Dawn of the Hunt - What We’re Working On

Many people are reporting that gameplay is feeling too slow. Sometimes this comes in the form of people saying that monster life is too high, or player damage is too low, or areas are taking too long. In this post we will talk about some of the things we have already done, and more of the changes we are planning on making.

Huntress Specific Concerns

One of the major concerns that we have seen for the Huntress is that a lot of the power of the class is locked behind the Parry mechanic, and some players do not wish to Parry. Getting Frenzy charges without Parry is an option available to the class later on, but there are no other early game options that don't involve Parrying.

We want to give early game players an option to get Frenzy charges without Parry, but we have to be very careful not to make this too easy and remove the rewards for doing the Parry combos.

In order to do this, we are adding a new Skill on the second row of the Spear skills called Cull the Weak. This skill is effectively the same as Killing Palm on the Monk, but for Frenzy charges. If a monster is in Culling Range, using Cull the Weak will charge towards the monster, kill it instantly, and give you a Frenzy charge. This skill should be patched in over the next few days.

We also want to improve the feeling of Parry more generally. Two issues we have identified are that in some cases it feels like you should Parry monsters but don't, and that in other cases you get Heavy Stunned in cases where you feel like you shouldn't. We are currently investigating improvements to these.

The other bit of feedback are players who don't want to enter melee range at all. While the primary role of the class is incentivising a ranged/melee hybrid playstyle, we do think we can improve on this type of gameplay somewhat while still incentivising using both types of attacks.

To make this type of gameplay feel better we are going to be buffing the speed of Spear throws generally, but especially Lightning Spear. The damage will remain the same, meaning that you will get approximately a 25% buff to DPS from using only Lightning Spear. Some other spear throws will receive slight speed increases too, but they generally have other mechanics that mean that attack speed on them is less relevant.

Player Minion Damage and Life

One of the areas of major balance adjustment in 0.2.0 was the minion life and damage curves for players. In the 0.1.1 endgame, minion characters were getting very out of control values mostly due to being able to significantly increase gem level on these gems.

We previously significantly reduced the growth of minion life and damage as these gems gain levels, and the intention was to mostly hit the top of the endgame, but it seems that this had an unintended effect on campaign play as well.

We are making a change to increase the damage and life that minions get during the campaign to be more similar to before, while still keeping the scaling nerfs that were introduced to the higher minion gem levels for the endgame.

Monster Life Too High

One of the first things we looked at when considering clearspeed concerns was the monster life curve. We found that monster life through most of the campaign after Act 1 was probably too high. We have made an adjustment to lower monster life by 25% through most of the campaign and this change has been deployed already.

A second issue we found was that the life bonus on Rare Minions was incredibly high. One of the reasons why this feels particularly bad is because these monsters are still White, but had more life than Blue monsters. This calibrates players' expectations incorrectly and makes Rare fights harder than they should be. This number has been set back to what it was in 0.1.0 which lowers rare minion life by about 60%. This change has also been deployed.

Large Area Sizes

Many players are reporting that areas feel like they are too large. Normally when this is the case, the main reason is due to other concerns such as monster life or player damage being incorrect, or just a lack of entertaining content in the area. However, we are checking to see if there are any outliers that players are spending too long in to see if any changes to area size need to happen.

In the meantime, we did notice that there are some areas that don't have sufficient checkpoints, so we are doing a pass of adding some more of these.

Crashes and Disconnects

On launch day we had a severe and common client crash in town. The "Failed to deserialise object" crash. This crash was fixed on the first day, but there are still other client and server crashes that remain.

Currently the number of client crashes is actually a bit lower than in 0.1.1 due to working around the somewhat common nVidia driver crash, but the rate of server side crashes is approximately 6 times higher, which results in you getting suddenly disconnected.

Thankfully, server side crashes are significantly easier for us to debug, and we believe that we should be able to resolve most of these within the next few days.

Of course, we will continue to work on client crashes as well, but as the primary crash we had in 0.1.1 is now resolved, we believe that we should be able to fix the remainder of these fairly quickly.

Quality of Life Features

We are additionally working on a few extra features that should be released relatively soon.

The first one is adding a system for Bookmarking locations on your Atlas map. This system will allow you to save locations with a name on the Atlas so you can find them later.

Another is adding Stash Tab Affinities for more item types including Socketables and Tablets, and updating the Flask Affinity to include Charms.

And another is adding a way to rebind Spectres and Tamed Beasts so that you can experiment with these options more easily.

Many people are reporting that gameplay is feeling too slow. Sometimes this comes in the form of people saying that monster life is too high, or player damage is too low, or areas are taking too long. In this post we will talk about some of the things we have already done, and more of the changes we are planning on making.

Huntress Specific Concerns

One of the major concerns that we have seen for the Huntress is that a lot of the power of the class is locked behind the Parry mechanic, and some players do not wish to Parry. Getting Frenzy charges without Parry is an option available to the class later on, but there are no other early game options that don't involve Parrying.

We want to give early game players an option to get Frenzy charges without Parry, but we have to be very careful not to make this too easy and remove the rewards for doing the Parry combos.

In order to do this, we are adding a new Skill on the second row of the Spear skills called Cull the Weak. This skill is effectively the same as Killing Palm on the Monk, but for Frenzy charges. If a monster is in Culling Range, using Cull the Weak will charge towards the monster, kill it instantly, and give you a Frenzy charge. This skill should be patched in over the next few days.

We also want to improve the feeling of Parry more generally. Two issues we have identified are that in some cases it feels like you should Parry monsters but don't, and that in other cases you get Heavy Stunned in cases where you feel like you shouldn't. We are currently investigating improvements to these.

The other bit of feedback are players who don't want to enter melee range at all. While the primary role of the class is incentivising a ranged/melee hybrid playstyle, we do think we can improve on this type of gameplay somewhat while still incentivising using both types of attacks.

To make this type of gameplay feel better we are going to be buffing the speed of Spear throws generally, but especially Lightning Spear. The damage will remain the same, meaning that you will get approximately a 25% buff to DPS from using only Lightning Spear. Some other spear throws will receive slight speed increases too, but they generally have other mechanics that mean that attack speed on them is less relevant.

Player Minion Damage and Life

One of the areas of major balance adjustment in 0.2.0 was the minion life and damage curves for players. In the 0.1.1 endgame, minion characters were getting very out of control values mostly due to being able to significantly increase gem level on these gems.

We previously significantly reduced the growth of minion life and damage as these gems gain levels, and the intention was to mostly hit the top of the endgame, but it seems that this had an unintended effect on campaign play as well.

We are making a change to increase the damage and life that minions get during the campaign to be more similar to before, while still keeping the scaling nerfs that were introduced to the higher minion gem levels for the endgame.

Monster Life Too High

One of the first things we looked at when considering clearspeed concerns was the monster life curve. We found that monster life through most of the campaign after Act 1 was probably too high. We have made an adjustment to lower monster life by 25% through most of the campaign and this change has been deployed already.

A second issue we found was that the life bonus on Rare Minions was incredibly high. One of the reasons why this feels particularly bad is because these monsters are still White, but had more life than Blue monsters. This calibrates players' expectations incorrectly and makes Rare fights harder than they should be. This number has been set back to what it was in 0.1.0 which lowers rare minion life by about 60%. This change has also been deployed.

Large Area Sizes

Many players are reporting that areas feel like they are too large. Normally when this is the case, the main reason is due to other concerns such as monster life or player damage being incorrect, or just a lack of entertaining content in the area. However, we are checking to see if there are any outliers that players are spending too long in to see if any changes to area size need to happen.

In the meantime, we did notice that there are some areas that don't have sufficient checkpoints, so we are doing a pass of adding some more of these.

Crashes and Disconnects

On launch day we had a severe and common client crash in town. The "Failed to deserialise object" crash. This crash was fixed on the first day, but there are still other client and server crashes that remain.

Currently the number of client crashes is actually a bit lower than in 0.1.1 due to working around the somewhat common nVidia driver crash, but the rate of server side crashes is approximately 6 times higher, which results in you getting suddenly disconnected.

Thankfully, server side crashes are significantly easier for us to debug, and we believe that we should be able to resolve most of these within the next few days.

Of course, we will continue to work on client crashes as well, but as the primary crash we had in 0.1.1 is now resolved, we believe that we should be able to fix the remainder of these fairly quickly.

Quality of Life Features

We are additionally working on a few extra features that should be released relatively soon.

The first one is adding a system for Bookmarking locations on your Atlas map. This system will allow you to save locations with a name on the Atlas so you can find them later.

Another is adding Stash Tab Affinities for more item types including Socketables and Tablets, and updating the Flask Affinity to include Charms.

And another is adding a way to rebind Spectres and Tamed Beasts so that you can experiment with these options more easily.