DEFENDERS,

We’re all so excited for the Steam Early Access release of Dungeon Defenders: Awakened on Feb 21st! We wanted to share some of the awesome work the team’s been working so hard on to get ready for the Early Access at the end of this week. This Dev Log will have some sneak peaks from different departments here at Chromatic: Art, Design, and Engineering! Also, if you haven’t and wanted any of the goodies that come with the preorder editions of DD:A, make sure to get them ASAP since they’ll be gone at 11:59PM EST 2/20! 

Some of The Team

Mary — Community Manager

Hi there! I’m Mary, the new Community Manager and I’ve been working for Chromatic for a little over a month now. I worked at Artix Entertainment previously for almost five years before coming over here. It’s been super fun and I had a blast at PAX South talking to everyone there about DD:A. I’ve been really enjoying reading all of your feedback and suggestions regarding DD:A, and making sure that your voices are heard by the team. I’ve also been working on ways to revamp some of our social media platforms like Discord and hopefully you’ll see those changes soon. I’ve also been getting together some little gif teasers together and getting feedback from the Discord community. Here’s some examples:

I’m looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts on the Steam Early Access of DD:A! It’s only 2 days away!

Brent Caulfield — Jr Designer

Hello, my name is Brent Caulfield and I am a Jr. Designer at Chromatic Games. I first started game development about 6 years ago when a friend and I started making a FPS game with wizards and magic instead of guns and ammo. That eventually evolved into a commercial project called Grimoire: Manastorm which was released on Steam in late 2017. After that I started a design internship at Chromatic and then accepted a full time design position shortly afterwards!

There have been a lot of interesting tasks, but my favorite would have to be the final implementation of gameplay elements for all the maps. Placing the final parts to make the gameplay work and then being the first person to playtest it was really exciting. Seeing the waves of enemies all come out on the maps full of beautiful art was a great experience and one I’ll remember for a very long time. There were so many talented peoples’ work that went into making it all happen and to be one of the first people to see it all come together into a full gameplay experience was very special and was definitely my favorite thing I’ve worked on!

Reverse engineering and breaking down DD1 code to find out exactly how and why different systems work was definitely the hardest stuff I’ve had to work on. In order to create an authentic DD1 style experience the Engineering and Design teams spent a lot of time going back into the DD1 code to see how it all functions. One of our major goals with the project is to bring back that awesome gameplay experience that so many people love and while we have extremely experienced people on the team that know how it all works there were still some surprises along the way that we never would have figured out without digging into the source code. This was very challenging at times, but extremely rewarding at the same time.

After the initial hazing (Javahawk told me it was possible to beat DD1 Insane Deeper Well on a fresh character) things have been great! Gainesville is my hometown and game development is my dream job so I feel extremely fortunate that I was able to find a place at such a welcoming studio that is working on a game I genuinely enjoy playing! There are so many amazing people on the team and it's a great feeling to wake up every day and be excited to go into work. I am really excited about everything we are working on and think the community is going to love all the awesome content we’ll be putting out in the future!

Jade — Jr 3D Artist

I go by Jadeite in the art world and I have a slight obsession with video games and all things nerdy! So much so that I decided to make some kind of a career out of it through the art side of things. I've been practicing 3D art since my junior year of high school, and it's my favorite medium to date. My life basically revolves around games, whether I'm at work making them, or at home playing them! I'm also a big fan of tabletop games like King of New York, Boss Monster, D&D, and Necromonda just to name a few.

I've had a lot of fun working on the many assets I've been tasked with, but if I had to pin down my favorite it would probably be the pets! I'd say I had the most fun when making these little guys, they're just so cute! I wouldn't really say I'm a character artist, but working on them gave me a chance to essentially be one for a small time and I learned a lot from it. Besides that I also really did like making weapons and shields, super fun especially when I got to make my own spin on old weapons or even just remake them from the ground up. 

I haven't had to make anything that frustrated me to the point of thinking it wasn't fun in the slightest. But for the hardest thing I’ve worked on I guess I would have the pick the new version of Ancient Aegis. From the start I just had no idea where to go with the new concept, and then actually carrying that out in 3D form was a bit of a challenge. I've also had a few issues come up with this particular model, having to add more or fix things in regards to texture, smoothing issues, etc. It was still a very interesting take on a "sword" and I learned quite a bit from it.

My time here has been nothing but enjoyable! I was more than thankful when I first got my internship position here just a few months after graduating, and it's been a blast ever since. One thing my university always said was that you never fully learn this art form until you land your first job, and man were they right! I've been practicing this art form for about 5 years now and I definitely struggled my first week here. I kid you not, I took an entire week making a bench haha. But I've learned a great deal of information, new techniques, and even made some friends along the way! I'd say this is an experience I'll never forget :D

(Also here's some more of my work)

Derek Stroud — Sr Programmer

One of my favorite things that I’ve worked on was setting up our abilities using Epic’s own AbilitySystem, which is a very neat and robust system to work with. Abilities are such a key component to the game as they include everything from placing towers to the Genie pet giving you mana. Setting up our core flow for this and making some of the base abilities was very satisfying and fun as it is one of the very direct means of adding fun interactions to the game. In previous development on the original Dungeon Defenders and Dungeon Defenders II, this was a lot more difficult. Swapping to Unreal Engine 4 is like a dream come true when it comes to setting up abilities and being able to do a lot more in a shorter amount of time.

With any project, there’s always going to be that mountain to climb, and it’s usually the hardest thing you work on. For Dungeon Defenders: Awakened, we needed to mimic the original Dungeon Defenders stats on every piece of gear and balance for gear, enemies, difficulties, you name it! Due to Dungeon Defenders evolving beyond its original scope (especially post release) there were a lot of tacked on additions to various formulas that became very hard to translate into an easy to work with system for DDA designers. Tracking down all the various additions and small stat tweaks that could happen in DD1 and making sure we incorporated them into DDA but also trying to keep the new systems intuitive and manageable was quite an undertaking... not quite sure we hit intuitive but I think we got manageable down. 

My favorite thing that has been added to Dungeon Defenders: Awakened that wasn’t in Dungeon Defenders (2012) is double jump! Anything that makes navigation feel better, also every game should have it cause it is the best. As someone who worked on both games, you should take this as a fact — double jump is best jump.

What’s Next?

Everyone has been working so hard on polishing things up for the Steam Early Access release of Dungeon Defenders: Awakened on February 21st and working on getting it ready for the full launch in Q2! A few of us are also getting ready to head out to PAX East at the end of the month, will we see any of you there? If you go, make sure to stop by and visit us, we love to hang out with some of our brave Defenders whenever we get the chance!

Social Defenders

To keep up with us and get the latest news on both Dungeon Defenders and us folks here at Chromatic Games, make sure to follow us on our social media:

• Discord

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Instagram

• Twitch

For Etheria!

Chromatic Games

Hi there everyone! 

My name is Mary (or known as [CG] Mary) and I’ve recently joined Chromatic Games as the Community Manager. I’m so excited to meet all of you, answer your questions, listen to your feedback, and be the bridge between you and Chromatic! I spent almost five years working player support and assisting with community management at Artix Entertainment on AdventureQuest, DragonFable, MechQuest, EpicDuel, AdventureQuest Worlds, and AdventureQuest 3D. I also have been volunteering for the RTX (RoosterTeeth) convention in Austin, TX for six years! I love being able to help out as much as I can and make sure people are being heard.

(My demodog Rusty and I)

I’ve enjoyed tower defense games since I found Bloons TD in 2007. Ranged/mage characters have always been my favorite, so I really enjoy playing The Apprentice (plus Flameburst is one of the greatest offenses.) The Huntress is my second go to, but I also love using the electric auras with The Monk. Outside of the Dungeon Defenders franchise, my favorite games to play are Fable II, Wolf Among Us, and Fallout: New Vegas. I’m currently playing Pokemon Shield and The Outer Worlds in my free time.

I look forward to talking to all of you! You’ll be seeing me on streams defending Etheria from the hordes, responding to your questions and feedback on our social media platforms (tag me on twitter @CG_Mary_), as well as acting as a bridge between the Chromatic Games team and you, our brave Defenders. If you have any questions you can find me on Discord and Twitter and I will do my best to answer as soon as I can! 

For Etheria!

PS If you understood the Fallout meme in the title we're gonna be best friends

DEFENDERS!

Today we released the PRIME INCURSIONS update on all platforms! We wanted to provide a challenge to our tested Defenders that was separate from Onslaught, and Prime Incursions are just that. There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s get into it!

PRIME INCURSIONS

What are they?

They are the highest and newest tier of incursions, selectable from the Incursions tab on the War Table. There are six different groups of incursions to play through that are releasing over time. You are able to play them as they are unleashed, the only thing that can hold you back is your own skill!

What are the rewards?

Prime Incursions have three different rewards associated with them.

Chaos VIII Ampoules
Each Prime Incursion has the chance to drop a Chaos VIII Ampoule. As you continuously progress, the Incursions get more and more difficult. As such, we wanted to increase the drop rate of Chaos VIII Ampoules to match that increase in difficulty. These Incursions can get pretty tough, which led us to making the hardest of these challenges have the highest drop chance for Chaos VIII Ampoules.

Chaos VIII Weapons
We’ve added a whole new slew of weapons with new weapon models that are only available through Prime Incursions. There’s over 25 new weapons to collect, sure to scratch that collector’s itch!

That’s not all there is to these weapons. Each weapon is upgraded to Chaos VIII, at the full 5/5 upgrade quality! That means they are perfectly upgraded, letting you focus on using Chaos VIII Amps to upgrade your relics and armor instead. Alongside these upgrades, we’ve curated these weapons to be what you really want. They have some of the most alluring shot and swing types many of you enjoy. ALONGSIDE THAT, included are curated mods specific to these weapons that really ensure these drops feel good and pack a punch!

Hyper Shards
Hyper Shards are something every player wants to boost up their arsenal. Previously, they were only acquired through Mastery completion, requiring a specific amount of Mastery Stars. Now, in Prime Incursions, you earn a Hyper Shard for every group you complete. There are six groups total, so if you complete all six of the groupings, you earn the seventh Hyper Shard as a capstone reward! This means you can now have up to TWO of each Hyper Shard in your ranks, pushing back the Old Ones forces more hyper-er than before.
When Do They Release?

Today we released the first two groups of Prime Incursions, Prime I and Prime II. Each of these groups contains 3 incursions, for a total of 6 to conquer. Every week, on Wednesday @ 9AM ET, we are releasing a new incursion. This is going until early November, giving you content to come back each week to enjoy. Here’s the schedule

Prime I & II:  TODAY!
Prime III Malthius:  September 4th
Prime III Power Surge:  September 11th
Prime IV Dark Awakening:  September 18th
Prime IV Return to Maldonis:  September 25th
Prime IV Bastille Master:  October 2nd
Prime V Altar of the Athame:  October 9th
Prime V Revenge of the Yetis:  October 16th
Prime V Spectral Assault:  October 23rd
Prime VI Dawn of the Blood Moon:  October 30th
Prime VI BETSY:  November 5th

New Costume
The Ascended Initiate is now available for purchase in-game at 800 Gems!

Social Defenders
To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The team had a blast making this content, we cannot wait for all of you to get your hands on our next update. Stay tuned for more info soon!

For Etheria!

Chromatic Games

Defenders!

I can’t believe we’ve reached $350,000 and that we’re still climbing!  We’re super grateful for all the support we’ve received so far, and we can’t wait to keep building this game.  

This is the last chance for everyone to back the Kickstarter so I just wanted to remind people what the perks are so you can spread the word! 

Being a Kickstarter backer comes with a lot of exclusive perks, but all our Backers get access to additional add-on products after the campaign ends on BackerKit.  That means that if you’re a Backer, you can purchase additional T-Shirts, postcards, copies of the game, and more for the lowest price.

Now I want to talk about the game!

As you may have noticed, we’ve hit several of our FLEX goals and I hope we hit more!  So I wanted to briefly talk about the ones we have hit, and even some that we haven’t yet.

Localization Support

This one is pretty simple, we want to offer the game in more languages, so we’re going to offer it in more languages!  Huzzah!

New Challenge Maps

Challenges are coming back!  In DD1 we called them Challenges, in DD2 they were Incursions, but in DDA they’ll be pure awesome.  We’ll be bringing back some of the classic Challenge Maps, but this stretch goal is even more!  With some of the new content that’s going to be in DDA, these will be accompanying custom Challenge Map versions with their own sets of rewards.  We plan to have sick loot that comes from conquering these, so get your Stashes ready!

For this next one, I’m going to let our Lead Designer, Mark Telfer talk a bit about “Massacre” Difficulty.

Massacre Difficulty

Hey Defenders!

We just blew past another flex goal, and that means even more opportunities for us to create new and exciting content.  Being the masochists that you are, you’ve decided to bring Massacre Difficulty into this world.  Allow me to titillate your masochism with the doom you’ve brought upon yourselves.  Massacre will be an intense challenge that will test the formidability of even the most seasoned defenders.  This isn’t just going to be the same enemy schedules with some stat buffs slapped on.  The enemies you’re going to face present brand new challenges that require some serious strategy and legendary skill.  You thought Nightmare was hard?  Pfft… Good luck!

GLHF,
Mark Telfer
Lead Designer

New Enemy and Map

This is an additional enemy and map threat that will be presented after the end of the campaign and at the end of the current progression.  This will be one of the new hardest maps to beat, and a challenging enemy threat to accompany it.

Customizable Tavern

I want to clear things up that we still plan to have similar levels of tavern customization to DD1 in DDA.  This stretch goal was to have even more control over where your trophies go, adding decorations, and really having additional customization options within your personal tavern.  This stretch goal was for the extra of the EXTRA!  Let’s HIT IT!

Bonus Boss Fights

We have a lot of awesome boss fights that we want to add into DD:A and you’ll be getting some of them with the base product, we just wanted to add more!  This goal was for that!  We still might add more as we continue to develop DLC’s or patches and content, but this was to get more at launch.

I hope that helps give a little more context about the FLEX goals we’re trying to hit, and some more details about the game we’re trying to build.

Let’s close out this Kickstarter with a BANG and get every awesome bit of content and features into Dungeon Defenders: Awakened!

Thanks again for your support, from all of us at Chromatic Games.

Colin “Elandrian” Fisher
Creative Director
 

From: Colin “Elandrian” Fisher, Creative Director

What’s up, Defenders!  Welcome to our first post as Chromatic Games!  If you’re new to the community, an extra helping of “welcome” is in store for you.  If you’re a veteran Defender, then welcome back. Let’s get right to it!

It’s been a wild ride these past couple months, but the cat’s out of the bag now!  There’s been a lot of news about our rebranding, new Kickstarter campaign, and what all of it means for you as a player.  I want to just take a brief moment to provide a little extra context about what’s going on. We’re #indieAF now, so it’s time to get the info straight from the horse’s mouth!  (Or maybe it’s beans time? Company beans? Who knows. Let’s do this.)

So What Happened To Trendy Entertainment?
For the more official take, you can check out the press release here.

For the realest take, keep reading!

In December of this past year, Augi Lye, one of the original founders of Trendy, came back as CEO to help return Trendy to its indie roots.  

The development team and I worked with him to figure out how we can have a good plan to move forward and start creating Dungeon Defenders games in the way they were meant to be made: for our players.  One of the things we wanted to make clear was that Trendy was no longer really Trendy.  There’s brand-new leadership, a new creative direction, and new energy at the studio that was just waiting to be released.  So we decided that we’re not really Trendy anymore.

Chromatic Games is our final form.  We’re over power level 9000 now, and we’re ready to rock.

We’re not answering to external people anymore.  We’re in control of our own destiny. We were able to keep the majority of the development team around, but we had some people move on to newer pastures. We’re so grateful for their years of service.  We love and respect all of our previous Trendy family, but now the Chromatic team is focused on the future — and that future is to keep improving DD2 and crafting Dungeon Defenders: Awakened.

What Does This Mean For Dungeon Defenders II?
Dungeon Defenders II will keep going!  Development is going to slow down, but we still plan on maintaining limited updates and content.  What do I mean by limited updates? We’re going to be focused on smaller quality of life updates, bug fixes, improvements and some occasional new cosmetics.  When I say smaller QoL, I mean in the development time aspect — we still plan on our quality of life features to be super impactful for players.  

We’re going to be releasing an update soon on all platforms that will have a vendor where you can get the Shards you’ve been looking for or looking to gild — a highly requested player feature!

There’s some extra morsels of dopeness in that update as well.  Most of the changes are gameplay related. We’re trying to make the fixes and improvements that everyone has been asking for.

Supporting Dungeon Defenders II will still continue to support the team at Chromatic and support our ability to continue to patch and grow DD2.  Our team is dedicated to figuring out how we can keep evolving the game in the right direction.

We’re going to keep making Dungeon Defenders II better and better, just as we’ve been committed to doing in the past.

So Why Dungeon Defenders: Awakened?
I’m just going to begin by addressing the elephant in the room:

“Elan, Dungeon Defenders: Eternity already happened.  Isn’t this just the same thing?!?”

The short answer is no. The long answer is HELL no.  DD:E was a different product entirely. We have no plans to repeat history when it comes to that.

We came up with Dungeon Defenders: Awakened as our first smaller-scope project as a new team. If we want to remain employee-owned/controlled (which is the dream!), we needed to prove that we’re the capable stewards and re-earn that trust before diving right into Dungeon Defenders III (which we have SO many slick plans for).

Dungeon Defenders: Awakened started as a plan to do a modern remake of the original Dungeon Defenders for the Nintendo Switch, but then it evolved from there.  We didn’t want the game to feel like some sort of weird attempt at Dungeon Defenders: Eternity again. We wanted to make a new game, a new experience, a new story.

As we began looking into what we could build with Unreal Engine 4, we found that we’ll need to rebuild a lot of the systems and code that supported the Dungeon Defenders games.  Fortunately, our engineers are rockstars. We’re taking a lot of the hard lessons we learned about building games over the years from DD1 and DD2 and now have the freedom to make these systems in newer, more optimized and scalable ways for DD:A.

We don’t just want the game to look better in UE4 — we want it to run and feel better.

We want controlling your character to feel “crispy.”  For some context on what that means, you should check out Ben Brode’s PAX Keynote from last year.  We love to draw inspiration from other games and developers, and that is one of my personal favorite talks that describes some of these key aspects of making games have that polished and responsive feel.

Then when it comes to content, we’re exploring ways of using and importing some of our existing content in new ways that we can use as a springboard to accelerate development.  

This is one of the things we show off in the Kickstarter.  Deeper Well is definitely still the same map effectively, but it has a completely new look and will play a little differently.  It will still be a familiar and recognizable location, but there are new things going on in these familiar spots and new gameplay that comes with it.

This is what will allow us to make our aggressive October timeline.  By using the content and assets that we’ve been developing over the years, the content team can go CRAZY and make the game look and run amazingly well while our design team focuses on bringing the gameplay into 2019.

Our goal is to bring Dungeon Defenders: Awakened to as many platforms and players as possible.  We want to make a game that everyone can enjoy, and enjoy together. It just takes additional support to get there, and that’s why we have our Kickstarter campaign.

Why Go To Kickstarter?
We JUST became fully independent again.  We want to build the game in a way that we can fully be in control of.  Obviously going to a publisher is an option that we can explore to get additional funding, but there’s always a bit of “loss” associated with that.  We’re really trying to move forward and make new games. We don’t want to have a publisher — we want to make Dungeon Defenders games that are fun, weird, engaging, meme-tacular, challenging, charming and magical.

By going to Kickstarter, we can maintain FULL control over development and the future of the Dungeon Defenders franchise.  Your support here is VITAL.

The “dream” is to add as much content to this game as possible and to make a game that you can enjoy as a solo player or as a co-op player, strategizing against new challenges, maps, defenses, and gameplay.  We love it when people make interesting builds that even baffle our internal designers. We love when people find cool ways to make defenses and heroes more powerful than we ever could have imagined. We want to give you more of that.

So we need your help.

In Conclusion
We’re here to make a game that communicates our passion for Dungeon Defenders. We want to fulfill the expectations of our followers both new and old.  At this moment, we’ve had about a month of focused pre-production development time so far, and look how much progress we’ve has been made already!

We can’t wait to give people more news and updates about Dungeon Defenders: Awakened as we make more progress. We’re focusing on having a player-first mentality be our driving force at Chromatic.  

We’re here for you, if you’ll be here for us.

Support our Kickstarter, spread the word, help us make the dopest Dungeon Defenders game of all time.

As always, feel free to hit me up on Twitter:  @LordElandrian

Welcome to our community.  Stay a while.

Greetings Defenders,

Welcome to the new forums! There's quite a bit of changes that had to happen in order to facilitate this move so please read everything to hopefully answer any questions you may have.

• Logging In
  • Email/Password Login: Your password did not carry over from the old forums and must be reset by going here: https://forums.dungeondefenders.com/lostpassword/ . Make sure to check your email junk/spam folders in case the reset email goes there.
  • Steam Login: You must login with email first and re-link your Steam account to your forum account.
• Post Counts
  • Since the new forum had to re-index everything during the migration, post count numbers will be to what posts you do have and not include any deleted posts, non-copied over old forum posts, or forum restore numbers.
• Messages
  • Messages between members on the old forums were not moved to the new one. Sorry 😞
• Threads with pages that show "There are no posts to show"
  • Older threads that had deleted/bad spam bot posts in them were cleaned up which may cause the error message above. Once new posts are added or you go to an earlier page instead of last post should work fine. New forum posts started on the new forums will not have this issue.
• Reporting forum issues
  • You can report new forum issues here: Forum Bug Reports.
• Titles/Ranks
  • We're working on bringing back some custom groups and post count promotion fully. Right now after you make a post you should see yourself get the correct rank updated on your account.

Thank you!

A Protean Check-In With Elandrian

Defenders Assemble! Sound the horns of Dragonfall! I come bearing beans!

Well, I have some beans, but I also wanted to talk about the recent launch of Protean Shift. It’s been a busy past two weeks for us here at Trendy and it’s great to finally get the expansion into everyone's hands. We’ve been scouring the forums and our various social platforms for comments and feedback, and it’s tremendously valuable for helping us shape what’s coming soon in upcoming patches. I also want to give you guys a glimpse at the future of the game as well, so read everything for all the juicy details.

In response to feedback (and just our planning in general), we have a bundle of changes, new content, and bug fixes coming soon. I’m not going to give any real time-frames… our goal is to get new changes and content out as quick as possible for everyone, but we’re a tiny team and we’re working as fast as we can! Here’s a quick list of some of our targets:

Short Term

• Bug Fixes (duh.)

• Buyback Functionality

  • This is currently in testing/iteration and we want to get it out soon. We really want to make sure there’s a way to get back items you’ve sold by accident. It will most likely just save some of the items you’ve been selling until you leave the Town or Tavern.

• Better Sorting/Filtering of the Inventory

  • One thing we want to improve is your ability to find your good items in an easier way. This will take a little more work, but we’re going to try to give you better sorting of item types, as well as possible sorting by your strong MOD rolls… or should I say “those big 5/5 Qualibeans.”

  • This also might include some changes to help find Shards and manage them better, but that might require additional time as well.

• Materials Vault Tabs?

  • This is something we’re investigating too.  We saw some players talking about this so we’re looking at making a section of the vault be able to support bigger stacks of materials and connect to all the places you want to spend them. We’re aiming for this to be a “short term” add… but it might end up taking a little longer.

Medium Term

• Onslaught Changes

  • I’m not going to go into TOO many details, as it’s still being discussed among the Design team… but I will say we have some goals for these changes.  

  • We want to make it easier for players to play and progress together.

  • We want to make the floors more significant to progress between.

  • We want to make it easier to make meaningful progression and less punishing.  (Aka. Three map floors might go the way of Skill Spheres.)

• Ancient Power Changes

  • These are going to be some changes to make it fit more in line with the Onslaught changes.

  • We’re also looking at making the resets more forgiving as you gain Ancient Power too. Again, not going to go into specifics as this is still an active discussion… but we ARE reading/discussing all the various opinions from the community and our testing teams.

Longer Term (But maybe shorter than you expect?)

• Better party functionality.

  • We’re trying to add more social functionality here… Things like better party leader knowledge in matchmaking, inviting/kicking from parties, a friends list?  There’s a lot on the schedule to add here, we’re going to get to as much as possible.

• Increased Multiplayer Incentive

  • We want people to be enjoying Dungeon Defenders together, but we know there’s not a lot of reasons to do so at the moment. We’re aiming at changing this, while still keeping solo-play viable.

• Better Matchmaking.

  • This is another laundry list of changes, but we want it to be easier for people to play together and stay together.  We also want to make the flow to get into gameplay much easier and with less interruptions and disconnects.

• Guilds

  • Secrets...

Now all these updates and changes are well and good, but we’ve also seen a certain desire from one or two community members. It’s been spoken of only occasionally… and by so few that we weren’t sure if it was important or not to everyone...

/endsarcasm

Our heroes will be receiving some calls to action to various regions of Etheria very soon. The first region our heroes will be heading to will be a somewhat familiar location. The distress call will come from a certain coastal region...

Just for some extra beanage at the end here:  There will be a new region to go to, new things to get, and possibly some new threats to face…

We appreciate all our players sticking with us as we continue to evolve and release our vision for Year Two of Dungeon Defenders II. We couldn’t have done any of this without all of your help.  

Thank you from all of us here at Trendy Entertainment.

Sincerely,

Colin “Elandrian” Fisher

Hey Fellow Defenders!

It’s about that time again.  Time for another Check-In with ya boi, Elandrian.  We hope everyone has been enjoying the Barbarian and the changes that came out with our last large update. We’ve been hard at work on a ton of new content for Dungeon Defenders II, and I wanted to talk a little bit about what’s coming next week to the game and some stuff that’s coming around summertime.

Next week is going to feature the Sky City Bank, Inventory Stack Splitting, a huge performance improvement with loading times on all platforms, and an assortment of bug fixes.

Sky City Bank

The Sky City Bank will be arriving in Dragonfall next week, and will be bringing some additional storage to everyone.  Every player will get at least one Bank Vault for free when they first log in. In addition to the one free Bank Vault, we’re going to be running a limited time promotion where you can get another free Bank Vault and unique Shutter Shades Flair for your heroes.  This will only last two weeks, so make sure to tell your friends to get the free space and cosmetic!

For people that have purchased the old Inventory Pack or the newer Bag Booster Pack, there will be some slight changes to where your inventory bags are now.  The bags that were activated from those bundles will become Bank Vaults now. We saw that there was some regular confusion usually in the form of: “Why do some players have 10-11 bags and I can only buy 8?”  So we’re standardizing what everyone can get.

Tl;dr If you’ve bought the Inventory Packs, you’ll keep all the space that you’ve purchased, and it will just transition into free Bank space when the update comes out.

So here’s what the new “Max Space” will look like:

Old Version:

8-11 Possible Maximum Inventory Bags

0 Bank Vaults

New Version :
8 Inventory Bags

12 Bank Vaults

We wanted to give everyone enough space so that they can just completely empty out their current Inventories into the Bank immediately once you log into the new update and roll out with an empty Inventory!

Stack Splitting

The Sky City Bank will also release with a couple smaller item management features.  The main one that we’ve introduced is Stack Splitting. I don’t think I need to explain how that works, but I will anyway!  If you have a stack of 99 pet food, you’ll be able to split it into two stacks if you so choose.  So maybe you want to just store a portion of our consumables, you can do that now!

Transfer All

The other management feature is the ability to transfer an entire bag with one press.  There will be a new “Transfer All” button that will move all your unlocked items into the Bank Vault that you have selected.  Locked items can be moved as well, you just have to manually move each one and they won’t be moved by accident with the “Transfer All.”  If you have several stacks of something that is able to be stacked, “Transfer All” will automatically stack those together when used.

Load Time Optimization

Our programmers have made an awesome performance breakthrough with how we load player profiles.  With the introduction of the Sky City Bank, we were aiming to improve all aspects of our item systems in some way, shape, and form.  Our lead programmer looked into how we were loading our save profiles and found several optimizations that we could make when we introduced the Bank for the first time.  

In one of our test cases, we saw a 60 second load time fall to a mere nine seconds.  Results will be varied for all our users, but this will be an improvement across all our platforms on how our save profiles are loaded, and I’m legitimately excited for this change to go live for all of you.

But What Else?

I know it wouldn’t be a good Check-In without some juicy tidbits, so I guess I’ll start sprinkling out some information.

I keep seeing a lot of new things popping up in our development build of the game, and all of it has the name “Proteus” attached to it.  I’m not quite sure what that means, but these new things LOOK amazing. There was even this new “magical property” thing that I found when messing around on my Barbarian that made me gain additional damage buffs each time I switched stances.  When I first looted it, one of our QA members told me I could do this new thing with it. It was this weird word too… I think it’s pronounced “Trah-Deah-Bluh,” but I’m not sure. I could be saying that wrong.

There was also another spaceship parked in the Heroes Marketplace, although I’m not quite sure what that’s about.  Everything seems so different. A bunch of game modes are different now too. Curiouser and curiouser...

I’ll keep investigating and report back to everyone with my next Check-In!

Thanks everyone, can’t wait to see you in Etheria!

Colin “Elandrian” Fisher

There’s a storm coming, Defenders! 

Wizards & Blizzards (Update 1.1) arrives August 23rd on Xbox One, PC & PS4! Our focus for this update is on delivering a new gender swap hero, creating important system updates, fixing numerous bugs, bringing the Revenge of the Yetis Incursion to all platforms, and setting the stage for adding larger modes and variety to the world of Dungeon Defenders II in our next updates.

Read the blog below to learn about the update, and then be sure to tune into our Wizards & Blizzards Devstream this Friday at 3PM EDT. We’re going to showcase the update and giveaway free hero codes!

New Hero:  The Adept!

“A dedicated bookworm and talented mage, the Adept pursued the arcane arts from a young age. Unrivaled in her valley homeland, the Adept has come to Dragonfall to prove herself among the finest arcane masters and take the fight to the Old Ones on the fields of battle.”

The Adept is our next gender-swap hero! She sports two new abilities and one new defense while retaining most of the Apprentice’s kit:

New Ability:  Arcane Bubble

The Adept creates a pulsing shield that reflects all enemy projectiles and periodically stuns all enemies within. It’s particularly useful against certain enemies (*cough* Dark Assassins *cough*).

New Ability:  Arc Lightning

The Adept sends piercing bolts of devastating lightning that damage marked targets and enemies caught in-between.

New Defense:  Hailstorm Tower

The Adept’s new defense is a powerful anti-air tower! The Hailstorm Tower fires a barrage of damaging ice shards at flying enemies, which also weakens them to follow-up attacks. This defense also draws reduced aggro from enemies.

New Shards for the Adept

The Adept has her own unique Shards to discover! (Note:  These details are subject to change between now and release. Check out the patch notes next week for final information!)

• Wither Shield:  Arcane Bubble withers enemies inside it increasing the damage they take by X%.

  • Found in the Campaign Shard Pack

• Sanctuary: Heroes inside the Arcane Bubble shield heal X% of their health per second during the duration of the bubble.

  • Found in the Chaos 2 Shard Pack

• Glacier:  Hailstorm Tower fires a large rock dealing X% Defense Power damage once every 5 volleys.

  • Found in the Chaos 2 Shard Pack

• Thunderwave:  Arc Lightning deals X% Ability Power as damage to all enemies around you.

  • Found in the Chaos 3 Shard Pack

• Arc Shielding: Arc Lightning places a shield on you that lasts 20 seconds that absorbs X% of your Ability Power. Enemies that hit the shield are damaged for a total of Y% of your Ability Power over 3 seconds.

  • Found in the Chaos 4 Shard Pack

• Marking Bubble:  Arcane Bubble adds X marks to enemies inside it.

  • Found in the Chaos 4 Shard Pack

• Thunderbolts and Lightning:  Increases the damage of Arc Lightning by X%.

  • Found in the Chaos 5 Shard Pack

• Explosive Finale:  Upon completion, the Arcane Bubble explodes dealing X% Ability Power damage to all enemies in and around the bubble.

  • Found in the Chaos 6 Shard Pack

• Icefall:  Hailstorm Tower attacks have a X% chance on hit to freeze enemies for 7 seconds.

  • Found in the Chaos 7 Shard Pack

Try the Adept for Free!

Perhaps best of all, when the update comes out, you’ll be able to try the Adept for free by visiting the Portal in the Heroes Marketplace! Once you enter the Portal, you’ll be given access to a normalized version of the Adept decked out in gear. If you like being able to try out a premium hero for free, please let us know!

Revenge of the Yeti’s Incursion on PS4 & PC

This frosty Incursion will be available on PS4 and PC in this update! Prepare to face the mighty Yeti and his abominable new minions on the Hot Springs map. Revenge of the Yetis will be available in Chaos VII, so prepare your heroes now!

Matchmaking System Updates

This update implements some major backend matchmaking updates, which we’ll be able to grow and improve the matchmaking experience upon. With this particular update, we’ve been able to improve the map-to-map flow, which makes it easier for you to stay together with a party of friends or with a group of randoms. We’ve also been able to fix the minimum Ascension Level Requirement filter, which will now stay active when you continue on to the next Trials match, and your custom game names will remain on transition. We’re also able to hide matches after they reach a certain threshold of play, so it’s less likely to join a nearly complete match. (Thanks for the feedback on that!)

There’s plenty more we want to do with this new backend system in the future (like improving the Party System), so stay tuned for more updates!

Gamepad Improvements

Continuing from our work in Patch 1.0.3, we’ve added a whole slew of new gamepad improvements! Among other changes, this includes Inventory UI quality-of-life changes, easier hero swapping, easier tower upgrading/repairing/selling and more! Check out the patch notes next week for a full list of details.

New Cosmetics Manager

This update introduces a brand-new Cosmetics UI to view and equip Cosmetics! Currently, equipping costumes and accessories is a pain. Not only do you have to go to a specific vendor to make your heroes look badass, but the current UI is a pain to navigate -- especially on gamepad.

This new UI is available directly from the “Cosmetics” tab in your Inventory, so now you can change your look on the fly! You’re also able to see all of the currently available Costumes, Accessories and Tower Skins in one location, and best of all, you can view all of them (including Tower Skins) before you make a purchase!

Bug Fixes

And finally, this update includes numerous bug fixes! Keep an eye on the patch notes for the full details.

We’ll see you in Etheria, Defenders!

Love,
The Trendy Team

Double XP Weekend!

The Double XP Weekend has begun on Xbox One, PC & PS4! From now until Monday at 4PM EDT, get 2x the experience from winning!

Get Your FREE Beat the Heat Bundle Before It's Gone!

• A free 4,000 Defender Medal gift!
• An exclusive Purrville the Helicatter pet!
• An exclusive Squilbur the Squid hat for the Squire!
• An exclusive PAWS the Corgi shoulder pal for the Squire!
• An exclusive shirtless beach Squire accessory!
• An exclusive Squire beach shorts accessory!

Greetings Defenders,

Patch 1.0.3 is available now on all platforms! Login now to get your FREE Beat the Heat Bundle, which is available from the in-game shop. The free bundle will disappear on August 10th, so don’t miss out!

FREE Beat the Heat Bundle & Double Gold Weekend Events

Login for the next two weeks and get free, exclusive items! You’ll find your free bundle at the in-game Shop (accessible through the Shop menu on the Pause screen). These items are only available until August 10th!

• A free 4,000 Defender Medal gift!

• An exclusive Purrville the Helicatter pet!

• An exclusive Squilbur the Squid hat for the Squire!

• An exclusive PAWS the Corgi shoulder pal for the Squire!

• An exclusive shirtless beach Squire accessory!

• An exclusive Squire beach shorts accessory!

Plus we’re doing TWO Double Gold Weekend events! The first event begins this weekend!

• July 28th to July 31st:  Double Gold Weekend Event

• August 4th to August 7th:  Double Gold Weekend Event

Once you redeem the bundle, you'll find your medals in your Inventory as an item. WARNING:  Make sure you have fewer than 8,000 Medals before redeeming or you will not get the full 4,000 Medal gift!

To find your accessories after redeeming the bundle, go to the Costume Shop, go to the Wardrobe, select the Squire, choose his Default costume, and you'll find his new accessories in the appropriate slots!

Loot Drop Updates

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

So with this patch, in all Chaos difficulties (but especially in Chaos 4-7), items now drop with larger power increases than before, and we’ve increased the chances of finding items with larger power increases. Not only that, but we’ve added 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’ve added 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’ve increased 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.

Optimization Improvements

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

Xbox One Crash Fixes

This patch includes more Xbox One crash fixes!

Inventory Improvements

We’ve added a number of Inventory improvements in Patch 1.0.3:

• Items can now be moved into bags with Auto Sort active.

• Added a Hero Level/Ascension experience bar to the Inventory.

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

• 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’ve added the option to disable controller vibration!

Game Browser Gamepad UI Changes

We’ve made several usability changes to the Game Browser UI to make it easier to join and create games on gamepads!

• When using a gamepad, the Join Game, Create Game and Refresh List options are now permanent keybinds on the Game Browser rather than physical UI buttons you have to navigate to. This should make joining and creating games MUCH easier.

• On gamepad, individual game information will now update on highlight rather than on interact.

Xbox One Vsync Option

We’ve added a Vsync option for the Xbox One version in this patch!

Controller Deadzone Updates

Thanks to a wonderful Reddit post, we’ve updated 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.

• Added Deadzone option to PC

• Deadzones are now circles instead of squares

• Updated the Deadzone slider to provide more useful deadzone options

Defense Balance Updates

Explosive Trap

While this trap has always had high damage potential, both its trigger and effect ranges limited its practical usage. We've made some quality-of-life improvements to the defense along with a slight power increase.

• Trigger Range increase 150 -> 225 (+50%)

• Base Effect Range increased 200 -> 300 (+50%)

• Defense Power ratio increase 4.5 -> 5.5 (+22%)

• Critical Damage ratio updated to match relative Defense Power change

Cannonball Tower

Our stalwart Cannonball Tower now has slightly more reach, slightly faster firing, and slightly more punch.

• Range increased 2000 -> 2,500 (+25%)

• Base Attack Rate improved 3.0s -> 2.5s (17% Faster)

• Defense Power ratio increased 9.5 -> 11.5 (+21%)

• Critical Damage ratio updated to match relative Defense Power change

Harpy's Perch

While the Harpy has good range and attack speeds, it needs a lot more punch to be competitive.

• Defense Power ratio increased 1.9 -> 4.5 (+136%)

• Critical Damage ratio updated to match relative Defense Power changes

Angry Nimbus

Angry Nimbus is now a much longer-range defense, more akin to an Earthshatter, with a wide radius. We've made it cheaper to be easier to deploy. It doesn't have as much raw DPS as other single-target defenses, but its immense range / radius should give it placement options that higher-DPS defenses can't use.

• Range increased 2,500 -> 4,000 (+60%)

• DU Cost decreased 80 -> 60 (25% Cheaper)

• Defense Power ratio decreased 47.5 -> 40 (-16%)

Obelisk

Oby's one of our most-fun defenses, but with an extremely high cost coupled with a primary attack that only deals damage to 1 target very slowly, it was pigeonholed into a very narrow role. We've radically rebalanced the Obelisk by making it cheaper, faster, and at upgraded tiers, apply its cool effects more frequently.

• Cost decreased 100 -> 40 (60% Cheaper)

• Base Attack Rate improved 4.0s -> 3.0s (33% Faster)

• Attack Rate maximum improved from 2.0s max -> 0.75s max

• Duration of CC effects slightly reduced (to counterbalance the defense having a much faster rate of fire)

• Defense Power ratio decreased 50 -> 27.5 (-45%)

• Critical Damage ratio updated (uses custom critical damage scaling equal to Defense Power ratio)

Ballista

Range has been increased for the Ballista, along with a slight rate-of-fire increase.

• Range 2500 -> 3000 (+20%)

• Base Attack Rate improved 5.0s -> 4.0s (20% Faster)

Earthshatter Tower

Earthy's undergone a major facelift, drastically reducing its cost and improving its rate-of-fire. Its per-hit damage has come down slightly, but given that it was overkilling many smaller enemies by large values, these net changes should help reduce its massive overkilling problem.

• Cost decreased 80 -> 60 (25% Cheaper)

• Base Attack Rate improved 4.0s -> 3.0s (25% Faster)

• Defense Power ratio decreased 31 -> 25 (-20%)

• Critical Damage ratio updated to match relative Defense Power change

Sand Viper

Sand Viper was pretty flexible, but it lacked enough punch to be worth it (Split Vipers aside). We've improved it to keep it competitive in its base form with other defenses.

• Defense Power ratio increased 4.0 -> 5.5 (37.5%)

• Critical Damage ratio updated to match relative Defense Power change

Lightning Strikes Aura

The Lightning Strikes Aura received a bit more of a serious redesign. We have a lot of high-cost, high single-target damage defenses already. We're changing the LSA to have much lower cost, giving it more flexibility of placement, rather than focusing on massive damage per hit.

• Cost decreased 40 -> 20 (50% Cheaper)

• Base Attack Rate improved 5.0s -> 4.0s (20% Faster)

• Attack Rate maximum improved 2.0s max -> 1.0s max

• Defense Power ratio decreased 21 -> 13 (-39%)

• Critical Damage ratio updated to match relative Defense Power change

Hornet's Nest

• Now properly scales with Defense Speed!

• Defense Power increased from 1.6 -> 2.8

• Attack Rate decreased from 0.6 base to 1.2 base

• Maximum Attack Rate updated to 0.3

Blaze Balloon

The Blaze Balloon has a strong overall damage output, but a high cost that makes it difficult to slot. We've pulled down the cost significantly to make it easier to work into existing builds.

• Cost decreased 80 -> 60 (25% Cheaper)

• Defense Power ratio decreased 22.5 -> 17.5 (-22%)

• Critical Damage ratio updated to match relative Defense Power change

Poison Dart Tower

When we updated the PDT's targeting, it went from being a 'mostly' single-target tower to a multi-target death machine, and our balance did not really sync well with that functional change. We've revised its balance to bring it down closer to other multi-target defenses like the Flame Aura, while still giving it some punch against single enemies.

• Dart Defense Power ratio increased 1 -> 1.25 (+25%)

• Poison Defense Power ratio decreased 4 -> 2 (-50%)

• Critical Damage ratio updated (uses custom critical damage scaling of 3.0)

Serpent's Coil

While the impact of Serpent's Coil is small, we want Mystic players to leverage it and have boosted its power to make it a relatively safe choice.

• Defense Power ratio increased 3.0 -> 4.5 (+50%)

• Critical Damage ratio updated to match relative Defense Power change

Skeletal Archers

Archers were decent, but they weren’t quite strong enough to compete with some of our stronger defenses. We've given the twins some more 'muscle' behind their bows, as much as skeletons can use muscle...

• Defense Power ratio increased 9.0 -> 11.5 (+27%)

• Critical Damage ratio updated to match relative Defense Power change

Weapon Manufacturer

Well, apparently the weapon manufacture was mostly manufacturing auras, but very few weapons. We've reduced the overall damage output of its auras in the hopes that it still sees some use, but leans more heavily on the weapon aspect and a little less on the aura aspect.

• Defense Power ratio decreased 4 -> 3.25 (-19%)

• Fixed a bug where the node increase Shard effect would remain on built WMs after removing the Shard from the relic

• Critical Damage ratio updated to match relative Defense Power change

Other Balance Changes

Tiny Ogres (Campaign)

• Tiny Ogres (Campaign) now have the same rough health/dps as a T3 Drakin

Abyss Stone

Abyss Stone has been refactored. We've enabled proper Criticals and drastically increased the damage-per-hit but reduced its duration. The net result is roughly the same total damage, but with much higher damage-per-second. Additionally, Abyss Stones no longer interfere with the placement of future Abyss Stones.

• Ability Power ratio increased 6.0 -> 11.0

• Criticals properly enabled (uses default 15x ratio and proper Hero Crit Chance)

• Duration decreased 8s -> 6s

• Attack Rate slowed 0.5s -> 1.0s

Knight of the Abyss

KoA has been almost exclusively the go-to ability for the Abyss Lord, even after our last round of changes, and we're trying to breakup his combat gameplay a bit more by reducing his reliance purely on KoA for both damage and stuns by making this change alongside the Abyss Stone refactor.

• Ability Power ratio slightly decreased 21.5 -> 20.0

Shatter Combo/Frosty Proton Node

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.

Geode Prime Special Enemy

Geode Prime now has been updated to be a correct special miniboss.

• Health and Tenacity increased substantially

• Size and Collision increased as well

• Loot fixed to have the same loot drops/chances as other specials/minibosses

Other Changes

• Betsy weapons have been added to the Wayfarer shop.

• Monk’s Pole Smash can be activated in mid-air.

• When the Inventory is full and auto-collect is set to pick up items, those items are now sent to the Scavenger.

• A text announcement will now display when opening an individual Shard Pack letting you know what Shard you received.

• Updated the Xbox One and PS4 Options menu UI.

• Increased the placement range of EV2’s nodes.

• Volume will now update in real-time when adjusting the sliders in the Options menu.

• Ground lane wisps will now only appear in Campaign Normal.

• Updated Explosive Trap VFX and scaled them up a bit.

• Updated melee impact VFX for Squire and Monk.

• Buff Beam description updated to mention Defense Crit Damage effect.

• Increased Summary Screen timer to 90 seconds.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an item duping bug. All duped gear has been removed. Thanks for reporting this, Defenders! You da real MVPs.

• Made multiple changes to reduce the likelihood of seeing an infinite loading screen.

• Added a possible solution for inventory data getting wiped.

• Fixed a memory leak related to defenses.

• Relics will now properly drop while playing as the Gunwitch.

• The Zapper special enemy will appear in Chaos VII Trials once again! Mwahahaha!

• Fixed a stuck Siege Roller spawning issue in the Ramparts.

• Fixed a bug where the Invert Y Axis option wasn’t working properly.

• Fixed a bug where the Apprentice, Gunwitch and Lavamancer auto-collect options weren’t working properly.

• Fixed a bug where loot could drop without stats if it dropped while loading into a map.

• Fixed a bug where Abyss Stones couldn’t be placed in the same spot as a previous Stone.

• Fixed a bug where Slime Pits and Hornet's Nests would occasionally ignore enemies within range.

• Fixed multiple bugs where Shards weren’t dealing the correct damage type (Ability Power vs. Hero Damage, etc.)

• Slime Pit Slimes no longer try to attack flying enemies.

• Fixed a bug where the mouse cursor set itself to the upper-left corner instead of centered on screen when entering into menus.

• Fixed a bug where interacting with an item before the tooltip of the item loaded caused the tooltip to never unload.

• The Use Key context icon no longer appears enabled and usable on the open Lockbox UI when you don't have a key.

• Fixed a bug where the victory hero waving animations didn’t always play.

• Fixed a bug where the reticle didn’t correctly change colors for players, NPCs and objectives.

• Fixed a camera issue with the Seamstress.

• Fixed animation flickering issues with the Initiate’s Chi Stomp.

• The Monthly Mission pets from the DM shop are now display their proper meshes when viewed in the Petrinarian UI.

• Incursion weapons that drop in maps now have the correct level requirements.

• Fixed a bug where the Gunwitch's weapon wasn’t now properly displaying to other players.

• Fixed an issue where some cutscenes weren’t rendering properly.

• Fixed a bug where the Apprentice’s right-click animation wouldn’t play in mid-air.

• Fixed the name of the Glaive of Storms in the Wayfarer shop.

• Fixed a bug where purchasing a premium egg and then incubating it right afterward would cause a temp/placeholder icon to appear in Hatchery UI.

• Fixed a bug where Inventory Tooltips for Weapons, Gear and Pets in the top Inventory rows would get cut off in the comparison view.

• Fixed a bug where attempting to bind ` or Tab would break all functionality on the controls screen.

• Fixed several visual bugs and collision issues on the Hot Springs map.

• Fixed a bug where the controller users couldn’t scroll the Summary Screen on 4:3 resolutions.

• Fixed a bug where the Haunting Shard VFX was off center of weapon. Now spawns from center of player.

• Fixed a bug where the Siege Roller would get stuck when killing a blockade with a node nearby.

• Fixed a bug where the Call of the Kobold Shard VFX was not deactivating properly.

• Fixed a bug on PC where changing the Graphics Quality Preset option using a gamepad caused it to stick there.

• Removed some non-obscene phrases from the profanity filter.

• Fixed a visual bug with the Lockbox UI.

• Fixed a visual bug with the Initiate’s Defense Boost aura where the VFX would remain after the ability was finished.

• Fixed a visual bug with the Empowered Beam projectile.

• Fixed a bug where Hero Crit DMG and Elemental DMG sorting wasn’t accessible by gamepad.

• Fixed a bug where the hatchery UI would become unusable if a player incubated a Defender Medal egg but closed the UI without actually hatching it.

• Fixed a VFX bug with EV2’s Proton Charge ability.

• Bag Inventory warning no longer overlaps Quest UI.

• The Level Up popup no longer overlaps with the Build Phase/Combat Phase/Wave Complete popups.

• Fixed a bug where the Dryad World Tree’s “Damage Taken” stat wasn’t accurately displaying.

• PS4 - The Reset to Defaults popup in the Options menu no longer gets cut off with split-screen active.

• Fixed a bug where the Lavamancer’s right-click could move players into spawn points.

• Fixed a bug where a Weapon Manufacturer node could be placed inside a Flame Aura by inspecting the aura.

• Fixed a typo in the Sandstorm Warrior tooltip to accurately reflect its damage.

• Fixed a VFX issue with the Blaze Balloon while using the Corrupted Tower Skin set.

• Fixed a bug where hotswapping heroes would cause the hero to die.

• Automeow & G4-T0 are now able to roll their unique pet abilities again.

• Fixed a bug where the Inspiring Strikes Shard could trigger from defense attacks.

• Fixed a bug where certain special enemies weren’t spawning on the Forest Poachers Incursion.

• Fixed a bug where the Overwhelming Buster weapon Shard could be equipped to non-weapons.

• Fixed a bug where the Charged Shot weapon Shard could be equipped to non-weapons and incompatible weapons.

• Fixed a bug where sometimes keybindings couldn’t be rebound.

• Fixed a bug where the top bar UI currency element would disappear.

• Fixed a bug where the Apprentice marks wouldn’t clear properly if the Apprentice is hotswapped to another hero,

• Fixed a bug where the Fiery Brimstone Shard would appear to be equippable for non-Tomes.

• Fixed a bug where Harbinger Shards were dealing more damage to Siege Rollers than intended.

• Fixed a bug where Inspect Defense could not be used on EV2 defenses in certain situations.

• Fixed a bug where volume options when opening certain menus.

• Fixed a bug where the Skeletal Ramster would not hit targets close to it while under the effects of Direct Command.

• Fixed a bug where Shards in the World Tree would not get reapplied if the Tree was rebuilt after being destroyed.

• Fixed a bug where using Pole Smash on larger enemies that can’t get knocked up would still let the Skyguard attack them.

• Fixed an inventory icon VFX issue.

• Fixed a bug with flying enemy icons on the minimap.

• Fixed a bug with shop item tooltips not displaying correctly.

• Fixed a bug where the Ascension button would sometimes not be active when opening the Inventory.

• Fixed a bug where the Dryad was able to use abilities during transformation.

• Fixed a bug where using the Dryad’s Starfall immediately after transforming would cause the ability to malfunction.

• Fixed a bug where enemies would occasionally spawn under the map on Greystone Plaza.

• Fixed a bug where the Skeletal Orc blockade would incorrectly accept Direct Command before fully spawning in.

• Fixed a projectile firing issue with single-shot Polearms where the projectiles weren’t going towards enemies properly.

• Fixed a VFX problem with Legendary weapons on the Shard Equip screen.

• Fixed a VFX problem with the Flamethrower tower.

• Fixed a bug where enemies were able to walk up walls and around light posts on Little-Horn Valley.

• Fixed a bug where the Harbinger’s ranged attack wasn’t properly damaging certain defenses.

• Fixed a bug where the Dryad could get visually stuck in corrupt form when hotswapping.

• Fixed a VFX issue at the Costume Shop.

• Fixed a bug where the Split Vipers Shard could also grant the Constrictor Shard bonus without having the Constrictor Shard equipped.

• Fixed a VFX issue with the “New” icon on maps after unlocking them.

• Fixed a bug where the Fissure defense would remain “busy” if the wave ends while recharging.

• Fixed an issue with enemies getting stuck in spawners on Nimbus Reach.

• Fixed a text issue with the Fissure of Embermount.

• Fixed various text issues with the Heroes Marketplace.

• Fixed various text issues with the Emporium.

• Fixed a bug where one of the Buried Bastille cores did not have the correct health value.

• Fixed a bug where the Campaign boss timers were appearing in Chaos Trials.

• Fixed a bug where the gamepad controls would sometimes appear on the Game Browser while using mouse/keyboard.

• Fixed a bug where the full size of the buttons on the Summary Screen were not fully interactable.

• Fixed a bug where players using gamepads would be unable to join Public Games on the War Table if the auto-collect message would appear.

• Fixed a bug where players could get trapped inside the falling ships on the Betsy map.

• Fixed an issue where the flying lane icons would not appear on the Dawn of the Blood Moon Incursion.

• Fixed a VFX issue with the Ghastly Halberd.

• Fixed an issue with the taunt VFX from Shards.

• Fixed a VFX issue on the Create Hero screen.

Known Issues

• The Minimum Ascension Filter does not work when using the Continue function. This is something we’re going to fix in our upcoming patches.

• (PC) The controller will not work if you turn on the controller while on the Main Menu after a fresh boot of the game. Rebooting the game or waiting until you reach the Tavern or Town to turn on the controller will get around this issue.

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.