This month's patch includes a number of fixes, updates, and an optimization pass. We have some fun things cooking for next month so stay tuned!
Updates
Updated Snare VFX.
Increased rapier damage.
Added new loading screen lore captions.
Improved consistency of spawn rate for Essence Gorgers .
Bulletin Board Task "Club Scouts" added location hint to description.
Supporters now have 1 additional health!
Resilience functionality has been revamped for players. It continues to grant the player a chance at a death save. However, each successive death save puts a stacking debuff on the player reducing their resilience by 5 for a few minutes.
Juggernaut's No Time to Die has been updated to grant increasing amounts of resilience for each rank. It starts at +175 and increases up to +230. With the -5 per stack debuff on each save NTTD will start having a chance to fail after 15-26 consecutive saves depending on its rank, but more saves are possible with more +resilience gear.
Added recipes for Imbued Silver and Iron Hauberks.
Updated Crafted Hauberk stats, it was found that these were not on par with other imbued crafted items.
Added more auto follow cancel types that show on the tooltip. If your auto follow is cancelling hover over the "You are no longer following anyone" chat message for an indicator as to why. Currently those abbreviated reasons are:
CameraMovement: happens if you move the camera in while in first person perspective while auto following.
AutoRun: happens if you engage auto run while following.
Executing: happens if you execute an ability while following.
Movement: happens if you hit a movement key while auto following.
MovementMouse (new): happens if you are attempting to move by holding the left+right mouse buttons while auto following.
Confused (new): happens if your character becomes confused while auto following.
TooFar: happens if your auto follow target gets too far.
NotMemberOfGroup: happens if your auto follow target is no longer a member of your group.
Added hunting log entry for Grubs.
Marshal's have a new ability Concussive Strike that unlocks at level 3; existing Marshals will need to talk to their trainer in Newhaven City to obtain it. This ability is a short daze that interrupts NPC executions. Alchemy versions turn it into a longer lasting AoE Daze with the Alchemy 2 version being unresistable.
Warden abilities Venom Shock, Lingering Strikes, and Viperid Toxins now all scale with +Chemical Damage. The majority of the game is not currently itemized for +Chemical Damage, this is currently mainly going to impact Ibaxus where Warden ability damage has fallen behind.
Warden's Viperid Toxins now give the Warden a small amount of threat based on damage dealt.
Brigand ability Mark now deals physical damage and scales with the Brigand's +Damage stats. The bonus amount is an average of all your +Damage stats.
Added new skylights in dungeons (EV's, Forgotten Depths, Aquifer). Previously these were a solid color matching the time of day. These now render as skyboxes with clouds and stars.
New cobweb shader. Cobwebs should have a bit of emission at night and a tiny bit of motion as if they were swaying in the breeze. In a future update they will react to varying wind strengths.
Fixes
Fixed incorrect stat amount on "Essence Guardian Ring Adornment".
Fixed incorrect text emote from Essence Grub AoE Root.
Fixed an issue where Emberflys would not be visible if they spawned outside of the camera frustum.
Lower level Quillbacks no longer count for Stinging Quillbacks Bulletin Board Task.
Reduced the size of some non-collision rocks in Redshore.
Nav mesh cleanup in Dryfoot Stronghold.
Ibaxus
New Ibaxian Recipes available from Archibald "Ibaxian Reclamation". These recipes allow you to get that tier's artifact back from a shaped adornment.
Fixed issue where Inner Armor Ibaxian Adornments would lose their Role requirement after being shaped.
New Ibaxian Runes added for +Chemical Damage
Striker set bonus now includes additional +Chemical Damage
Parry/Block cap values have been increased to 100%
Continued Optimization Efforts
Most of the “obvious big wins” in client optimization have already been addressed. This leaves smaller, incremental improvements that we will be progressing through over the next few months.
Before migrating to Steam, we had to be very mindful of our client size. We paid for bandwidth, and our old launcher wasn’t great at delivering efficient deltas, so we compressed most textures using a lossy format to keep the download size down at the cost of visual quality.
Now that we're on Steam, those bandwidth constraints are largely gone. With this patch, we’ve begun moving our textures to a higher-quality compression format. This increases disk usage, but improves texture quality across the board. We are still in the process of migrating all of our textures so expect the client to grow a little in the next few updates. Also note that this patch will be a bit chunkier because of these changes.
We have also started the process of optimizing memory consumption (both RAM and VRAM) throughout the game. This has led to a number of changes:
Disabled some HDRP features that were allocating VRAM.
Reduced texture resolutions on a number of items. We tried to only do this in instances where there was no substantial visual difference. If something looks a bit off let us know.
Reduced the size of a number of UI icons.
Added icons to a number of sprite atlases (reduces draw calls).
Adjusted import settings on a number of meshes to reduce memory consumption. Let us know if there are issues with collisions or non-collisions with objects.
Adjusted audio compression settings for a number of audio clips.
Humanoids:
New tech to cap specific texture channel resolutions. This allows us to maintain detail while reducing VRAM overhead.
New tech added that allows different humanoids to share textures. Previous to this patch all humanoids generated unique merged textures at runtime. This caused VRAM usage to skyrocket when a large number of humanoids were present (Newhaven City, Freehold).
To allow humanoids to share skin textures we unfortunately had to remove the "Muscle Tone" slider from character creation / editing. Each body type will now show as if the muscle tone slider was in the middle.
New skin shader to accommodate texture sharing.
New eye shader to resolve some visual issues and accommodate texture sharing.
Depending on your system settings and your character's location these changes could have a significant positive impact on performance, especially for those who have struggled with zoning into Newhaven City.