It’s good to be releasing a build again! Despite gearing up for Kickstarter there’s been a lot of updates. We’ve added an item stash, a shop, an arena, new unique art, a new skill and lots of tweaks, balance and quality of life changes!
New Systems
- Added an item stash that persists across characters, accessed from The Square
- Added a shop for buying and selling items to The Square
- Added The Arena
- Unlocks after the final boss
- Waves of enemies spawn scaled to your level (including up to one boss)
- There is a 30 second pause every 5 waves (with a button to skip)
- Items dropped disappear after 30 seconds of being on the ground, uniques after 120 seconds
- Added 8 enemies specific to the arena
Items
- Reworked the affix number calculation. Items with zero and one affix will start common and become rarer at higher levels, while items with four affixes start out very rare and become more common. Drop rates for items with two and three affixes have been changed, but less noticeably
- Added 2 new unique items
- Added new art for Arboreal Circuit, The Monolith, Bleeding Heart, Fighting Chance, Keeper’s Gloves, Preparation, Strong Mind and Close Call
- Rebalanced nearly all affix rolls
- Affix rolls are now re-rolled when adding a shard
- Magic items now drop with a natural fracture chance of 2% per affix per tier
- Changed implicit mod text
- Some property descriptions have been changed to more descriptive versions already used by explicit mods
- The numbers no longer have a different color to the text, to make it clearer that they are not modified by the explicit mods
- The appropriate "+", "-", or "adds" prefixes are shown before the number to make it clear that the implicits are mods, not totals
- Item base type is now shown on tooltips
- Early enemies now have less variance in item drops
- Changed health regen on items from a flat amount to a percentage increase
- One handed weapons (except wands) can now roll Added Melee Holy Damage (new affix)
- Two handed weapons can now roll Added Melee Void Damage (new affix)
- Made some affixes rarer
- Made some affixes rarer on specific item types
- Added melee fire, cold and lightning damage mods, that are rare on most weapons.
- Changed "Chance to _" affixes to suffixes
- Improved the description of leech affixes
- Block Armor is now a prefix
- Added an Elemental Protection suffix that can spawn on most items
- Made Fire/Cold/Lightning Protection suffixes rarer
- Added a Block Elemental Protection prefix for shields
- Buffed Fighting Chance
- The size of item borders in equipped slots now depends on the size of the slot, not the item
- Reworked item generation (back-end stuff)
- Shattering Stones now drop at enemy locations instead of your feet
Skills
- Added Flanking Strike to the Beastmaster, which lets you dash and attack alongside your closest minion.
- Overhauled Mana Strike's augment tree
- Reworked node connections
- Buffed several nodes
- Added a node for attaching a spark charge to enemies (spark charges last 0.7 seconds and then explode in an AoE)
- Added a node for attaching a spark charge to enemies to the Elemental Nova tree
- Fire Shield, Healing Wind, Ice Ward, Innervate, and Thicket Blades can now be cast instantly, without an animation.
- The Wolf, Bear and Spriggan now resist damage from powerful AoE abilities
- The torrent node on the Fireball skill tree now reduces damage by 7%
- Totems and Illusory Trees can longer dodge
- Added 2 new nodes to the Beastmaster Passive Grid
- 15% less damage taken for 2 seconds when you hit an enemy with a melee attack (does not stack)
- When you are stunned you gain 15% increased damage and 150 tenacity for 5 seconds
- Claw totems now start attacking from 33% further away and last 12 seconds, up from 10
- New VFX for the Circle of Flames node on Fire Shield
- Replaced animation for Entangling Roots
UI
- On startup the game now shows the Last Epoch logo and background panning instead of Unity
- Changed the passive grid interface so now the unspent points are in the middle of the screen
- Ability cooldown indicators now use a radial fill
- Item tooltips now show descriptions for affixes and implicits when you hold the left alt key
- Space bar now toggles item ground tooltips on/off
- The "coming soon" text on the unusable subclass icons no longer overlaps with the version text
- Added "delete all enemies" and "respec all nodes" buttons to devmode (accessed using + on a numpad)
- Changed the font of the new character name field to make it more legible at low resolutions
- Increased the maximum length of character names from 12 to 16
- Changed the font of the new character name field
- Improved item tooltip appearance
- Added new item borders in the inventory
Enemies
- Adjusted the drop rates of most enemies. Bosses now drop more items!
- Rebalanced magic and rare monsters, they now have smaller base increases to health and damage, but their affixes are more impactful
- The Omen of Silence now casts void beams below a health threshold, and spawns 3 Aged Forms below another
- Abyssal Crawlers can no longer have an affix that makes them repeatedly spawn spectral copies
- Added the "Guarded" monster prefix, which makes the monster summon another rare of a different, but related, monster type
- Added the "Familiar" monster prefix, which makes the monster resurrect two seconds after dying, with higher speed and damage but less health
- Reduced the damage dealt by Abyssal Crawlers
- Draal Grubs are now slightly larger, tankier and slower
- Reduced Void Pillar health by 33%
- Stationary enemies can no longer have a suffix that increases their movement speed or dodge chance
- Void Pillars can no longer have an increased damage affix
- Abyssal Crawlers now cast Void Orb below 80% health
Level Design
- Added The Square area attached to Breirhold
- Has several NPCs with text, the shop and stash
- Portal now leads to The Square (activated by NPCs)
- Added a very large statue to Sundered Path
- Added checkpoints to Cliffs, Ruins and Temple. If you pass a checkpoint and then die you will respawn there
- Removed the last Dire Wolves from the Swamp
- Removed Voidfire Husks from Sundered Path
- Added more Voidfire Husks to Ruins
- Added some harmless statues to Sundered Path. Not all statues are guaranteed to be harmless
- Added Voidfire Aberrants to the Temple
- Added new note text to Breir's Watch and the Cliffs
Sound
- Changed Ahuizotl spawn sound
Other
- Reduced character displacement from screen center by 40%
- Improved the performance of ability collision
Bug Fixes
- Fixed Strong Mind’s tenacity bonus
- Fixed the protection, armour, and block armour displays in the character sheet
- Fixed a bug where some uniques could not drop if there were other uniques with the same base type
- Fixed a bug where the block elemental protections on the stat sheet showed the wrong values
- Fixed The Monolith’s tooltip not quite matching its stats
- Fixed obstruction, visual and Navmesh issues in various places in Temple
- Fixed a bug where items that were equipped when loaded had larger icons until they were unequipped
- Fixed a typo in axis descriptions
- Fixed a vision obstruction issue towards the end of Cliffs
