Build 19 - Steps of Torment and 2h melee now available!

v0.2.5.3 (b19)

Note: This build includes many behind-the-scenes changes to quests in preparation for Multiplayer. It is possible that some quest may become reset and can be completed again, although most instances of this have been fixed.
All quests should continue to play out exactly as they did before B19, so if you observe any quests behaving incorrectly, please report it as a bug.

Major New Features:

  • The Rogue-like Dungeon in Steps of Torment is now available! To unlock access to this dungeon, you must complete a quest line, which begins in Old Arkovia.
  • Two-Handed Melee Weapons are now available.
  • Tooltips have been overhauled to provide a cleaner overview of item and skill attributes.
  • Out-of-Combat Regeneration is now limited by a new resource: Constitution. This new healing mechanic is still experimental and will likely need further changes and / or balancing. We’re not quite sure we’re happy with it yet but we felt it was important to get B19 out, both so you all could start swinging those big two-handers but also so we can gather feedback on the current changes and begin the next phase of multiplayer implementation.
  • Constitution is an overlay on your health bar which indicates how much fast-regeneration you have remaining. If this pool runs out, you will not be able to regenerate rapidly until it is replenished
  • Constitution is refilled via Food Rations and Vital Essence, which can drop from enemies, breakable objects and chests. It is also reset upon gaining a level or dying.

Art:

  • Updated Item Art on Salazar’s Sovereign Blade.

Animation:

  • Two-handed melee animation set for player characters (20 animations)
  • New PC “Channeled Spell Attack” animations (begin, loop, end)
  • Updates to the PC “Run” animations for all weapon types
  • New NPC “Chat” animation
  • New Dranghoul “Run” animation
  • New Dranghoul “Walk” animation
  • New Groble “Walk” animation
  • New alternate Ghost “Spawn” animation
  • New Zombiehound “GetUp” animation
  • New Boneback “Death” animation
  • New Boneback “Get Up” animation

Game:

  • Increased Warden’s physical melee damage and reduced delay of phase 2 spike projectile attack
  • Reduced enemy OA in normal difficulty
  • Increased the quality of Gutworm’s loot chest
  • Bumped up difficulty on veteran a touch
  • Skeletons and Ghosts no longer bleed on death
  • The Depths of Old Arkovia side-quest now has an additional reward
  • All Armor now also states what type of armor it is (Light, Heavy, Caster) in order to clarify the variation in protection value and stat requirements
  • Shield block recovery time was reduced and block chance scaling increased.
  • Shield damage blocked increased.
  • 1h Melee weapon damage given a slight boost from tier 3 up.
  • Physical damage bonus from cunning has been equalized to match the magical damage bonus given by spirit. Physical was previously higher as an effort to offset enemy armor, however, it was decided that because physical damage is also much easier to amass, it didn’t need the stronger bonus multiplier.
  • Reduced the Scrapmetal and Iron Bits crafting cost of Enchanted items
  • Increased the quality of items generated from Enchanted blueprints and updated the description to better clarify that these recipes can generate items of Rare quality.
  • Increased the chance of getting rare affixes on Rare quality blueprints (ex. Ranger’s Badge).
  • Reduced the crafting cost of consumables
  • Increased the duration of crafted consumables, but also added a cooldown on their use
  • Revised what items can grant active skills (skills that are placed on your skill bar to use) in order to reduce skill bloat. In accordance with this, many granted skills were turned into auto-cast skills or moved to different items.
  • With a few rare exceptions, granted item skills can be found on: 2h-ed Guns and Melee Weapons, Amulets, Head Armor and Relics
  • Updated stats on Aethersteel Alloy, Bindings of Bysmiel, Corpse Dust, Dense Fur, Ectoplasm, Focusing Prism, Frozen Heart, Kilrian’s Shattered Soul, Leathery Hide, Molten Skin, Radiant Gem, Rigid Shell, Runestone, Sanctified Bone, Scaly Hide, Silk Swatch, Soul Shard, Spined Carapace and Viscous Venom components
  • Converted Vicious Spikes to be usable in All Weapons and changed its stats to be more appropriate for Pierce and Bleed dmg. Vicious Spikes now provides a new skill: Piercing Aura II
  • Venomous Fang component has been removed from the game. All crafting recipes that required a Venomous Fang now require a Vitriolic Gallstone.
  • Vitriolic Gallstone has had its stats updated to also appeal to melee Poison users. Acid Strike has been replaced with Poison Aura.
  • Wrathstone and Riftstone now grant new abilities: Aether Aura and Chaos Strike
  • Reduced the item level of Hallowed Ground and Dread Skull, making them more accessible in high-end areas such as Steps of Torment
  • Updated the crafting recipe for Radiant Gem
  • The following components are now primarily acquired via crafting (new blueprints have been added to loot tables). They can still drop as loot, but are much more rare: Aether Soul, Ballistic Plating, Blessed Steel, Focusing Prism, Haunted Steel, Leathery Hide, Mark of Mogdrogen, Restless Remains, Rotten Heart, Runestone, Sanctified Bone, Spined Carapace and Vengeful Wraith.
  • Adjusted stats on some Rare affixes
  • The Bloodreaper’s Glory set has had its stats adjusted
  • The Ornate Chestguard has been renamed to Nightstalker’s Chestguard. Its stats have been redesigned.
  • Slightly increased the effectiveness of dmg stats on 1h melee weapon affixes
  • Increased absolute Energy bonuses on gear
  • Increased absolute Energy Regeneration bonuses on most items, particularly on Magic items.
  • Increased the chance of generating % dmg bonus Suffixes on Off-Hands
  • Mastery Prefixes (+1 Skill) now also grant a small bonus relevant to the mastery they are boosting
  • Troll MI maces are now 2h-ed weapons. Existing 1h-ed versions are now legacy items and will never drop again. Troll Talisman blueprint has been updated to use the new 2h-ed version.
  • Demolitionist: Rebalanced Firestrike and Explosive Strike to make the base skill more desireable and tone down the mod’s AoE a bit. Firestrike got a %physical and flat fire damage increase and reduced energy cost. Explosive Strike %wpn dmg was scaled back and energy cost increased. Explosive Strike burn chance no longer scales but has a high base value and physical dmg slightly reduced.
  • Demolitionist: To emphasize fire damage more on the Firestrike line, the %fire dmg on Splinter was moved to Static Strike and flat fire damage was added to Splinter.
  • Soldier: Mehir’s Will now has increased regen scaling and the %health restored begins lower but scales up quickly to encourage more investment.
  • Soldier: Overguard’s bonuses begin a little lower and scale faster in the first few levels to encourage investment.
  • Soldier: Block Chance was removed from Overguard and Block Recovery removed from Veterancy to reduce redundancy and strengthen the role of each skill.
  • Soldier: %Physical damage scaling increased for Veterancy and it now also raises constitution.
  • Soldier: Slightly reduced flat physical damage on Cadance while increasing bleed damage on Fighting Form and reducing duration, so that it does more bleed damage over a shorter period.
  • Soldier: Markovian and Zolhan chance to be used starts higher and skill stats scale more significantly with levels.
  • Soldier: Reduced energy cost on Blade Arc.
  • Soldier: Cadence %wpn dmg now scales higher and physical scaling has been reduced to help create a more pronounced difference when using two-handed melee weapons.
  • Occultist: Increased Raven’s healing cooldown by 1 second
  • Occultist: Added 15% heal to Blood of Dreeg so that the Occultist has at least a modest emergency heal available from a directly controllable skill (as opposed to the sometimes clutch but not always reliable raven healing).
  • Occultist: Moved all %chaos dmg in Witchfire to the modifier and added %poison to the base skill to create a synergy with Dreeg’s Evil Eye. Increased flat chaos damage in the base skill.
  • Occultist: Bumped up poison and acid damages on Dreeg’s Evil Eye and modifiers while changing base skill physical to %weapon dmg. Removed poison from Vile Eruption and increased acid.
  • Occultist: Reduced Sigil of Destruction cooldown from 15 to 12 seconds.
  • Nightblade: Veil of Shadow and Nightchill have been reworked to hopefully make these skills more worthwhile. Veil has been reduced from 16 to 10 points max, OA reduction scales faster and higher and it now reduces total attack speed. Nighchill damage has been almost doubled and it now reduces pierce and cold resist.
  • Nightblade: Dual Blades now has a max level of 16 and allows damages to scale to a higher level.
  • Nightblade: removed % health regeneration from Shadow Dance
  • Health tonics now return 50% of health instantly and 50% over time.

wohoo downloading it now :smiley:

I saw it when i was playing Grim Dawn… there goes my sleep for this week. and also my exams :frowning:

also a good thing that i have been farming for blood of ch’ton for days, got 54 of them now xD

Well, very cool - didn’t expect the build :slight_smile:
Gonna try the new SoT and a build with 2h weapons.

Awesome, thanks guys.

Big build; nice folks. Thank you for all your hard work :slight_smile:

Been playing for a while with 2h weapons, this is awesome!

A big thanks for you guys, it’s incredible how the game is going better and better with each new builds.

I actually liked the constitution mechanic: needs a little bit of tweaking, but the idea is pretty solid. My only problem is that you have no control over it: you don’t chose when to use it or not (because sometimes you would have liked to just wait and rely on your life regen instead of using precious constitution :slight_smile: )

2h feels great, the early game is quite hard. Only regret: one of the hitting animation is clearly behind the others (all the new anim are great).

I’m really pleased with this game, thanks again guys :smiley:

Sounds good, noticed some pretty huge fps drops though. Dropping to 15 at times that it was 40+ in B18. I look into it more.

Nice Quest line :smiley: BUT after opening the gate i had a incredible LAG/FPS drop and coulnt move… gate was closed and i wasted my free key Q.Q

Amazing update. will check it out later tonight

Waiting for the download to complete. Thank you so much Crate for all your passion for this project. I’m sure you have long nights spent developing this game, allowing us to spend long nights playing it. This is how early access and crowd funding should work. To be honest, even if Grim Dawn somehow never gets released, I feel that I’ve got my money’s worth even before build 18.

Once again thank you! Only 110Meg to go…

This is a beefy update, awesome!

I’m a little concerned about this change. Though I will give this a shot and test it out with the new lowered block recovery by default in the shields.

Can we also get some clarification in how exactly Block Recovery reduction works?

I.e. if my shield block recovery is 2.5 seconds, and I have 50% block recovery reduction (what 12 points in Veterancy used to provide). Do I now block once every 1.5 seconds [2.5 * ( 1 - 0.5 )] or do I now block once every 1.667~ seconds [ 2.5 / ( 1 + 0.5 )]?

In my testing in build 18, it felt like the first option, and that meant with Veterancy and Overguard along with the Guardsmen’s Defender I could achieve a block recovery value of 100% and have a block recovery time of 0s (i.e. every single incoming attack would be blocked if I had 100% block chance, which I was at 98%).

zOMG it’s finally out! Damnit, I’m going to be driving home thinking about this now. :smiley:

Please, please, please, I hope the Squire’s Handguards blue prints are dropping now.

I have run through the 4th and 5th level of SoT, my first impression; holy hell i like the atmosphere and the traps that are placed around!

Furthermore i like the amount of champions you have to fight (i play on veteran) also extra recipes!! fuck yea.

and the final battle is really good, I had to run away for once haha

but overall i say this is a very nice build and i also like the new constitution, this will keep me for not running like an idiot towards the huge crowd that is awaiting me. Thumbs up to Crate, they did it again!!

This is a very good point and deserves a quote. Perhaps have constitution not kick in until you reach a certain low health threshold, or perhaps have it heal (and consume) much faster on low health and barely any when at high health.

Perhaps have constitution regen on your own life regen? That way it would never feel wasted I think, unless there’s a penalty applied but I think even that would be taken for granted.

Perhaps even have a calculation “If life regen would heal you to full from your current health in less than X (10?) seconds then don’t use constitution”?

Quite a few reasonably viable options there, perhaps even a combination of a few.

Woooooooo! Can’t wait :slight_smile:

Im not ready to venture in there just yet! I need to max my character since Im too afraid to die early on and not be able to go back in there :stuck_out_tongue:

Heh… was streaming when a viewer told me the build was released.

Overall first impressions are very positive, constitution will take some getting used to and didn’t get too far to say much but 2-handers seem quite powerful in the early game… 1-shotting instead of 3-4.

Will have a look at my replays but did Phantasmal Blades get some changes… it’s not in the notes :frowning:

I see there was a change done to tonics. The healing tonics are now 50% instead of 100% with a Heal over time mechanic after the initial burst. I don’t see this as documented in the notes?