Hi all!
Thanks a ton for the feedback on explosions from player weapons. It seems they were a little too potent, especially in later levels where it's almost impossible to avoid some friendly-fire damage as you're swarmed with hordes of fast-moving enemies.
Explosive weapons are generally meant to be more powerful than other weapons, with an inherent risk of self-damage associated with the big AoE damage they provide. There are definitely some improvements to be made in how explosions work and how they're communicated, which I hope this patch provides.
Some notable callouts before getting to the full changelog:
There's now a new visual indicator for every explosion so you can see the exact radius of damage; you can now stack Armor in your build to more effectively shield against explosion damage; and explosions are now capped at 30% of your max health per hit to give you a little more time to react in situations where you need to tank a hit or two (and also to prevent people from just instantly dying when they wish for a nuke at the Wishing Well...).
I don't want to completely remove the friendly-fire damage from explosions yet -- I think there's a lot of fun to be had in how you mitigate that risk, especially in the kinds of swarm-heavy levels you'd most want AoE clears in -- but if there are still issues with surprise explosion deaths, we might just disable the friendly-fire damage until we have a better solution. I'll be watching!
Explosion Changes
There's a new visual effect for weapon explosions to help visualize their radius and damage type.
Armor is now twice as effective at mitigating explosive self-harm damage (previously, you took 1 less damage for every point of armor you had; now you'll take 2 less damage per point of armor).
Self-damage from your own exploding weapons is now limited to 30% of your max health per instance of damage, and triggers the standard 0.5s of post-hit invulnerability (with damage flash) that you get from any other damage.
Melee weapons and Aura weapons can no longer roll explode-on-hit effects. Any existing melee/aura weapons will have their explosion effects removed.
Character Changes
Sproing's Slinky weapon has been redesigned to look more like a slinky (smaller, slower expanding projectile) and now includes a very slight "pull-back" on any enemies hit by it. Also now always rolls a +1 Magnet affix on the base weapon.
Enemy Changes
Expanded the variety of enemies that spawn in Rumbridge.
Reduced Chicken move speed by 50% and changed their logic to run around the randomly instead of always swarming the player.
Paper Lanterns now spawn a hazardous Fire in the level when they burn up (after 5 seconds). You can kill them before then to prevent the fire, but you'll spawn a Paper Lantern Ghost instead.
Paper Lantern Ghosts now attack half as often and their projectiles are 50% slower.
Increased the scale and damage of Wendigaunts by 50%.
Hellforge Cultists now summon legions of Imp Tormentors to attack the player.
Bugfixes
Fixed several enchantments that the Halo Forge could bless your items with that either did nothing or very little (e.g. a flat +0.1 Might instead of +10% Might)
The Fire that Emberlings spawn when killed can now be destroyed like any other Fire.
Fixed a bug that resulted in explosion radius being slightly larger than expected for some crafted weapons.