[2019] BFP #1: Patch Notes 0.5.0

BFP #1 is here and raring to go! Patch 0.5.0 will go live on 11/07 at 07:30 UTC. Downtime is 2.5 hours from 05:00 UTC.



Patch 0.5.0
BFP #1
“We are extremely excited to finally bring you the very first of our planned updates which we have worked so hard on over the last few weeks. Every single team member, from game design, to art and programming, all the way to QA went absolutely full-throttle in order to bring you the kinds of new features you can get really excited about. Of course, this is just the beginning of our BFP series, and we plan on making each BFP live up to its name. For now, we hope you’ll have fun picking and choosing different abilities for your heroes, complementing them with brand new items and just all-round wreaking havoc across the Land of Rod.

A lot of exciting and new features await you in this patch. From new hero abilities to new items and crafting, we truly believe that the upcoming changes will completely change the way you play Pagan Online.

However, the unintended and unfortunate consequence of these changes is the wiping of player progress. Big systemic changes like these have both serious and sometimes hard to predict consequences on players’ save games. After testing, in order to avoid the individual mayhem that these changes would introduce (such as the permanent corruption of the save file), we’ve opted for the safe option for all players.

In our minds, with our current technical structures in place, this was the equivalent of a pretty big failure that, as explained previously, we wanted to avoid it by all means. Although we initially didn’t plan for overhauls so big that they may introduce such a huge wipe, both player feedback and our own lessons proved that changes like these were necessary.

That being said, we want to extend the biggest thank you we can to all of our community, both veteran and new, for staying with us on this journey. Below, you can find all the details on our newest features which will, hopefully, make you fall in love with Pagan Online all over again.

As compensation for the progress lost and in order for you to have a great week back playing the brand new Pagan Online, we are unlocking our three starter heroes for all of your accounts. You will also get a Hero Soul and 150 shards for each of our heroes (for a total of 1200 shards!). As a result, when you launch your game, you will NOT go through the Tutorial but you will join the Pantheon as Kingewitch. Play the very first quest of the campaign to unlock your Hero Forge and then you can find all your heroes there!

Have fun – we are just warming up.”

- The whole entire Pagan Online team

HEROES & THE ABILITY TREE
By popular demand, we are introducing the first version of the long-awaited hero build customization aka the Ability Tree. Our intention is to make a robust system for abilities that is long-term scalable. We pushed hard for this first version to make it into the 0.5.0 build and it needs to be said that this is not the final version by any means. We plan to work mainly on three things;

1) User Experience – this is only the first iteration with a basic user interface and some glitches to it. We plan to work more on clarity and overall polish such as visual effects.
2) Balance – a lot more numbers are introduced to the game. The balance is not perfect and will be something that we will work on constantly.
3) New Abilities – we will be adding new abilities in next patches to expand build options for all Heroes.

With that said, we are happy to let you try the ability tree and make some over the top OP builds.

Ability Tree System

• All abilities for all heroes were reworked to fit into the new Ability Tree system

• Earn a potency point with each level-up of a hero and use it to either unlock a new ability or to enhance an already unlocked ability

• Every ability in the tree can be leveled up to level 3 with Potency points (near future plans include having gear that can level up abilities even further, up to Level 8)

• Every ability has up to three different bonuses. Bonuses are either new properties that can be added onto the ability or they are bonuses to already existing ability parameters

• Every ability has up to three Special Modifiers. These modifiers further alter the ability itself

• Primary Attacks – these have special modifiers only

• Secondary Attack (default key: RMB) and Defensive Ability (default key: LShift) cannot be upgraded or modified at this point

• Passive Abilities – cannot be upgraded or modified currently (plans include having upgradable passives and even additional new passives)

Hero Balance and New Abilities
Every hero gets two brand new abilities in this patch (with more coming in the next patches). Below are descriptions for basic abilities only (play and find out more about bonuses and modifiers).

Kingewitch

• Flamestrike

An axe swing that unleashes a wave of fire, hitting all enemies in a line.

• Judgment of Svarog

Summon the divine banner of Svarog from the skies which creates a divine area, inflicting low damage over time and granting protection for allies.

Anya

• Altar of Gore

Impale single enemy on a blood spear and make a blood altar out of it. Enemy is stunned for the duration and receives continuous damage while all allies in the radius leech health.

• Blood Spikes

Summon blood spikes from the ground to impale enemies, inflicting stun and low damage over time.

Istok

• Rolling Mountain

Charge in a target direction, dealing massive damage and stunning the first target hit

• Sacred Ground

Create a protective area on the ground that grants healing and damage resist bonuses to all allies.

Morokh

• Limbo

Create a dome that traps enemies in another reality, greatly slowing time and reducing movement, attack and projectile speed. All characters outside the Limbo are unaffected by characters inside the Limbo. Characters can enter the Limbo at all times

• Decay

Corrupt targeted ground causing damage and movement speed slow over time to all enemies.

Lukian

• Lightning Wall / Fire Wall

Lightning Wall (LMB) – creates a wall of lightning that deals damage and stuns all enemies that pass through.
Flame Wall (RMB) - creates a wall of fire that deals damage and applies burn to all enemies that pass through.

• Lightning Disciple / Fire Disciple

Lightning Disciple (LMB) – summon a lightning spirit that follows you and periodically attacks nearby enemies with lightning beams.
Fire Disciple (RMB) – summon a lightning spirit that follows you and periodically attacks nearby enemies with fireballs.


Valeria

• Smoke Bomb

Throw a smoke bomb that deals low physical damage and blinds all enemies in radius

• Chakram

Throw a chakram that travels at moderate speed in a zig-zag direction it is cast and damages enemies it goes through.

Dameer

• Ring of Thorns

Summon a Ring of Thorns that deals damage and slow all enemies

• Feral Souls

Summon a forest wolf spirit to fight for you.

Masha

• Own the Stage

Create a zone on the ground, making yourself and all allies in it immune to Crowd Control. If you are standing in the zone at the end of the duration, an explosion is created that damages enemies

• Tendon Slash

Crouch down, slicing enemies in a circle and making them more vulnerable for a short while. Vulnerable enemies receive more damage from all sources.

STATS & ITEMIZATION
We’ve revamped our stat system with the removal of some stats and the addition of brand new ones. These changes are meant to allow for different attributes to be viable within same character builds and to switch emphasis from building only damage to building more defensive stats.

Removal of Evasion & Chance to Dodge

• The Evasion & Chance to Dodge stat has been removed from the game.

• The reasoning behind this is that Evasion as a stat didn’t make enough sense in a game like Pagan Online – the dodging part of the gameplay was meant to come from using controls and real-time dodging, so having an evasion stat was not congruent with this intention.

• Chance to Dodge will remain a part of certain heroes’ kit (such as Masha’s passive) and will probably reappear in the future on certain characters as a spell bonus or a spell modifier.

Critical Damage Bonus

• Critical Spell Damage Bonus and Critical Attack Damage Bonus have been unified and all characters now benefit from the Critical Damage Bonus stat

• Can be gained from boosting the Strength attribute or as a stand-alone roll on items and recipes.

Critical Damage Reduction & Critical Damage Reduction Bonus

There is a new defensive stat which mitigates the damage you take from critical hits. For example, if you have 50% of Critical Damage Reduction, you can expect that 50% of critical damage from enemies’ hits won’t affect you.

• You will still be hit with the entirety of the base damage that the enemy deals, so only the critical part of their hits is mitigated

• Critical Damage Reduction will appear on Charms with a base value of 5%

• Critical Damage Reduction Bonus can be gained from boosting Dexterity as a stand-alone roll on items and recipes.

Astral Shield & Astral Shield Bonus

• New defensive stat which appears on defensive items instead of Evasion

• Works as a shield, which regenerates when heroes don’t take damage for a certain amount of time

• Astral Shield Bonus can be gained from boosting Intelligence as a stand-alone roll on items and recipes.

Bonuses to Max Resists

• Bonus to Cold, Sunfire, Poison or Lightning resist can be found as stats on Wards

• These bonuses increase the resists over the set cap for each of the resists

• Due to UI issues, these stats may appear as 0 on certain tier 1 items, although their value is actually 0.75% (the UI doesn’t show decimals correctly).

Item Changes

• Base weapon value has been rebalanced – weapons of high tiers now do more damage than before

• Base Wards, Charms and Tomes drop with either Armor Rating or Astral Shield, not both

• Only base Charms have two stats by default – Astral Shield and Critical Damage Reduction

• Legendary items have been rebalanced to reflect the changes in the stat system

• Legendary rings and amulets have been added.

CRAFTING & RECIPES Additionally, crafting is going to be less of an obligatory factor in the upcoming update, with the removal of Craftsman Levels and the decreased rate of recipe drops. However, players who do enjoy crafting will be able to play around with different recipes and their stats.

• Crafting level has been removed

• Recipes now come with a set of guaranteed and random stats

• Guaranteed stats of recipes are no longer randomly rolled, but specifically designed for each recipe

• The type of guaranteed stat doesn’t change while reforging – only their values change

• Random stats can be gained or changed whenever you reforge crafted items

• Dropped items can’t be reforged anymore

• Stat values don’t increase with rarity – only the number of guaranteed stats does

• Stat values change with base item tier and power level – the more powerful the base item, the more powerful the stats

• Recipes now drop much less frequently – together with the removal of the crafting level, this change is meant to move away the focus of itemization from crafting to drops

• Recipes don’t have a tier or power level anymore – this means that you can use the same recipe on any item you like, regardless of its power level.

GAME BALANCE Overhauling crafting and itemization, as well as adding brand new skills, deemed rebalancing enemies and drops necessary. Apart from these changes, we’ve added some quality of life improvements – those of which players have been asking for for a while (hint: just don’t move too fast). As always these balance changes are an iterative process, and may be tweaked in the future.

• Base movement speed for heroes and enemies has been increased, so dodging enemies’ abilities is easier, even when attacking

• Items of non-base rarities are more prominent now

• Gold drops has been significantly nerfed over all tiers and enemy power levels

• Corresponding systems have also been rebalanced (item and recipe sell value, craft and reforge price, Hunts reroll price)

• All enemies and bosses have been rebalanced

• Custom attributes which deal elemental damage now only benefit from weapon damage and corresponding elemental damage (e.g. lightning strikes on Divine Executioner deal more damage the more lightning damage your character has, but doesn’t benefit off of physical or poison damage).

STORY: ACT VI As promised, the new act is finally here! Our narrative designers worked hard to bring you the new chapter of Land of Rod in its most polished state possible. We sincerely hope you’ll enjoy the lore-galore as much as we do (and that you don’t get seasick).

• Act 6 has been added to the game

• The story continues as heroes search for the missing Gods, fighting a brand new boss at the end of Act VI.

UI & QoL IMPROVEMENTS Our UI artists and programmers were very focused on the functionality of the Ability Tree adidtion, however, they still managed to sneak in a couple of quality of life improvements when it comes to UI.

• Reforge screen has been visually improved

• Esc in Pantheon now opens the Options menu

• Items, when right clicked, now go to the current Stash page, not the page with an available slot

• With every Legacy rank increase a new screen will be shown in Pantheon – Legacy Rank Up

• Player Profile panel has been visually updated.