Runes of Power, Patch 0.9.2, is coming 2023-09-07T16:00:00Z!
Runes of Power 0.9.2 Overview by Game Director, Judd Cobler
Welcome everyone to the Patch Notes for Beta Patch 0.9.2 Runes of Power. In just a couple more days everyone will be able to get their hands on the latest Mastery to come to Last Epoch in the Runemaster, alongside Rune Prisons, Experimental Crafting, Monolith improvements, and so much more. Today is the day we look at the details for all the changes coming in Runes of Power that didn’t make it into a Blog Post. Read ahead to prepare yourself for the arrival on Thursday!
The Runemaster provides the greatest opportunity for customization and skill expression to date with Runic Invocation.
Mastery Skill: Runic Invocation
Passive: Whenever you directly use an elemental skill, gain one Rune of the corresponding element. For Channeled skills you gain 1 rune per second instead.
Active: Consume all of your active Runes to cast a unique Invocation based on the combination and order of runes consumed.
5 Point Skill: Flame Rush
Turn into a ball of flame and launch yourself in a targeted direction. The longer you channel the ability the slower you move, but the larger and more damaging the explosion is when you stop channeling. You take 40% less damage during Flame Rush.
15 Point Skill: Frost Wall
Create a wall of frost which persists for 6 seconds. Enemies inside the wall take cold damage over time and receive a stack of chill every 0.25 seconds. You can have one active Frost Wall at a time. Enemies that reach the wall at least 0.2 seconds after it’s been created are frozen for twice as long as the wall hAs existed, up to a 2 second freeze duration. Bosses cannot be frozen in this way.
30 Point Skill: Rune Bolt
A combo spell that fires piercing projectiles. The first part of the combo is fire, the second is lightning, and the third is cold.
35 Point Skill: Glyph of Dominion
Places a lightning glyph on the ground that grows over time. Deals lightning damage over time and slows in its area. At full size it detonates, dealing large amounts of lightning damage to enemies within its area. You can have a maximum of one Glyph at a time by default.
In response to early feedback from the Runemaster mastery, missing the ability to quickly and easily generate Heo (cold) Runes early, we have added a new low level, spammable, cold spell for all Mage Masteries!
Added new Base Mage Class Skill: Frost Claw
Unlocked at Level 12 as a Mage
Fires three projectiles in an arc to a targeted location to create a burst of frost. Added spell damage applies to the burst at 100% effectiveness, and it has a freeze rate of 40.
Rune Prisons are randomly occurring encounters in the campaign and endgame, similar to shrines.
When you click on a rune prison it opens to free the Exiled Mage inside, who is a miniboss with a random set of abilities that will attack both you and other enemies in the zone.
At above level 70, Exiled mages may also drop a Rune of Research, which can seal experimental affixes and give you a chance to create a Glyph of Insight when you do so.
A Glyph of Insight can be used to craft experimental affixes onto your items. The exact affix you add, and its tier, are determined by the numerical properties of your item, but exactly which properties decide the outcome and how is something you’ll need to discover through experimentation.
Added One-shot and Lost caches, a new type of discoverable, that are essentially more exciting chests.
There are two types of Item cache:
One-Shot Caches. These exist in specific locations in campaign zones. The first time you open one on a character you get specific loot from it, but on subsequent occasions it’ll just give you some weaker generic items.
Lost Caches. These spawn randomly in endgame, so you get the full loot from them every time you encounter them. They contain random related items.
If one player opens a cache it only opens it for players 16 meters around the cache. For other players it will still appear closed and they can open it for themselves later on in that instance of the zone, or in another instance of the zone in future. This is to prevent players accidentally missing the one-time loot for a cache because they weren’t aware of it.
We wanted items from Fixed Caches in the campaign to be special in terms of stats and lore connection, without requiring a full unique item. To do this we’ve added Personal Items, which are rare items with a personal affix. Personal affixes do not drop naturally and completely define the name of the item, e.g. an Astrolabe with an Ucenui’s personal affix will always be called Ucenui’s Astrolabe regardless of the other affixes and it will be a pale yellow color. Personal Items are intended to be useful levelling items for specific builds that you may want to go out of your way to pick up, but are not intended to be particularly viable in endgame. Personal items drop with no forging potential and their other affixes are predetermined.
Reduced backtracking by making some older echoes more linear, adding connections where echoes previously were dead ends, and removing some dead end paths.
Reduced sizes of many large monolith echoes. For example Alpine Halls is about 1/3 the size it was before.
Updated many player spawn points and added new ones to create more variation in each echo.
Increased the pack size of enemies in monolith echoes.
Made some monster spawners more compact to make groups of monsters spawn closer together. We have more to do here in the future, but this is a first step towards better balanced endgame monster density.
Removed the ambush that featured two Covenants of Dominion.
Added a new ambush that contains two Forged Soldiers.
Added a new ambush that contains the two new Chapter 1 osprix minibosses, Sturiax the Burning Sky, and Brightblade Palarus.
The Lightmage ambush no longer spawns in the Reign of Dragons Timeline.
The Misshapen Remains ambush can now spawn in the Reign of Dragons Timeline.
Ambush objectives can now be disguised as either a Boss or Gate objective. These work the same as normal ambushes, but the quest UI displays as if it’s another type of objective until the ambush is triggered.
There is now a Bug Report button at the top left of the screen at Character Select, and at the bottom of the Esc menu.
Making a bug report from in-game automatically includes diagnostic information from the server you’re connected to, making it much easier for us to investigate technical issues.
You can also type in a description, choose a category and severity, and optionally add Player Data and/or take a screenshot of your current game state.
The changes to Monolith Echo layouts do result in higher xp gain than before, but these changes are intended to increase the time it takes to level up in endgame so the leveling process doesn’t end so abruptly compared to the late endgame item hunt.
Fixed some issues causing region selections to not update properly.
Changing region as a solo player now causes you to change region on the next scene transition in Campaign. Arena and Monolith work differently; if you go back to Town you’ll be in your chosen region.
Added a system message in the chat window noting which region is being changed to and who changed it.
The Region Identifier that appears when hovering over your ping display has been temporarily removed due to technical issues: we will bring it back once those are resolved.
Fixed a bug where the 15 second countdown could start before the client was fully connected to the server (potentially leading to being dead on arrival).
Moving during the 15 second countdown now ends the grace period after 2 seconds rather than immediately.
Players with Grace Period active are no longer targeted by enemies.
Improved how time remaining is displayed on the Grace Period icon.
Your character list is now ordered by when that character was last modified (saved).
Your character can now change direction more quickly for a brief period of time after starting to move. This improves positioning responsiveness.
Minions now follow you through player portals, fixing issues where they would get stuck behind in-zone transitions (i.e. the climb down at the start of Imperial Maj’Elka).
Changed minion AI so that they no longer run back and forth when you give them an enemy target outside their normal leash range.
Slow Breathing grants 12% reduced mana drain (from 10%).
Cosmic Insight grants 15% increased cooldown recovery speed (from 10%), but is no longer multiplicative with other sources of increased cooldown recovery speed (this is a buff unless you had more than 50% increased cooldown recovery speed from other sources).
No longer prioritizes attacking enemies near the player. It will instead target the enemy nearest to itself. This will avoid issues where the Abomination struggles to reach enemies in densely packed groups near the player, and will overall improve its killing speed slightly due to spending less time travelling to the next enemy to attack.
Rapacious Protection now also causes the Abomination to prioritize enemies close to the player (restores the original defensive behavior).
Base damage and damage effectiveness per second increased to 18 and 300% (from 7.5 and 125%).
Time Dilation grants 25% chance to blind every second (from 10%). Max points reduced to 4 (from 5).
Rifts no longer grants less damage dealt (from 10% less). Increased Cooldown Recovery Speed increased to 20% (from 10%). Now grants 15% less pull area and 15% less pull strength (from 10% reduced for both).
Absolute Zero grants 25% chance to chill every second (from 5%). Max points reduced to 4 (from 5).
Heat Wave grants 2% ignite chance per second for every 1% uncapped fire resistance (from 20% ignite chance per second).
Cascade Fracture no longer says “second Black Hole is half as effective”. This reduced effectiveness was never applied.
Armageddon no longer adds 200 to Black Hole’s mana cost. Now uses Meteor’s tree, and the damage modifiers of Black Hole’s tree no longer apply to the Meteors. Consumes Meteor’s mana cost for every Meteor cast by Black Hole, but will not cast Meteor while you have negative mana.
Fixed a bug where if you had one point in Binary Star, but less than three points in Scorching, you could not allocate Infusion.
Infusion grants 18 ward per second (from 10) and can have 5 points allocated (from 3).
Massive grants 15% increased area (from 10%) and can have 4 points allocated (from 5).
Deep Space grants 90% freeze rate multiplier (from 75%) but can have 5 points allocated (from 6).
Gravity’s Guile grants 35 physical damage per point (from 5).
Scorching can have 5 points allocated (from 6).
Flaming can have 5 points allocated (from 6).
Supermassive can have 4 points allocated (from 3).
Heat Wave requires 3 points in Flaming (from 5).
Drifting Singularity requires 1 point in Absolute Zero (from 2).
After directly casting Bone Curse, you also cast Bone Curse on hit for the next few seconds, but Bone Curse costs more mana. This effect can’t occur more than once per second. Bone Curse cast indirectly by this node can’t apply Cursed Limbs, and does not consume mana.
Fixed a bug where applying Bone Curse through Cursed Limbs caused that Bone Curse to also inherit the damage modifiers of that skill that applied it.
Bone Curse’s Illusion of Pain reduces the duration of Cursed Limbs and Cursed Ground by 50% (from 75%).
Sleetfire now puts the player at negative mana equal to your max mana for its duration, instead of negative max mana times ten. This prevents abuse cases centered around missing mana, such as Font of the Erased.
Added a new Affix, Armour and Reduced Bonus Damage from Crits, that can roll on helmets, body armour, gloves, boots, belts, and shields.
Ward Per Second affix changes:
Now also rolls of Catalysts, Acolyte Helmets, and Acolyte Body Armour (from only rolling on Mage helmets and Mage body armour).
Is now more significantly more common (but still uncommon overall).
Starts dropping from level 22 (from 39).
Is slightly weaker at T1 and about 30% stronger at higher tiers.
Renamed to “of Warding” (from “Mage’s”).
The Idol Mage Ward Per Second affix now grants 12-40 ward per second (from 11-30). It has been renamed to “of Warding” (from “of Innervation”).
The Idol Mage Chance to Gain 20 Ward on Melee Hit affix now grants 10%-22% chance (from 8%-20%) and has been renamed to “of Quartz” (from “of Warding”)
The Idol Mage Mana Spent Gained as Ward affix now grants 12%-40% of mana spent gained as ward (from 10%-35%).
Now grants 1% block chance per strength against enemies within 4m (from 100% block chance against enemies within 4m).
Changed base type from Kite Shield to Old Kite Shield. This reduces block chance to 14% (from 25%) and block effectiveness to 320-400 (from 600-800) and adds 4-10 strength.
Is rarer and has a lower chance of having legendary potential.
Scrolling up in chat now prevents the chat window moving down to show the most recent messages. However, the chat messages you’ve scrolled to will be overwritten once enough new messages are received.
When typing a chat message it is now color-coded to the channel it will be sent to.
Pressing the up arrow key in the chat input box will re-type your previous message if the input box is empty.
Added info about item linking to the chat help page.
Towns were re-enabled live last week. While playing solo, entering a town will now match you with other players in the same region so you can meet other players in Eterra. If you find yourself already in a party, you will instead be given a town instance for just your party.
When in a town scene you can now click on the player nearest to you (Right click with Mouse and Keyboard or Left Bumper/L1 with Gamepad) to open up a menu of interaction options. The options are currently the same as if you right clicked their username in chat.
Reworked phases 1 and 3 of the Lagon boss fight (both campaign and monolith versions).
You can no longer directly attack Lagon. There are instead two large tentacles, one at each end of the arena, that share health with each other and with Lagon.
Lagon still attacks as normal.
The tentacles attack the same way as regular lagon tentacles with the same damage, but with a 56% larger area.
This change was made to bypass the numerous bugs that occurred due to trying to attack a boss that was so far away from and below the walkable area.
Fixed Lagon Tentacles being tricky to hit with some projectiles like Fireball.
Fixed Lagon Tentacles’ swipe attack not hitting in Multiplayer.
Added a ground visual effect around Lagon Tentacles.
Overhauled rat enemies with new visuals, abilities and sounds.
Voidfused Forge
Magma pools appear on the ground slightly faster and deal ~23% less damage.
Melee attacks deal twice as much damage.
Updated Immortal Eyes and Oculus Mortis enemies with new abilities, including new visual effects and sounds. Their death explosions deal ~33% more damage.
Added new idle animation variations for Wolf enemies.
Updated the visual effects for killing enemies with Necrotic or Void damage.
Updated the casting visual for Winged Fire skybeams.
Adjusted the coloring for Fume enemies and their abilities.
Updated the visuals of Osprix Lightmage meteors.
Updated the Tri-Nova and death visuals of Flame Gryphons.
Updated the visuals of Lightning Elementals.
Updated the snow visuals on Wengari Outriders.
Updated the weapon models used by skeleton enemies.
Made the sizing of skeleton enemies more consistent.
Most skeleton enemies now have physics on death, their bones falling to the ground.
Ability icons on the actionbar are now greyed out while in a town in Online mode to show that they can’t be used.
Added a “shine” effect to ability icons when they come off cooldown.
Adjusted the colors for mouse over outlines to be less saturated. Neutral objects now have a slightly blue outline.
Added a slight outline around chat text to make it more visible.
The World Map now shows the level of the zone you have selected.
The crafting window now shows how many runes are left of the current active rune.
The crafting window now shows more clearly which affixes will be affected by the procedure, for example, highlighting the flows to empty slots that will be filled.
The orange glow effects in the crafting window are now animated.
There is now a brief delay between dying and the death screen appearing so that you can see your character’s death animation.
There is now a brief timer before you can click the respawn button.
This patch includes a lot of low-level changes to the game’s networking, improving performance. The game isn’t fully converted yet, so there are more improvements to come and we will be monitoring our metrics to identify what to address next.
Improved the server-side performance of several player abilities. We’re trialing this change on some of the heavier abilities so we can monitor the effects before taking it further.
Improved transition times when connecting to a new server by up to 6 seconds (i.e. going to a new campaign zone in a party, or going to/from a town). This was done by refactoring systems to run in parallel so we aren’t bottlenecked.
Matchmaking can now occur during the cutscene for creating a new character. This means if you don’t skip the cutscene, you should instantly connect to the server.
Improved the performance of abilities being created.
Improved the performance of various abilities that targeted minions (such as Sacrifice).
Significantly improved the performance of pathfinding for minions, enemies and NPCs.
Improved the performance of Osprix enemy models, especially when ragdolling.
Improved the speed of party updates (sending/accepting invites, etc), there is more that we’re doing to improve the speed and reliability of this in the upcoming patches.
Improved the performance of skeleton minion/enemy models.
Fixed a bug where leaving the game without clicking on the Empowered Catalyst after watching the cutscene would prevent you from unlocking Empowered Timelines.
Fixed a bug where unlocking a Timeline while in a party with another player would cause you to unlock all of the timelines they had unlocked.
Fixed a bug where Timelines could sometimes be unlocked for players joining another player which has already unlocked them.
Fixed a bug in offline mode where town portaling next to the timeline catalyst in the Monolith of Fate and then returning through that portal could lock the players into a cinematic for the rest of that play session.
Fixed quest pulses in The Ransacked Camp not updating after the first quest step.
Fixed a bug where hiding chat channels (or disabling chat entirely) did not save properly between game sessions.
Fixed a bug where “Chat is Disabled” could be shown in the chat window when it was actually enabled.
Fixed a bug where chat would re-enable itself during gameplay when joining or leaving a chat channel. This happens when entering/leaving Towns or joining/leaving a Party.
Fixed the /r command for replying to your last DM not working.
Fixed the right click menu being cutoff when right clicking on the most recent chat message.
Fixed a bug where clicking on part of the channel select dropdown would move your character.
Fixed a bug which rarely caused players to join campaign servers with players they were not in a party with.
This hasn’t happened (at least not significantly) for quite a while, but we’ve fixed the root cause now.
Fixed a bug where a failed attempt to transition to a zone could rarely become completed after loading a different character, causing the second character to go somewhere unintended.
Fixed a server-side bug that caused players to be stuck in the “Connecting” or “Entering (zone name)” state for a long time, despite the failure happening quickly.
Fixed a bug where return portals were created after going to town via a town portal inside a dungeon. Being able to re-enter a dungeon was unintended, and the dungeon would be uncompletable anyway.
Fixed a bug where the 15 minute AFK timeout would not trigger in some cases.
Fixed a bug where some emerging enemies would be invisible if you joined the server after they emerged.
Fixed a bug where certain On Kill effects would not take tag changes from skill trees into account, (e.g. “chance to cast fire aura on kill with fire skills” would not work with the fire conversion of Surge). Most on kill effects did not have this problem.
Fixed a bug where Dungeon Abilities would temporarily disappear when going to a new floor of the dungeon in Offline mode.
Fixed a bug where one player respawning would remove the respawn button for all other dead players.
Fixed a bug where if the Respawn button appeared over a waypoint, clicking the button would open the world map instead of respawning you.
Fixed a bug which caused the “damage taken to mana before health” stat, available on the Fractured Crown unique, to apply endurance to the damage taken to mana if your current health was below your endurance threshold.
If you specialize in a skill and then refund your passives such that you no longer have access to the skill, your specialization tree no longer applies. If you regain access to the skill, your specialization tree will apply again.
Fixed Detonating Arrow’s hit detection working incorrectly, causing it to deal damage to targets it shouldn’t.
Fixed a bug where converting Summon Spriggan to cold gave it a cold scaling tag instead of a cold minion tag. This change means it will now be affected by effects such as “+3 to Cold Minion Skills” such as from Apogee of Frozen Light.
Fixed a bug where Static Orb’s skill icon did not display an inactive cold or lightning tag when its current element is lightning or cold, respectively.
Fixed Frenzy Totem’s icon being greyed out on the Passive Tree until you spent 30 points in Beastmaster. It was still usable at 25, just greyed out.
Fixed a bug where Flame Ward cast on allies would appear at an incorrect position on that player.
Fixed a bug where Maelstrom’s VFX did not increase in size when its area was increased.
Fixed a bug where the active ability for Summon Scorpion lasted too long when converted to Lightning, causing it to deal damage after the visual effect finished, even if the Scorpion had moved.
Fixed a bug where Fire Aura stacks could be endlessly sustained by casting Teleport. This fix also resolves other cases where some effects could last longer than intended.
Fixed a bug where Bees Per 10 Seconds stats resulted in slightly fewer bees than intended.
Fixed a bug where leaving a crafted Legendary in the Eternity Cache would prevent you from being able to craft a Legendary next time you ran the Temporal Sanctum. You can now take out the previously crafted Legendary and then make a new one.
Fixed the origin point (alignment) of ability visuals for the Rogue’s Ballista, Voidwings, Voidtouched Groles, Void Husks, Festering Cultists, Skittering Undergrowth, Phrax, Rotflies, Lagon, and Heorot.
Fixed outlines on mouseover not working correctly for Flame Wraith minions, Balthas in Keeper’s Vaults and Cliffside, Zerrick in Majasan Heights, and some Voidfused Armor enemies.
Fixed a bug where Plated Gauntlets were invisible on Rogues.
Fixed a bug where unlocking a waypoint did not always play the activation visual for the waypoint.
Fixed lightning effects displaying incorrectly for Lightning Primal Wolves.
Fixed a bug where the tendrils Drain Life makes between the player and targets did not appear in Online mode.
Fixed a bug which caused items to appear in the background of character select when switching characters. There may be other causes of this; let us know if this happens to you.
Fixed the models for Aberrant’s Call, Aergon’s Refuge, Alluvion, Jasper’s Searing Pride, Scales of Eterra, Shadow Beacon, Trident of the Last Abyss, Tu’rani’s Bident and Undisputed having incorrect lighting properties.
Fixed a bug where the “out of mana” particle effects did not appear around your character in Online mode.
Fixed visual issues with ice projectiles in the Heorot boss fight.
Fixed a bug where the respawning at the beginning of The Maj’Elka Waystation would respawn you stuck in the floor.
Fixed a bug where you could get stuck in place when teleporting into Sanctum of the Architect after the bossfight started.
Fixed a minimap issue in Last Refuge Outskirts near Grund.
Fixed a bug where the “Attempt Harder Waves” button in the Arena could sometimes appear twice, and when clicked twice, would cause the game to be unplayable.
Fixed a bug where music would not transition properly when teleporting to party members (i.e. boss music for a zone not starting if you teleported into the arena).
Fixed Apophis talking over herself if you interact with her multiple times in The Chamber of Vessels.
Fixed a bug where Mortar projeciles from Primeval Dragon and Profane Flesh abilities exploded high in the air, causing them to not deal damage (and look strange).
Fixed a bug where skills could not be equipped by dragging them to the actionbar in Online mode.
Fixed a bug where the display for how many crafting materials you have did not always update after using a crafting item.
Fixed a bug where key presses were sometimes still detected by the game after alt-tabbing out, causing UI windows to open and close.
Fixed a bug where trying to switch between Eras in the world map too quickly could cause your inputs to be ignored.
Fixed a text display bug where Flame Guard Sulla would incorrectly have “an” or “the” before his name in death descriptions and monolith objective descriptions respectively.
Fixed the background of the minimap not disappearing when the UI is disabled (delete key).
Fixed a bug where clicking the boss voting window in Dungeons could move your character.
Fixed a bug where the “Entering X” popup did not appear in the Temporal Sanctum.
Fixed a bug where holding alt when moving between different skill node tooltips could cause tooltips to overlap.
Corrected Black Hole Patch Note: Black Hole stated damage effectiveness was increased to 300% from 37.5% effectiveness. It has in fact been increased to 300% damage effectiveness from 125% (from 37.5% every 0.3 seconds to 90% every 0.3 seconds)
Added missing note: Fixed a bug which caused the “damage taken to mana before health” stat, available on the Fractured Crown unique, caused endurance to be applied to the damage taken to mana if your current health was below your endurance threshold.
Void Knights are not supposed to be tanky, they are themed to be the most offensive Sentinel spec.
Also Vitality was a stat that literaly everybody and their grandma were taking on any non pure ward build on almost all avaialble slots.
So if this change really does hurt VK too much, then they can do some specific changes to VK.
Yeah, now it’s not really good for any class… except Sentinel perhaps. Although a good Reduced Damage on Block rare is way better. Not sure how they justify raising the rarity on an item they pretty much knocked off the desirability block. “Hey, we made it harder to get an item you really won’t want to use anymore…”
Saw this as well. I don’t mind the 1% block chance per STR thing, because it ‘niches’ it more but keeps it viable. But I’m really not crazy about the change in it’s BASE.
they trashed the item to the point it might be useless now. And even gated it behind more nerf to LP. (totally unnecessary, it was already super hard to find one with 1LP). This decision is super crazy to me, and not expected from the staff who made lot of superb things.
I hope this wont be another game that will be killing strong stuff instead of balancing things.
Definitely needed it but my glacier sorc will miss it fondly
