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The “Spirit Mastery and Crafting” update for the Early Access version of action RPG announced.
Here are the details:
Major Topics
Spirit Mastery
Masters of Spirit call on the forces of the Underworld to summon shades of the dead and cast otherworldly spells, drawing from their own life force to sustain their advance.
- Spirit contains 10 new Actives and 26 new Passives.
- Watch Spirit Mastery in action in the Showcase trailer.
We are also taking a first step towards a larger change when it comes to our Passives, starting with Spirit. The goal of the following changes is to create more interesting choices with Passives when making your builds:
- More Passives: We added more Passives than in previous Masteries. This way we are able to offer more choices between slightly different effects that can provide bonuses for similar builds.
- Reworked Feats: In the past each Passive could only have 3 Feats. We removed that restriction. This should create fewer situations where your Feats were almost “pre-determined” by your specific build direction. Instead it offers more actual choices based on the specific area your build might want help in.
We hope that this will allow for more interesting and nuanced build crafting. For now this new approach is only present in Spirit, but we will try to add it gradually to the older Masteries as well, if you guys enjoy the approach.
One potential downside of this is that the addition of these new choices makes getting an overview for Passives a little more difficult than in the past. We are aware of this and will try to offer solutions here in the future.
We can’t wait for your feedback on this new approach and Spirit in general.
Crafting
Crafting will allow you to perform different actions on items to adjust some of their rolls. You can:
- Replace an affix with a random different one (following item-rules)
- Reroll the values of an affix
- Add affixes to items if the item has fewer than its possible maximum
- Level up an entire item to your level
Crafting in ARPGs is an important part, but also much discussed for good reason.
- If it becomes too easy to control, the chase for items itself moves into the background, which hurts the core gameplay of hunting for exciting loot.
- If it is too hard to control outcomes, it becomes a very unsatisfying and grindy experience.
Crafting’s role also changes during different phases of the game. How it is used during leveling and campaign play should be different compared to later stages of a character’s progression. For this reason we went with a straight forward system that hopefully manages to strike a good balance here. It should be easy to understand, but offer the right amount of control. The goal is to:
- Early/Midgame: We want to encourage players to do some crafting during earlier stages of character development. You will be able to cheaply get some initial improvements instantly, but soon reach a point where it’s best to wait for the next natural upgrade you find instead of spending further resources.
- Lategame: In later stages of the game you have the ability to focus more efficiently on farming for resources and thus will be able to try to get the perfect rolls for your items, but still might want to look for a new base if you don’t get the desired results after a while.
Both of these are achieved via the escalating costs for crafting and which materials are used at which stage of crafting an item.
We are looking forward to your feedback on this feature, the costs, ways to obtain materials and so on. We will continue to fine-tune this in the future.
Other Larger Changes
- We have increased the base movement speed of the player. We have heard the complaints about the game feeling slower, especially early on. This change will hopefully improve this. We tried to make sure to strike a balance here, as we still want players to have a good feeling of progression when investing into Movement Speed via gear and builds.
- We have taken a look at item rewards and decided to improve certain drop rates, mostly relating to Epic items and Relics.
Changes to Gameplay and Balance
- Masteries
- Noteworthy Points
- We have taken another look at the Doom mechanic and made a significant change to make it more viable. Doom’s duration does not get reset anymore when adding a new stack, which makes it much easier and more comfortable to get its main damage to trigger.
- With Spirit we have added the new Execution mechanic. This will be rolled out with further support throughout other Masteries in the future. For now we have added it only to Rogue’s Trickshot.
- With Lifesteal becoming more important with Spirit we have made an iteration to its balance. In its old form Lifesteal was almost irrelevant in Early Game but in later stages it was carried a lot by the damage amount itself, so didn’t require much investment. We made changes so that Lifesteal is now stronger early but falls off more if not invested into in later stages. We have added strong investment options for Spirit and will add more to Warfare and Rogue in the future.
- We have added the option to also reserve Life instead of Energy for many abilities. This will support a new “Low-Life” playstyle introduced with Spirit and also potentially free up some of your Energy for certain reservation-heavy builds.
- General Mastery Changes
- Critical Hit Base Damage Multiplier: 2 -> 1.5
- Super Critical Hit Base Damage Multiplier: 3 -> 2.5
- Enhanced Area Modifier: increased Area Size 50/100/150/200/250% -> 30/60/90/120/150%
- Increased Vitality Damage starting lifesteal from 10% to 20%
- Earth
- Added new Main skill tag to Earthquake, Fissure, Flame Volley, Ignite, Roiling Magma and Volcanic Eruption
- Earth Enchantment: Enabled Health Reservation modifier
- Forge
- Added new Main skill tag to Armor Eruption and Minefield
- Forcefield: Enhanced Device Damage mod changed to Enhanced Summon Damage
- Tempered Arsenal: Enabled Health Reservation modifier
- Rogue
- Added new Main skill tag to Bladespin, Grenade, Lethal Strike, Scattershot and Trick Shot
- Lethal Strike: Lethal Strike can now Execute
- Preparation: Enabled Health Reservation modifier
- Storm
- Added new Main skill tag to Call Lightning, Cyclone, Frostbite, Ice Nova, Ice Shards and Lightning Bolt
- Storm Nimbus: Enabled Health Reservation modifier
- Warfare
- Added new Main skill tag to Barrage, Heavy Attack, Rain of Arrows, Stomp and Sweeping Strike
- Battlefield Awareness: Enabled Health Reservation modifier
- Items
- We have made affixes to reduce cooldowns more available on Items as this was not supported well enough for cooldown skills to become more viable.
- We have improved Epic Games Store. A full release is planned for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC.
Watch a new trailer below.
“Spirit Mastery” Deep Dive
