
Heroes!
We have a big update for you this time. There is a lot of ground to cover, so let's get straight into it. First let's get an overview of the major topics of the update, then we will have a long list of individual changes and bugfixes.
Summons are added to the existing Masteries. This is our first step towards allowing a full "Summoner" playstyle in the game.
This will then be concluded with the addition of the summoning focused Spirit Mastery later this year.
Our design goal is to give you a choice:
Do you prefer a more passive playstyle and have your summons do the work for you?
Or do you want to engage more actively and use a playstyle where you empower your summons with active abilities?
Both are possible, as well as various combinations in between of course.
We are adding the following abilities:
New Active Abilities: Core Dweller (Earth Summon), Wisps (Storm Summon), Automaton (Forge Summon), Shadow Clone (Rogue Summon) and War Banner (Warfare)
New and Reworked Passive Abilities: We have added 3 new summon-centered Passives to Masteries and also added additional summon-scaling elements to existing passives.
We know that items and especially Epics have been an often debated topic. With this patch we introduce a huge amount of buffs, additions and changes to our items.
Here is an overview of what this means:
New Powerful Affixes: Added a new set of item affixes that directly increase the power of your skills. These can increase the level of all passives for a whole Tier of a Mastery, or add capacity to all actives in one Tier of a Mastery.
Added Talismans: Talismans are a new off-hand weapon type. They offer inherent bonuses to energy, which could be hard to come by in the past.
Added new Epics, Relics and Charms: We have added 13 new Epics (including Epic Talismans), 13 new Relics and 3 new Charms.
Reworked existing Epics: Almost all existing Epic items were reworked, buffed or both so they are more powerful and exciting to find.
Added Potion Affixes: New Potion Affixes should make this item type more exciting to find.
New and Reworked Affixes: We have added tons of new affixes and reworked some existing ones. This includes adding more Energy-related affixes.
Staves Rework: We have reworked Staves, especially their implicit bonuses, to make them more useful for casters.
Added Affix Tiers to all affixes: We have started this process in the past and now all affixes should use the correct Affix-Tiers.
Due to all of these changes, some items will be partially re-rolled to their new versions. We believe this is the best approach here. Anything we reroll usually is a buff and we don't want you to have to "find it again".
We did the following re-rolls:
All Epic items were re-rolled, as we have completely overhauled and buffed all of them.
All item Implicits were re-rolled, as we improved many of them (see the staves example above)
Some very specific Affixes that we moved/removed were rerolled. These are very few.
We have included an extra section at the end of this changelog that will deep-dive into the individual changes to items and also offer an overview of our goals with these changes in more detail.