Dauntless Dev Tracker

1: Yes, this is the case. Attack speed and Movement Speed now go hand in hand, and sources of one are sources of both. Max Stamina and Stamina recovery speed are also tied together now. Weapons should be better about taking advantage of the bigger stamina pools.

2: While we will go into this more when we get to a blog on Armour and Perks, we are removing skill tiers from Perks. Perks will now be active, or inactive, with different perks having different thresholds. Predator for example, a powerful and desirable perk will likely have an activation threshold of 6. Medic meanwhile, as a party supporting utility ability would only require 2 points to activate. Having less or more than the activation threshold has no benefit. Part of this is to ensure we can make both weaker and more powerful perks, but balance them meaningfully against each other.

3: This is almost certainly going to affect balance, we'll be doing extensive playtesting before this launches, and continue...

This would not be possible. Any stacks gained above 10 would only refresh the stack, but not add beyond it. When looking at your build, we hope you'll consider the sources of CRITICAL and how reliably they will let you reach 10 stacks. Once you feel your build is in a place it will hit that cap comfortably, use some of that Perk economy to gain stacks of MIGHT, or SPEED, or even VITALITY!

That is a part of it. But part of it too was just about ensuring all buffs that grant same or similar effects now channel into one singular source that can be 'keyworded' around, to be used by Weapons, behemoths, amps and more. This opens up development opportunities, and gives player clarity.

Oh that's good feedback, thanks for dropping it. They're intended to be fun - since there are so many seasons, we decided to have fun with some of them.

Next season's titles are

Top 5
Top 100
Participator

But after that we get back into the cool with

Savior
Guardian
Warden

Escalations are definitely a challenge, as the source of by far the most random icons that end up in the bar up there. This is on me, I made almost every Escalation amp in the game!

But where possible we are still converting them into the new system, otherwise, we're doing a lot more 'action -> reaction' based changes. So for example, there is currently a fairly unnecessary buff stack that shows up while you have Thunderous Mantle that builds up while sprinting, but this can be clearly shown by the appearance of the lightning VFX around the character to show you have reached enough sprint time to get the damage bonus.

A lot of this is about cleaning up that buff bar so that it only contains actually relevant information, and all of that information is immediately understandable.

I see it now - be sure to drop the bug report or the feedback in the first message so we know it's from a player!

These are no longer separate Stacks. Both of these add to SPEED, and SPEED is universal. If your Assassin's Fury adds a stack of SPEED, it will refresh the duration and increase the SPEED count by 1. The system no longer cares which perk was the source, nor does it deal in separate cooldowns and durations for every stack. You have one stack that increments and decrements one at a time.

If the duration for a SPEED stack is 30 seconds (defined by SPEED, not by individual perks) and you have 6 stacks of SPEED, then when that duration ends, you will drop to 5 SPEED, and the countdown will begin again back at 30 seconds, rather than the whole stack falling off at once.

Hopefully this is clear!

easy UI change.. the cursed sentence haha

very cool ideas though

Wherever possible, all current Perks are being converted into this system yes. Some perks do things outside of this, for example, Strategist which grants shields after dodging through an attack. But any Perk that impacts your Damage, Move Speed, Attack Speed, Crit chance, Crit Damage, Stamina, Stamina Regen, Damage Resistance, etc will be converted.

By default right now all temporary buffs last 30 seconds per stack. That is to say, stacks fall off one at a time. If your at 10 MIGHT (say 4 permanent, and 6 temp stacks), after 30 seconds one stack will fall off and you'll now be at 9 MIGHT. This will continue to tick off 30 seconds at a time until you fall to 4.

1) Yes. We just had a fairly final conversation today about what these effects will be, but we're not ready to share them yet.

2) All weapons will have the ability to weapon swap.

3) Yes, though Cells will serve more of a 'getting over the line' purpose in this update. A larger amount of your perk points will come from the gear you wear, all slots will be prismatic, and Cells will be the last boost to nudge perks the extra point or two needed to activate them. If you are familiar with Monster Hunter, Decorations are a good reference point here.

Hey thanks for all the feedback and thoughts here. It's appreciated.

As for Gauntlet seasons, we'll be re-thinking rewards for Gauntlet once this lands. Perks will be much more tied to armour rather than cells in the rework, we'll want to keep injecting new Perks into the game, and maybe this will mean new armour each Gauntlet Season, or something else entirely. No answer to this yet and we probably won't put too much thought into it till we launch this patch!

Hi! In addition to these systemic changes, we're also working on new enemies including behemoths, new gear, new cosmetics, and a returning but upgraded game mode!

Classic cosmetic content, all cosmetic content, will certainly be returning as well.

Pulse is still under review and may be one of the perks that doesn't survive this change. We'll go into more detail later, but most perks are being reworked to 'on or off', rather than 6 levels of different values. Pulse is one of the few Perks in the game that strongly values having those 6 levels of values because different weapons have different wants. I have not yet decided how to handle this Perk in particular. As for how it works with the new buff system, it wouldn't be changed from what it is if we keep it, and I plan to try to.

We're usually watching threads here and trying to keep up in the discord to see bug reports. You can also find user "danielle" on the official dauntless discord - our community manager - and let her know what you've found.

This is both. While we are re-working large parts of the system, we are also adding new content. New weapons are in development, with the Bow planned for shortly after this large patch, and the Behemoth known as Crudge is in process. New content is definitely part of this plan.

I do suspect that the three offensive buffs will generally be more popular than the defensive buffs, but work is still being done to find a balance to make sure that defensive buffs feel like they make a meaningful and worthwhile contribution. In part this is being done through the new weapons and how they interact with the buffs.

The goal is to encourage more variety in viable options, for sure. Of course, in a game with perfect dodging - there will always be players who can avoid every attack so defense and health are less helpful to them. They'll likely find good uses for things like endurance and speed.

But if you're like me and a heroic escalation keystone hits you at least a few times each hunt - a little extra defense is awesome. or, if you want to support friends in a challenging fight, spreading support buffs could be really fun.

A few reasons for the damage cap. Firstly, there will still be cases that go outside the damage cap. For example, one of the talents on Ardent Cyclone increases the damage of Ardent Cyclone by 20%. This is in addition to your MIGHT stacks. Second, as Dauntless stands right now, there's no reason not to run Glass Cannon, it's not an option, it's the only build there is. While there are many factors that go into this, and we're addressing a lot of them, part of this is on us for getting out of control with how many sources of bonus damage that can all be put together we've added over the years. You'll certainly still be able to make Glass Cannon builds. The Hunger with Revenant Omnicell for example will be a definitively glass cannon build, dealing massive damage while riding the line of nearly dead.

Omnicells are not changing significantly in this, though places where they would add damage bonuses, or speed bonuses, or critical for example will just now be using the new buff...

Those status conditions still exist without change. You can be chilled or wounded or corrupted or burning etc.

It's not yet complete.

Currently you can't see teammates - but that's a really good point, especially at high level content if you're trying to maximize upside without being wasteful, knowing where everyone else is at would be super helpful. On the other hand, could get crowded on screen so.. certainly something we should think about!