Update 8 is currently scheduled to arrive Tuesday August 20!

Update 8: Quality of Life 

The team at Echtra has spent the last milestone almost fully focused on Quality of Life improvements and clearing out our bug list. Sometimes you just need to clean up all the dust in the workshop before you get back to expanding the frontier. Update 8 has a few smaller features like Difficulty Selection, a reimagining of a Dusk Mage skill, and major progress on the Gamepad experience - but mostly it’s just cleaner, more stable, and a lot more polished than before. With this work caught up for Update 8, the team is heads down on a fresh batch of features and content to put out in Update 9. Enjoy!

Features

Difficulty Selection

We have added a difficulty system for players who seek a more challenging and demanding combat experience. Difficulty is set on a per-character basis and can be changed at any time. When difficulty is set higher monsters begin to deal a lot more damage, and take slightly less damage from the player. Higher difficulty settings also grant the player a Luck buff which increases their personal item drop rate. 

To prevent cheesing dungeons, private instance difficulty can only be lowered, never raised. Players who want to play a dungeon at a higher difficulty will need to change their character’s setting and enter a fresh instance. Private instances will be set to the lowest difficulty of any player who enters, so when playing in a party be sure to coordinate. 

Players in the same public area will interact with monsters at their own personal difficulty setting, and receive loot at their personal Luck rate. 

Quality of Life Improvements

• Character Select screen now sorts characters by most recently played at the top.

• The Fort Build menu now goes back to the list view when the player changes the sub-category.

• Improved Skill Menu navigation when using Gamepad. 

• Added gamepad support for scrolling on UI screens.

• Improved gamepad experience to better target enemies when non-enemy targets like breakables are in close proximity. 

• Improved Skills menu navigation being difficult to control when using a Gamepad

• Items are now repopulated after leaving an area with items laying on the ground and then warping back.

• Player characters are now prevented from vibrating in difficult navigation situations.

• Player can now use a potion if their health is full but their pets is not

• Quests for another frontier shouldn't show outside of town in the tracker. This change makes all quests show in the fort too. Tutorial, weekly and daily quests show everywhere.

• Dramatically reduced the time for quest status to load after travelling. 

• Trait display table cleaned up. This affects the player stats UI. Traits for health on kill, health on hit, summoning minions, and minion capacity all collapsed into fewer rows.

• Added friends context UI actions to chat widget.

• The welcome screen no longer shows more than once per session

Class Changes

Dusk Mage

• Reimagined Skill: Radiant Blast

  • Light Skill. Blast enemies with Light. Deals 25% weapon damage and infuses enemies with Light energy for 6s, allowing you to kill them to unleash a hail of bolts that deal an additional 25% weapon damage per hit. 

  • Synergy bonus: +Damage to Radiant Blast / + Dark Spears duration.

  • 10 points in Dark Skills required.

• Reduced the amount of synergy bonuses granted by Dusk Mage skills Holy and Unholy bolt, by half. 

• Revised the Dusk Mage's buff when fully charged with light power, halving its mana regeneration rate. The result is that you still have plenty of mana, but it's not impossible to drain the bubble at all.

• Lowered Energy Spike's damage from 20% weapon damage to 10%, increased mana cost from 2 to 2.5 per cast, and decreased it's per level total damage bonus with 12 points from 40% to 30%. It was too strong.

Railmaster

• Increased the base train car shoot skill damage from 15% weapon damage to 25% weapon damage by default. Added tooltip to indicate the damage the lead car passively does per shot.

• The Railmaster Train's default turret has a slightly longer range and can shoot much more frequently.

• Inverted the math that was checking whether Pound would stun to make it function as stated.

• Updated Railmaster track buffer art.

• Updated Railmaster Shield Car description to reflect the duration of Major Shield (the buff players get when walking out of the activated shield while it's up).

Forged

• Forged's Servo-Driven Uppercut was adding its per level bonus directly, resulting in over 100% chance to stun. This was always meant to work as a multiplier, which it does now. Lowered overall base chance to stun too. Starts at 15%, gets up to just over 30% with all points. 

• Reduced the amount of synergy bonuses granted by Forged skills Rapid Strike and Rapid Fire by half.

Tuning

• Set the skill-enhancing affixes to be able to appear on level 4+ weapons of quality magic or higher.

• Re-tuned harvesting interactions to all take as close to 3.5 seconds as possible.

• Increased damage affixes (primary and secondary) for legendary weapons to be at a minimum stronger than the maximum damage of rare damage affixes for two levels.

• Fixed an issue where summon procs could keep spawning minions and destroying your previous spawns without giving them time to do anything.

• Maxed out attack speed bonus at 60% regardless of gear. It's a hard cap.  

• Lowered rolls for attack speed bonus by about 10% across all rarities. Made it so no item can double roll attack speed, resulting in ludicrously high rolls on a single item.

• Reduced the values at which the Major Shield duration affix can roll.

• Enabled vs. Netherim defensive affixes to rarely drop on global (physical) armor as secondary affixes.

• Increased cooldown for Blood Drinker Spinning Blade skill from 6s to 8s. Decreased chance to spawn blood pool from 25% to 15% when killing a bleeding enemy.

• Maxed out slow on enemies at -50% movement speed regardless of skill or gear combinations.

Monsters

• Moved the Skeletal Archers to first appear at level 8.

• Increased the hit points of stone elementals.

• Increased Goblin Gunner damage.

• Reduced the damage per second from Toxic champion affix poison pools.

• Undead no longer spawn throughout the goblin frontier at night. They are now restricted to specific dungeons meant for them, except for any specific one-off PoI encounters.

• Global monsters can now spawn into all Hyvid frontier areas.

• Increased the defense buff from Hyvid Armor Crystals.

• Revised monster spawning in the Hyvid frontier to be largely Hyvid monsters, but also a minority of more global monsters.

• Increased the hit points of Netherim Spellbreakers and Netherim Spellslingers.

• Set all Hyvid public areas to have their triggered spawners check players' current drama before spawning.

• Added celebration sfx to Wideload death.

• Adjusted overkill to require 150% total target damage for direct damage skills and 75% total target health for DoTs. Bumped up overkill chance to 60% in those circumstances

• Bosses should no longer over-target pets when they should be targeting the player.

• Netherling gethit root motion was not enabled. get hit should now play cleanly. Netherling now quickly hit back and recovers into idle root position. 

• Switched all netherim to only spawn via a magical netherim portal.

• Goblin Quenchers now spawn at one or two points during the Wideload and Strongtusk boss fights and drop a potion when defeated. 

• Juicy Hyvid Fliers now spawn in the middle of the Krronk boss fight and drop a potion when defeated. 

• Added Non-blood GIB VFX.

• Portal and spawn vfx for Netherim Brutes, Warriors, and Spellbreakers

• Increased the amount of incoming player damage that is reduced to bosses and champions the more nearby players there are: 2 players: 60% damage; 3 players: 40% damage; 4+ players: 30% damage

• Added longer anticipation to Goblin rider charge abilities. Updated Phasebeast version as well.

• Fixed the Goblin Bomber to play the correct animation when they explode.

• Added longer Rider anticipation to Yapper with hair, ears and cape. 

• Made many monsters now able to play their get hit animations more often

• Goblin Brute turns cleanly to face player and get hit .

• Added Stone Elemental gib variant.

• Yapper now defaults to his more aggressive posture. No Smeagol, all Gollum.

• Reduced the loot from Yapper.

• Increased Rotgord's health dramatically to make him less of a push-over.

• Set certain monsters to be not eligible for pack monster affixes (mostly goblin hounds and riders). Set pack monster affixes to not be valid for unique champions.

General

• The dragonling now sits on a perch in character select.

• In character create, added manual focus to sequences, adjusted owl foot placement and added owl fly off.

• Updated lighting in character create screen to be more neutral. 

• Relic weapons on the character select screen now turn all the way around instead of oscillating.

• Added "Create New Hero" slot for the character create list panel.

• Pet perch in character select now only appears when in use.

• Character Create updated with NPC background characters. DOF issues fixed. Nosy Alpaca doesn't walk up to dog selection screen anymore.

• Changed the style of the create character button so that it looks like part of the list.

• Adjusted lighting on characters in character create.

• Revised text in the "Unlocking Skills" help widget.

• Duskmage footsteps added in character create when walking to pet.

• Darkened default hair colors.

• Players can no longer move during a cinematic.

• New shrine VFX for poison and fire defense shrines.

• Added animated claw props to several infested forest levels.

• Added vfx to infested vents.

• Increased variety of mapworks dungeons to 8 goblin and 8 hyvid.

• Adding hole to haunted well level and cleaning up prop.

• Haunted well prop: Recolored candles.

• Added appropriate breakables and removed tons of props that won't be seen and don't add to the intro experience.

• The shared stash now plays the correct animation when you operate it.

• Updated reliquary model, replaced the temp art with the real deal.

• New reliquary fort prop icon.

• Added gamepad support to combo boxes. 

• The options menu and video settings can now be used with the gamepad.

• Gamepad now works on Frontiers Traders Store UI.

• The feedback button now hides on the HUD when the gamepad is active. Added a feedback button to the in-game menu.

• Added descriptions to the raw, refined and rare resources.

• New Devil Pipe Focus FX for each element affix [Fire, Poison, Electric, Water, Ice ] 

• Added Antidote potion VFX

• Updated Corrupted Hyvid Crystal's description to communicate what it does.

• Made NPC guards untargetable, so players don't confuse them with monsters.

• Screeching stun pet skill now indicates it's stun chance -- 35%.

• The UI will now explain what to do when you have too many pets.

• Pets can now display a rarity in the UI.

• Revised the tooltips for Pet: Battlecry and Pet: Defensive Posture to be more similar to each other and mention "allies" instead of just players.

• Prefixed all account quests with "Account:" in the quest title.

• Revised Kenik's intro dialog to only talk about Yapper, not Wideload.

• Updated Relic Weapon mini-help pop-up to specify "claiming" the weapon.

• Made it so you can destroy the Blood Drinker Relic Core, but not sell it, and it has no sell value.

• Adding new tag text "Relic Weapon Active Skills" so that when a player gets a synergy bonus to these skills it displays properly in the stats panel.

• Revised the status effect tooltips for Bleeding from Blood Drinker's activation skill (was Deep Wounds); Burning from Blazing champion/area affix; Battle Cry pet skill; Poisoned from Noxious champion/area affix.

• Made class description revisions to character select screen.

• Turned breadcrumb text of the Character Select UI  into buttons. Removed arrow between the buttons.

• New minimap boss icon that replaces the question mark.

• The map opened when clicking on a waypoint is now a separate widget that only has "Waypoint" in its navigation header. This makes it less confusing that it looks the same as the map in the character menu, which does not allow you to warp, and you can no longer tab over to "Inventory" and then come back to map and be unable to warp.

• Several improvements to UI panel icons and transitions.

• Moved resource tab to the far right in the inventory.

• There is no longer an X button on character select/create. Instead the menu/options button is accessible through the whole flow and contains a quit option.

• The names displayed over player's heads are now their character's name instead of their account.

• Minimap party pins update. All party pins are now blue.

• Revised the text of the skills help menu to be more clear about how skill points are spent.

• Cleaned up Help panel and updated close button for consistency.

• Added nameplates over the pets in character create. Hooked up the pet name/description to the UI.

• Changed "Party" to "Social" in the options key binding list.

• Player nameplates no longer appear when a modal UI is visible. Adjusted nameplate height so they're less likely to go off screen when zooming in.

• Cleaned up the map vendor UI to look less like a crafting panel.

• Added Feedback button to the main character Create HUD.

• Hid title of resources and relic core to match all other inventory elements. 

• Updated player map marker art.

• Mapworks dungeons can now be assigned name spawn rows to generate random names.

• Lock numbers no longer show on relic skills that are unlocked by level.

• Revised all the status effect tooltips for consistency.

• Updated description text of Common Goldrush Map to: "A challenging map with a 10% increased chance for extra gold."

• Style update of the resource description tooltip.

• The occlusion shader is no longer active during cinematics.

• Added new art for Goblin Cage Key and Zephoras' Amulet quest items.

• Muster Your Metal quest is now optional.

• Added "Account:" to the quest name of "Bug Out" so that it's clear that it's saved per account.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where the client would not correctly simulate root motion if it did not come from an animation.

• Fixed an issue with the Silver Retriever not animating.

• Audio no longer plays when you click on the empty space in some Character Create screens.

• The forged no longer snaps back after playing the new selected animation in character create.

• Fixed particle light color saturation in character create.

• Fixed no character create sounds playing.

• Fixed animation issues in character create so that pets play their selected animations correctly and go to the ready state when they are at the railing.

• Fixed an issue that caused Railmasters to turn to the northeast when using Build Train.

• Fixed Mortar and Flamethrower Car are removed from hotbar while upgrading either skill in the Skills Menu.

• Fix for projectiles and drop vfx disappearing when above water or acid pools.

• Fixed delay on certain goblin breakables.

• Fixing some last straggling cases of wobbly ferns in the goblin forest.

• Removed undead mound causing projectile collision issues.

• Fixed an issue where overkills would turn breakables invisible.

• Fixed an area where the player would be blocked by a large rock formation in the foreground.

• Fixed fort wardrobe placement sfx.

• Fixed the fort walls to block projectiles.

• Fixed an issue where the disconnect menu could not be used on the gamepad.

• Fixed an issue where selection was reversed when using a gamepad to navigate the world map.

• Fixed an issue where cursor movement became restricted when interacting with panes in Shared Stash.

• Fixed an issue where a player could not scroll through Waypoint Portals unless triggers were pressed via gamepad when accessing Waypoints.

• Fixed being unable to rearrange shared stash on gamepad.

• Fixed gamepad issue where character animation were inconsistent when activating particular skills and holding the associated button.

• Fixed on gamepad where inventory categories could not be cycled when highlighting active gear slots.

• Fixed order of frontier map nodes on gamepad.

• Fixed gamepad issue causing player to be unable to scroll down to pet items when in the equipped inventory.

• Fixed graphical issues with quest items in celebration UI.

• When finding affixes to spawn on gear, check that the affix's trait keys are valid.

• Fixed an issue where the Deadhammer could spawn Skeleton Knights instead of just Skeleton Warriors.

• Fixed an issue where the Major Shield duration affix wasn't working.

• Fixed issue where the Duskmage would wear their shield on their back when unarmed.

• Fixed hood type duskmage helm to sit on the head in a better position.

• Fixed major shield buff duration once and for all. It's finally no longer reading from different variables that just happen to be named the same thing in different blueprints. Good times had by all.

• Fixed an issue where Wardrobe Fort Props wouldn't show correct player stats.

• Compiled localizations so that the translated strings actually show up in game.

• Fixed some broken spawners in the Haunted Cemetery, so you'll get enough monsters.

• Fixed Mossrats of Unusual Size clipping into ground.

• Adjusted Netherim brute blend and top speed to fix sliding bug. 

• Fixed an issue where monster health would appear to decrease too rapidly when walking into and out of range for Bane's Miasma and then pop back to the correct percentage.

• Fixed Yapper's Gore attack not dealing damage.

• Fixed incorrect champions spawning in Gobstomp Stronghold.

• Fixed an issue where players could get stuck inside Wideload after being hit by his charge.

• Corrected blocking navmesh issues throughout all levels.

• Vendors no longer become non interactable after talking to them (they are now set to loop operational statuses).

• Fixed pets not always warping down to a boss arena with the player.

• Removed "Aura" in the description of Defender pet skill.

• Fixed an issue where pets were missing after creating characters with a full pet shelter.

• Fixed an issue where, occasionally, Pets sink or float above ground when entering locations.

• Fixed pets not loading in consistently.

• Set the correct pet quality values.

• Fixed an issue where pet buffs wouldn't apply to minions.

• Fixed a typo in "A Favor for Yapper" quest tasks.

• Task incomplete UI appears after having completed all tasks and using the red portal in Dast's Lair.

• Fixed the guards inside coccoons to not use the occlusion shaders.

• Fixed newly-activated quests not sending their active quest tasks to the client.

• Fixed an issue where relic weapon could not be stored when using a gamepad.

• Removed the tiny cost associated with activating a Relic Weapon, which was causing a weird .1 of no specified energy type to show up as the cost.

• Updated reliquary UI: The relic storage was the only crafting panel that used the inventory tab, so swapped that out for a widget; Fixed a bug with re-initializing lists; Fixed a bug where after leaving reliquary, you were locked out of interacting, since the details page was still holding focus.

• Fixed crash when teleporting to Wideload's Arena.

• Fixed the LUX charge up page taking the player to the wrong product URL.

• Updated dogs and dragons pet portraits to fit better in the non-square format of the pet vendor inventory.

• Fixed incorrectly labeled button prompt in the character create flow.

• Moved the status effect message above the relic UI in the skill bar to fix overlap.

• Fixed an issue where a player would be unable to close pet shelter menu.

• Removed errant "burning" on screen message when you were taking damage from a goblin fire trap.

• "Sell All Pet Items" button fits better in the panel.

• Removed extraneous target nameplate on the intro town portal.

• Item affixes no longer appear duplicated in the UI or on items they are not supposed to be attached to.

• Fixed an issue where the friends widget name became empty after implementing displaying other players' character names.

• The back prompt no longer appears on the class selection screen if you don't have any characters to go back to (otherwise you go back and it immediately sends you into character create).

• Fixed quest name collision.

• Fixed an issue where the in game menu could become blocked by other UI.

• Sell prices no longer show up incorrectly the first time you open your inventory.

• Revised Gold Rush mapworks maps descriptions to match their affixes. They were previously displaying two different values.

• Fixed an issue where Monster UI flickers when hovering over its debuff when the monster is under it.

• Fixing an issue where changes to the fields of the Options submenus persisted after canceling modifications.

• Other player's nameplates are no longer visible during cinematics.

• Fixed an issue where affixes wouldn't display all the information for their traits.

• Fixed Minion summoning traits not displaying correctly.

• The UIs for waypoints, vendors, account stash, and pet storage no longer appear for all players when they are opened.

• Fixed a variety of gamepad and focus issues on the crafting screens.

• Champion and mapworks random names no longer appear in non-english localizations.

• Language selection no longer applies immediately without clicking "Save and Apply" and no longer switches the whole UI immediately when picking from the drop down.