Hello Slayers!
Over the last few weeks, we've published three State of Dauntless posts that summarize features landing tomorrow in 1.6.0. The goal of these posts is to explain our reasoning behind the latest updates while gathering fan feedback.
If you missed them, here they are:
We will continue to publish State of Dauntless posts in order to communicate features early and raise transparency.
Do you have a topic we'd like to cover? Let us know in the comments!
External link →I thought patch notes were dropping today?
They just went live, enjoy!
Patch notes when?
After watching Cpt maelstrom's video on 1.6.0, as i feared, the new hunt pass has nothing to look forward to, except the elite armor. Looking at the way it look pains me, i knew removing the weapons skins from the pass will make it less valuable.
Want to talk about how the slayer club will boost you MORE than i thought ( SC player weekly challenge gain is 7600 coins and 1820 crystals VS None SC player gain is 3800 coins and 910 crystals ). Now don't get me wrong, i have nothing against a subscribe option in the game, but this is a bit unfair for F2P players who are gonna grind more than slayer club players, specialy those who don't want to login everyday.
I am not even going to talk about A THIRD SLAYER PATH CURRENCY YOU HAVEN'T MENTIONNED ANYWHERE!.
I hadn't even thought to consider this a currency to be honest. I'm the designer behind these Slayer's Path additions. These Slayer Path additions replace during Radiant Season what would have been Talent Trees in previous Escalation seasons.
The 'Fragments of Times Past' which are the 'currency' for these nodes are functionally the same thing as if we'd called it 'Charged Radiant Aether' in my mind. It is earned by killing Primal Behemoths that spawn in the Hunting Grounds, and is spent in this seasonal Slayer's Path addition.
Fragments of Times Past are not affected by Slayers Club, nor purchaseable in any way. Any Behemoth on any island starting on Brightwood and beyond has a 50% chance of being a Primal Behemoth, which will drop these Fragments.
Edit for more info: I should have surfaced this earlier, but as I said, I hadn't even thought of it as a currency, but as just the next season's Charged Aether, which is something we've done for every elemental season, just outside of Escalation this time, and with more freeform a levelling path than the previous Talent Trees.
So this seasonal material/currency is not part of the Coins and Crystals? How do we acquire them? Will we have to grind these just like with the seasonal currency? Why is this addition necessary and why in the world hasn't PHX mentioned anything about this anywhere on their official Reddit posts? This literally came out of the blue just one day before the patch launches. Why were they hiding this?
There was no intent to hide anything here. 'Kill seasonal content, level up your seasonal talents' is a mechanic we've used for all five seasons of escalation, and we've twisted and tried new things with it season over season. This is the next iteration of that, and I did not think to realize this might be a controversial thing to do.
I hadn't even thought to consider this a currency to be honest. I'm the designer behind these Slayer's Path additions. These Slayer Path additions replace during Radiant Season what would have been Talent Trees in previous Escalation seasons.
The 'Fragments of Times Past' which are the 'currency' for these nodes are functionally the same thing as if we'd called it 'Charged Radiant Aether' in my mind. It is earned by killing Primal Behemoths that spawn in the Hunting Grounds, and is spent in this seasonal Slayer's Path addition.
Fragments of Times Past are not affected by Slayers Club, nor purchaseable in any way. Any Behemoth on any island starting on Brightwood and beyond has a 50% chance of being a Primal Behemoth, which will drop these Fragments.
Edit for more info: I should have surfaced this earlier, but as I said, I hadn't even thought of it as a currency, but as just the next season's Charged Aether, which is something we've done for every elemental season, just outside of Escalation this time, and with more freeform a levelling path than the previous Talent Trees.
Thanks for the info, Ahrelia! Super helpful :D
I see this as a currency because it stack up like rams, steel/gilded marks, bounty token, coins and crystals, and definitly not like the charged aether XP you get in escalation until you reach 25 points that you can spend in a talent tree.
I don't like the way it is executed because that leads me to think the legendary radiant behemoth will be based on these primal behemoth mechanic with breaking those modifier pillars (correct me if i am wrong).
I don't like the primal behemoth mechanic because it involve (Once again and again) modifiers! Slayers don't want to deal with modifiers that debuff them, they want to deal with the behemoth! A primal behemoth should be stronger, faster, harder by nature, they seems to be stronger than heroic behemoths but they actually aren't without us activating modifiers to make them stronger.
I'm very sensitive to the fact that players don't want to fight modifiers, and I've been attempting to build these ones to be a more engaging experience that ultimately focuses on how the players fight the Behemoth itself, in a way that the modifier only accentuates. I'm aware I might not always hit the mark on this.
The Legendary Radiant Behemoth will have as much to do with these modifiers as the other Legendary Behemoths had to do with their seasonal Escalation modifiers. Ultimately, the Primal Behemoths let you choose a difficulty that fits you best, even at their base level, they are inherently more difficult and powerful than normal Behemoths of their level, because they cannot be stunlocked to death, nor lifestolen through. Players can get these abilities back, at the cost of enhancing the Behemoth further.
I'll be happy to take feedback on it, and try to learn further from any mistakes I've made in this design, but please try it out and see how you feel.
So you mean what would be added to Slayer's Path is a new way to "upgrade" your skills/boosts/whatever in the not-Escalation? This is all confusing.
And yeah, putting it in Slayer's Path is not a great way Imo. As far as I see Slayer's Path, things in there are to be permanent, not replaced/removed for next season.
It is its own separate tab in the Slayer's Path menu. The Slayers Path implementation was just a much cleaner, stronger, and more versatile way to build a Talent Tree from a design perspective than the old Escalation Talent Trees that had a whole lot of tight restrictions (How many tiers you could have, how things could connect to each other and branch, etc)
We had the option of rebuilding the Talent Tree tech from scratch for the old Escalation Talent trees, or utilizing what we had built in the Slayer's path to build future Talent trees, and we chose the latter. The Seasonal Talents for Radiant also represent abilities and perks that work in all Hunting Grounds and Escalations, rather than being locked into a specific slice of content the way the old Escalation Trees were.
Confusing approach to the non-Escalation Radiant season, but this explanation has been helpful to understand it... somewhat. You keep going into deeper waters and I'm not sure how to feel about it.
Something that I'm not sure about: when you unlock the Nodes with these Fragments, will those only apply to the Hunting Grounds (like Escalation Amps and upgrades only applying in Escalations) or are we able to use the boosts in every hunt mode until replaced/removed by the end of the Radiant season? Also, how much of these Fragments do these Primal Behemoths drop per kill? Is RNG involved?
Currency or no currency, this should have been more highlighted in your posts about this addition in the Slayer's Path. I haven't seen or read anything about Slayer's Path getting something new in the patch.
Like I kinda get that the non-Escalation hunts (Hunting Grounds to be specific) won't be tied to Arkan and his L.A.D. that uses the charged Aether from the charged Escalation crystals, but this is taking a huge step without giving us detailed information of what to expect.
The nodes unlocked with these Fragments will apply in all parts of the game other than Trials.
There is no RNG involved in the Fragment drops. Players involved in the kill of a Primal Behemoth will received a flat amount of Fragments (killing higher level Primals rewards slightly more Fragments).
We're doing our best to be transparent and visible with the directions we go and decisions we make. We wont always hit that mark, and unfortunately sometimes we'll put out content that hasn't had a detailed breakdown ahead of time. We've had our intention to have a new seasonal talent tree outside of Escalation in our roadmap, and we hope that ultimately you enjoy what we've put out, but we'll always be open to feedback if it ends up not feeling great.
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