The Bonfire Navigation mastery now requires getting a team of 7 characters instead of 9. This allows to unlock the mastery before endless runs again.
The Zone Boss in the Horizon Paths was still blocking many players from unlocking endless runs. Now the phase 2 of the boss has about -10% Maximum Health, -20% Total Resistances, -20% Attack Damage and -15% Skill Damage, but their Convergence trigger skill now grants 40% Maximum Health and Heal to allies on death instead of 30%. This should allow more players to win the fight directly, but it also makes it easier to kill at least one enemy in that phase to start gaining progress through the Ghost system across multiple rounds.
The mastery trait Slice was trivializing the new boss in endless runs due to his high Maximum Health, so it no longer grants "+3% Target Health dealt as Piercing Damage on Critical Attack", it now grants "+30% Penetration with Critical Attacks" instead.
Previously the Forge was the only way to upgrade your items by either enhancing them with an additional random modifier, or merging 2 items together, and each Forge option also has a mastery that upgrades it.
Now that we introduced item quality you can also increase the magnitude of their modifiers, which is also a strong option to upgrade your items.
The Forge and item quality are both good ways to uprade your items, but in combination they multiply each other very strongly, especially if you were merging items with the Masterwork Merge mastery, which doubled the modifiers of a random item when merging.
This created a very high ceiling of power for "perfect" items, meaning the most powerful items you can craft, but it also meant that there was no way for enhancing items at the forge to ever create items that sometimes were stronger than merged items.
We decided to make the following changes to the Forge so that both merging and enhancing can create perfect items, but in their own ways, so that sometimes it's better to use one or the other based on what you are looking for:
You can now enhance items a second time after they reach max quality.
Merging items now causes the resulting item to have the lowest quality from the 2 merged items, instead of the average quality. This means you now always know the quality of the resulting item, but also that merging items now requires a bit more planning if you don't want to waste quality consumables.
The Masterwork Merge mastery no longer doubles the modifiers of a random item when merging, it now sets the resulting item to max quality if both items had at least 1 quality, saving you 1 quality consumable per merged item you craft. This in combination with the double enhance change is meant to bring the power ceiling to a middle point between the 2 options.
Given that items have different max quality multipliers based on their rarity, being 3x for common, 2x for uncommon and rare, and 1.5x for ancient and legendary, this opens up the possibility for both merging and enhancing items to be able to create the best items for your team based on what you need in each slot.
To give some examples about forging items after the changes:
By enhancing a common item 2 times, it can now have 3 modifiers, their original one and the 2 from enhancing, which could end up being the same. At max quality this would provide the value of 9 modifiers since the item is common.
By merging 2 rare items, the merged item will have the 4 modifiers from those items. At max quality this would provide the value of 8 modifiers since the merged item inherits the rare rarity.
Since merged items inherit the rarity of one of the merged items chosen randomly. you can also merge a common item with an ancient item, and if the merged item ends up with common rarity, at max quality you'll get a 3x multiplier on the common item modifier, but also on the ancient item modifiers, which normally would only go up to x1.5.
We're still working on more balance and QoL changes for upcoming patches.