Hi, in the past couple of patches we focused on fixing game breaking bugs, tweaking the balance of problematic enemies, and increasing the chances of getting traits from your masteries.
Difficulty Rebalance
In this patch we wanted to focus on rebalancing the whole game's difficulty to start much easier, so that the starting experience is less punishing, especially to new players trying to learn the game.
We still want to keep a similar level of challenge that the game had at the top end, but by this we are mainly talking about the last zone and the higher difficulty versions of zone bosses accessible through their alternate dialogue options.
To achieve this we've done the following changes:
Enemies in the first zone no longer appear with items by default. They can still get items from superior combat modifiers, but those items will be new variants with 50% less power.
The amount of enemy items will slowly ramp up in the following zones, but it will still end up with a couple less items by zone 4. Only the items in zone 4 retain the same power of the previous enemy items.
The first zone boss now has -40% Maximum Health. For those who fought her in the demo, this is almost the same value as she has there.
The Maximum Health of zone bosses will slowly ramp up in the following zones, but it will still end up with a bit less by zone 4.
The higher difficulty versions of zone bosses accessible through their alternate dialogue options are now locked until you complete their zone successfully, and they still retain their previous Maximum Health values.
The enemy items being so plentiful and powerful all the way through the game was causing a lot of troubles. It created a lot of difficulty spikes that new players weren't able to prepare for, and it also created a need for very optimized teams to simply clear the first zone of the game, which should be more about learning than optimizing.
The first zone bosses should now be much easier to beat with a good team, especially if you cleared the maps in that zone with little toruble. For clarity, their dialogue options only increase their difficulty, the easiest version of their fight is their default dialogue.
We'll keep checking how players are feeling about the difficulty to see if there are other broad or targeted changes we could do to improve the difficulty curve, so please keep sharing your feedback!
Let us know if you think we're on the right track as well, that helps us too.
There are other bug fixes and new features coming in the following days, but that's it for today. Have fun in the Underboard!