Addressing your Early Access Post-launch Feedback

Hi everyone. The launch weekend has been a blast. We've really enjoyed seeing all of you get your hands on the game and finally try out the project we have been working on for so long.

But now that the launch weekend is over it's time for us to look at the feedback and make some changes. There are lots more things coming. The list in this post are some of the things we felt needed to be more urgently addressed.

Some of these changes have already been deployed without a realm restart, others will be deployed in an upcoming patch.

Dodge Roll Changes

A lot of players have expressed frustration about being trapped in by monsters. While it is intended that monsters are able to trap and kill you, we felt that the frequency of this was a little too high.

We will be deploying the following changes in an upcoming patch:

• Player size is now set to Zero units while dodge rolling instead of One unit
• Some smaller monsters can now be pushed while dodge rolling. This includes monsters such as the Adorned Beetles in Keth.

This should result in getting trapped less often.

Note that you can still be trapped. A player size of a zero can still not phase through monsters, but it can get through even the smallest gap between them.

Checkpoint Changes

A lot of players have been reporting that it can be tedious to need to retread areas of maps in order to get back to objectives that they already found.

We will be deploying the following change in an upcoming patch:

• Clicking on a checkpoint will allow you to teleport to other checkpoints in the area that are explored on your minimap
• Checkpoints have been added to all entrances and exits of zones to allow for teleportation
• A Checkpoint has been added to the midpoint of the first Dreadnaught area

We will be making further adjustments to checkpoint positions as we continue to gather feedback.

Item Changes

One of the major problems that players have been experiencing is feeling that the game is not rewarding enough. This is an area that we have to be very careful when adjusting because it's very hard to reduce drops if we increase them by too much.

We have identified a few key areas that we believe will significantly improve the experience that players are having.

Rare Monster Changes

We felt that Rare monsters were not rewarding enough. This didn't affect the campaign as much because there are more Unique bosses, increasing the overall amount of drops, but it's especially noticeable when playing in the endgame where Unique monsters are less common.

In particular, the reward that you were getting for the increased difficulty of rares wasn't lining up.

We have deployed the following changes:

• Rarity bonus per rare mod has been doubled
• +10% Quantity bonus per rare mod
• Increased the chance of rare monsters inherently having more modifiers as you progress through endgame

These changes will cause rare monster rewards to naturally scale up as you get to higher levels because the number of mods a monster can have increases throughout the campaign and into endgame. In addition, many other forms of map juicing will indirectly cause rare monsters to have more mods as well, increasing the rewards of these other mechanics too. Also note the change below to make sure each map has a minimum number of rares which will also increase the average number of rare mods, and thus increasing drops further.

Currency Changes

We felt that players were not getting enough of certain currency either in the early game, or to sustain adding mods to maps.

We have deployed the following changes:

• Regal orb drop rates increased around 40%
• Disenchanting of six mod rares to give two regal shards instead of one.
• Lesser Jewellers orbs drop rates increased around 33%
• Reduced the drop rate of Chaos Orbs slightly as they are less valued and so that it doesn't consume so much of the "rare currency" drop pool. This causes currency such as Exalted Orbs to increase somewhat.
• Gemcutter's Prism drop rates increased by 500%
• Gemcutter's Prisms now increase quality on gems by 5% instead of 1%

Map Mod Changes

Like with rares, we felt that players were not being rewarded enough for the difficulty that was being added by map mods. We have significantly increased the value of all prefix map mods.

We have changed all map prefix mods, but some example changes we have deployed are:

• Rarity mods have been increased by 2.5x
• Quantity mods have had extra rarity added to them (This is now in a later patch)
• We removed the bottom tier of some mods
• You are much more likely to roll modifiers that affect drops or pack size rather than less useful mods

In addition, it has been identified that some areas are not being affected by the "Increased Number of Monster Packs" mod as they should be. We will be fixing these maps to work correctly in a later patch.

"Unlucky" Drop Protection

One of the major issues we have identified are outlier "unlucky" drops. A single Unique boss dropping badly, especially early on can significantly affect your character.

We have deployed the following changes:

• No more than 50% of an Unique monsters drops can be gold
• Act Bosses and Map Bosses will always drop at least 1 rare

The first of these changes is more significant than it first appears because players can't see the difference between "normal" and "rare" gold piles. You will get more equipment and currency items which can take more advantage of the rarity increases that unique monsters provide.

Click to Move

There was an issue where the "Move Only" command was namelocking. This would often result in your character confusingly attacking in an unexpected direction while holding down this action.

We have deployed the following change:

• Move Only no longer namelocks

Endgame Maps

A concern for players in endgame maps is accidentally missing Rare monsters. In addition, many maps did not have the number of rare monsters that they should have had.

We will be making the following changes in an upcoming patch:

• Rare monsters now appear on the minimap when there are 200 monsters remaining, instead of 50
• Many maps have had additional rare monsters added to them to make sure that there are a minimum number in every map type.

Over the coming weeks we will be continuing to work on map layouts and monster density issues in maps.

Conclusion

We will be posting patch notes for these changes when they're deployed. For a full list of what's just been deployed, check out the patch notes here.

There are still a lot more changes to come, these are just some of the changes that are fast for us to make. We will be continuing to monitor feedback and adjusting things as we go.