but Ascension was quietly removing them.
It doesn't anymore.
Unfortunately, I can't restore points lost during previous Ascensions. The game didn't separately record where those points originally came from, so there isn't reliable information I can use to reconstruct them.
I'm sorry to anyone who lost permanent points this way.
Switching characters no longer discards unsaved progress from the character you were leaving.
Tooltips no longer remain stuck on screen after the thing they were describing disappears. Thank you to Satur9 for reporting this one.
Swiftness no longer displays “Cost: undefined Mana.”
And Prey Sign's description now matches what the skill actually does: it applies a hunter's mark that causes you to deal +25% damage to the target, rather than granting the Attack Power bonus the old description claimed.
🀄 CHINESE
Swiftness's description was appearing in English with a corrupted word mixed into it. That's fixed, along with two Bard buff names that weren't being translated.
The “session ended” message is now properly translated into Chinese and explains what to do to recover.
Thank you all, as always.
And a special thank you to everyone who's taken the time to tell me where the levelling curve has felt too slow. The long-term grind is very much part of Portalborn — the goal is to make that grind feel more rewarding, not remove it. This change should make progressing additional classes feel better now, while also making the road to unlocking Hero Classes considerably faster when they arrive.
— TheHand