Today we are continuing to work on changes based on player feedback and this is a list of the updates that we have finished internally. We will be deploying the following changes over the next few days.
This is just a list of the changes that have been made so far. These are not the only changes we are investigating and they do not represent a full list of what players are reporting to us.
Player Balance Changes
Now that we have a lot of the nerfs out of the way, we can concentrate on buffing things that are not performing well.
Sorceress Specific Changes
- Arc now does a lightning explosion when it hits a shocked enemy but can no longer shock. It does not consume the shock.
- Eye of Winter now gains bonus elemental damage when passing through other elemental orbs like Solar Orb, Orb of Storms or Frost Bomb.
- Incinerate's exposure duration has been increased to 8 seconds from 2 seconds.
- Mana Tempest can now be used with all spells, and has been changed to cause empowered spells to split to additional targets instead of chaining or forking.
- Frostbolt explosion radius has been increased by 50%.
- Ice Nova's freeze buildup has been increased significantly.
- Frost Bomb exposure duration has been increased to 8 seconds from 5 seconds.
- Mana remnants has been changed to work with other elemental ailments than just shock.
- We are lowering the delay for Ignites spreading from sources such as the Wildfire support to 1 second from 2 seconds, but the radius has been decreased slightly.
Bleed/Chaos Innoculation
- Energy Shield no longer prevents bleeding from being applied.
- Chaos Innoculation now prevents bleeding.
- The passive clusters that grant you additional stun threshold based on your maximum energy shield now also increase your ailment threshold so you will no longer be ignited/chilled/frozen/shocked as often while using CI if you take these passives.
Huntress Specific Changes
- Parried enemies can no longer evade your attacks.
- The spear stuck in enemies by Rapid Assault now always bleeds on hit when you detonate it, the AoE has been increased by 20% and the detonate does 67% more damage.
- Spearfield's spear duration has been increased to 10 seconds from 6 and had it's damage growth increased, dealing 30% more damage by level 20.
- Herald of Blood no longer deletes the corpses of Rares or Uniques, allowing you to use Ritual Sacrifice on the rares.
Warrior Specific Changes
- Temper Weapon on Smith of Kitava now adds 3 empowerments per strike of your weapon, and is 25% faster. The damage might need to come down a little.
- Shield Wall is now detonatable with Warcries.
- Armour break being applied to players by monsters no longer has the 20% extra physical damage modifier that was intended to only be a buff to players, and we have also reduced its duration to 4 seconds from 12. In addition, there was a bug where partial armour breaks were never removed on the player.
Ranger Specific Changes
- Stormcaller arrow now proliferates shocks to nearby enemies in a small radius and has had its AoE radius increased by 50%.
- Lightning Rod damage has been increased by 30%, and their duration has been increased to 20 seconds.
- Lightning Arrow has had the radius at which it arcs to targets increased by 50%.
- Tornado Shots maximum duration has been increased to 15 seconds
New Support Gem
We have added a support gem called Inhibitor that prevents charges being consumed but increases the damage of the supported skill by 4% for each type of charge you have.
UPDATE: We've since found that the implementation for the increased damage per type of charge to not be feasible in the timeframe that we want this support gem to be released, and the core of the design of the support is an important tool to get into the hands of players, so we will be releasing it without that stat present.
Delirium Changes
Delirium encounters now last approximately 2.5x longer.
Crafting
We've added several Artificers Orb's to fixed locations throughout the campaign allowing you to craft with them more often.
We have also added runes for attributes allowing you to fix early game requirement issues.
We are also updating all runes to also apply to Wands and Staves. This work will require adding specific mods for these items. We are unsure if Soul Cores and Talismans will be able to be added at the same time, but it is our intention to attempt to make this change.
Finding Rares in Endgame
During endgame a common issue is missing a Rare in the corner of the map that you didn't happen to explore. In order to mitigate this issue, we have changed rares to show up on the minimap at all times.
Matlan Waterways
We have made a change to Matlan Waterways to merge some sections of water together, reducing the average number of levers that you will encounter while playing it by 6 levers.
Monster Speed
One of the issues that is often reported is getting swarmed by monsters. We are currently doing a pass to investigate this issue and can probably talk about specific changes tomorrow, but the changes are likely to be targeted at specific monsters that are too difficult, especially in zones that have a lot of fast monsters.
A Note About The Ritual Exploit
Recently there was an exploit involving reducing the deferral cost of Ritual items in combination with using a Unique Tablet that allows for unlimited rerolls. This occurred during the middle of the night and unfortunately due to an internal miscommunication, we didn't fix the exploit until around 8 hours after. We have banned 301 accounts that were clearly exploiting this, and they will remain banned until the end of the current league. Thankfully, the economic impact outside of the banned accounts is relatively small.
And that's all the changes that we have finished today. The changes in this post will be deployed over the next few days, but we should have more to report tomorrow.
