Proteus505

Legendary gear will be no different. You'll still need all the same parts minus the Arcstone. Legendaries will start more powerful than all other gear when you craft them, and they can be Power Surged to end game power just like all other gear, which brings them to +15 equivalent power.

Thanks for the feedback! Yes we are trying to find all the spots in our game where island wide effects need to be updated for the new hunt structure. We need to do a pass on the Bounties to account for this. We've found some interesting bugs now that we have many behemoths on island. For example, a lot of the behemoth effects like Riftstalker's umbral dimension and Stormclaw's lightning effect were affecting everyone on island even when they were fighting another behemoth someplace else.

For the release of Hunting Grounds, we won't support inviting someone into the hunt. Obviously this would be a better experience but we won't have time before launch so it's something we are thinking about for the future. But you are able to queue for another island while on a hunt, and still form parties on hunt. You can even party up with a friend and then queue up for the same island if you want and it'll transition to a new instance of that island.

On Iceborne, as I mentioned in...

You don’t need to but you’ll get more in the data migration if it’s level +15. The other part is that we are assigning tiers to all gear in the new system so some gear may get less powerful at its base crafting level until you Power Surge it.

No new cosmetics from Mastery in this release.

Yeah this is one of my biggest concerns. I know a lot of people in the same boat. We are still figuring this part out and trying to make it feel good for players.

Yeah it’s always tough changing things and trying to value the time investment players have put in.

You’ll want to upgrade as much as you can to +15 before the patch drops. If you don’t reach +15 it means you’ll have to grind more to unlock the materials to Power Surge.

For every +15 you will be given an Aetherheart as part of the patch which is the primary material needed to Power Surge. We have another material, Aether Sparks (name not finalized) that will gate your Power Surging and we will likely grant you those for gear that is lower than +15 but using those Sparks will require grinding weapon class XP.

You will have a way to swap load outs on island. It won’t be unlimited and we are still tuning things but the idea is that you can swap gear occasionally depending on what you’re seeing on island.

It will be going away so I encourage you to upgrade gear as much as possible because we will only look at gear levels for the migration and won’t compensate for raw materials.

With that said, we aren’t removing it from your inventory. It’s always possible we revive the currency later on for some other purpose but that’s too far off to depend on.

It will be primarily a new Merit currency that you will use to unlock content and upgrades on the Slayer’s Path.

I posted above with more details.

Behemoths will scale based on the number of players in the same combat area so if 2 players are fighting one behemoth and 2 other players are somewhere else on island, they won’t affect the fight. We have some UI indicators to show how behemoths are scaling during a fight but we are still finalizing those.

It will work the same way as before. You will be able to Power Surge legendary weapons to take them to the equivalent of +15. We had talked about only allowing you to bond to another Power Surged weapon but that likely won’t happen and you’ll be able to bond to any level weapon.

Yeah this is a tricky one for us honestly. The new system doesn’t really line up with the old so we’re still debating what to give players for their time investment in gear for levels +10 to +14.

Yes this is all accurate. Orbs and Arcstone are indeed being removed although gear requirements aren’t finalized yet so we could always change our design a bit. Power Surging a piece of gear will be equivalent to bringing it directly to the power level of a +15 weapon. We have ideas for building on top of the Power Surging mechanic but that will come later.

We’ve decided to remove the base lantern capacitor entirely. We are adding a small amount of power back into Slayer’s Path and the elemental bonuses on gear but it will likely be equivalent to less than 50 power. We also have some brand new really time consuming end game upgrades in the Slayer’s Path that will be unlocked as you Reforge your weapon classes a bunch. Every weapon class will have its own perk. We will have to keep an eye on this over time so we don’t introduce another power creep vector. We’re hoping to get Heroic Escalation and some new Hunting Grounds end game content out before that becomes a problem th...

I’m not sure what you mean by equivalent but this is a substantial rework to the way the gear upgrade system works. We will only have a single end game upgrade for all gear now rather than 15 levels that don’t feel very meaningful. Getting this final upgrade will require you to collect a new Aetherheart material which comes from leveling up weapon classes, any weapon class, and Reforging that weapon class (resetting it back to level 1).

Yeah we tend to agree. We're going to forgo cell nerfs for this release and re-evaluate after the lantern capacitor change.

After reading a lot of the feedback, I think we've decided to forgo any nerfs on cells at this point and just focus on the base lantern capacitor for the time being. As a lot of people have pointed out, we shouldn't change too much at once. We are going to buff a bunch of underutilized cells though.

Yeah we've talked about this a lot. We want to remove all the immunity effect cells from the game and bake them into elemental set bonuses. Not sure on timeline though but that's the thought right now.

A lot of your power is going to come from your level in the new system, and you'll be able to level up fighting any behemoth. You will gain XP faster by facing tougher opponents.