Usurper Reborn v0.65.3 - "Countdown"
A big maintenance and balance update on the road to 1.0: two Power Strike fixes, a high-severity economy exploit closed, a data-driven early-game survivability pass, and a stack of quality-of-life improvements pulled straight from player feedback.
Combat and Classes
- Power Strike (class ability) fixed for two-handed weapons. While wielding a two-hander, the trained Power Strike ability could deal less damage than a plain auto-attack. The two-handed damage bonus that normal swings get was not being applied to the ability. It now is, so Power Strike (and other physical melee/ranged abilities) reliably beats a basic swing for two-handed builds, at every level.
- Power Attack now triggers your weapon enchantments. The tactical Power Attack was silently skipping every on-hit effect (life steal, elemental procs, holy bonus vs undead/demons, poison coating, and more), which is why it could feel weaker than a free swing. It now runs the full on-hit pipeline on both the main hit and the off-hand follow-up.
- Early-game survivability pass. Based on a full month of live death data, two targeted fixes (no global nerf, no blanket difficulty change):
- Early dungeon floors now ramp up in difficulty (floors 1-3 at 50%, 65%, 80% monster strength) instead of jumping straight to full strength on floor 2.
- Barbarian gains a small innate heal-on-kill before its level-36 Bloodlust unlocks, giving the class real sustain early instead of being completely dependent on a healer companion.
Combat round counter and active-buff line. Combat now shows the current round number and a compact list of your active buffs (Inspiring Tune, songs, Well-Rested, food buffs, Bloodlust, status immunity) with how many rounds or combats remain. Added to standard, compact/BBS, and screen-reader displays.Fixes and Exploits
- Reforge gold/power exploit closed (issue #112). Unequipping reforged gear was resetting its quality, which let players re-collect the reforge upgrade bonus over and over and compound weapon power and gold into the billions. Items now keep their quality through unequip/re-equip, save/load, the home chest, trades, and companion handoffs, so the loop is shut. The same fix also stops unequipping from dropping stats (a shield losing its block, items losing agility/stamina, and so on). Note: items already inflated by this exploit are not retroactively reduced; the fix stops further inflation.
- Party XP no longer stranded on a dead teammate's slot. With a custom XP split, a teammate's death could leave a chunk of every kill's XP allocated to an empty slot and silently lost. Redistribution now works correctly and honors the auto-redistribute-on-death toggle, and the Party Management screen self-heals an orphaned slot the moment you open it.
- Inn arm-wrestling daily limit resets on sleep (single-player). The 3-per-day cap was not clearing when you slept to the next day; it now resets like every other daily activity.
- Shields keep their block value across every equip path, and reforged quality now survives equipping from inventory, the home screen, and the magic shop.
Quality of Life
- Quest list scrolls, and merc contracts are readable. The active quest list now paginates (ext / rev / ack) instead of cutting off at eight, /contracts is now an alias for the quest list, and Sellsword Hall contracts are tagged so they stand out.
- Resting heals your whole party. Sleeping at the Inn or resting at Home now restores your companions and team NPCs to full HP and mana, not just you. No more dungeon trips purely to hand-feed them potions.
- Black Market: inspect before you buy. You can now inspect any rotating-gear slot ( then the slot number) to see its full stats, attribute bonuses, enchantments, level requirement, and price. The market also stays open after an inspect or purchase so you can browse and buy several items in one visit.
- Dungeon features are rarer and worth more. Examining interactable features () on nearly every room had become autopilot busywork. They are now much less frequent (roughly a two-thirds cut) and their gold/xp/heal rewards are doubled to compensate, so the ones you find feel worth stopping for.
- Clearer home bed upgrade. The bed renovation row now names what it does (fertility), instead of an unexplained "No penalty".
Under the Hood
- Combat telemetry fix. Our internal death tracking was being crowded out by the much larger volume of victories, making it look like deaths were far rarer than they actually were. Death records are now retained properly, so balance decisions are made on real numbers.
- Broad consolidation of item-conversion code so stats and enchantments stop quietly going missing one at a time, plus restoration of two world-boss item perks that had drifted out of the loot equip path.
- All new text localized across English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Hungarian.
Thanks as always for the detailed bug reports and feedback. Keep them coming.