New Loot Test Build Patch Notes: 12/2/15

Hi, Defenders!

We’ve just released a new update to the Loot Test Realm. You can find the changes below. Later this week, we’ll send out a survey asking how you feel about these changes! Your feedback is crucial to improving the game, so please take the time to read below and to fill out the survey when it comes out.

PASSIVES

We’ve done a significant update to the current pool of passives, from removing some passives, to refactoring existing ones, to even adding a few new ones. Our goal with these changes is to increase the number of useful and desireable passives, while pulling out some of the less liked passives. This should help improve the general quality of items, by insuring that stats are generally paired with more appropriate passives for their role.

• Several passives have been broken up; instead of appearing in a single large value on one item slot, they now appear in many item slots in smaller values.

  • Superconductor

  • Channel

  • Tripwire

  • Pyromania

  • Vector Corrector

  • Radiance

  • Amped Up

  • Power Pole

  • Full Hearts

  • NOTE: Trap Range will be updated in a future patch to function like other range-increasing passives.

  • NOTE: Old items that have these passives will have their stat clamped to the new max value. Going forward, if we change the min/max values on passives, existing passives will be updated to clamp to the new max (or min, if we increase the min).

• Gold passives have been refactored into a single, more useful, less frequently appearing, passive.

  • (NEW) Jackpot - Random chance to quadruple gold earned from any source.

  • Replaces Leprechaun, Pickpocket, and Mercantile on future items.

• Construction now combines the effects of Construction and Service Call.

  • Service Call will not appear on future items.

• Several passives have been re-scaled to have more useful end-game values.

  • Retribution

  • Regeneration

  • Conflagrate

  • Life Leech

  • We need feedback on the scaling of these passives! Please share your thoughts on the forums.

• Finglonger has been disabled from all future items.

• Experience-increasing passives have been disabled from all future items.

• Several entirely new passives have been added to further improve basic loot quality.

  • Iron Core - Increases Cannonball and Heavy Cannonball Damage

  • Shrapnel - Increases Concussive Shots and Sticky Nades Damage

  • Starlight Burst - Increases Arcane Volley Damage

• Lastly, passives that affect multiple defenses, or abilities (via uber spheres), now state so in their description! Hurray for clarity!

We know these are big changes, so let us know what you think of the changes!

LOOT

Based on initial feedback, we’ve updated how loot is distributed once again. Specifically, the first test build missed its mark in terms of total item quantity dropped in Nightmare modes. We’ve refactored loot in a few key places, and especially in Nightmare mode, to better-hit our initial targets.

• Quantity of items dropped in Nightmare decreased by 20-30%.

  • Overall item quantity should closer-match Free Play Hard and End Game Insane.

  • This should largely be a decrease in low-tier items, with only minor changes to Rare-or-better items.

• Victory Chests drop slightly less total loot, but drop slightly better loot at higher difficulties.

  • Victory Chests were still spawning too many low-value items, so we’ve adjusted this.

• Specials and Ogres drops less low-value items.

  • We also fixed a number of bugs on how special enemies drop loot, fixing a few ‘loot pinata’ enemies and insuring that broken special enemies now drop loot (Explodinator is a go!).

• Lockboxes appear less frequently.

• Pet consumables and eggs appear slightly less frequently.

PROGRESSION AND DIFFICULTY

We wanted to make some slight tweaks to the overall difficulty to insure that players smoothly progressed from one difficulty to the next, with iPWR progressing smoothly alongside them. This has a resulted in a small increase in difficulty in some parts of the game. We also refactored our iPWR recommendations in many parts of the game, to better reflect what we think is the ‘target’ iPWR for those difficulties.

• Increased difficulty in Free Play hard slightly.

• Increased difficulty in End Game Normal and Hard significantly.

• Increased difficulty in End Game Insane moderately.

• Increasing difficulty in Nightmare 1-3 modes slightly.

• Increasing difficulty in Nightmare 4 incursions slightly.

We’ve also gone through and tried to take a serious look at iPWR progression, all the way from Campaign end to Nightmare 4. We’ve updated our iPWR recommendations for a lot of content, to reflect what we think is a reasonable challenge. We hope this makes it much clearer as to which maps you should tackle next, with the gear available on your heroes.

We’d love to hear your feedback on these changes, so please let us know if you feel the iPWR recommendations reflect the challenge correctly!

Is it supposed to be already on ? I got the home screen changed but my old gear haven't changed and running a NM1 Gates still drop me a Service Call and Pickpocket ... I also switch back and forth from Normal to Beta so it d/l update again but no change ...

Not sure how good breaking up the passives onto more pieces is. At first you only had to roll the right primary stats as well as passive in only one or two pieces of armor. Now you have to get it on ALL of them to have the best stats.

Spent too much time on farming nm4 gear, if this is another whole series of re-grinding gear then I am done lol.

Please make changes on onslaught too especially for nm4, the higher wave should get higher ipwr or else what's the point to spend whole day to reach 30/40+ wave just to get same ipwr gear?

Regarding IPwr recommendation i'm not sure it's useful, in fact ...

I mean finishing Gates NM1 gearless is nothing special. Should it be IPwr 0 ? Obviousively not.

By the same token IPwr for NM4 is clearly not the same if you play Solo or Multi ... I even wonder if NM4 inc are doable solo with any kind of gear ... Especially with *cough* Hero Deck limiting tactical option.

I personnally stick to better IPwr for drop = harder and go from map to map. It's actually not accurate (I can't think of Forgotten and Crossroads inc being as easy as Gates or Liferoot ...) but it works fine enough and you should quickly get the hang of which map are really easier/harder. It's not like there so much map to test anyway.

Finglonger has been disabled from all future items.

I liked  Finglonger :(

Can we get rid of Heavy Toe on the boots?  Pretty useless.  Most of the time I am pinballing off the mobs when I am jumping.

Breaking up Tripwire and Vector Corrector will just make farming more tedious. It's a change no one asked for. It was kind of nice being able to gear up the huntress builder and squire builder (even though he's useless in the late game) with generic tower gear. Now we need more specialized gear for those two classes to get to where we already are. Just label it for what it is, "we're nerfing all your existing gear so that you have farm again for an unspecified amount to get to where you were". 

I hope the stat clamp is not slot specific and actually applies to the the total of all items. Because if all the old items become useless many people are not going to be happy. This is the only thing i'm worried about and hope doesn't get messed up come 15th. I really don't want to to regrind all heroes just to get the same gear I have now, otherwise you might as well call this a wipe because that's what essentially it would be like without some of these passives.

A dev confirmation on this would be nice.

Several entirely new passives have been added to further improve basic loot quality.

• Iron Core - Increases Cannonball and Heavy Cannonball Damage

• Shrapnel - Increases Concussive Shots and Sticky Nades Damage

• Starlight Burst - Increases Arcane Volley Damage

Great additions, its nice to see something in there for sticky nades and the cannonball tower =)

I don't mind re-grinding gear & would even re-level my characters if I had to, pretty much all of my gear has odd passives anyway.