With the release of the Winds of Magic expansion later today and the start of Season One, we wanted to put in place some design changes in response to your some of your feedback.
We appreciate that moving talents you were familiar with and shifting them behind 5 more levels wasn’t particularly engaging. As such we have moved the Tier 6 Talent row back down to level 30 in response to your feedback. Whilst this might not help those who have levelled heroes already, it should help those still levelling through as well as those without max level careers.
We’ve also made adjustments to the Amulet in that now progress is shared across the entire account, no more need to grind that on a career basis. Any excess essence spent should be refunded to you when you next log in.
Last week we adjusted the stagger system to bring back some of that weighty feeling when flinging enemies around with your attacks. All difficulties beneath Cataclysm should now feel much more familiar to your experiences before patch 2.0, whilst leaving us in a position where we can scale difficulty in a more reliable and ultimately more engaging, more cooperative way.
We’re still looking at the threads, posts and topics you’re creating discussing the pros & cons of change, the merits of and improvements that could be made to seasonality and rewards, and hope to be able to discuss where we’ll be going with these systems in the future in the coming weeks.
The magic amulet is now shared across all heroes and careers. Any excess essence spent on amulet upgrades has been refunded.
Fixes
Fixed a crash that could happen if the host lost connection to the Steam lobby.
Fixed an issue where the game could crash when loading the game and a client lost connection and then reconnected during the loading screen.
Fixed an issue where the game could crash when loading into a Weave Arena with a dead or respawning player.
Fixed a crash related to the removal of buffs.
Fixed an issue where no weapon would be visible if picking up a throwing axe while throwing your last axe.
Fixed an issue where boss doors spawned by the Minotaur were invisible.
Fixed some locations on Dark Omens where players could get stuck.
Fixed a facepatrol location on Dark Omens.
Fixed an issue where players could see the low detailed version of the environment when respawning on Dark Omens.
Fixed the pacing of the end event on Dark Omens.
Slightly increased the amount of health drops on Dark Omens across all difficulties.
Bardin Slayer talent ‘Impatience’ - Fixed an issue where the movement speed bonus was not applied correctly when playing as a client.
Kerillian Waystalker talent ‘Serrated Shots’ - Fixed an issue that caused arrows fired to not properly apply a bleed effect. Tweaked bleed effect, now stacks up to 3 times.
Kerillian Waystalker talent ‘Weavebond’ - Fixed an issue causing the talent to return 1.5 health on headshot/crit instead of intended 2.
Kerillian Waystalker talent ‘Piercing Shot’ - Updated firing time from 0.1 seconds to 0 seconds. The arrow will now be released on the same frame as the ability input is released, meaning it will not be affected by the animation offsetting the crosshair.
Kerillian Handmaiden talent ‘Heart of Oak’ - Fixed an issue where the talent did not apply correctly while playing as client.
Victor Saltzpyre Witch Hunter Captain talent ‘Flense’ - Fixed an issue that caused melee strikes to not properly apply a bleed effect. Tweaked bleed effect, now stacks up to 3 times.
Barrage ‘trait’ - Fixed an issue that prevented AoE attacks (Conflagration Staff/Fireball Staff/Hagbane Shortbow) to stack barrage. Barrage now only looks at the first target hit for the purpose of adding additional stacks.
There’s vast amount of completely broken things that aren’t mentioned. BW Kaboom doing nothing, Handguns not ignoring shields, Talents not working or bugged. I had hoped the patch notes would have been MASSIVE bug fixes across many things. Still, Kerillian gets a lot of fixes -.-
Ungors poking you to death through enemies so you can’t even see them, and… well. You know.
hey, so i bought the game a couple of days on steam (62 hours played so far). never really heard of it before, i also didn’t play VT1. I just wanted to say: you guys are really on top of things! clear communication with the community and fast adjustments. i was planning to buy wind of magic on >some< website, so i could save a little bit of money. seeing all your guys hard work and dedication, I’m definitely gonna buy it “full price” on steam! not bad for a couple of mayflies.
Ignorance is bliss
Gonna have to jump in today just to see how much of a mess this is. Been reading alot and not really playing anything.
Well to be fair your actions don’t really match your words given the history of feedback provided.
Giving it one last go then. Just one last desperate try.
There’s vast amount of completely broken things that aren’t mentioned. BW Kaboom doing nothing, Handguns not ignoring shields, Talents not working or bugged. I had hoped the patch notes would have been MASSIVE bug fixes across many things.
For this patch we really wanted to get those design changes in soon. We’re still (metaphorically) crunching through bugs as they get reported and hope to have a more fix focused patch for you soon.
Aye. At least they’ve listened on the lvl 35 talents and the weaves (a bit, there remains the issue of the 1k unlock cost for weapons), credit where credit’s due.
That said, I too was hoping the issues with beastmen/combat etc. would be addressed beforehand, but now I imagine it’ll take the post-WoM launch reviews to get progress there. There’s a lot that needs addressing.
I’m praying later certain talents that were pointed out by people in the other betas already for being underwhelming will get addressed as well, but that isn’t as much of a priority right now, even as disappointed as I was that they didn’t do anything with them after the last beta.
Now please fix BH ult talents. Right now, if we want pellets + big bullet, we have to use the “ult recharges every 25 kills” talent, which is actually way worse than no talent selected. Just please make melee kills (or better, hits, so it works on boss too) reduce the cooldown quicker. Right now recharging ult while kiting boss/horde is extremely difficult, sometomes impossible, and selecting double shotted is not a solution, since it removes horde clearing ability a d is actually only good vs bosses, since even with standard ult CW dies easily even without crit and the shotgun ult talent is not a good option either since it removes long range capability.
Hedge, can you please clarify with the team if no further thp on cleave change (relatively quick stuff, few lines of code, as I understand) means you’re happy with values now?
Thanks.
Oh, and less grind is definitely right direction. Keep on marching it %-)
As much as I had hoped for a new career-specific talent tier on all characters before, I’d rather they ensure all the existing talents are in a decent place first now. One example of a bad talent is Just Reward as @Krator pointed out above, as it leaves no option to have the baseline BH ult with natural ult regen. Another is Burning Dregs on Unchained which messes up your heat management. Overall the new talents are an improvement over the old ones, but there are outliers like these.
It does leave me wondering what FS are going to do with levels in future expansions however. If they increase the level cap too much it’ll either: 1) become even more of a grind for people to be at maximum power in Legend, if they continue to balance it around maximum power or 2) become too easy at maximum power.
That said, 35 seems alright, it leaves them room to add in a new talent tier in future if they decide to.
