News

Greetings Defenders,

It’s been a busy few weeks! We were absolutely blown away by the launch reception. As more players dove into the game, we scrambled to put out the server fires. You may have noticed several patches and maintenance updates since launch, which we’re pleased to report have greatly improved our server stability. On the Xbox One side, these server issues also caused several crashing issues -- most of which were fixed in last week’s patch! There’s still work to do, but things are looking brighter by the day.

Alongside Xbox One and server fixes, our team is working on Patch 1.0.3! This patch contains loot tweaks, balance changes, optimization updates, quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes based on the feedback we’ve seen since launch. It also includes a little something special for sticking with us through the launch madness! We’re still finalizing and testing the patch, so we don’t have a release date for Patch 1.0.3 yet. We’ll have a release date for you soon!

Here’s what’s coming in the patch:

FREE Beat the Heat Bundle & Weekend Events

In Patch 1.0.3, we’re giving away some exclusive gifts for hanging with us through our launch kinks. These items will only be available for a limited time once the patch comes out:

• A free 4,000 Defender Medal gift

• A free, exclusive Purrville the Helicatter pet!

• A free, exclusive Squilbur the Squid hat for the Squire!

• A free, exclusive PAWS the Corgi shoulder pal for the Squire!

• A free, exclusive shirtless beach Squire accessory!

• A free, exclusive Squire beach shorts accessory!

• And our eternal gratitude, which is the most priceless gift of all. Literally. It has absolutely no real-world value. Damn you, society!

Plus we’re doing TWO Double Gold Weekend events when the patch comes out! Keep your eyes peeled for more details on these free items!

Xbox One Crash Fixes

This patch will include more Xbox One crash fixes. It’s also our goal to release another hotfix before this patch releases with even more crash fixes!

Loot Drop Updates

After reviewing player feedback and diving into the data, we agree that item progress, especially in Chaos 4-7, is too slow. There are too many items spawning that only give very small increases in power. This is making it take far too long to beef up all your characters, and the problem gets worse as you play in the later Chaos difficulties.

So with this patch, in all Chaos difficulties (but especially in Chaos 4-7), items will drop with larger power increases than before, and we’re increasing the chance of finding items with larger power increases. Not only that, but we’re adding in the occasional chance for a ‘super drop,’ which gives you a chance at items that are substantially more powerful. There’s still a good bit of randomness in the system, so don’t expect to get loads of high-powered legendaries dumped on you in your first game. But there are now far more opportunities for ‘big wins’ than there were before, and we hope players really feel it!

While we don’t consider this a blanket ‘fix’ to all the known item issues the community has highlighted, we do consider it a great step in the right direction. More changes coming soon!

Four More Chaos VII Trials Maps

We’re adding four maps to the Chaos VII Trials rotation! These maps are:

• Little-Horn Valley

• Assault on Throne Room

• Buried Bastille

• The Dead Road

You’ll encounter 8 total maps when you tackle the C7 Trials. More Trials improvements to come!

Wall Collision & Range Indicator Updates

We’re increasing the collision size on our blockades!

• The Spike Blockade collision volume is 37% larger on the X axis and 20% larger on the Y axis.

• The Volcano's square collision volume is 37% larger.

• The Training Dummy's square collision volume is 18% larger.

• The Arcane Barrier's collision volume is 66% larger on the X axis.

• The Maw of the Earth Drake's collision volume is 25% larger on the X axis.

• The Viper's Fangs collision volume is 11% larger on both the X and Y Axis.

• The Colossus' collision volume is 33% larger on its Y Axis.

In addition to this, we’ve added new range indicators on blockades to help you seal your lanes.

Trap Range Indicator Updates

All traps now display two ground decals during placement and inspection modes:  one decal displaying the trigger radius, and another decal displaying the damage range!

Minimap Improvements

The minimap now displays damage states for defenses. On top of the flashing when they get hit, towers will change colors from green, to yellow, to flashing red when below predefined health thresholds. Defenses that have been destroyed will also show up on the minimap with a blinking icon for 3 seconds for a better at-a-glance view of your moment-to-moment action.

Balance Updates

We’re making numerous balance updates to specific defenses with this patch, with a special focus on a few of our less frequently used defenses.

Most of our fixed-target towers (Cannonball Tower, Harpy’s Perch, Earthshatter Tower, etc.) will see a substantial increase in their overall DPS. This is a straight stat boost to these towers, trying to make them competitive with defense that can hit many targets. We want to see these towers leveraged more, especially in Chaos difficulties where projectile towers are expected to shine.

Defenses with extremely slow ATK Rates (Earthshatter, Lightning Strikes Aura, etc.) will see some improvements in their ATK Rate. While we’re not expecting every defense to hit as fast as the Flame Aura, the slow ATK Rates on these defenses has lead to a lot of ‘overkill’ damage and general targeting failures. These defenses will fire faster by roughly a second or so than they are currently, with corresponding adjustments to Defense Power and Crit Damage ratios.

Next up, many of our defenses with very high DU/Mana costs will see their base costs come down. Defenses like the Blaze Balloon have proven hard to use, despite their relatively high DPS outputs, and we want to get them back into regular usage. This change is intended to be more of a usability improvement and not a straight stat buff, so we’re accompanying these changes with corresponding reductions to their Defense Power and Crit Damage ratios when appropriate.

There’s a few bug fixes going in that will affect balance as well. Swapping shards to temporarily increase the max nodes on some of EV2’s defenses has been eliminated; you must leave the shard on the defense or the extra nodes are removed. We’ve also fixed a terrible bug with Hornet’s Nest that was crippling its DPS, and it should result in it being quite a powerful defense again!

We’ve also finally made some updates to the Shatter combo effect. While we’re super happy to see players using Frosty Proton Node to setup this combo, we felt that the potential damage output of the Shatter effect was a bit too strong. We really didn’t want to nerf Frosty Proton Node, and, there was certainly no call to nerf the Cannonball Tower, Earthshatter Tower, etc., so we went with a reduction to the Shatter effect itself. Shatter will still obliterate weaker enemies like Goblins, but after this patch it will no longer be a guaranteed kill on tougher enemies like Drakin and Berserkers. We’ve also fixed it so it can now damage minibosses / special enemies, instead of just consuming the Freeze and having no effect.

And while the reign of the Weapon Manufacturer (and to a lesser extent, the Poison Dart Tower) has been interesting, it’s proven to be too much of a ‘one stop shop’ solution to many Chaos difficulties. As such, we’re making some adjustments to reduce its dominance, with the hopes of seeing diversity increase with these changes plus our numerous defense buffs.

We hope these changes will improve diversity and flexibility amongst builders in all Chaos difficulties! Fans of the Mystic and the Obelisk will want to take special note, as it’s undergoing some pretty radical balance updates with this patch. (It’s basically hit by every one of our core changes listed above!)

Optimization Improvements

This patch includes several optimization improvements to the game, which should improve framerate across all three platforms but particularly on the PS4 and Xbox One versions. We’re exploring more optimization changes to improve framerate on the console versions. Stay tuned for more information!

Inventory UI & Shard Icon Tweaks

We’re adding a number of Inventory UI improvements in Patch 1.0.3:

• More Shards have unique icons now! This will help you find the Shard you’re looking for.

• The Experience/Ascension bar is now permanently located on the Inventory screen

• The Inventory now highlights any new item that the player didn't previously own until the player focuses on the new item. This includes auto-equipped items, items that have been manually picked up by the player, and bundled items like Shards.

• Items selected in your Inventory will now highlight any valid slots on the left side Hero Manager screen, making it easier to determine which items can be equipped where.

• The number of weapons a hero can equip is now accurate, which means only the Squire has two weapon slots now!

Disable Controller Vibration Option

For those who don’t like to play with your controller shaking like an earthquake, we’re adding the option to disable controller vibration!

Game Browser UI Changes

We’re making several usability changes to the Game Browser UI to make it easier to join and create games on controllers!

Xbox One Vsync Option

We’re adding a Vsync option for the Xbox One version in this patch!

Controller Deadzone Updates

Thanks to a wonderful Reddit post, we’re exploring updates to our controller joystick deadzones. In case you don’t know, deadzones relate to how far you have to move the joystick from its central resting place before the game registers movement. A large deadzone means you have to push the joystick really far to the edge before movement begins; a small deadzone means very little joystick movement is needed. The result of these changes should improve overall joystick movement and give you more useful deadzone options. This is a stretch goal for the patch, so if it doesn’t come out in this patch, it’ll come out in the patches following.

Bug Fixes

Finally, this patch will contain a number of bug fixes, including a fix for the auto-collect options not working properly.

Thanks for your support, Defenders, and stay tuned for more information on Patch 1.0.3 and the FREE Beat the Heat bundle!

Love,
The Trendy Team

Greetings Defenders,

Our first Xbox One patch is here! This patch fixes the biggest Xbox One crashes and bugs you’ve reported to us:

Bug Fixes

• Fixed the loading screen crashes.

• Fixed the Town crashes.

• Fixed the Series EV2 proton beam crash.

• Fixed a number of crashes that would happen when placing certain Dryad defenses, Lavamancer defenses and auras.

• Fixed a bug where players were unable to properly equip costumes.

In addition to these fixes, this patch includes a number of features and improvements from the 1.0 Update that were not available at launch, including tutorial improvements, new Campaign gameplay updates and more. With this patch, Xbox One is now fully up-to-date with the PC & PS4 versions! You can find the full 1.0 patch notes here.

Thanks for your overwhelming support! We’re continuing to work on server stability and improvements, and we’re also cooking up our first big post-launch update. Stay tuned for more information!

Love,
The Trendy Team

Dungeon Defenders II is officially out of Early Access and free-to-play on Xbox One, PC & PS4! With this major milestone in our game’s history, we’re releasing Update 1.0.

Update 1.0 focuses on our New Player Experience. This update fixes a ton of bugs, adds a lot of polish, introduces more quality-of-life changes, improves our early-game experience, and gets new players through Campaign and deep into Chaos. After today, we’re spinning up on features and changes you’ve been asking for (Endless Mode says hi).

We’ve been in Early Access for more than two years. With more than 60+ updates, Dungeon Defenders II has grown up before our very eyes. It’s been exciting and, quite frankly, a little unnerving to develop a game with you watching every step of the way. Our growth and improvement is because of your support, your feedback and the dedicated members of our team who went above and beyond to drive our game forward. We’re proud of where Dungeon Defenders II is today, but launch is just the beginning. With your support, Dungeon Defenders II is only going to get bigger and better!

Here are the notes for Update 1.0:

Xbox One Version Available Now!

Brewed in secrecy, the Xbox One version is finally here! Download the game for free here.

The Xbox One version includes:

• All of the content & features from the other versions of the game

• A limited-time exclusive map & Incursion:  Yeti’s Revenge

  • This map and Incursion will be available on PC & PS4 in our next major update!

• An exclusive pet

• An exclusive weapon

Features

The Initiate

Come on and SLAM!

The Initiate is our first gender-swap hero. This powerful Chi-wielding warrior is the gender swap of our bald friend, the Monk. She uses the same defenses as the Monk, but she comes with a suite of new abilities:

• Chi Stomp:  A powerful slam that can be activated in mid-air!

• Crippling Chi Wave:  The Initiate builds up a glowing ball of Chi and launches it at her enemies, which damages and debuffs any enemies hit!

• Talisman of Empowerment:  The Initiate places a talisman on the ground that temporarily boosts the power of nearby defenses!

The Initiate is available at a lower Gem and Defender Medal price than other heroes. And don’t worry:  The Barbarian will have his time to shine soon.

Updated Tutorials

Play our all new Tutorial map and check out our new Tutorial videos with the new How To Play Menu! The new videos and map cover a variety of helpful hints, tips, and tricks that will aid in your defense of Etheria!

Updated Story and Campaign

Etheria has never felt so alive! Play through the updated story in our revamped Campaign experience and stave off the Old Ones advance. Prepare for new threats and twists that will appear. Make sure to keep an eye out during Build Phase!

New Summary Screen & Score System

At the end of each map, whether you win or lose, there’s a new summary screen that will score you based on your performance. Our new scoring system includes many different modifiers and bonuses to help you tweak your builds and get higher and higher on your personal mental leaderboard. Shortly after the release of score, we’ll add some form of score tracking for players to see!

Updated HUD & Health Bars

We’ve updated a number of our Heads-Up Display elements to make the UI cleaner while providing more information. The biggest change is the addition of hero deck hotkeys above the Health Bar. Now you can easily see which hero is in which hero deck slot hotkey, which is especially handy if you’re the kind of player who constantly rotates heroes in and out of your Hero Deck!

New Tower Skins

Check out the all new Bit Crush Dryad, Woodland Apprentice, and Hypno Abyss Lord Tower Skins! (Time for an Abyss Lord/Monk defensive DANCE PARTY! Unce unce unce #hype)

New Shard Icons

We’ve added new iconography for some of the most popular Shards in the game. We’ll continue to improve on our Shard icons after launch!

• Channel - Icon Type Change

• Inspiration - Icon Type Change

• Hero Critical Strike - Minor Border Change

• Life Leech - Icon Type Change

• Speed Boost - Icon Type Change

• Superconductor - Icon Type Change

• Construction - Icon Type Change

• Explosive Guard - Icon Type Change

• Defensive Critical Damage - Minor Border Change

• Destruction - Minor Border Change

• Fortification - Minor Border Change

• Deadly Strikes - Icon Type Change

• Panic Fire - Icon Type Change

• Press Your Luck - Icon Type Change

Incursions & Legendary Weapons

As part of our New Player Experience, we’ve introduced Incursions into Chaos! The goal of our Incursions is to provide variety and progression milestones as players progress through Chaos.

Each Chaos tier will now have its own unique Incursions. After completing an Incursion, you’ll unlock unique Legendary weapons at the Wayfarer! The Wayfarer will forge these unique weapons based on your highest powered hero. The Wayfarer will sell these weapons for Defender Medals, so be sure to sell those Souls4Gold when the update comes out!

As for long-term gameplay variety in our endgame, we have a number of interesting changes and features we’re going to add post-launch. Stay tuned!

New Weapons

In addition to the Wayfarer weapons, we’ve added many new weapon models to the game across many of our different heroes. Go forth and get that sweet new loot!

PS4 Optimization

This update improves PS4 framerate, especially when a lot of enemies are on-screen at once. This is just the first of our optimization updates for the PS4 -- shortly after launch, we have a litany of other changes that should improve framerate even more!

Quality of Life

• Added a new Minimum Ascension Level host option.

• Added the ability to rename your heroes for free in the Inventory.

• Added controller sensitivity option on PC.

• Revamped range indicator decals for visibility.

• Now you can play and access everything on PC with a controller, including the Options Menu!

• Added the names of defenses under relic slots.

• Added Server Region display to the Main Menu.

• Improved the Flamethrower Tower’s visual effects.

• Added a minimap and NPC blips to the Heroes Marketplace.

• Improved player name display with proper capitalization!

• Added a “Hold <blank> to rotate tower” for PC controller users.

• Improved and unified the look of many different UIs.

• Updated the first quest in the game to have smarter text and a better UI.

• Victory chests show up on all minimaps.

• The War Table in the Private Tavern should now default to Private Games. Such private. Many seekrits.

• Updated the game icon to the Squire’s Head. This was the most important change of all.

Balance

Core Health

• Increased the core health in Chaos to protect against enemies one-shotting the core

Shards

• Ballista - Black Arrow damage increased from 50% to 60%.

• Cannonball - Stun Fire proc increased to 25% and stun duration from 2.4 to 3.0 seconds.

• Cannonball - Heavy Cannonball damage increased from 950% to 1250%.

• Earthshatter - Earth Toss proc chance increased from 35% to 100%. Knockup duration increased slightly.

• Fire for Effect chance increased from 25% to 45%

• Flame Aura - Encroaching Flames proc chance increased from 25% to 30% and damage increased from 40% to 60%.

• Skeletal Archer - Explosive Arrows proc chance increased from 15% to 30% and damage increased from 110% to 450%.

• Snakes on a Plane - Proc chance increased from every 5 seconds to every 3 seconds and damage increased from 525% to 3000%.

• Enduring Bubble - Levels increased from 8 to 10. Buff duration decreased from +5 seconds to +2 seconds.

• Lateral Blast - Damage increased from 725% to 2250%.

• Mega Rock - Proc chance increased from every 10 volleys to every 5 volleys. Damage increased from 1150% to 4000%.

• Frosty Proton Node - Proc chance increased from 5% to 25%, duration decreased from 5 to 2 seconds.

• Gunwitch’s Hunting Blind Tower damage unchanged from 0% to 0%.

Betsy Weapons

• Betsy weapons now have their shards locked in a shard slot to mimic their old, pre-shard passive effects.

• Apprentice and Huntress Betsy Weapons have had updated firing rates and damage to better match our new balanced solutions.

• Updated Betsy’s Empowered Lightning Shard description to make more sense.

Bug Fixesss

• Fixed another magical Proton beam crash. Huzzah!

• Fixed an issue with an endless black screen after multiple loading screens.

• Hero Information and Currency indicators should no longer overlap.

• Improved fullscreen and windowed game display modes.

• Fixed another Siege Roller stuck issue.

• Power Transfer Shard functions when equipped to Boost Aura now.

• “Speeds” are “Orbs” again.

• “Skulls” are “Marks” again. We have no idea how that happened.

• This also means the Orb and Mark filters work again!

• Abyss Lord’s Abyss Stones are now able to crit.

• This update fixes a bug where multiplayer enemy health scaling was scaling higher than intended. Per-player enemy health scaling is now +25% rather than +50%. Go forth and defend with friends!

• Fixed an issue where you could not drop a Shard onto a bag icon.

• Shard Packs and Shards should go through the proper auto-collect flow now.

• Fixed a text pop up at a really high Ascension level.

• Jumping and using the right click dash on the Lavamancer should work properly now while dashing around the map. No more randomly hitting invisible walls! HOORAY!

• The Ogres on the Forest Ambush Incursion thought it’d be really cool to just T-pose for fun. We set them straight.

• The crosshair reticle should now turn the correct colors when targeting allies and other things in game. It will be colors other than red now! ADDITIONAL HOORAYS.

• Updated several error message text to make more sense.

• The resolution selector in the Options Menu is now scrollable with scroll wheels.

• The World Tree now properly gets destroyed during the Victory animation if it’s too close to the Victory Chests.

• Updated the description on the Shadowflame Dagger.

• Updated the consumable tooltip to use the new UI.

• Combined Power - Serpent’s Coil beams will now attack training dummies.

• Updated the error text if there are no marked targets for Arcane Volley.

• Gunwitch’s Snipe Critical Damage Shard no longer applies to all elemental damage.

• Fixed the Level 50 Level Up Pop Up to show Level 50 instead of “Level 0”.

• Renamed the default hero names to their classes.  Squire is now “Squire.”  Monk is now “Monk.”  Barbarian is now “Pete.”

• Fixed a challenge display issue where it would render completed challenges twice in the UI.

• Flame Aura properly calculates crit damage and chance into its inspected DPS number.

• Fixed a matchmaking issue where if Player 2 declines, then Player 1 gets an “Unknown Error.”

• Fiery Brimstone Shard now only works for the Abyss Lord as originally designed and fixed the critical damage scaling on the procs from 100% to 12% where it should be.

• Unequipping items will go through the auto-collect flow and go to the bags that they should be.

• Fixed an issue where swapping to EV2 Mark III was causing a rogue torso to display.

• Fixed Drakken’s eyes and mouths to be glowing properly.

• Added a notification that a party request has been sent to another player.

• The “Could not authenticate with Steam… try again?” pop up was missing some buttons.  We gave them back.

• Fixed a crash if you had selected Exit on a menu screen while an immediate message was being displayed.

• Mystic’s Dark Torment damage over time critical effect is no longer scaling inversely with hero damage.

• Fixed a billboard issue on Siege of the Throne Room.

• Fixed an area where Kobolds could get stuck in the Ruins.

• G4T0’s facial animations have been restored! Beep boop. Bloop.

• Fixed a boost aura description typo.  “Precentage” is right… right?

• Fixed small lighting issues on the Dryad Hornet’s Nest and Slime Pit.

• Monk’s alternate attack is no longer blocked by towers.

• Fixed the wyvern death animation.

• The Weapon Filter on the Filter By… bag no longer has defense stat options.

• Fixed a spot on Dragonfall Plaza where the Dryad could exit the map.

• Fixed several small issues with tower damage challenges.

• Fixed a massive performance issue with Shield Geodes.  Should be most noticeable on PS4.

• PS4 - Dark Torment’s visual effects now display properly.

Known Issues

• No “Press G to End Match” message is displayed after beating wave 4 on Airship Battle. This is only a visual problem and G still functions correctly.

• Glaive of Storms isn’t currently purchasable in the wayfarer shop. It still unlocks and drops from the Power Surge Incursion.

• Glaive of Storms’ unique shard is missing its icon.

Three more days. Just three more days until Dungeon Defenders II launches on Xbox One, PC & PS4. Three more days until the game is officially out of Early Access and free-to-play on all platforms. Excuse us while we hyperventilate. OH GOD. *grabs knees*

On June 20th, along with this major milestone in our game’s history, we’re releasing Update 1.0, which is focused on our New Player Experience. In our Devstream above and blog below, we’ll walk you through the major beats of the patch. After June 20th, we’re spinning up on lots of features and changes you’ve been asking for (Endless Mode says hi).

Launch is just the beginning. With your support, Dungeon Defenders II is only going to get bigger and better!

Gender Swap:  The Initiate

Come on and SLAM. The Initiate is joining us on June 20th!

 The Initiate is our first gender-swap hero. This powerful Chi-wielding warrior is the gender swap of our bald friend, the Monk. She uses the same defenses as the Monk, but she comes with a suite of new abilities.

• Chi Stomp:  A powerful slam that can be activated in mid-air!

• Crippling Chi Wave:  The Initiate builds up a glowing ball of Chi and launches it at her enemies, which damages and debuffs any enemies hit!

• Talisman of Empowerment:  The Initiate places a talisman on the ground that temporarily boosts the power of nearby defenses!

The Initiate is available at a lower Gem and Defender Medal price than other heroes. And don’t worry:  The Barbarian will have his time to shine soon.

New Tutorial Mission + Tutorial Videos

We’ve completely revamped our tutorial mission! Our new tutorial teaches players how to place different types of defenses, how to hotswap between different heroes and more. We’ve also added a new How To Play section with additional videos to teach players about advanced tactics, loot, Inventory and more.

Updated Campaign & Story

We’ve given our early-game experience some additional love! On several maps, we’ve added new mutators to keep the gameplay experience fresh through the Campaign. We’ve also fleshed out the existing story with new cutscenes and new in-game dialogue. If you’ve already played the Campaign, be sure to grab a new hero and check out the changes! There might be a few hints of things to come...

Incursions + Legendary Weapons

As part of our New Player Experience, we’ve introduced Incursions into Chaos! The goal of our Incursions is to provide variety and progression milestones as players progress through Chaos.

Each Chaos tier will now have its own unique Incursions. After completing an Incursion, you’ll unlock unique Legendary weapons at the Wayfarer! The Wayfarer will forge these unique weapons based on your highest powered hero. The Wayfarer will sell these weapons for Defender Medals, so be sure to sell those Souls4Gold when the update comes out!

As for long-term gameplay variety in our endgame, we have a number of interesting changes and features we’re going to add post-launch. Stay tuned!

Updated HUD + Health Bars

We’ve updated a number of our HUD elements to make the UI cleaner while providing more information. You can check out the Devstream video to see it in action, but the biggest change is the addition of hero deck hotkeys above the Health Bar. Now you can easily see which hero is in which hero deck slot hotkey, which is especially handy if you’re the kind of player who constantly rotates heroes in and out of your Hero Deck!

New Summary Screen & Score System

It’s finally here! We’ve implemented a new summary screen at the end of the match, and the biggest new change here is our score system! Each match, you and your team will be given a score based on how well you played and built. We’ve included a number of multipliers in this first iteration of the score system. Optimize your builds to get the best score! In the future, we plan on adding leaderboards, rewards and more based on our score system!

PS4 Optimization

This update improves PS4 framerate, especially when a lot of enemies are on-screen at once. This is just the first of our optimization updates for the PS4 -- shortly after launch, we have a litany of other changes that should improve framerate even more!

Shard Buffs

We’re continuing our Shard Buffs! These buffs are focused on hero-specific Shards, especially on Defense Shards. More Shard Buffs (and Defense Buffs) will come post-launch!

First Shard Icon Updates

We’ve updated the icons of some of the more popular Shards to help you find them easier in your Inventory. We’ll continue to update our Shard system, you guessed it, post-launch.

Host Option:  Minimum Ascension Level

In the update, you’ll be able to set a minimum Ascension Level for your matches! You can use this feature to reduce the number of new players jumping into Chaos VII matches -- of course, if you want to help the newbies out, you can keep this set to 0. More host tools are on the way!

Hero Renaming

Hero renaming! For free! From the Inventory, you can rename all of your heroes as often as you want.

Multiplayer Scaling Bug Fix

This update fixes a bug where multiplayer enemy health scaling was scaling higher than intended. Per-player enemy health scaling will now be +25% rather than +50%. Go forth and defend with friends!

New Tower Skins

We’ve added several new sets of Tower Skins so you can betterfy your towerz.

Full Controller Support on PC

Now you can play and access everything on PC with a controller, including the Options Menu!

Bug Fixes

Tons of them.

We can’t wait for Tuesday. We’ll see you there, Defenders!

Love,
The Trendy Team

Dungeon Defenders II is launching on Xbox One, PC & PS4 on June 20th!

For more than two years, we’ve delivered 60+ updates during Early Access. We’re finally ready to tell the world that Dungeon Defenders II is officially here. And we’re excited to tell people that, yes, we’re bringing our game to the Xbox One!

On June 20th, Dungeon Defenders II will be free-to-play on ALL platforms. If you’ve been waiting for F2P to jump into the PS4 version, or if you’ve been waiting for the Steam version to leave Early Access, that day is your day.

When the Xbox One version launches, it'll come with an exclusive pet, an exclusive weapon and a limited-time exclusive map. The new map will make its way to the other versions shortly after the release of the Xbox One version! What is that new map? Perhaps the trailer above offers some clues.

We know you have plenty of questions. We’ve tried to anticipate and answer the more popular ones below, but if you have another question, ask us in the comments!

Your Anticipated Questions

First of all, how hard was it to keep the Xbox One version a secret?

SO DAMN HARD. You have no idea how many times we wanted to tell people. Yes, we love our Xbox fans, and we can’t wait for you to experience Dungeon Defenders II three weeks from now!

Is Xbox One free-to-play?

Yes! From the very first day, the Xbox One version is free-to-play.

Is the Xbox One version up-to-date with the PC & PS4 versions?

We’re working right now to get the Xbox One version as close to the PC & PS4 versions as possible. If it’s not at parity with the other versions on launch day, we’ll get the Xbox One version on parity shortly thereafter.

Will the Xbox One version always be up-to-date with the PC & PS4 versions?

On the Xbox One, we need to put our updates through a more stringent certification process than we do on PC or PS4. It’s our goal to release Xbox One updates as close to day-and-date as possible, but the cert process could mean that Xbox One updates could come out a little later.

Is this the end of development?

NO. With your support, we’re going to bring new content, new features, quality-of-life changes, optimization improvements, continued bug fixes and so much more to Dungeon Defenders II.

What are you working on between now and launch?

Greetings, Defenders! We hope you’ve been enjoying The Loot Update! These two patches on PC & PS4 fix the issues we’ve seen since the update came out:

Patch 21.2 (May 30th, 2017)

Patch 21.1 (May 26th, 2017)

Max Loot Stat Range Fix

• Loot wasn't rolling up to the intended Chaos stat ranges. This is now fixed. You should now find loot with higher stats in every Chaos tier!

  • In all Chaos tiers, loot will now roll up to a higher maximum stat number than before The Loot Update.

  • If you had max Chaos 7 loot from before The Loot Update that was boosted with the update, you should now find loot that’s equal or slightly higher than that. Everyone else is able to find this same loot when they reach the top end of Chaos 7.

Love,

The Trendy Team

The Loot Update is out now on PC & PS4! Read on to learn all about the update.

Loot Updates

We’ve been working on a series of changes that takes the new loot system from the Trials update and tweaks it to make loot more interesting and more intuitive. It applies the feedback we’ve received since the Trials update and instills more of the spirit of the loot system from the original Dungeon Defenders. These changes will apply to all new drops; your current gear will be unaffected with the exception of the upgrade scaling change. We hope you’ll enjoy the following changes:

New Stat Rolling System

Before this update, rarity affected the stats on loot -- the higher the rarity, the higher the stat roll. This was intended to make higher rarities desirable, but this was actually making progression slower than intended and caused roadblocks in progression. Equipped Legendaries (and even Mythicals) would increase the time until your next stat upgrade, and in some cases, it stopped intended stat upgrades from appearing at the end of a Chaos tier. We’ve removed this, and in its place, we’ve made some exciting changes to rarities to make them worthwhile to find. You’ll discover these changes later in the patch notes.

Something else that’s plagued loot in DD2 is its lack of multi-dimensionality. When you look back at the first Dungeon Defenders, the loot system begged you to give every loot drop a chance. There wasn’t always a simple “yes” or “no” of whether an item was better for you. Stats on loot rolled individually, so there were vastly more implications when deciding if a drop was better or worse for you. Say an item rolled with Defense Power and Defense Health. Perhaps Defense Power rolled higher than your current gear, but Defense Health rolled lower. Is that a tradeoff you’re willing to make? Is power worth more than health for your particular build? Worth more at this point in your progression? Is it bad for one hero but better for another? This kind of decision making was a driving force in DD1 in both the main progression and in the endgame.

With that spirit in mind, loot stats will now roll independently from each other! This should instill more of those interesting decisions into loot, and at the same time, it’ll introduce sidegrade opportunities to improve your speed of progression!

4 Stats on Legendaries!

Legendaries are going to roll with an additional stat! If Legendaries are going to be rare, then you should mess yourself a little when you see that golden beam rising toward the heavens. Throughout our Early Access period, we’ve learned (and you’ve learned) that you don’t need that extra stat in order to succeed. But there was a certain joy in DD1’s loot when all of those beautiful stats rolled on a single item. It was that little extra push to keep playing and keep hunting. This change should make Legendaries feel just that much more special. Along with this change...

New Fixed Upgrades Per Tier & Upgrade Scaling

Rarities have new upgrades! As of this update, each rarity has a specific upgrade number that the rarity will always drop with.

• Legendary:  Will always drop with 60 upgrades

• Mythical, Epic and Powerful:  Will always drop with 30 upgrades

There was an upgrade bug with late C6/C7 loot where max stats gained by upgrading was way higher than intended. The issue wasn't the amount of stats you could get; it was the growth per upgrade. This would have caused major stat issues in future Chaos tiers, so we've changed the growth rate.

We didn't want to leave you guys being unable to reach the same amount of stats as before, so we also increased the stat roll range for all Chaos tiers. This means you can reach the same stat values (if not higher) as before, but you're relying a little less on upgrades in higher Chaos tiers and more on the actual loot drops.

Increased Armor & Weapon Shard Slots to 3

We’ve also increased the Armor and Weapon Shard Slots from 2 to 3! Even better, these 3 Shard Slots will appear on both Legendary AND Mythical loot! We can’t wait to see what new builds you’ll create with these changes.

Increased Loot Drops

We’ve increased the amount of loot that drops in Trials!

Loot Rolls Based on the Most Powerful Hero in Your Deck

One of the most common confusion points of our new loot system was how loot generated. Before this update, loot generated based on the average stat power of every hero in your deck, so if you had heroes with worse stats than others, the generated loot would be worse. In this update, loot will generate based on the most powerful hero in your deck. You won’t have to remove your other 3 heroes before Combat Phase just to get the best loot. Based on our playtesting, this change alone removes a lot of the WTF moments from our new loot system.

Increased Stat Roll Ranges

Speaking of loot generation, loot is generated in a +/- range around your equipped gear. Currently, that +/- range is fairly small. There aren’t enough of those “wow” moments of finding a loot drop with big stat upgrades -- not enough of those “power spike” moments. We’re increasing this range so that power spikes happen more frequently. Another thing to note is that with the new individual stat rolling, items that would previously be an across-the-board “-” roll (since both stats rolled in identical numbers) could now become possible upgrades!

Higher Loot Cap Per Chaos to Help Bridge the Gaps

For some players, moving between Chaos tiers was easy enough. For others, the gaps felt like an impenetrable wall. That’s what we’ve heard over and over since the Trials update.

In the loot system introduced in Trials, each Chaos tier drops better and better loot up to a certain point. Once you hit that point, you’ll need to move on to the next Chaos tier in order to keep finding better loot. With this update, we’re increasing the maximum loot cap per Chaos tier. If you can’t survive the leap to the next Chaos tier, you can now progress higher in your current tier. This additional power potential should decrease the gaps and increase your upward mobility.

Increased Gold Rewards

Players weren’t earning enough gold in earlier Chaos tiers. For rough comparison, Chaos 1 only awarded around 13,000 gold per victory, while Chaos 7 awards around 56,000 gold.

So in this update, we’ve increased the gold rewards in all Chaos tiers below Chaos 7, with significant increases in the early Chaos tiers that taper off into the higher tiers. For example, Chaos 1 should now award closer to 21,000 gold, which is around a 60% increase in gold per victory! This should greatly help with the gold squeeze in earlier difficulties. It’s also worth noting that our increased loot drops will leave players with more gold than before. We’ll continue to monitor the gold-per-hour and gold-per-difficulty players achieve at these new values and make more adjustments if needed.

As a result, players will see an increase in gold earnings with this new patch, and that’s not even including the following change:

Consecutive Win Bonus XP & Gold

In this update, we’re rounding out our Consecutive Win feature by introducing Gold and XP bonuses! You’ll begin to earn these bonuses on your 1st overall win, and these bonuses will grow up to a cap. The more you play, the more you’ll earn! (Also, we’re actively working on Matchmaking fixes. Several fixes will come out in this update, which includes possible solutions for being unable to continue after the end of a match, and more fixes are on the way soon. We’ll continue to make the Consecutive Win bonus and Matchmaking feel better and better!)

Experience and Ascension Updates

We’re happy with how fast players are earning Ascension levels when they’re playing at a challenging difficulty. But some players are farming much, much lower difficulties to earn Ascension levels at very fast rates, and it’s thrown off our estimate on how fast players would earn Ascension levels.

When we released Chaos 6 and Chaos 7, some players had steamrolled way ahead of our Ascension estimates by farming earlier Chaos difficulties. In essence, we had two audiences -- one that was at or near the target Ascension level for Chaos 6, and another group that had pulled way, way ahead. Balancing new difficulties for these two different audiences became quite challenging, and we realized we needed to close the gap between them a bit if we wanted to keep releasing new difficulties.

So to help hit that goal, we’ve made the following changes:

New Difficulty XP Bonuses and New XP Curve

Each higher Chaos difficulty gives much more experience. Chaos 5, by comparison, now awards several times more experience than it used to. This means that playing at higher difficulties gives much more experience than playing at lower difficulties.

But we’re also increasing the amount of experience required to earn each level. These changes combined mean that if you’re currently playing Chaos 5, it’s more efficient to farm Chaos 4 or Chaos 5 for experience rather than going all the way back down to Chaos 1. This change won’t alter your existing Ascension level, but it will update the amount of experience you need to reach the next level.

The time-to-level should not increase if you’re playing at a challenging difficulty, but it will increase if you’re playing at a difficulty way below where you should be. In practical terms, this means Chaos 1 will no longer be the most efficient difficulty for every player to earn Ascension levels, especially if you’re well over Ascension 200.

New Ascension Power Caps

While our first change is targeted at smoothing out the rate of progression and encouraging players to play harder difficulties, this next change is intended to limit the overall power of players who are many times over the target Ascension level for our hardest difficulty.

With Chaos 7 being our current hardest difficulty, we have lowered the cap on powers from 999 to somewhere in the mid-100s (roughly 140). Powers that were capped at 10, 15, or 20 are unchanged; only the powers that had 999 caps are affected. As we release harder difficulties, the cap will go up.

If you’re under Ascension level 400, this won’t affect you at all as you wouldn’t have enough points to hit any cap. But if you’re over Ascension 420 (roughly), you may notice you’re starting to hit caps that will require you to diversify your points rather than stacking them into a single power.

Accompanying this change is a free reset of all Ascension points, allowing all players to freely update their Ascension Powers. Our intent is to shrink the power gap a bit between our most dedicated fans (some of whom are over Ascension 1,000!) and the vast majority of our playerbase (most of whom are less than Ascension 300), so we can continue to release content that challenges both audiences in a timely fashion.

New Ascension Level Rewards

We didn’t want this update to be all redos and system updates, so we’ve included some new rewards for reaching higher Ascension levels!

Starting with Ascension level 100 (and continuing up to 1,000), players will earn rewards for hitting Ascension milestones. One of the rewards will be new titles, available to our more dedicated players who push the upper ends of Ascension.

New Multiplayer Enemy Scaling

Thanks to your feedback, enemy damage in multiplayer will no longer scale with each additional player added to the game. Now, only enemy health will scale! Play around with this and let us know how it feels now!

Our First PS4 Trophies

Our first PS4 Trophies are available in this update! This is just a first small batch of trophies; more trophies are on the way!

Quality of Life Changes

• Max upgrade stat values are now visible on the Item Tooltip. With this change, you can see if maxing out that new loot drop is an upgrade over your current gear!

• Shards not valid for the current hero will no longer appear on the Shard Equip screen.

• Shards that are not valid for the current hero will say so on their Item Tooltips in the Inventory

• When a Relic is equipped to a defense slot, its Item Tooltip will now display stats that are not valid for that defense.

• Reduced the tower placement barrier for several defenses to make them easier to place next to each other.

• Added a three-second timer to the Sell All popup to reduce the likelihood of accidental sell-alls.

• Increased the size of the Siege Roller’s weakpoint by 25%

Balance

Blazing Phoenix Shard

• Blazing Phoenix's Defense Power scalar increased from 550% to 850%

• Updated tooltip text to be slightly more clear/correct

Explosive Surprise Shard

• Explosive Surprise Defense Power scalar increased from 650% to 1,200% at max level

• Proc chance reduced from 65% to 50%

• Net change is around a 50% DPS increase for this shard

Enhanced Poison Shard

• Increased Enhanced Poison's maximum rate bonus from 25% to 40%

Dryad Ability Cooldowns/Costs

• Removed the cooldown reduction of Dryad's starfall off of primary attacks

• Cooldown of Starfall reduced from 15 seconds to 5 seconds.

• Reduced Dryad's mana cost for several abilities

  • Normal Form

    • Ability 2:  20 to 10

  • Corrupt Form

    • Ability 2:  20 to 10

    • Ability 3:  30 to 15

Bug Fixes

• Fixed several issues that would stop players from being able to Continue to the next map. If this is still happening, please report it on our Bug Reporting Site.

• Series EV2’s Weapon Manufacturer will now crit properly without needing to hero swap to get it to work.

• Fixed the Zapper boss getting stuck in the Echoing Tunnel spawn point on Dragonfall Sewers.

• Fixed the Zapper boss getting stuck in the River Low Patch spawn point on Nimbus Reach.

• The Annoyance Shard will now properly update when hotswapping heroes (it was staying present in the last location of the hero with the equipped Shard).

• Crane Stance Shard no longer procs for all heroes that have a ranged attack when an elemental weapon is equipped.

• Fixed a bug with the Abyss Lord’s right-click attack where the less Hero Damage you had, the more Crit damage it would do. This now scales correctly from Crit Damage.

• Opening the Inventory while dead will no longer cause Inventory UI issues.

• Removed the debug text from the Ability Mana Ascension Power information.

• All individual Lockbox Master Keys purchased from the shop with gems can now properly open lockboxes.

• All Lockbox Master Keys properly stack now.

• Fixed level geometry issues on Greystone Plaza.

• Fixed a bug that stopped players from being unable to purchase the Five Pack of Hero Cards with Defender Medals.

• L2 context icon in the Shop now properly displays on all resolutions.

• Fixed collision issues on NPC shops.

• Context icons for switching between the left/right sides of the Scavenger UI are now displayed with the controller active.

• PS4 - An error message will display now when attempting to redeem a non-valid redeem code at the Mailbox.

Known Issues

• In multiplayer, the bonus xp and gold totals shown on the summary screen will show the xp/gold default values for the map instead of the xp/gold correct bonus totals for some players. It’s just a text issue as the correct amount are given to the players. It just shows the incorrect total on the reward screen. Happens about half the time on certain maps.

Greetings Defenders,

The Loot Update is delayed until next Tuesday, May 23rd. As we were going through our final playtests, we felt we needed an extra week to get it right. This is an important update, and we want to deliver something we’re confident in. We know how eager you are for the update -- trust us, we are, too! -- but this extra time will truly make it shine.

With this additional week, we can also:

• Add in more quality-of-life changes! (For example, showing an item’s max upgrade stat values on the Item Comparison tooltip. With this change, you can see if maxing out that new loot drop is an upgrade over your current gear!)

• Add in our first PS4 trophies! We need to go through Sony’s certification process for trophies, so while we’re aiming for day & date with the PC update, it might come out a few days later depending on what happens with cert. This is just the first batch of trophies; more will come in the future!

• Add in more bug fixes! Sweet, sweet bug fixes.

The feast is coming.

As you read on, you’ll learn about The Loot Update coming next Tuesday. [Update:  The Loot Update is now coming May 23rd. As we were going through our final playtests, we felt we needed an extra week to get it right. More information is available here.]

This update delivers the loot and progression improvements we’ve been cryptically teasing. We’re eager to share these succulent details, as we’re sure you’re eager to gobble them up. But soon, the feast will arrive. You’ll be treated to a five-course meal stuffed with details of our release plans. You’ll discover when we’re releasing and what we have planned between now and that fateful day. There are surprises in store for you, too, but we won’t spoil those now. Not yet.

As you saw with The Spring Forward update, and as you’re going to see in next week’s Loot Update, we’re working on more system improvements. More quality-of-life changes. More bug fixes. More polish. We’ve made a lot of changes to our game during our 2+ years in Early Access. After your feast, the guests will arrive -- the hungry masses of new and returning players -- and we’re going to make sure Dungeon Defenders II is ready for them.

Loot Updates

We’ve been working on a series of changes that takes the new loot system from the Trials update and tweaks it to make loot more interesting and more intuitive. It applies the feedback we’ve received since the Trials update and instills more of the spirit of the loot system from the original Dungeon Defenders. These changes will apply to all new drops once the update comes out; your current gear will be unaffected. We hope you’ll enjoy the following changes when they come out next Tuesday:

New Stat Rolling System

Before this update, rarity affected the stats on loot -- the higher the rarity, the higher the stat roll. This was intended to make higher rarities desirable, but this was actually making progression slower than intended and caused roadblocks in progression. Equipped Legendaries (and even Mythicals) would increase the time until your next stat upgrade, and in some cases, it stopped intended stat upgrades from appearing at the end of a Chaos tier. We’ve removed this, and in its place, we’ve made some exciting changes to rarities to make them worthwhile to find. You’ll discover these changes later in this blog.

Something else that’s plagued loot in DD2 is its lack of multi-dimensionality. When you look back at the first Dungeon Defenders, the loot system begged you to give every loot drop a chance. There wasn’t always a simple “yes” or “no” of whether an item was better for you. Stats on loot rolled individually, so there were vastly more implications when deciding if a drop was better or worse for you. Say an item rolled with Defense Power and Defense Health. Perhaps Defense Power rolled higher than your current gear, but Defense Health rolled lower. Is that a tradeoff you’re willing to make? Is power worth more than health for your particular build? Worth more at this point in your progression? Is it bad for one hero but better for another? This kind of decision making was a driving force in DD1 in both the main progression and in the endgame.

With that spirit in mind, loot stats will now roll independently from each other! This should instill more of those interesting decisions into loot, and at the same time, it’ll introduce sidegrade opportunities to improve your speed of progression!

Legendaries are going to roll with an additional stat! If Legendaries are going to be rare, then you should mess yourself a little when you see that golden beam rising toward the heavens. Throughout our Early Access period, we’ve learned (and you’ve learned) that you don’t need that extra stat in order to succeed. But there was a certain joy in DD1’s loot when all of those beautiful stats rolled on a single item. It was that little extra push to keep playing and keep hunting. This change should make Legendaries feel just that much more special. Along with this change...

New Upgrade Ranges

Rarities have new upgrade ranges! Each rarity has its own unique range, which means a Legendary loot drop will always have more upgrades than a Mythical, which will always have more upgrades than an Epic, and so on. The final upgrade ranges are still being tweaked and will be available in the patch notes next week.

Along with this, upgrades will now roll in all numbers across their range. Something we’ve heard from our min/max players is that it was just a little too easy to find perfect gear, which really is the driving factor to keep playing DD2 as it was in DD1. These upgrade changes should ensure that higher rarities retain their usefulness and power while providing just a little bit more to look for.

Increased Armor & Weapon Shard Slots to 3 

We’ve also increased the Armor and Weapon Shard Slots from 2 to 3! Even better, these 3 Shard Slots will appear on both Legendary AND Mythical loot! We can’t wait to see what new builds you’ll create with these changes.

Increased Loot Drops

We’ve increased the amount of loot that drops in Trials by about 50%!

Loot Rolls Based on the Most Powerful Hero in Your Deck

One of the most common confusion points of our new loot system was how loot generated. Before this update, loot generated based on the average stat power of every hero in your deck, so if you had heroes with worse stats than others, the generated loot would be worse. In this update, loot will generate based on the most powerful hero in your deck. You won’t have to remove your other 3 heroes before Combat Phase just to get the best loot. Based on our playtesting, this change alone removes a lot of the WTF moments from our new loot system.

Increased Stat Roll Ranges

Speaking of loot generation, loot is generated in a +/- range around your equipped gear. Currently, that +/- range is fairly small. There aren’t enough of those “wow” moments of finding a loot drop with big stat upgrades -- not enough of those “power spike” moments. We’re increasing this range so that power spikes happen more frequently. Another thing to note is that with the new individual stat rolling, items that would previously be an across-the-board “-” roll (since both stats rolled in identical numbers) could now become possible upgrades!

Higher Loot Cap Per Chaos to Help Bridge the Gaps

For some players, moving between Chaos tiers was easy enough. For others, the gaps felt like an impenetrable wall. That’s what we’ve heard over and over since the Trials update.

In the loot system introduced in Trials, each Chaos tier drops better and better loot up to a certain point. Once you hit that point, you’ll need to move on to the next Chaos tier in order to keep finding better loot. With this update, we’re increasing the maximum loot cap per Chaos tier. If you can’t survive the leap to the next Chaos tier, you can now progress higher in your current tier. This additional power potential should decrease the gaps and increase your upward mobility.

Coming Up:  Better In-Game Instructions

The above changes should make the system more intuitive, but we recognize that some elements need to be more explicitly stated. In the future, we’re going to include better in-game information to players about how loot works.

Coming Up:  The Return of Unique Legendary Weapons

In the coming updates, our unique legendary weapons will return! Keep an eye on our blog for more details.

Increased Gold Rewards

Players weren’t earning enough gold in earlier Chaos tiers. For rough comparison, Chaos 1 only awarded around 13,000 gold per victory, while Chaos 7 awards around 56,000 gold.

So in this update, we’ve increased the gold rewards in all Chaos tiers below Chaos 7, with significant increases in the early Chaos tiers that taper off into the higher tiers. For example, Chaos 1 should now award closer to 21,000 gold, which is around a 60% increase in gold per victory! This should greatly help with the gold squeeze in earlier difficulties. It’s also worth noting that our increased loot drops will leave players with more gold than before. We’ll continue to monitor the gold-per-hour and gold-per-difficulty players achieve at these new values and make more adjustments if needed.

As a result, players will see an increase in gold earnings with this new patch, and that’s not even including the following change:

Consecutive Win Gold and XP Bonuses

In this update, we’re rounding out our Consecutive Win feature by introducing Gold and XP bonuses! You’ll begin to earn these bonuses on your 1st consecutive win (so on your 2nd overall victory), and these bonuses will grow up to a cap. The more you play, the more you’ll earn! (Also, we’re actively working on Matchmaking fixes. Several fixes will come out in this update, which includes possible solutions for being unable to continue after the end of a match, and more fixes are on the way soon. We’ll continue to make the Consecutive Win bonus and Matchmaking feel better and better!)

Experience and Ascension Updates

We’re happy with how fast players are earning Ascension levels when they’re playing at a challenging difficulty. But some players are farming much, much lower difficulties to earn Ascension levels at very fast rates, and it’s thrown off our estimate on how fast players would earn Ascension levels.

When we released Chaos 6 and Chaos 7, some players had steamrolled way ahead of our Ascension estimates by farming earlier Chaos difficulties. In essence, we had two audiences -- one that was at or near the target Ascension level for Chaos 6, and another group that had pulled way, way ahead. Balancing new difficulties for these two different audiences became quite challenging, and we realized we needed to close the gap between them a bit if we wanted to keep releasing new difficulties.

So, to help hit that goal, we’re making the following changes:

New Difficulty XP Bonuses and New XP Curve

Each higher Chaos difficulty gives much more experience. Chaos 5, by comparison, now awards several times more experience than it used to. This means that playing at higher difficulties gives much more experience than playing at lower difficulties.

But we’re also increasing the amount of experience required to earn each level. These changes combined mean that if you’re currently playing Chaos 5, it’s more efficient to farm Chaos 4 or Chaos 5 for experience rather than going all the way back down to Chaos 1. This change won’t alter your existing Ascension level, but it will update the amount of experience you need to reach the next level.

The time-to-level should not increase if you’re playing at a challenging difficulty, but it will increase if you’re playing at a difficulty way below where you should be. In practical terms, this means Chaos 1 will no longer be the most efficient difficulty for every player to earn Ascension levels, especially if you’re well over Ascension 200.

New Ascension Power Caps

While our first change is targeted at smoothing out the rate of progression and encouraging players to play harder difficulties, this next change is intended to limit the overall power of players who are many times over the target Ascension level for our hardest difficulty.

With Chaos 7 being our current hardest difficulty, we are lowering the cap on powers from 999 to somewhere in the mid-100s (roughly 140). Powers that were capped at 10, 15, or 20 are unchanged; only the powers that had 999 caps are affected. As we release harder difficulties, the cap will go up.

If you’re under Ascension level 400, this won’t affect you at all as you wouldn’t have enough points to hit any cap. But if you’re over Ascension 420 (roughly), you may notice you’re starting to hit caps that will require you to diversify your points rather than stacking them into a single power.

Accompanying this change will be a reset of all Ascension points, allowing all players to freely update their Ascension Powers. Our intent is to shrink the power gap a bit between our most dedicated fans (some of whom are over Ascension 1,000!) and the vast majority of our playerbase (most of whom are less than Ascension 300), so we can continue to release content that challenges both audiences in a timely fashion.

New Ascension Level Rewards

We didn’t want this update to be all redos and system updates, so we’ve included some new rewards for reaching higher Ascension levels!

Starting with Ascension level 100 (and continuing up to 1,000), players will earn rewards for hitting Ascension milestones. One of the rewards will be new titles, available to our more dedicated players who push the upper ends of Ascension.

We’d like to close by thanking all of our players who are helping to make DD2 a great game. You guys have totally amazed us with your dedication, and we hope you continue to support DD2 as we approach our official release!

Love,
The Trendy Team

Server Improvements

• We’ve made multiple improvements to our servers that should help reduce the overall number of disconnects.

Zapper Boss Changes

The goal of the Zapper boss is to disable a large amount of defenses at once; however, its damage was causing defenses to instantly die -- and in some cases, the core, too. With the below changes, the Zapper should be more in line with how we want it to affect the battlefield.

• Damage radically decreased to very, very low values.

• Health slightly decreased.

• Has a very large radius that stuns all Defenses hit for 45s.

• Size slightly reduced, and AI updated to make kamikaze mechanics target more correctly and be less easy to trick into kamikazing into a Hero.

Split Viper Shard

The Split Viper Shard was turning Sand Viper into a bit of a runaway monster. With this change, we wanted to keep the net DPS of hitting 3 targets pretty high, but a slight Defense Power penalty allows us to keep it closer to the intended benefits (it's still really, really good though).

• Split Viper Shard at max level now applies a small Defense Power penalty, ending at -20% at maximum level.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where the Defense Speed stat wasn’t accurately applying unless players unequipped/re-equipped their Shards/Relics. Everyone should see accurate Defense Speed stats now.

• Fixed an issue where the Earthshatter Tower was unable to hit smaller enemies. We gave it some new glasses, and it now hits them properly.

• You can now pick up the golden ingot from the Forest Biome map in all game modes.

• The Mystic has regained the Snake God’s favor. Appeasement buffs are working again.

• Kobold Fliers and EMP Kobold Fliers have death animations once again. Now they should crash into the ground and dissolve out when killed, rather than instantly disappearing. Good for you; bad for them.

• If a player has more than 8 inventory bags, the price of the "max out bags" bundle will no longer appear negative.

• Added some collision to the scroll cauldrons behind the Gran Ma’ster in the tavern.

• PS4/Controller - Fixed an issue where unequipping all shards was not working while using a controller. Players no longer have to go into the upgrade UI to unequip shards individually.

• PS4 - Dark Assassins will no longer become invisible after using their demon kiss ability for the 3rd time.

Known Issues

• There’s an issue with the End-of-Match screen where it sometimes won’t let players Continue. We’re looking into it now and hope to have a fix very soon.

To celebrate the release of The Spring Forward Update, we're removing the cost of Ascension Point Resets this weekend! Tweak, test and get turnt* to your heart’s content while you hone your new builds. This event will run from now to Monday morning EDT. Enjoy!

*Trendy Entertainment is not responsible for any turnt-related injuries.

Thanks for the feedback on the Spring Forward Update! Today's hotfix addresses some of the bugs you've reported since yesterday. More fixes are on the way!

Changes

• Apprentice Tornado and Monk Pole Smash no longer have hidden cooldowns on re-applying their Knockup buffs.

  • Note that the enemies must still start falling before a knockup buff can apply! This simply eliminates a hidden delay between when they hit the ground and when they could be knocked-up again.

Bug Fixes

• Chaos II and Chaos III have the correct enemy spawns again.

• The Flamethrower Tower no longer fires while stunned.

• Fixed the Power Dart Tower Damage Ascension Power tooltip text.

• The cores in the normalized version of Forest Biome take damage again.

• Fixed some issues with closing and opening the Costume Shop.

The Spring Forward Update is available now on PC & PS4!

We’re getting ready to leave Early Access (which we’ll talk about in more detail in the near future). We’re tying up loose ends, fixing the biggest issues, squashing the biggest bugs, and polishing the most visible areas. The Spring Forward Update is the beginning of this process, and you’ll see more improvements in our regular patches after the update lands.

Here’s what’s in the update!

Features & Changes

Two New Chaos Tiers
This update adds Chaos VI and VII, and with it comes two new enemies, better loot, new Shards and the return of many Shards that were unavailable since Patch 19.5!

New Enemy:  Hex Throwers

With their mighty javelins, Hex Throwers curse your defenses from long range! You’ll first encounter these Olympic rejects in Chaos VI.

New Enemy:  Kobolts

Keep your eyes on the skies! These flying EMP Kobolds disable your defenses when they explode! You’ll first encounter what is sure to be everyone’s new favorite enemy in Chaos VII.

Weekend Event:  Free Ascension Resets!
To celebrate the release of the new Chaos difficulties, we are removing the cost of Ascension Point Resets this weekend!  Tweak, test and get turnt* to your heart’s content while you hone your new builds. This event will run from Friday afternoon to Monday morning EDT.

*Trendy Entertainment is not responsible for any turnt-related injuries.

Tower Skins

Finally! This was by far the biggest system we needed before our Early Access exit since many of you purchased a certain Collector’s Pack a long time ago and have been patiently waiting on certain Tower Skins. This update includes 8 sets of Tower Skins available for purchase and the Collector’s Pack Tower Skins given to owners of the pack and to our Defense Council members.

• Tower Skins come in Sets, and each Set includes 4 Tower Skins -- one for every defense in a hero’s kit! The first sets are for the Squire, Monk, Huntress and Apprentice, and you can find these Tower Skins available for purchase in the new Emporium shop (available in the Heroes Marketplace or via the Pause Menu). Tower Skins for the other heroes are coming soon!

• We've added a new Cosmetics tab in the Inventory, and this is where you'll equip Tower Skins (and eventually Costumes). In this tab, you can individually select which skin you want on which defense -- so if you want the Corrupted Poison Dart Tower Skin and the Defense Council Blaze Balloon on the same Huntress, go for it!

Defense Council/Collector’s Pack Tower Skins

On the Store Page, we said we were going to make 4 Tower Skins for the Collector’s Pack -- one tower skin apiece for the four original heroes. Well, we’re giving you 16 Tower Skins -- that’s a skin for every Squire, Monk, Huntress and Apprentice defense! If you own the Collector’s Pack or if you’re a Defense Council member, you’ll find these Tower Skins when you login. Thanks for the support!

PC Controller Support

We’ve added near-total PC controller support! Controllers will natively work for every command and every in-game menu except for the Options menu, which we’re hoping to get setup very soon!

Bag Auto Sorting

In this update, we’ve added an Auto Sort option to bags! When you select Auto Sort, items in the bag will re-organize by type (Weapons, Armor, Consumables, etc.), and within that type sorting, items will organize by rarity (for example:  Legendary Weapons, Mythical Weapons, Legendary Armor, Mythical Armor, Consumables, etc.) While this option is on, items will automatically sort based on these rules. If you wish to move items around in the bag, you’ll need to turn off the Auto Sort function.

Defense Against the Dark Assassins

We’ve added a 5-second protection between Assassin attacks while playing and a 10-second protection from Assassins after respawning. No more permanent chain-silencing!

Open Trials Matches on the Game Browser

Now you can view every open public Trials match on the Game Browser! This is perfect for finding the map to begin your win streak.

New Town Marketplace

Our world artists really went to town on the marketplace! *badumtish* But seriously, it’s amazing. New out-of-bounds scenery. New buildings. New skybox. It’s just one of those polish areas our world artists wanted to get in before we left Early Access!

The Emporium

Another feature we’ve been putting off is a unified shop, and as we’re approaching our exit from Early Access, now is the time to add it in! From this one single shop, you can find almost all of our in-game purchases. The Emporium is also available anywhere via the Pause Menu.

Other Changes

• Added a kill timer for Ogres and Siege Rollers that get stuck in the spawners.

• Removed the Victory Chest cutscene at the end of a match.

• Removed teleporting to Victory Chest at the end of a match.

• Added a new Victory splash and new victory hero animations at the end of a match.

• Selecting “To Tavern” at the end of a private match will take you back to the Tavern rather than the Town.

• Items picked up manually will now follow your auto-collect filtering rules.

• Added Forest Biome as a Forest map for Daily Missions.

• Changed Item Interact keybind on PC to Ctrl + Left-Click.

• We have removed Practice maps for the time being to reduce confusion while we work towards improving the overall endgame experience.

• Removed the Forge now that all of the Forge UI is accessible via the Pause Menu.

• Changed anything that said “Slow X%” to “Slow to X%.”

• Added the War Recruiter (DM Shard Shop) to the Tavern. (He was previously only in the Heroes Marketplace.)

• Betterfied the left side of the inspect tooltip. All numbers should now truncate properly and shortened numbers now show an additional decimal place.

• Accessory upgrades can now be purchased and equipped from the Costume Shop.

• Betsy Cluster Nades Shard is now a Weapon-slot Shard.

• Updated various UIs to the new UI format.

Balance

Buried Bastille Map

• Increased Buried Bastille’s starting mana to 2400 and DU limit to 2000.

  • Buried Bastille was consistently coming in as one of the hardest maps to complete in Chaos Trials. As a result, we’ve increased the starting mana and DU to allow for more defenses and to minimize the amount of hero intervention needed in distant lanes.

Skyguard Tower

• Fixed the Skyguard’s rotation time to always exceed its firing time. This allows the Skyguard to fire as quickly as intended by its Attack Rate.

Defense Crit Damage

• Adjusted the Defense Crit Damage Ascension Power per-point value to +20, matching the value used by the Hero Crit Damage Ascension Power.    

  • This update should have rolled out with Patch 19.5, but we missed it. Previously, this power had inflated per-point values to make it more useful. With the rebalance to Defense Crit Damage scalars in every defense, this power should have been updated to provide the same benefits as the Hero version.

Poison Dart Tower

• Poison Dart Tower Damage Ascension Power now correctly increases Defense Power, rather than raw damage, making this power useful.

Slime Pit

• Slime Pits now scale with Defense Speed, which means faster-attacking Slime Pits that scale much better in Chaos Trials!

• Alos increased base scaling from Defense Power and Defense Crit Damage.

Skeletal Orc

• Reduced the Orc Skeleton Direct Command’s damage bonus from Ability Power from 12 to 9.

  • This Direct Command has proven quite excellent at smashing single targets, and even after this update, the potential damage output is still quite monstrous with the correct shards.

Sandstorm Warrior Shard

• The Sandstorm Warrior’s buff no longer stacks with itself.

  • Unfortunately, the stacking effect of this Shard was never intended and was caused by a technical issue. This is actually a bug fix, but since it has an impact on certain strategies, we’ve documented it here in the balance section.

Heavy Cannonball Shard

• Greatly increased the damage of the Heavy Cannonball Shard, but reduced the duration of the stun and slightly reduced the proc rate.

  • During our last update, we modified many Shards that added stun, slow, and other utility effects to defenses. Unfortunately, we missed the Heavy Cannonball shard in that update. As such, we've gone back and updated it, bringing it more in-line with our other defense proc shards. The stun duration has come down a good bit, but it has been accompanied by a substantial increase in damage to help ensure it remains competitive against other Shards.

Bug Fixes

Thanks to all of the players submitting bugs on our Bug Reporting Site! As we get closer to our exit from Early Access, it’s vital that everyone is reporting bugs to the site and upvoting the bugs you feel are the highest priority to fix. Together, we’re going to fix as many bugs as possible! Let’s do this.

• Fixed a crash that could occur while opening and closing the Scavenger’s...shop? Is it a shop? He’s just fishing around in his jacket and giving you back your loot. That reminds us:  Wash that loot off. Thoroughly. You’ve been warned.

• Fixed an issue where the Abyss Lord’s secondary attack could fire faster than intended. This attack now has a proper absolute maximum attack rate like other ranged attacks.

• Fixed a bug where the Dark Torment damage over time effect did not appear.

• Enemies should get stuck less often in the Echoing Tunnel on Dragonfall Sewers.

• Fixed a bug where Cyborks were not properly affecting the Fissure of Embermount.

• All decked heroes should now heal to maximum health when entering Build Phase.

• Taser Suit Shard now works on Assassins that are bound to the player.

• Life Leech Shard now works on the Abyss Lord’s primary and secondary attacks.

• Sundering Blows Shard works properly now.

• Abyss Fountain Heal Ascension Power now works properly.

• Power of Embermount Shard properly works, it does.

• ‘ey, you remember the Fire for Effect Shard? We hear it’s working now. And properly, too! Crazy, right?

• Betsy Cluster Nades Shard. Work? Properly? Now? Yes. A thousand times yes.

• Fixed a bug on the Water Elemental Shard where it was doing 30% additional damage of your Defense Power rather than 30% additional damage of the defense itself. In most cases, this was resulting in lower damage than intended.

• Oil Geyser Slow Ascension Power wasn’t giving any additional benefit after 15 points; it does now.

• The Trials Victory screen no longer erroneously tells players to Replay Map when there is no “Replay Map” button.

• Fissure of Embermount now displays on the minimap.

• Fissure of Embermount’s upgrade tier now displays above it.

• Fixed a bug where the Angry Nimbus base Defense Speed was a teensy tiny bit higher than intended. Does not impact gameplay, just makes his stats less mildly infuriating to look at.
  

• Several shards with stacking effects have had their descriptions clarified to reflect that they stack off any attack rather than only primary attacks.

• Changed the description of the Overwhelm Shard to match the effects. This Shard procs off of both primary and secondary attacks (the old description only said primary attacks). Added a 3 second delay between procs to prevent issues with certain secondary attacks.

• Unequipping Shards from an item while your Inventory is full will now tell you they were sent to the Scavenger.

• Snipe Critical Power Shard no longer incorrectly increases the Critical Damage of primary attacks.

• Fixed a bug where Flying Kobolds will always dive bomb Abyss Stones. They are now wise to the tricksy Abby.

• Fixed an issue where Tomes could generate with elemental damage stats even though they weren’t being applied. This fix only affects Tomes generated going forward and will not reroll previously generated Tomes.

• The Mystic’s Appeasement buffs now work properly again.

• Fixed a bug where the Confuse effect in the Forest Biome was set to 60s rather than the intended 5s. Players were exploiting this to perma-cc the whole map.

• Power Bolts Shard can now be equipped on non-Legendary Relics.

• Fixed a bug where an area would become unbuildable if you kicked a player who’s in the middle of building a defense there.

• Adjusted some spawners to properly block towers in the Assault on Throne Room.

• Betsy’s name splash no longer stays on the screen after she comes down on wave 5.

• The icon of the Monk's Chi Blast no longer shows up near the Scavenger.

• Items are now successfully removed from the Blacksmith/Relic NPC shops when purchased.

• Fixed the Fire Mushroom buff stacking issue.

• Updated Earthshatter to correctly deal single-target damage on all attacks.

• Shards that increase stats for defenses will now update the Inventory screen stat display for your current hero (fix for the other decked heroes coming soon).

• Fissure of Embermount now plays upgrade SFX when upgraded.

• Fixed some incorrect names and descriptions for maps on the Any Map section of the War Table.

• Fixed an issue where enemies were walking through sub-objective lanes too soon before the lane fully opened on Greystone Plaza.

• Fixed an issue with the Orb display in the Relic shops.

• Gran Ma'ster and War Recruiter Shard Packs now use the right Shard Pack mesh (previously they all used the Chaos 1 Mesh).

• Fixed minimap icon issue for the air lanes in Little-Horn Valley.

• Galactic Weapons no longer drop 100% from Throne Room in any Chaos difficulty.

• Fixed an issue where Shards were using the wrong tooltips when in the Scavenger’s dirty little hands.

• There is now a visual indicator for activating Pet Abilities when using gamepad.

• Fixed a bug where opening a consumable box with a full Inventory would send those items to the Scavenger; now there’s a pop-up telling you that your Inventory is full.

• Fixed an inspect tooltip issue with the Hornet's Nest.

• Minor update to the description text for Lightning Strikes Aura to indicate that it does Storm damage.

• Tier 1-3 Abyss Lord Tomes now have names and should persist between map loads.   

• Fixed a bug where the titles of certain consumables were not wrapping. This was most obvious with unidentified Shards.

• Fixed a UI issue with the Session List.

• Fixed typos in several Shard descriptions.

• Fixed the descriptions for Dawn of the Blood Moon and Buried Bastille.

Known Issues

• (PC/PS4)  Navigation of the Costume Shop with the controller has issues.

• In some cases, the Emporium UI might get stuck. Hit ESC or Back on your controller to exit out as a workaround right now.

• Ascension - Movement Speed power doesn't change the hero movement speed value on the left side of the inventory. Just a visual thing.

• Heroes for Hire Board - All hero images link to the Dryad in the Create Hero screen.

• If the user has more than 8 inventory bags, then the price of the "max out bags" bundle will go negative. (Nothing bad happens from it.)

• Controller Input: With the controller active, if you cancel a purchase from an NPC shop the cursor moves to the top of the list instead of staying where it is.

• The Costume Shop will not close correctly (leaving the character stuck) when you access it via the Emporium and close it by selecting the yellow "X" close button. Just open the shop again, and you’ll be ok.

• Shards - Annoyance Shard effect stays in last location the equipped hero was present.

• Haunting Shard - Gains stacks from secondary attacks, but does not shoot the ghosts.

• Sandstorm Warrior - Bubble showing the buff does not last the full duration of the upgraded Shard.

• The hatch button doesn't pop up when the egg is ready to hatch. Closing the UI or leaving/re-entering the tavern or marketplace should cause this UI to refresh properly.

• On the PS4, opening the Emporium shop via the Colonel NPC and then selecting Browse All will cause the Emporium shop to not close correctly when you exit the Costume Shop/Create Hero screen. If you experience Emporium shop problems, transitioning to another map or pressing the circle button twice in the Emporium shop will correct the issue (fix incoming later this week).

Birds chirping. Breeze blowing. Leaves growing. Springtime is here!

At least, that’s what we’ve heard. For us, this Spring means staying indoors and getting Dungeon Defenders II ready to leave Early Access (which we’ll talk about in more detail in the near future). We’re tying up loose ends, fixing the biggest issues, squashing the biggest bugs, and polishing the most visible areas. The Spring Forward Update is the beginning of this process, and you’ll see more improvements in our regular patches after the update lands.

So when will the Spring Forward Update come out? How about next Tuesday, April 18th? Does that work for you? Cool. We’ll put that down in our calendars then -- April 18th:  Make Great Spring for Glorious Playerbase Nation. Done!

Here’s what’s in the update:

Two New Chaos Tiers

We told you the next Chaos tiers would happen soon! This update adds Chaos VI and VII, and with it comes two new enemies, better loot, and most of the Shards that were disabled in Patch 19.5. 

So what fearsome new enemies are we adding now?

Hex Throwers

With their mighty javelins, Hex Throwers curse your defenses from long range! You’ll first encounter these Olympic rejects in Chaos VI.

Kobolts

Keep your eyes on the skies! These flying EMP Kobolds disable your defenses when they explode! You’ll first encounter what is sure to be everyone’s favorite enemy in Chaos VII.

Beyond these new Chaos tiers, we’re continuing to investigate changes to our loot system, difficulty balance and economy. Look for improvements in the coming weeks!

Tower Skins Are Coming

Finally! This was by far the biggest system we needed before our Early Access exit since many of you purchased a certain Collector’s Pack a long time ago and have been patiently waiting on certain Tower Skins. This update includes 8 sets of Tower Skins available for purchase and the Collector’s Pack Tower Skins given to owners of the pack and to our Defense Council members.

Tower Skins

Tower Skins come in Sets, and each Set includes 4 Tower Skins -- one for every defense in a hero’s kit! The first sets are for the Squire, Monk, Huntress and Apprentice, and Tower Skins for the other heroes are coming soon! 

We've added a new Cosmetics tab in the Inventory, and this is where you'll equip Tower Skins (and eventually Costumes). In this tab, you can individually select which skin you want on which defense -- so if you want the Corrupted Poison Dart Tower Skin and the Defense Council Blaze Balloon on the same Huntress, go for it!

Defense Council/Collector’s Pack Tower Skins

On the Store Page, we said we were going to make 4 Tower Skins for the Collector’s Pack -- one tower skin apiece for the four original heroes. Well, we’re giving you 16 Tower Skins -- that’s a skin for every Squire, Monk, Huntress and Apprentice defense! If you own the Collector’s Pack or if you’re a Defense Council member, you’ll find these Tower Skins when you login after the update comes out. Thanks for the support!

PC Controller Support

Speaking of support, in this update, we’re adding near-total PC controller support! Controllers will natively work for every command and every in-game menu except for the Options menu, which we’re hoping to get setup very soon!

Bag Auto Sorting

In this update, we’re adding an Auto Sort option to bags! When you select Auto Sort, items in the bag will re-organize by type (Weapons, Armor, Consumables, etc.), and within that type sorting, items will organize by rarity (for example:  Legendary Weapons, Mythical Weapons, Legendary Armor, Mythical Armor, Consumables, etc.) While this option is on, items will automatically sort based on these rules. If you wish to move items around in the bag, you’ll need to turn off the Auto Sort function.

Breaking the Assassin Cycle of Silence

Let me speak! In this update, we’re adding a 5-second protection between Assassin attacks while playing and a 10-second protection from Assassins after respawning. No more permanent chain-silencing!

Open Trials Matches on the Game Browser

Now you can view every open public Trials match on the Game Browser! This is perfect for finding the map to begin your win streak.

New Town Marketplace

Our world artists really went to town on the marketplace! *badumtish* But seriously, it’s amazing. New out-of-bounds scenery. New buildings. New skybox. It’s just one of those polish areas our world artists wanted to get in before we left Early Access!

The Emporium

Another feature we’ve been putting off is a unified shop, and as we’re approaching our exit from Early Access, now is the time to add it in! From this one single shop, you can find almost all of our in-game purchases. The Emporium is also available anywhere via the Pause Menu.

Crit Update

After Patch 19.5 came out, a lot of you told us that crits were OPOP. We believe you! We’re looking into it, and we think we’re zeroing in on the reasons why. We should have some changes for this in the update. Thanks for the feedback!

Bug Fixes

No update would be complete without bug fixes! This update fixes, among other things, a long-standing firing issue with the Skyguard that made itself more visible in Patch 19.5. The Skyguard was firing at 60% of its expected fire rate, but now this baby is singing. We also hear Slime Pits are affected by Defense Speed now! The full bug fix list will be available next Tuesday.

Patch 19.5 is live now on PC and PS4! This patch contains changes to Shard drops, balance, UI and more. 

Here are the full patch notes:

Shard Changes

According to our recent survey, Shard drops were the #1 biggest frustration from the Trials update. Our biggest focus for this patch was to improve Shard farming time speed and improve your ability to specifically target farm the Shards you want.

• Each Shard Pack now contains unique Shards. For example, Shards A, B and C can only be found in Chaos I Shard Packs, while Shards D, E and F can only be found in Chaos III Shard Packs.

  • This also means that Standard Shards will no longer drop from within Chaos Shard Packs!

• Each victory in Trials will guarantee at least 1 Chaos Shard Pack from that given difficulty. For example, when you beat Chaos II Trials, you will be guaranteed a Chaos II Shard Pack.

• Before, Shard Packs had a chance to give you 1 Shard from a pool of up to 120(!) different Shards. In the patch, we’re reducing the Shard pool per pack from ~120 to somewhere between 25-35 Shards per pack, which will increase the chances of getting the Shard you want when you open a pack.

  • Some Shards have moved around. Be sure to check out DD2Tools, our official Wiki or the Interactive Shards Sheet for details on where Shards drop now!

  • Some Shards have been disabled from dropping, but don’t worry, most of them will return with the new Chaos tiers, which will come out very soon!

• Standard Shard Packs and Chaos 1-4 Shard Packs are now available for purchase at the Gran’Masta and War Recruiter shops.

• Victory Chests will now drop 2 Shard Packs guaranteed every time.

  • When you win, you’ll receive one Shard Pack from that difficulty and one Shard Pack from any previous difficulty (for example, if you beat Chaos III Trials, you’ll receive 1 Chaos III Shard Pack and 1 Chaos II, Chaos I or Standard Shard Pack).

By making Shard Packs drop unique Shards, increasing drop chances within a pack, guaranteeing Shard Packs per difficulty, giving you 2 Shard Packs guaranteed on every victory and adding a Shard bonus for consecutive wins (more details below), it’ll be much faster to get the Shards you want. Again, if you want to know the new Shard drop locations, check out our Wiki and on our community-made webtools (like Czokalapik’s DD2Tools and Pandynator and xlogisticsx’s Interactive Shard Sheet).

Trials Consecutive Win Shard Bonus

This patch adds the first pass on our Trials consecutive win bonus, which gives bonus rewards for winning consecutive random maps in Trials. This patch adds the Shard consecutive bonus; in future patches, it’s our goal to add XP and Gold bonuses, too.

• Once you win 3 consecutive random maps in a row in Trials, you’ll activate the Shard consecutive bonus. On your 4th consecutive victory onward, you’ll earn an extra Shard Pack for as long as the streak continues.

• This extra Shard Pack is a guaranteed Shard Pack from that difficulty.

  • That means once you activate the win bonus, you’ll get 3 Shards guaranteed every victory (2 Shard Packs of that difficulty, 1 Shard Pack from previous difficulties) until the streak is broken.

Sort Shards By Name

Another pain point brought up in the survey was the frustration of trying to find the Shard you want within your Inventory. A popular suggestion (both in the survey and in the community) was a Shard filter that sorts Shards alphabetically by name, and we were able to get it in for this patch! We’re investigating more Shard filtering options and possible Shard icon improvements for future updates.

• Added the “Name” filter in the All Bags -> Shards section, which sorts Shards alphabetically.

Hero Management UI Changes

Something we’ve heard from players with a high number of heroes is that it’s difficult to navigate to certain heroes in the new Hero Management UI. These changes are aimed at alleviating that frustration.

• Added a Quick Select option. Quick Select displays up to 18 heroes per page. Select a hero to go to that hero’s position in the Rolodex. More improvements to the Quick Select feature will come in future patches!

• You can now interact with any visible hero card in the Rolodex. Previously, you needed to use the arrows to navigate through the hero cards. (FYI:  You can also use the Middle Mouse Wheel on PC to scroll through your hero cards.)

Bag Quick Scrolling

On the PC version, we’ve added hotkeys that will cycle left and right through your bags! This should make moving items from one bag to another much faster, especially for those of you who don’t have a Middle Mouse Wheel.

• Q and E will scroll between left and right between bags on PC.

• Reminder:  The Middle Mouse Wheel can also scroll through bags, too!

Return to Tavern No Longer Forces Everyone Back to Tavern

If one person selects Return to Tavern, that person will leave. Not you. You will Continue, baby. And you’ll keep Continuing as long as you want to Continue.

New Weekend Event Support

This patch includes the ability to do Weekend Gold and Weekend XP events! Perhaps you’ll see them soon...

New Title:  Discord Defender

We’ve added a new title that you can earn by being active on our Discord server!  

Defense Balance Changes

With this patch, we’ve taken a serious look at the viability of all defenses as well as how several of our specific defense stats scale, and we made some fundamental changes as a result. We hope these changes will make many defenses, at least when it comes to raw DPS and utility, viable in later Chaos difficulties. You can read an expanded explanation of these changes in our Patch 19.5 Preview blog.

• Defense Power scalars have been refactored on all defenses. Every defense receives more damage bonuses from Defense Power.

• Defense tier upgrades now increase Defense Power and Defense Crit Damage much more significantly on low-DU defenses than high-DU defenses.

  • As a rule, high-DU defenses are still more efficient at Tier 5 than low-DU defenses, but this makes the gap smaller and removes much of the penalty of using 20 DU defenses like Explosive Trap.

• Defense Crit Cap increased from 30% -> 33%.

  • Note:  Hero Ascension Powers no longer break the Defense Crit Cap.

• Defense Crit Damage scalars on most defenses are set to 500% that of the Defense Power scalar.

  • Exceptions apply to certain unusual defenses, like Poison Dart Tower and Obelisk.

• Defense Crit Damage Cap increased to hopefully unreachable levels.

• Defense Speed has been refactored to apply consistent benefits across all defenses.

• Attack Rate caps have been refactored. Primarily damage-dealing defenses have rate caps of 4x faster than base Attack Rate. Primarily utility defenses have a rate cap of 2x faster than base Attack Rate.

  • We’ll keep an eye on this. We would ideally have similar rates on all defenses, but certain utility defenses become nearly unstoppable (by themselves) at very high attack rates.

• Defense Rate shard no longer breaks the Attack Rate cap on a defense.

• Default Attack Rate of some very-slow defenses has been slightly increased to reduce overkill damage inefficiencies on Goblins and other weak targets.

  • Lightning Strikes Aura and Earthshatter are the primary beneficiaries.

• All defense-based stuns, slows, and similar utility effects, including those provided through shards, have had their durations updated to account for the changes in Defense Speed and Attack Rates.

  • In many cases, this means that the duration of these effects are slightly lower, as the defense can apply them more frequently at higher defense speeds.

  • Ascension Powers and Shards that increase the duration or power of stuns, slows, and other utility effects have also been rebalanced for the same reasons.

• Defense Range Gambit Ascension Powers have been refactored and standardized across defenses.

  • All many-target defenses (like the Flame Aura and the Flamethrower) may now gain up to a 25% increase in range from these powers.

  • All fixed-target defenses (like the Hornet’s Nest and the Cannonball Tower) may now gain up to a 50% increase in range from these powers.

  • We will keep an eye on these values and adjust accordingly, but we want fixed-target defenses to receive larger benefits from range upgrades than many-target defenses.

• Fissure of Embermount now benefits from Defense Speed.

• Gunwitch Sniper Roost tower has double the default crit chance.

• Snaking Sands now benefits from Defense Speed and no longer has a hidden 12s cooldown.

• Sand Viper’s Defense Power scalar heavily revised. Should now be much more competitive with other fixed-target towers.

• Obelisk’s Smite and Fire mechanics have been heavily revised.

  • Smite Damage and Rate are now displayed on Inspect.

  • Smite rate now properly scales with Defense Speed and no longer has hidden cooldowns.

  • Additional Obelisk buffs (Shield, Transmog, Bubble) now apply more frequently thanks to Defense Speed scaling.

  • Fire (from maximum appeasement) stats are now more clearly labelled on Inspect.

  • A chunk of the Obelisk’s damage output has been moved from Fire to Smite. While we like the mechanic of rewarding players for playing combat Mystics, we did not want the Fire effect to be so vital to the defense that the defense was useless outside of it. We’ll keep a close eye on this balance going forward and try to ensure its viability in a non-Fire spam role.

• Lightning Strikes Aura health no longer breaks during tier upgrades, and the health has been reduced to sane values.

• Reflect Beam description clarified to explain the Torpedo effect better.

• All effects that modify the slow % of a defense or ability are now multiplicative, rather than additive.

  • Tier upgrades, Ascension Power upgrades, and shard upgrades that improve slows are now multiplicative, rather than additive. This means that a 10% improvement on a base 65% Slow will only reduce the Slow to 58.5%.

  • This was a necessary step to fix some defenses in achieving negative slows on enemies, as well as giving us more room to improve slows with additional shards / powers.

  • This affects the Oil Geyser, Proton Node, Frostbite Tower, and the Dryad’s Powder Toss ability.

• Frostbite Tower's chill/slow effect has been rebalanced across all Ascension Powers/shards/upgrades (no more moonwalking…)

  • Through Ascension Powers/shards/tier upgrades, the maximum slow the Frostbite Tower can achieve is around 50% now, rather than being -15%...

• Mystic’s Serpent’s Coil has been heavily improved.

  • Benefits from Mystic’s defense Ascension Powers.

  • Benefits from Defense Speed stat.

  • While it still cannot be upgraded, it is a very efficient 20 DU defense now.

• Poison Dart Tower’s projectiles deal basic damage again. We will be revising this defense’s mechanics again once technical upgrades allow us to handle the Crit Damage issues more gracefully.

• Frosty Power shard no longer stacks with itself.

  • We felt the power of this shard was strong enough on its own that allowing it to stack, especially in conjunction with a specific other shard, was giving too much bang-for-the-buck.

• Colossal Fissure scaling stat changed to Ability Power and now deals damage properly.

Hero Balance Changes

• Increased default mana regeneration on the Apprentice, Huntress, Monk, and Squire from 2 MP/s to 3 MP/s.

• Abyss Stone damage increased by 10%, but Abyss Knight damaged decreased by 10%.

  • Abyss Lord's primary damage ability is intended to be his Abyss Stone, but we've noticed the trend is to spam Abyss Knight more so when it comes down to brass tax.

  • As a result, we're moving some of his damage dealing power from Abyss Knight to Abyss Stone to separate the functions of these two abilities a little more.

• Fixed several Abyss Lord and EV2 ability descriptions incorrectly specifying they scaled from stats they did not scale from. Abilities scale from Ability Power.

• Molten Brimstone Tome now has proper gameplay values, scales entirely from Ability Power, and functions more usefully at shard level 1.

• Power of Storms shard has been refactored completely.

  • Shard description updated to state the new effect. When triggered, it increases mana regeneration by 20 MP/s for 3s but has a 10s cooldown (at max level).

• Shards that deal damage directly now have proper, unique Crit Damage scalars.

  • Crit Damage from these shard attacks can no longer reach infinite values…

Campaign Balance Changes

• Enemy levels in Campaign have been increased to account for the increases in overall defense damage.

• Hero level 1 stats slightly increased to account for slight increase to enemy levels in campaign

  • Except EV2. Her level 1 stats were slightly decreased, because for some reason they were way, way, way higher than everyone else’s….

• Certain intro enemies had their HP reduced in the campaign (Lady Orc, Wyvern, etc.)

Chaos Balance Changes

• Enemy levels in Chaos have been increased slightly to account for the increases in overall defense damage.

  • We paid specific attention to enemies that are generally not affected by defenses (Witherbeast, Siege Rollers, etc.) and re-weighted their stats accordingly. They can still be slain in a timely fashion only by heroes.

• In combination with the above changes, we’ve reduced the Chaos 1 enemy level by 10%. The result of this along with our defense balance changes should result in a smoother entry into Chaos 1. We’ll continue to monitor both player feedback and our internal data to see how players are progressing into Chaos 1.

Stuck Special Enemy Fixes

One of the biggest bugs we wanted to fix was the Stuck Special Enemy bug where Siege Rollers and other Special Enemies were getting stuck in their spawners. Our world builders have gone through the maps reported to us and changed geometry within the spawners that were causing trouble. If you see a stuck Special Enemy after this patch, please report it to our bug site!

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a crash when replaying The Wyvern’s Den.

• Fixed a duplicating bug in the Inventory.

• Slow improvements now show as benefits rather than negatives on all inspect and Ascension Power interfaces.

• Mana Bomb no longer causes the Flamethrower to stop attacking.

• Flamethrowers will now attack the Demon Lord.

• Fixed Shield Geodes touching Cores and setting them to 3K health.

• Shield Geodes moving over EV nodes will no longer create a Shield on the nodes.

• Frosty Bind Shard now properly improves slow speed.

• Howling Feast Shard now functions properly.

• Withering Fountain Shard now functions properly.

• Lateral Blast Shard now properly deals damage.

• Mega Rock Shard now properly deals damage.

• Rain of Oil Shard ignite now properly deals damage.

• Defense Crit Damage and Destruction Shards now work on EV2’s Buff Beam.

• Weapon Manufacturer now updates if you equip gear after it’s built.

• Monk Skyguard Slow Ascension Power now properly caps at 20.

• Lightning Touch Shard, Water Elemental Shard, and Shattering Torpedo Shard now deal proper bonus damage.

  • These shards had bugs that would sometimes cause them to deal considerably more or less amounts of extra damage. The damage stated on the shard description is now their actual bonus damage and should show properly as damage numbers.

• Fixed an issue where the Flamethrower would try to target enemies outside of its range.

• Fixed a bug where the Pumpkinator Shard was applying to defenses of the hero who equips it.

• Fixed an Inventory tooltip issue that would display items with the wrong item type information.

• Rain of Oil Shard description clarified.

• Bots of Oil Shard description clarified.

• Updated EV2 Shard descriptions.

• Updated several Shard descriptions that used incorrect stat names.

• Shard and Shard Pack tooltips now display their sell price.

• Mystic’s Defense Crit Chance Ascension Power now displays the proper number.

• When EV2 nodes are stunned, all nodes display the stun VFX.

• Fixed an issue where the Ascension Point displays would overlap.

• Updated The Dead Road boss schedule to spawn from Wave 2 onwards.

• Fixed goofy Monk weapon holding in certain situations.

• Fixed VFX on the Quake Shard.

• Harbinger Squad challenges updated to be completed on Campaign Hard instead of Nightmare II.

• Fixed a sub-objective naming issue on Forgotten Ruins.

• Gold Ingots now look like Gold Ingots instead of weird Gold Crystals.

• Campaign Relics no longer have a chance to generate with Defense Range.

• Fixed lighting issues on several maps.

• Fixed collision issues on several maps.

• Fixed several typo issues.

• Fixed an issue where some costumes were displaying incorrect names and descriptions.

• PS4 - Fixed a cursor clone issue in the Inventory.

• PS4 - Mailbox UI no longer becomes unresponsive after closing the soft keyboard.

Over the past year, we’ve worked under the cover of darkness on a game-changing update — so game-changing we’re compelled to do something special. Something extraordinary. The game is evolving. The name should evolve, too.

We’re excited to introduce the world to Gobu Defenders II!

Become a Goblin Warrior and defeat the evil Heroes standing between you and your rightful claim to the Eternia Crystals. This update introduces five new Goblin Warriors, completely new gameplay, the Commander system, and more.

Become a Goblin Warrior

Despite an average height of 4’10”, the Gobu Legion stands tall. The Legion represents all Goblins within the Old Ones’ Army, but only a select few are called upon to be Goblin Warriors. These brave few are gifted with incredible powers -- which includes the incredible power of dying fast and often!

Play as one of these brave Goblin Warriors in the update:

• Mudgrinder, the Siege Roller Expert

• Steampot, the Mech Engineer

• Screechy, the Expert of Death

• Fastrocket, Death with Wings

• Mr. Bombs, the Demolitions Gobu

We’ll reveal the full powers of our Goblin Warriors in a future news update.

Begin the Gobu Assault

As a Goblin Warrior, it’s your job to lead the charge on the battlefields of war. Gone are the days of playing as those pathetic humans. They’re the enemy now! Beyond your incredible power of dying, your biggest strength is the size of the Gobu Legion. Your best tactic is to run in a straight line directly at their defenses. Don’t dodge. Don’t jump. Just run straight ahead until you overwhelm their defenses with your claws, your jaws and gallons of your goblin blood. And when their defenses are down, kill the Heroes, destroy the Eternia Crystals and then...the thing happens. You know, the thing. The crystal blows up, the world gets dark, and it has something to do with the Old Ones. There’s totally a strong lore basis for it. And it’s up to you to make that happen, gobu!

Become the Commander

The Gobu Legion is vast, but they need a leader. Someone cunning. Bloodthirsty. Someone willing to sacrifice as many gobu as it takes to win. They need a Commander. And they need You.

Every three months, a new Commander is selected by the community. The Commander is the ultimate authority over the Gobu Legion. Commanders decide where to attack, what resources to gather and what daily objectives to complete. As the Gobu Legion completes these orders, new bonus reward options are unlocked, and it’s up to the Commander to choose which rewards to give the Legion. Commanders also get a unique, full-size Betsy mount to display their awe-inspiring power to other players. Our first Commander is none other than dreamanime, whose dedication to the Gobu Legion is second-to-none.

We’re very excited about this next step. If you want to talk about the next evolution of our game, @Kaoelol has set up the Gobu Defenders II subreddit and Gobu Defenders II Discord!

Patch 19.5 comes out next week on PC & PS4! This patch contains changes to Shard drops, balance, UI and more. If you missed the Devstream, you can watch the Twitch archived video. (The YouTube version is available now.)

Over the past month, we’ve been working on improvements to the Trials update based on your feedback. We sent out a survey last week about Shards and the Trials playlist, and beginning with Patch 19.5 we’d like to start introducing most of those ideas into the game. The full Patch 19.5 Notes will be available when the patch comes out, but below is an overview of the changes coming:

Shard Drop Changes

From the survey results, we learned that most players were satisfied with the concept of Shards but not with their current implementation. In fact, Shard drops were the biggest point of dissatisfaction in the entire update. The main areas of concern were the time it takes to get the Shard you’re looking for and frustration over the confusing setup of Shard Packs (which is what we call the containers you get from Victory Chests).

These are the areas we’ve focused on in Patch 19.5:

Improving Shard Target Farming

Right now, Shard Packs do not drop unique Shards per pack. There’s a lot of overlap between different Shard Packs, which means players can get a Standard Shard from a Chaos III Shard Pack, and players don’t understand where they need to farm in order to get the Shard they’re looking for (say, the coveted Defense Range Shard, which can actually drop from multiple Chaos Shard Packs).

In Patch 19.5, each Shard Pack will have unique Shards. For example, Shards A, B and C can only be found in Chaos I Shard Packs, while Shards D, E and F can only be found in Chaos III Shard Packs. This also means that Standard Shards will no longer drop from Chaos Shard Packs! Along with this, each victory in Trials will guarantee at least 1 Chaos Shard Pack from that given difficulty. For example, when you beat Chaos II Trials, you will be guaranteed a Chaos II Shard Pack.

With these changes, you’ll be able to specifically target the Shards you want. Once this update goes live, we’ll share the complete Shard drop locations on our Wiki and to those players who are making amazing webtools (like Czokalapik’s DD2Tools).

Improving Shard Farming Time

Right now, Shard Packs have a chance to give you 1 Shard from a pool of up to 120(!) different Shards. In the patch, we’re reducing the Shard pool per pack from ~120 to somewhere between 25-35 Shards depending on the pack, which will increase the chances of getting the Shard you want when you open a pack.

We’re also changing the drop rates and drop setup on Shard Packs in Victory Chests. Instead of having a chance to drop between 1-3 Shard Packs, Victory Chests will now drop 2 Shard Packs guaranteed every time. When you win, you’ll receive one Shard Pack from that difficulty and one Shard Pack from any previous difficulty (for example, if you beat Chaos III Trials, you’ll receive 1 Chaos III Shard Pack and 1 Chaos II, Chaos I or Standard Shard Pack).

We’re trying to get the first pass on the Trials consecutive win bonus into this patch, which gives bonus rewards for winning consecutive random maps in Trials. This first pass would add a Shard bonus. Once you win 3 times in a row, you’ll earn an extra Shard Pack on every victory after that for as long as the streak continues. This extra Shard Pack would be a guaranteed Shard Pack from that difficulty. That means once you activate the win bonus, you’ll get 3 Shards guaranteed (2 Shard Packs of that difficulty, 1 Shard Pack from previous difficulties) until the streak is broken. If the Trials win streak doesn’t go into Patch 19.5, it will be available in a patch soon thereafter.

By making Shard Packs drop unique Shards, increasing drop chances within a pack, guaranteeing Shard Packs per difficulty, giving you at least 2 Shard Packs guaranteed on every victory and adding a Shard bonus for consecutive wins, it’ll be much faster to get the Shards you want.

Sort Shards By Name

Another pain point brought up in the survey was the frustration of trying to find the Shard you want within your Inventory. A popular suggestion (both in the survey and in the community) was a Shard filter that sorts Shards alphabetically by name, and we were able to get it in for this patch! You can find the “Name” filter in the All Bags -> Shards section. We’re investigating more Shard filtering options and possible Shard icon improvements for future updates.

Hero Management UI Changes

These were discussed in a previous blog, and they’re coming in Patch 19.5! Something we’ve heard from players with a high number of heroes is that it’s difficult to navigate to certain heroes in the new Hero Management UI. We’re adding a Quick Select option that allows you to see a large number of heroes at one time and then go to that hero in the UI. We're also allowing you to select the other cards in the Rolodex view without having to click the darn arrows. This isn’t the end of our Hero Management UI improvements. More changes coming in future patches.

Bag Quick Scrolling

On the PC version, we’ve added hotkeys that will cycle left and right through your bags! This should make moving items from one bag to another much faster, especially for those of you who don’t have a Middle Mouse Wheel.

Return to Tavern No Longer Forces Everyone Back to Tavern

If one person selects Return to Tavern, that person will leave. Not you. You will Continue, baby. And you’ll keep Continuing as long as you want to Continue.

Defense Balance Changes

With this patch, we’ve taken a serious look at the viability of all defenses as well as how several of our specific defense stats scale, and we made some fundamental changes as a result.

Below is a deep-dive into how we approached balance for this patch and how we hope these changes will make many defenses, at least when it comes to raw DPS and utility, viable in later Chaos difficulties.

Defense Speed and Defense Power

One of the biggest changes has been a complete overhaul of the Defense Speed formula. Previously, some defenses would benefit very heavily from Defense Speed, while others would hardly benefit at all. Some defenses had very restrictive rate caps, while others had very flexible rate caps, and that made it difficult to balance these defenses as item stats progress into Chaos 5 (and soon, Chaos 6 and beyond…).

So, we took a step back and rebalanced all Defense Speed scalars and rate caps across all defenses. Defenses scale consistently with Defense Speed now, such that +100 Defense Speed gives the same % DPS benefit to each tower. We also fixed a number of defenses that had hidden cooldowns that prevented their Defense Speed from correctly affecting their Attack Rate. There are still a few exceptions (Slime Pit still needs more work before it benefits from Defense Speed), but nearly every defense now benefits from it in an obvious way.

As to Attack Rate caps, we adjusted those to more consistent levels. Most raw ‘damage’ defenses (like the Flamethrower) can go up to 400% faster than their starting attack rate, while more ‘utility’ defenses (like the Geyser Trap) can go up to 200% faster.

We also looked at various utility effects, especially stuns and other forms of hard crowd-control. Those effects become more potent as the attack rate gets faster, so we made adjustments to the duration of many of these effects. We have a rough target ‘uptime’ that we try to maintain, and as such, most of these utility defenses saw balance updates to prevent them from reaching ‘infinite stunlock’ situations at higher firing rates. In addition, we also updated many of the Shards that add utility effects (especially stun procs) to ensure those also don’t develop into ‘infinite stunlock’ situations as Defense Speed increases.

Is this a buff or a nerf? It varies. Some defenses, like the Earthshatter Tower, were receiving very little benefit from Defense Speed, and this change results in substantial improvements. Others, like the Flamethrower Tower, were benefitting heavily from Defense Speed and will see no benefit.

But fear not! Across-the-board, we made increases to the Defense Power ratios of nearly every defense! Every non-blockade is now much deadlier to the foes of Etheria, especially in earlier difficulties, thanks to the increase in raw damage numbers. This increase is intended to help offset the loss of Attack Rate on some defenses, but you will definitely see some defenses (like the Cannonball Tower) once again strike fear into the hearts of Etheria’s enemies.

Also, we modified the base attack rate of some defenses (Lightning Strikes Aura, we’re looking at you) to try and reduce the amount of ‘overkill’ damage these defenses were inflicting on weaker enemies. Many single-target towers are much stronger in this update, and we hope you’ll try them out again! (To note:  We’ve discussed other changes to single-target towers to make them more appealing, and we’ll continue to keep an eye on the community’s tower usage data and feedback for more improvements.)

Defense Crit Chance and Crit Damage

Defense Crit Chance and Damage had similar scaling issues to Defense Speed. Both stats were very underutilized in earlier difficulties, making it hard for new players to appreciate the stat. Making things worse, we discovered several bugs with Defense Crit Chance where specific Shards and Ascension Powers allowed you to exceed the Crit Chance maximum, creating random inconsistencies where some heroes could have higher Crit Chances than others.

We’ve fixed all those bugs (we hope!) and also set new baselines. All defenses now have an innate Crit Chance of 10%, up from the old 3%, to make the Crit Damage stat more valuable early in the game. In addition, we increased the Crit Chance max to 33% on all defenses and fixed the bugs that were allowing various defenses to bypass the maximum.

Defense Crit Damage was re-standardized across all defenses to make it a much more valuable stat, rivaling that of Defense Power once your Crit Chance gets close to the max. In general, you should see much more value in the Crit Chance and Crit Damage stat on Defenses, as pretty much every defense receives much better benefits from the stat.

Defense Tier Upgrades

Yet one more major defense change is the complete rebalance of how defenses progress as they receive tier upgrades in-game.

Some defenses scaled very poorly at later tiers, namely low-cost defenses like the Explosive Trap. Others gained massive benefits from each upgrade like the Earthshatter Tower.

We’ve redone every tier upgrade to provide larger benefits for low-cost defenses and less benefits for higher-cost defenses. As a general rule, higher-cost defenses still perform more efficiently at Tier 5 than lower-cost defenses, but with this rebalance, the gap is much, much, much smaller.

Fans of Explosive Traps, Oil Geysers, and other low-cost defenses rejoice, as you can now upgrade these defenses without fear of them becoming grossly inefficient by Tier 3+!

Max Target Changes

Some defenses were limited in the number of targets they could affect, with the cap being 8 (some exceptions). Other defenses could affect an unlimited number of targets, and there was not a lot of rhyme or reason as to which defenses had caps and which did not.

As of this patch, all defenses have a max targets of 10. Defenses that used to have a max of 8 targets have been increased to 10, and defenses that had no cap are now capped at 10.

To note, these caps exist to try and make the balance between fixed-target defenses and many-target defenses somewhat plausible. We’ll keep an eye on it moving forward and make adjustments as the relative balance between these subtypes dictates.

Range Gambit Ascension Powers

Not to sound like a broken record, but Defense Range had scaling issues as well, most notably with the inconsistencies between how the Range Gambits would affect different defenses. The Skeletal Ramster notoriously had almost no benefit from this Power, while Explosive Trap could alter the face of Etheria at maximum values.

And once again, we went back and re-standardized how defenses are affected by Defense Range. We broke this down into roughly two categories:

Fixed-Target defenses, meaning those that generally hit a set, small number of targets, will get large benefits from Range Gambits. This includes the Cannonball Tower, Hornet’s Nest, and others. As the range benefit to these towers generally doesn’t really let them clear a wave that much faster, they receive more benefit from Range Gambits.

Many-Target defenses, meaning those that generally can hit 5+ targets, will get much smaller benefits from Range Gambits. This includes defenses like Flame Aura, Skeletal Ramster, and others. (That said, the Ramster will get more Defense Range from the Gambit in this patch than it currently does.) As each range increase on these towers makes it more likely they’ll hit additional targets, these defenses receive less benefit than Fixed-Target towers from Range Gambits.

This is something new that we’re testing out for the first time, and we’ll continue to adjust the Gambits as we go along. This change does NOT affect the Defense Range shard Deadly Strikes, as we’ve left that at a flat % increase for now.

Enemy Levels and Stats

With all these defense buffs, we had to make a few tweaks to the levels of enemies to ensure they didn’t get blown out of the water. The level of all enemies, in all difficulties, across both the Campaign and Chaos difficulties has increased. But fear not, as your mightier defenses will make quick work of these slightly-tougher enemies! The net effect is that balance has taken a slight shift towards defenses, away from heroes.

To note, we paid special attention to enemies that are generally immune / unaffected by defenses and have altered their stats accordingly. Pests like Witherbeasts, Dark Mages and Siege Rollers, which are very difficulty to kill with defenses, have had their stats re-weighted to ensure they can still be slain by hero focus-fire in a very timely fashion.

Chaos 1 Enemy Level Reduction

In combination with the above changes, we’ve reduced the Chaos 1 enemy level by 10%. The result of this along with our defense balance changes should result in smoother entry into Chaos 1. We’ll continue to monitor both player feedback and our internal data to see how players are progressing into Chaos 1.

Mana Regen Updates

We wanted the base 4 heroes to have a little more ability uptime to closer match some of the heroes like Gunwitch. As a result, we’ve increased the base mana regeneration of our core 4 heroes from 2 MP/s to 3 MP/s. This should have a big impact on Campaign (50% more mana!), and this should give roughly about 20% more mana alongside the Channel Shard.

But we must also mention we had to make substantial changes to the Power of Storms Shard. Sadly, the Shard was bugged -- it was giving some heroes nearly infinite ability mana, which was not the goal for the Shard! We’ve reworked this Shard, and it now provides a large burst of mana every 10-12 seconds, but it no longer feeds the hero a nearly bottomless stream of ability mana. The Shard’s description has been overhauled, so the actual impact/effect is clearly stated, and players can work out if they’ll benefit more from Channel or Power of Storms in their build.

Stuck Special Enemy Fixes

One of the biggest bugs we wanted to fix was the Stuck Special Enemy bug where Siege Rollers and other Special Enemies were getting stuck in their spawners. Our world builders have gone through the maps reported to us and changed geometry within the spawners that were causing trouble. So far things are looking good, but if you see a stuck Special Enemy after this patch, please report it to our bug site!

New Weekend Event Support

This patch includes the ability to do Weekend Gold and Weekend XP events! Perhaps you’ll see them soon...

And More Bug Fixes

Which includes Shard fixes (hello, Frosty Bind), defense bug fixes and more.

Full patch notes will be available when the patch comes out!

Update:  This survey is now closed. Thanks for the nearly 3,000(!) responses, and thanks again for your feedback!

Greetings Defenders,

We’ve created a survey to gather more feedback about Shards and Trials. This survey also contains some ideas we’re discussing on how to improve these two systems, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on them!

Click here to fill out the survey!

Thanks for your feedback, Defenders!

Love,
The Trendy Team

Patch 19.4 is available now on PC & PS4! Thanks again for all of your feedback so far, and we'll continue to make adjustments to the game in our forthcoming patches. 

Here are the full patch notes for 19.4:

Chaos Enemy Spawn Changes

Here's our Chaos philosophy: For each Chaos tier, we want to introduce enemies that counter certain defenses and strategies. Based on that, we want to reward you for recognizing and countering that threat. Each Chaos tier should have its own counters and strategies, and the build variety should be in the ways that you can counter them. Not everything should be effective, but there should be enough things that are effective to keep things interesting. Before this patch, the combination of Chaos enemy spawns muddied the enemy and defense counterplay. There were so many types of defense counters happening that there was a very narrow set of counters you could use, especially in Chaos IV and V. These changes are aimed at expanding the viable set of defenses per-Chaos.

Chaos II

Cyborks are an anti-trap/aura/node enemy. If you’re attempting to take down Cyborks with these defenses, you’re going to have a hard time. If you’re building around the Cyborks, we want to reward you for that behaviour. We don’t want to spawn enemies that also counter the defenses you would use to destroy Cyborks, so in Chaos II, there are no longer any Vanguards from the previous Chaos (Chaos I).Vanguards are replaced in the rollouts with standard enemies. We adjusted some of the support enemies (Dark Mages, Kobolds, Witherbeasts, etc.) in the same manner of reinforcing the Cyborks.

• Removed Vanguards from Chaos II

• New Chaos II Enemy List:  Cyborks

Chaos III

Chaos III is all about the Shield Geode and blocking projectiles, so having Cyborks show up in this Chaos impairs your ability to counter the Geode. Again, we don't want to punish players for countering the Chaos enemy theme; however, Vanguards support the Shield Geode theme of projectile blocking, so you will still see them in Chaos III.

• Removed Cyborks from Chaos III

• New Chaos III Enemy List:  Shield Geodes, Vanguards

Chaos IV

This Chaos is centered around the Berserker Orcs. Berserkers are all about being fast and dealing high damage upon reaching defenses, so using things like stuns and knockups to slow them down are your main counter for this threat. Cyborks counter most of those kinds of effects, so you won't see Cyborks in this Chaos tier anymore.

• Removed Cyborks from Chaos IV

• New Chaos IV Enemy List:  Berserker Orcs, Shield Geodes, Vanguards

Chaos V

Chaos V is all about Dark Assassins. We want players to work together to get those pesky Assassins off, or if you’re solo, we want your defenses to have a clear line of sight on them to prevent them from teleporting and healing. So having Shield Geodes and Vanguards disrupts that, so you won’t see them in Chaos V anymore.

• Removed Shield Geodes and Vanguards from Chaos V

• New Chaos V Enemy List:  Dark Assassins, Cyborks, Berserker Orcs

Once you try out these changes, let us know how they feel. We’ll continue to make tweaks to the experience based on what we’re hearing!

Siege Roller No Longer Destroys Traps, Auras and Nodes

Rejoice! The Siege Roller caused players to never build certain defenses out of a certain crushing fear, and we figured that with our Chaos enemies providing enough counterplay, we can remove this.

There's also a bug where more Siege Rollers are spawning than intended. We're looking into a fix for the near future.

Item Comparison Change

Now you can more easily compare two pieces of loot in your Inventory, even when the items are equipped. Pick up an item and hover over another item to compare those two items directly against each other. More Inventory UI changes coming soon! (Note:  For now, the default Relic comparison popup is disabled.)

Multiplayer Enemy Scaling Reduction

It looks like the multiplayer enemy scalar was dramatically increasing the difficulty in multiplayer matches, so we’ve reduced the multiplayer enemy health and damage scalar from 35% to 25% per player. For multiplayer scaling, our goal is not to punish you for your playing with your friends. Our long-term goal for MP scaling is to increase enemy stats for each player added to ensure the content isn't trivialized and to increase the rewards you get per player added to encourage MP games. For the time being, we have reduced the enemy stat scaling per player added until we can make those changes.

Thanks for the feedback on this issue, and we’ll continue to make adjustments!

Campaign Changes

We’ve been monitoring progression from Campaign into the Chaos difficulties, and we’ve found we agree with player sentiment that the initial ‘jump’ is a bit too awkward to make. The goal with these changes is to make breaking into Chaos a bit more sensical and easy, by providing more Chaos-ready loot in the final few Campaign maps. We'll continue to monitor this and make adjustments as needed.

Secondly, we wanted to put an end to players blitz-farming Harbinger’s Warship as a way to get easy XP. While this wasn’t much of an issue for players at the appropriate difficulty, players with very high-end gear could clear the map much quicker than desired. As a result, this map now provides much better Campaign loot, but provides no experience after the first clear.

• Assault on the Throne Room can now drop the highest power items in the campaign, the same as Harbinger’s Warship.

• Harbinger’s Warship only provides experience on the first clear, and subsequent clears provide almost no experience.

• The Harbinger himself drops over double the number of items (on average), making killing him far more rewarding for players gearing up for Chaos 1.

Construction Shard Update

We love the Construction shard, but we felt the repair rate bonus was starting to trivialize some encounters. A number of strategies started to evolve around repair-stalling enemies at blockades rather than building defenses to counter enemies earlier in-lane. We want to ensure that Construction remains a valuable shard, but as we move forward, we very much want to see key enemies engaged prior to reaching the blockades. As a result, Construction has lost some of its punch, although it remains a significant time saver when it comes to repairing blockades.

• • Base bonus decreased from +125% to +25%

  • Max bonus decreased from +205% to +75%

Ghastly Halberd and Lunar Portal Revisions

• Ghastly Halberd

  • Max Summons 5 -> 3

  • Halberd Damage scalar decreased 350% -> 150%

  • Halberd Attack Rate decreased by 50% (attacks only 2x per second now)

• Lunar Portal

  • Max Summons 5 -> 3

  • Portal Damage scalar decreased 350% -> 300% (attacks 1x per second)

• Descriptions of both of these effects now documents their damage, attacks-per-second, and lifespans.

Bug Fixes

• Dark Assassins were unintentionally being instakilled by shattering and other instakill effects. (Next on our list is looking into the Frostbite fast-freezing bug.)

• Worm Scarf now properly reduces damage taken, instead of increasing damage taken. We had thought that dying faster was going to provide an advantage on some maps, but it turns out we were horribly, horribly wrong, and we should have realized that players generally don’t want to die faster by equipping expensive shards. ;)

• Goblin melee units had somehow starting equipping themselves with Armor-ignoring cleavers. We’ve discovered their treachery, and have forced them to start using their normal cleavers once again.

• Gunwitch’s hands have become quite frostbitten, and she will no longer sometimes double-fire Ice Needle as she warms them up.

• Enlightenment, a mythical Apprentice Magic Staff, is now equippable again, and will once-again generate as a random mythical weapon skin.

• Fixed a bug where the Dryad came back to life with 1 health if she died in Corrupt Form.

• Fixed collision issues on Unholy Catacombs.

• (PS4) Fixed a bug where the Victory Screen wasn’t fully visible while in split-screen

• (PS4) Fixed a bug where, while in split-screen, picking up or equipping an item would make it appear twice in the Inventory.

Known Issues

• We’re taking a deep dive into the stuck Siege Roller spawns that are being reported to us. If you see a stuck Siege Roller, please report the map, lane name, wave and difficulty on our Siege Roller reporting thread.

• EV - Shield Geodes moving over EV nodes cause the nodes to create a visual Shield.
  

• Looks like a set of Vanguards and two Shield Geodes manage to sneak their way into Chaos 5. We'll nuke them.
  

• We’re also investigating changes to our loot system, Shard drops, gold gain and more. Keep the feedback coming! <3

Greetings Defenders,

It’s been a wild couple of weeks here at Trendy. We’re excited to see people coming back and braving the Trials of Chaos. We’ve also truly appreciated all the feedback you’ve provided as it is helping guide our actions towards improving DD2 overall! As we mentioned earlier this week, we’re not done with the Trials update and have a series of changes we’re considering, implementing, and testing. Some are scheduled to come out next week, some are going to take us a couple weeks to complete, and others are scheduled to come out in future milestones. To show you that we are listening and taking your (sometimes soul-crushing) feedback seriously, we wanted to take some time to discuss some of the concerns you’ve raised since the Trials update:

Changing Chaos Enemy Spawns

Here's our Chaos philosophy: For each Chaos tier, we want to introduce enemies that counter certain defenses and strategies. Based on that, we want to reward you for recognizing and countering that threat. Each Chaos tier should have its own counters and strategies, and the build variety should be in the ways that you can counter them. Not everything should be effective, but there should be enough things that are effective to keep things interesting. Right now, the enemy and defense counterplay is muddied by the current combination of Chaos enemy spawns. There are so many types of defense counters happening that there's a very narrow set of counters you can use, especially in Chaos IV and V.

In next week's patch, we're changing the enemy spawns in Chaos II, III, IV and V:

Chaos II

Cyborks are an anti-trap/aura/node enemy. If you’re attempting to take down Cyborks with these defenses, you’re going to have a hard time. If you’re building around the Cyborks, we want to reward you for that behaviour. We don’t want to spawn enemies that also counter the defenses you would use to destroy Cyborks, so in Chaos II, there won't be any Vanguards from the previous Chaos (Chaos I).

Vanguards are replaced in the rollouts with standard enemies. We adjusted some of the support enemies (Dark Mages, Kobolds, Witherbeasts, etc.) in the same manner of reinforcing the Cyborks.

• Removed Vanguards from Chaos II

• New Chaos II Enemy List:  Cyborks

Chaos III

Chaos III is all about the Shield Geode and blocking projectiles, so having Cyborks show up in this Chaos impairs your ability to counter the Geode. Again, we don't want to punish players for countering the Chaos enemy theme; however, Vanguards support the Shield Geode theme of projectile blocking, so you will still see them in Chaos III.

• Removed Cyborks from Chaos III

• New Chaos III Enemy List:  Shield Geodes, Vanguards

Chaos IV

This Chaos is centered around the Berserker Orcs. Berserkers are all about being fast and dealing high damage upon reaching defenses, so using things like stuns and knockups to slow them down are your main counter for this threat. Cyborks counter most of those kinds of effects, so you won't see Cyborks in this Chaos tier anymore.

• Removed Cyborks from Chaos IV

• New Chaos IV Enemy List:  Berserker Orcs, Shield Geodes, Vanguards

Chaos V

Chaos V is all about Dark Assassins. We want players to work together to get those pesky Assassins off, and if you’re solo, we want your defenses to have a clear line of sight on them to prevent them from teleporting and healing. So having Shield Geodes and Vanguards disrupts that, so you won’t see them in Chaos V anymore.

• Removed Shield Geodes and Vanguards from Chaos V

• New Chaos V Enemy List:  Dark Assassins, Cyborks, Berserker Orcs

Once you try out these changes, let us know how they feel. We’ll continue to make tweaks to the experience based on what we’re hearing!

Siege Roller Changes

In next week's patch, the Siege Roller won't destroy traps, auras and nodes! Rejoice! The Siege Roller caused players to never build certain defenses out of a certain crushing fear, and we figured that with our Chaos enemies providing enough counterplay, we can remove this.

There's also a bug where more Siege Rollers are spawning than intended. This won't be in next week's patch, but we're looking into a fix for the near future.

Inventory Loot Comparison Improvement

In next week’s patch, we’re including a way to more easily compare two pieces of loot in your Inventory, even when the items are equipped. You can pick up an item and hover over another item to compare those two items directly against each other. For example, in the picture above you can see our friendly neighborhood QA maestro Petire comparing an unequipped Totem with an equipped Totem.

Comparing Upgraded vs. Unupgraded Loot

While this is still in the investigation phase and not scheduled for next week’s patch, we’re discussing how to improve the user experience of determining whether an upgraded loot drop is better than your upgraded loot. Right now, our idea is to display the maximum potential stat value so you can determine if that shiny new loot drop will be better once it’s fully upgraded without having to do tricksy head math.

(super work-in-progress shots)

Hero Management UI Improvements

Something we’ve heard is that players with a high number of heroes are having a hard time navigating to certain heroes in the new Hero Management UI. We’re working on a Quick Select option that allows you to see a large number of heroes at one time and then go to that hero in the UI where you can then put them into your deck, check out stats or equip loot without putting them into the Deck. We're also allowing you to select the other cards in the Rolodex view without having to click the darn arrows. These changes are not in next week's patch, but they are coming soon.

Bag Sorting

Another big pain point we heard is that players can no longer sort individual bags. We’re still in the investigation period here, but this is something we want to get in sooner rather than later. Once we have more to show, we'll show you in a future blog!

Thanks again for all of your feedback! While we don’t have concrete details to share right now, we’re also investigating changes to improve the new loot system, Shard drops and more. We’ll have more details to share in future blogs.

And as a final reminder:  Our 3X Daily Weekend Event is live from now until Monday. Enjoy!

Thanks for your feedback so far! Today’s hotfix addresses some of the bugs we’ve seen since the last patch, and we’ll have more fixes in our patch next week. Keep an eye out for our blog later today [Edit: RIGHT HERE] where we discuss the bigger changes we’re making to Chaos enemy spawns, Siege Roller, UI and more.

At 1PM EST today, we're turning on 3X Daily Missions for the weekend! Enjoy. 

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where Flamethrowers and Fissures would stop attacking

• Fixed an issue where Colossus, Skeletal Orc and World Tree would take increased damage from enemies after upgrading

• Fixed an issue that was causing the Cybork’s EMP attack to shutdown the Angry Nimbus, Moss Hornet’s Nest and Slime Pit from longer range than intended

3x Daily Weekend Event!

• Get three Daily Missions every day this weekend!

• Here’s how it works:  Every 8 hours starting at 1PM EST today, you’ll receive a new Daily Mission until the event ends on Monday. Make sure you complete all of your Dailies to take full advantage of the event!

• Mission Madness runs from 1PM EST today until Monday, March 13th at 2PM EST

Thanks for your feedback! This patch fixes some of the bugs and balance issues we’ve seen so far. In the next few weeks, we’re going to address the more pressing UI and gameplay issues we've seen, which includes the hero management UI and Chaos enemy spawning. We’re hoping to have details of those changes either at the end of this week or next week.

UI Changes

• The Item Comparison tooltip now displays +/- Number of Upgrades

• Added text to display what the next Ascension Point investment will give

• Updated the UI style for consumables (pet consumable UI change to come soon)

Enemy Changes

Cybork

• Lifespan of EMP disable reduced from 30 seconds to 15 seconds

• EMP disable now activates on every attack

• Cyborks now ignore Buff Beams

Hero Changes

Abyss Lord

• Secondary Attacks

  • Uncharged Secondary Attack damage reduced from 11 to 9

  • Charged Secondary Attack damage reduced from 13 to 10.5

Apprentice

• Arcane Barrier

  • Health scaling reduced from 200 to 150 match other 30 DU Blockades

Dryad

• General Defense Changes

  • The Dryad's Defenses, except Slimes, now consistently benefit from Defense Speed

  • Hornet's Nest and Harpy's Perch no longer reach maximum rate with minimal Defense Speed additions

  • Rebalanced Hornet's Nest, Harpy's Perch and Angry Nimbus damage to be more comparable to other defenses

• Angry Nimbus

  • Now benefits from Defense Speed, and his Inspect displays his Rain Rate

  • Should no longer damage multiple targets; should consistently only hit 1 target

  • Range decreased from 3,500 to 2,500

• World Tree

  • Upgrade costs increase to 125 / 275 (was 50 / 50)

Gunwitch

• Book Drop

  • Lifespan reduced from 15s to 6s

  • Now affected by Tenacity

Huntress

• Poison Dart Tower

  • Default Crit Chance decreased to the default 3% used for all other defenses

  • Crit Damage reduced from 5 to 2.5

  • Defense Speed adjusted to match other towers

Mystic

• Viper’s Fangs

  • Health upgrades slightly increased to now match other 30 DU blockades (example:  Tier 2 upgrade increased from 1.2 to 1.3)

  • Bubble lifespan decreased 5.0s -> 4.0s

  • Bubble base rate decreased 6.5s -> 8.0s

  • Bubble maximum rate raised 3.0s -> 5.0s

Lavamancer

• Maw of the Earth Drake

  • Now has a slower maximum fire rate (raised from 4.5s to 6.0s)

Series EV2

• Weapon Manufacturer

  • Damage decreased from 3.0 to 2.5

  • Speed rebalanced to be comparable to other towers

Shard Changes

Radiant Power

• Level Max decreased from 14 to 5

• % Bonus Max decreased from 30% to 6%

• Updated description to clarify effect

Bug Fixes

• Shard Auto-Collect will now correctly pick up Shard Packs

• Fixed a bug where blank Shard Packs dropped in Campaign

• Fixed a bug where the Siege Roller could be insta-killed when petrified

• Fixed the maximum Ascension Level XP curve (it was 9,999,999 and now it’s 2,500,000)

• Fixed a tooltip issue where long tooltips on equipped items would go off-screen

• Fixed a tooltip issue where long tooltips on items in the bottom 3 rows of the Inventory would go off-screen

• Fixed a crash that would happen when getting stunned during a cinematic

• Fixed an equip issue with the Iron Reaper Squire weapon

• Fixed a bug where clicking an Inventory Bag tab while the bag was open would cause the bag tab highlight to disappear

• Abyss Lord’s Abyss Stone now shows an ability mana icon instead of a builder mana icon when out of ability mana

• Fixed a bug where the Cybork would continuously try to stun Abyss Stones

• Fixed a Dark Assassin bug involving hotswapping heroes

• Fixed a bug where swapping heroes while an item was grabbed in the Inventory caused some wonkiness (official scientific term)

• Fixed a bug where if you right=clicked on an equipped item on a non active hero while you were on the All Heroes screen, it would bring up the Item Enhancement UI instead of unequipping/equipping the item

• Fixed an issue where only one of EV2’s nodes would display a stun VFX when disabled by a Cybork (Reflect Beam still has the issue for now)

• “Trials” now appears on the Pause Menu

• Flamethrower and Earthshatter Range Gambit descriptions now show the full text

• Fixed lighting issues on several maps

• Fixed several SFX issues

• Fixed several collision, environment trap trigger and camera fading issues

• (PS4)Fixed a bug where split-screen players could not interact with an item that was equipped

• (PS4) Fixed a bug where Bag Options would not work while in split-screen

Known Issues

• Items often appear as the wrong type when moving them into an inventory slot that is occupied until the UI is refreshed.

• Radiant Power - Shards that were fully upgraded before the update will not move to new cap for Radiant Power. This is only a display issue, shard will show as upgraded to 14/5 level or similar numbers.

• The issue with the names showing up at 999 on the session list appears to may have come back (on PS4)

The PS4 version also includes last week's PC hotfix changes.

Hey everyone,

Thank you so much for the feedback so far! We're discussing ways to improve the Trials experience and mitigate some of the pain points with the new UI. Keep an eye on our patches over the next few weeks for more details.

Today's hotfix is for PC and PS4. Here are the full notes: 

PC Changes

• Added performance optimizations for the Inventory and netcode. (PS4 will get these changes in our next patch.)
• Added server performance optimizations. (PS4 will get these changes in our next patch.)
• Fixed an issue with people seeing a black screen when loading into the Main Menu.
• Rebound "Item Interaction" from MMB to Shift + Right-Click so that players without MMB can use Shards.
• Rebound "Sell All" all the way over to Y to mitigate some of the accidental sell all issues.
• Removed the "Are you sure you want to sell" popup from Epics. This is only on Mythicals and Legendaries now. With fewer popups when managing the Inventory, we hope players will be more focused on what the popup says to help reduce accidental sell all issues.

PC & PS4 Changes

• Bewitching Hour Shard for the Gunwitch now only procs on snipes.
• Ramparts Siege will no longer show up in Chaos V.
  

We have another patch planned for next week. More details soon!

Greetings Defenders,

Trials: The Endgame Update is now available on PC and PS4! Check out the Trials Update Page for an overview of the changes.

This update represents our shared vision of the core Dungeon Defenders II gameplay experience. It’s the culmination of two years of new features, bug fixes and conversations with you about where the game should go. As a result, this update is MASSIVE. But it’s also not the end. From here, we’ll continue to expand our endgame with more Chaos tiers, more Shards, more maps, and … well, you’ll just have to wait and see.

On a personal note:  We hope you love this update as much as we loved making it. Many of us gave up our holiday breaks, our nights, and our weekends to make this update a reality. This game is built by the seemingly endless passions of our small team, and with your support, our game will keep growing and growing.

Features and Changes

Chaos Difficulty and the Trials

• Nightmare is over. Now is the time of CHAOS!

• This update scratches the surface with five tiers of Chaos, but don’t get too comfortable because we have more Chaos tiers in store. (queue maniacal laugh track)

• As you descend through the tiers, new threats will appear and combine to lay waste to your heroes and defenses. Following us on social media may or may not give you some indication of what’s to come. (SHAMELESS CROSS PROMOTION!)

• Chaos is unpredictable and can only be thwarted through conquering the Trials.

• In the Trials, the Knight Commander assigns you to a defense commensurate with your power. Survive enough Trials at a specific difficulty, and you will accumulate the experience, gear, and resources needed for the Knight Commander to deploy you on even more dangerous fronts.

• If certain Trials prove to be too much initially, you can perfect your strategies by practicing on any map at any difficulty. Remember, though, that the Trials are the only path to glory, gear, and gold (among other valuables).

Shards:  A New Way to Build Your Hero

• Goodbye Passives and Skill Spheres; hello Shards!

• Shards are upgradeable artifacts that slot into your Defense Relics, Armor, and Weapons.

• Shards give you extra buffs, bonuses and sometimes even new functionality!

• Most Shards can be moved between gear. No more leaving your Passives behind when you find an upgrade!

• Defense Relics can hold up to 3 Shards and can only equip Defense Shards.

• Armor and Weapons can hold up to 2 Shards and can only equip Hero Shards.

• Shards drop in Victory Chests.

• Shards can be upgraded directly from the all-new Inventory to further augment your dominance on the battlefield.

• When Veteran Defenders first login, they’ll find themselves ahead of the game with a complementary bundle of Shards we’re giving all Defenders as a thank you for their patience and support while we polished this update to be something truly special. You’ll also find that all the Skill Spheres you’ve previously purchased have been replaced by a bounty of gold! (Trust us, you’ll need it.)

Ascension:  Go Beyond Level 50!

• How far past 50? Your imagination is your only limit in Ascension. That and the code that comprises the system...

• With this update, heroes at the level cap will generate account-wide Ascension XP that accrues towards Ascension Points.

• Ascension Points are invested on a per-hero basis in Ascension Powers that bestow additional bonuses and augmentations.

• Some Ascension Powers are universal for all heroes; some are unique to each hero.

• Harder challenges award greater sums of Ascension XP.

• Multiple Level 50 heroes in your Hero Deck will not grant additional XP.

Defense Relics, Defense Speed & Defense Range

• Now you can build powerful defenses AND be a fearsome combatant at the same time!

• All Relics are now Defense Relics and will roll with up to three Defense stats. Armor and Weapons will roll with up to two Hero stats.

• Heroes can now customize each of their defenses’ strengths individually by attaching a Defense Relic to them.

• Defense Speed is back as a stat!

• Defense Range is now available as Shards and as Ascension Powers.

• Two new Relics are available:  Orbs and Marks. Orbs are for Defense Speed builds, and Marks are for Defense Crit Power builds.

Five New Enemies

• The Siege Roller was just the beginning. Whatever horrors Chaos brings, rest assured that they will push you to experiment, adapt, and overcome. You will need to achieve perfect hero/defense unity to best what awaits you in the Trials.

New Inventory

• Everyone (and we mean everyone) is getting a brand-new inventory UI!

• We’ve streamlined the loot management process by putting more stuff in fewer bags, consolidating item management to a single UI, and bringing hero and item management under one roof.

• Additionally, we expanded the item sorting and management options to empower you to interact with, compare, and save/sell loot more easily, efficiently, and expediently.

• Added the ability to lock items on PC and made Locking do what it should have done in the first place on PS4 (oops).

Loot System Upgrades

• Loot generation has been revamped, reworked and revised. The new system will help you find more upgrades more often.

• iPWR has been removed. We hope that players will enjoy the new feeling of focusing on our new item systems and stats. Items still generate with stat ranges in each difficulty tier, and some stats reach a maximum cap in each difficulty. Want higher stats? Crank up the difficulty!

• Now you can enhance your loot (and Shards) without leaving your Inventory (or putting on pants)!

  • Also, no more silly “put 5 pieces of loot in” nonsense. Just upgrade with Gold or Defender Medals!

Hero Changes

Every Ability and Defense has been completely rebalanced, and these changes are more fundamental than just a numbers update. Each Defense now has its own stats, and many have undergone changes that alter their fundamentals so the entire defensive playing field is very different.

Rather than provide a before-and-after stat difference (which would be a bit misleading and very messy due to every defense being modified in several ways), below is a summarized list of the major changes to each hero’s defensive kit. This will include information such as changes to defense lineup, changes to defense roles, and other major high level changes to gameplay.

All Heroes

• Adjusted all Hero Damage, Critical Damage and Ability Power scaling.

• Adjusted all Defensive Stat scaling across all Defenses.

• Blockade towers aggro levels are now equalized. Abyss Lord’s Colossus has a slightly higher aggro value.

• All normal tower aggro levels reduced to Flamethrower levels. Traps and Auras remain unchanged.

• 2-Spread and 4-Spread firing solution weapons are disabled from spawning. The only firing solutions are Single, Triple, Penta, Burst Shot, and Scatter Shot.

• Improved handling when in the air on all Heroes to closer match the Gunwitch.

• Balanced all Hero swing information to closer match the Squire swings (results in a substantial Monk melee DPS increase).

• Charge attacks now deal more damage.

Abyss Lord

• Direct Command now scales with Ability Power instead of Defense Power. (Except Skeletal Orc)

• Revised basic attack values to improve DPS slightly.

• Removed AoE effect from secondary attacks.

Apprentice

• Flameburst Tower has been replaced by Flamethrower Tower.

• Arcane Barrier now maintains collision when in its deactivated state.

• Arcane Barrier DU cost increased from 20 to 30.

• Earthshatter DU cost increased from 50 to 80.

• Apprentice Flameburst Tower Challenge/Achievement now relies on Flamethrower Tower.

Dryad

• Revised core stats to match new melee hero scaling.

• Revised melee combo multipliers.

• Reworked Blessing to provide damage reduction instead of an armor buff and updated the description.

• Revised slow and damage values on Powder Toss.

• Adjusted Starfall’s damage and Corruption cost.

• Moss Hornet’s Nest spawns an additional hornet and gains additional Hornet movement speed in Corrupt Form.

• Slime Pit’s oil applied by Corruption can now be ignited.

EV2

• Anti Gravity Bots, Death From Above and Proton Charge now only scale with Ability Power.

• Proton Charge heat consumption doubled.

• Rebalanced heat dissipation values of certain Canister types to be more viable.

• Reduced secondary attack charge time to better match the audio and VFX.

• Mortar weapon types now properly do AoE damage.

• Cleaned up Weapon Manufacturer inspection tooltip.

• Reduced Reflect Beam DU from 60 to 30 for two nodes, with an additional 10 per node.

Gunwitch

• Removed Hero Damage scaling on abilities.

• Increased/added Ability Power scaling on abilities.

• Twice the Price activation cost increased from 60 to 80.

• Book Drop Broom Power cost increased from 30 to 40.

• Broom Storm cost increased from 50 to 60.

Huntress

• Oil Flask duration reduced.

• Increased Blaze Balloon DU from 50 to 80.  (Remember that we changed all defense scalars all over the place!)

Lavamancer

• Hero Health refactored to be slightly closer to Squire.

• Damage resistance decreased slightly to fall in line with other melee heroes.

• Balanced all Ability costs.

• Removed innate resource generation.

• Inflame no longer makes you take more damage while activated.

• Oil Geyser can now properly combo with fire effects to ignite enemies.

• Added a Fissure of Embermount 30 DU Cost.

• Reduced Maw of the Earth Drake DU Cost from 80 to 60.

Monk

• Added double jump.

• Lightning Aura is now Flame Aura.

• Serenity Aura has been removed and has had some effects combined with Boost Aura.  Boost Aura now can equip all Serenity Aura shards but does not heal heroes standing within.

• Lightning Strikes Aura has been added as a base tower at 40 DU.

• New weapons spawned for Monk will come with one of the new firing solutions (does not affect pre-existing weapons).

• Lightning Aura Challenge/Achievement now relies on Lightning Strikes Aura.

Mystic

• Revised core stats and base health to match new melee hero scaling.

• All secondary attack firing solutions provide more consistent DPS.

• Reduced Dark Torment’s DoT and Tower duration.

• All ability costs revised and Serpent’s Coil now costs 20 DU.

• Increased arc on Viper’s Fangs and updated decal to show new size.

Squire

• Adjusted ability, hero damage scaling, and base stats to match new melee hero scaling.

• Reduced mana cost of Sword Beam from 25 to 20.

• Balanced Light and Heavy damage multipliers to closer match Medium.

• Increased Training Dummy DU from 20 to 30.

Enemy Changes

Siege Rollers

• We’re reducing the maximum number of Siege Roller spawns. This applies to both solo and multiplayer matches.

• Siege Roller rockets can no longer damage the core. The Siege Roller must hit the core with the roller to hurt it.

• Siege Roller can now be stunned with diminishing returns based on the number of players.

• The hitbox on the weak point is being adjusted so that melee heroes and certain defenses can hit it more easily.

Ogres

• Ogre melee range reduced. This change makes Ogres slightly harder to kite and less likely to miss defenses placed on slopes.

• Ogre punches are slightly quicker.

Special Enemies

• Special enemies’ HP / Damage increased substantially to match closer to Ogre category. All special enemies should now present a threat (even Griblok).

• Tenacity has been rebalanced for them as well. Most enemies have 50% Tenacity. Some have less (Gnash, Lady Orc Berserker). Some have more (Griblok, Tuskar, generic melee meatbags).

Other Changes

• Rebalanced Campaign to account for all of these changes. We made it slightly harder overall based on your feedback.

• Updated the Campaign Quest rewards to reflect our new loot changes.

• Crit chances now display as percentages.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed all of the Passive and Skill Sphere bugs by removing Passives and Skill Spheres from the game.

• Fixed all of the old Inventory bugs. Now there are new Inventory bugs to discover! Yay!

• Fixed all of the Onslaught bugs by...removing Onslaught from the game. We’re seeing a trend here…

• Honestly, there are so many community-reported bugs that we fixed in this update by virtue of our system changes.

• Melee goblins now hit towers and cores much more reliably. Be scared. Be very scared.

• Demon Eye and Eye of Cthulu no longer get knocked back and fall through the world when using knockback or knockup abilities / towers.

• No longer can G up before the chests show up on Harbinger’s Warship.

• Fixed a bug where the Lavamancer was able to get stuck on Gates of Dragonfall while submerged.

• The Create Hero voiceover volume is now properly controlled by the Volume settings in the Options menu.

• Player names in the Session List will no longer stay at "999" (the default data).

• Slime Pits no longer glow like the sun in bright areas. Tower base and top are now unlit meaning their lighting will look more even across the board.

• Fixed collision issues in Dragonfall Sewers.

• Fixed collision issues in the Ramparts.

• Okay, we fixed collision issues on all of the maps.

Quick Hits: What Happened To…?

The Skill Sphere System

• We converted most of our old Skill Spheres into Shards.

• Some Skill Spheres were turned into Ascension Powers.

• Some Skill Spheres were removed from the game.

• Those who’ve purchased Skill Spheres with either Gold or Defender Medals received a Gold refund. Our goal is to make sure that your choice to invest in your hero’s power is translated over into this new system -- you’ll need all the Gold you can get to upgrade your Shards and your Loot.

  • All gold and Defender Medals spent on Spheres will be reimbursed based on a calculated conversion ratio.

  • For this compensation only, every Campaign quest completed will give players 2 Standard Shards per quest. Players who have completed all Campaign quests prior to this update will receive a maximum of 36 Standard Shards.

The Passives System

• Passive have been changed into Shard Slots on gear.

• Many of the bonuses previously offered by Passives can now be found in Shards.

• Others can be found as Ascension Powers.

• A select few item-specific passives in this update (those on the Terraria weapons) have turned into special LOCKED shards that come with the weapon and cannot be removed.

• Some Passive effects were lost along the way (the flu hit really hard this year) and will possibly be added in at a later date.  Others were removed or reworked.

The Stat Allocation System

• The previous Stat Allocation System is retired.

• You will be able to find many similar options in the Ascension system and level them to the MAX.

Nightmare Difficulty

• It’s gone to make room for better things.

My Inventory

• Bags were consolidated to fit more items in fewer bags.

• Converting to this system has been constructed to ensure that you will receive the same if not more item slots when you log in for the first time.

My Current Gear

• Most Passives turned into Shard Slots; some weapons kept their unique passive as a locked Shard.

• Relics are now used for Defense stats. Weapons & Armor are now used for Hero stats.

• Medallions and Totems will retain their primary stats and gain a random secondary and tertiary stat. Rings will be rerolled into different Relics with different defense stats and will no longer exist in the game.

• All Weapons & Armor have been rerolled with new hero stats.

• Loot XP Boosters and Wyvern Tokens are now gone.

Terraria Weapons and Wayfarer

• We didn't want players to immediately shortcut to owning Chaos V weapons with Souls when the update launched, so for now, you can only buy the Campaign and Chaos I versions of the Terraria weapons. We're still finalizing our plan on how players can acquire later Chaos versions of the Terraria weapons.

Guaranteed Drops

• The only guarantee in Chaos is your doom!!!

• We might re-visit these in the future.

Incursions

• Will remain in game as a fun way to earn Defender Medals.

• For the time being they will only be at Campaign Hard difficulty.

  • Will these be updated? Only the shadow knows… and Jason because he sets the schedule.

Onslaught

• Onslaught is finally taking the rest we’ve been talking about. In the future, we have plans for an Onslaught revamp or for a new system to take its place. It shall be reborn!

Miscellaneous

• Daily Map Bonuses have been removed.

• The My Heroes UI on the Pause Screen has been removed.

• The Forge now links to the new Inventory interface.

• Titles and Collections have been moved to the Pause Screen.

Known Issues

• Keybinds may have been reset due to changes.

• Controller is not supported on all user interfaces. We’re working on it!

• Some Incursion weapons and their respective passives/Shards have been removed in this patch and will be re-introduced at a later date.

• Volcano tower does not get increased attack speed from Eruption anymore.

• Ramster Gambit Talent only gives 3 range per talent point (should be higher).

• Tooltips display improperly in the Scavenger UI.

• Frostbite Slow Talent displays as negative (harmful) on Inspect.

• The inspect tooltip of the Frostbite Tower says the slow gets worse as you upgrade it more. This is visual only as the slow does get stronger as you upgrade.

• Whenever the Cybork stuns a chain of EV nodes, only 1 node in the chain will have the stun VFX.

• The arc that the arcane volley projectiles take to their target is a lot higher than intended.

• If you’re having continued odd game problems, validate the integrity of the game cache via Steam.

• PS4: The Equip/Unequip context icon doesn't update after you equip or unequip a pet in the Petrinarian UI.

• PS4: Various navigation issues on the PS4 costume shop.

• Magic and physical resists have been removed from the game, but they are still on pets. Please reroll them using your millions of saved pet reroll items.

• Worm Scarf is the best shard in the game and is totally not broken right now.



Devstream 71 is over! If you couldn't watch us live, you can catch the YouTube archive above.

In this Devstream, Elandrian and Blacksmith showcases the new features coming in Trials: The Endgame Update, which launches on Tuesday. They also dove into Chaos and...they died. A lot. As expected. 

This is the last Devstream before Trials:  The Endgame Update comes out on Tuesday. We hope you'll enjoy the update as much as we enjoyed making it!