As you might imagine, we spent the entire time today analyzing what’s going on and addressing some concerns that came up for the Breach Update.
Our goal was initially to get this hotfix out tonight still, but we’ve been working on quite a lot of things at the same time until now and we’d like to still have our Quality Assurance team test the hotfix before we release it - so we’ll release it tomorrow instead, probably around 5pm CEST.
I wanted to summarize some of the changes that we’ve made based on the data we’re seeing. The goal here as always is not to dumb down Wicked or to appeal to one crowd or the other. Instead, we’re doing what Early Access is for: We’re carefully evaluating all data and are making changes based on actual telemetry to ensure that people get the experience we’re after!
So here goes:
For now we’ll remove the interval we have on weapons and armors. What that means is that if an item had a base value of 10, there was a 30% chance that the item could drop from 7-10. We wanted to remove this for quite some time and instead introduce ‘superior’ items at some point anyway, but given that people reported issues with weapon damage and armor, we decided that we’re changing this now already. With that, any weapon and armor you find will be exactly what the designer intended it to be
We’ve also made adjustments to the ‘gear score’ system, so there’s gonna be a higher chance that a REALLY nice item drops for you every once in a while.
For Breach, we tried to do something smart that would encourage players to put armor into all equipment slots, but that’s backfired since a lot of you apparently want to run around without pants. Fine then, we reverted this to what we had on the previous LIVE build. That should fix the issues people reported about getting killed too easily.
A lot of you were bothered about archer builds using focus again for their arrow skill instead of stamina. I tweaked this stuff today so that the arrow skill is quite a lot cheaper now. Please try it and leave feedback if this alleviated your concerns! On a side-note, we will definitely put a LOT of love into Archer builds within the upcoming Combat Update!
We saw that you folks are often starved of the earlier herbs, so we increased the drop rates on Artemisia Herbs.
We fixed an issue reg. elemental damage affixes on enemies. Some of you tried to make builds around elemental damage and it didn’t fire the way you expected and the way it should’ve worked, so that’s fixed now.
There was a bug that snuck in that didn’t allow players to backstab enemies while they were in certain states. We fixed that and also adjusted the backstab angle to be a bit more forgiving again. We also made the backstab icon appear and disappear more rapidly so that players get clearer feedback.
We fixed that silly Blade Oil Description bug
We increased drop rates on rarer enemy spawns like Sirens and Wolves.
We adjusted the parry window a bit. We even had a slew of our non-parry players internally try it and even they felt it was ‘challenging, but good!’
There was a poise issue with Witches and the Pickaxe Nith enemies. They’ll now be instantly interruptible with any weapon, as originally intended.
We added some text on the main menu for now to clarify to everyone what’s going on with their legacy saves.
We fixed the issue where people couldn’t exalt items anymore with items locked in their house chests.
We removed the XP Cap on higher level enemies. We saw some of you just absolutely determined to beat enemies that are at a far higher level than yourselves and if you manage to do that, that should be properly rewarded!
We had an initialEnemyLevel mistake in Nameless Pass that resulted in too high of a difficulty spike once you went from the Pass to the Quarry - Now enemies in the Quarry will be Level12 instead of Level15 to allow for a smoother progression.
Medium Roll got a few extra iframes. Keep rolling, rolling, rolling!
We lowered the level increase in the later Orban Glades areas a bit so that the difficulty jump for Darak and the enemies in that zone isn’t as abrupt.
There was a bug that artificially increased the Enemy Levels after the Servant of God and Of Rats and Raiders Quests were completed. We fixed that now.
There was another bug that made the enemies in the Prologue too tough to beat. They needed 11 hits or so, which wasn’t intentional. Now they’re fairly weak again as they should be for the tutorial
We saw that a lot of you like the Fallen Embers and what they can do for you, but you’re using the system a LOT and run out of embers a tad too quickly. Thus, we increased the drop rate of Fallen Embers accordingly.
There was an issue with the drop rates of weapon and armor shards that’s now fixed.
We decreased the drop rate of Plagued Items a bit since for Breach, they were balanced to be more advanced weapons for advanced players that like the challenge of making an entire build around them. Try to be creative with them, don’t immediately dismiss an item if you don’t immediately like the negative enchantment that’s on it - you might just be able to get something out of it
We also drastically increased the effects of conditional enchantments. If an enchantment requires you to perform a backstab, a parry or has any other condition like that, the reward should be significant, so that’s adjusted now.
And that’s just a few of the changes - There’s quite a bit more being discussed and we’ll have more detailed patch notes for you tomorrow!
And lastly, let me apologize that the Breach Launch might not have went as smoothly as we all wanted it to be. No Rest for the Wicked is an enormously complex project and we tried to squeeze as much new stuff as possible into it, which ultimately meant that some late-stage testing that should’ve happened didn’t happen anymore since we ran out of time.
But we’re very carefully listening to all your feedback, we’re constantly watching streams, we’re looking at all social media channels and we’ll be fixing things as fast as humanly possible. We are listening, so please keep sending your feedback our way and we’ll promise we’ll try to make the perfect ARPG experience for all of you out there!
Personally I’m not a fan of bows being in the shield slot, but I’ll leave that as it is. Instead…
Will we see a Crossbow as a main/two-handed item? And instead of Dex based Strength based? The enemies seem to have various crossbows, seems only fair we get some too.
Nothing about camera change. So we’re just forced to play this way now? Large enemies hide the player character and the constant over exaggerated movement makes playing with precision a a pipe dream.
Please don’t apologize, you’re doing great. I’m looking forward to the patch so I can stab my enemies again.
I have a question: Is the first boss a little easier now?
I remember the first time, I died about 17 times before killing him, and it was with parries and lots of food. This time, I killed him with gloves. I feel like I did a lot more damage to him, and he did a lot less damage to me. Am I right?
I’m pretty happy with The Breach overall. But regarding these patch notes:
I have no idea what “adjusted” means in some sentences like #10: “We adjusted the parry window a bit.” - Does that mean increased? Decreased? Shifted? In most cases when you use that word and follow up with what was wrong and how that it should have been. But if you don’t, the word can mean anything.
Some extremely blatant issues like the fact that the Artemisia Herbs are used for almost ALL early+mid-game recipes. Or the fact that in 20 hours played since release (yes for real) I have found a total of 7 Fallen Embers. The Herbs are essential, not only to allow us to craft better food for healing but also to lighten the pressure on our inventory space in the early game. You say you’ve increased the droprate but what concerns me is the fact that it was so low a year ago and still was until today. I feel like it would take a new player all about 20 minutes to identify that as an issue. I know you’ve hinted at farming coming to the game in the future which might help solve this issue but until then…
2.1 Regarding Fallen Embers. Their value is too high. I want to try different weapons. I want to try a block build, a parry build, a dodge build, a mage build etc etc. But if I invest 3-4 fallen embers in a weapon. That weapon is now too valuable to let go for a LONG time and I also dont have enough FE to experiment with my other gear if I constantly want to swap weapon and reroll/add affixes with FE. Fallen Embers are simply too scarce which means they’re too valuable which discourages experimentation and indicates that you expect the player to have a planned build or settle on what item and playstyle they will aim for almost from the get-go of your character. This is a huge issue in my opinion and I cannot believe FE are in a good state.
2.2 Continuing on Fallen Embers. THEY’RE ALSO OUR RESPEC CURRENCY? Like for real. How in the hell am I supposed to switch from a Dex build to strength (or whatever else) if I can only respec 1 stat point per fallen ember??? It’ll take days to farm those embers and in the meantime I’m stuck on a build I apparently no longer want to play. I’m guessing your argument is to “start a new character” which is sort of fair but also not what everyone wants to hear. At the very least, what is painfully obvious, is that Fallen Embers should not be both the weapon reroll currency AND stat respec currency. Pick one (and like, double their drop rate, it’s really fun to reroll affixes)
No need to apologize at all. Honestly, this list of fixes already addresses most of my concerns. Out of curiosity, does anyone know what change they made regarding #3 on the list that they’re reverting?
I can’t wait till you guys add farming one day. It’s gonna be so cool to be able to grow the stuff we need and produce it all to keep us going. I’m imagining a hardcore Animal Crossing situation, and I’m all here for it hahaha.
This hasn’t happened to me yet but it’s something that immediately rang some alarm bells.
The Downside of “cannot be repaired” is cool, is the sense that if you also have “indestructible” they cancel out and you might have a neat little item with no apparent downside - I get it.
However, if I’m rerolling the downside on my main/only weapon (does anyone play this game using more than 1 weapon, not counting rune-slaves on additional slots?) and I get the downside that it no longer can be repaired. Then I run at risk of completely bricking my character if I don’t have additonal Fallen Embers on hand or a replacement weapon to use until I can farm more Embers.
So, while it’s not a guaranteed brick, it can lead to a catastrophic scenario where I lose my weapon which in the endgame might severly gimp my character and render it virtually unplayable. This is further enforced by the extremely high price of respeccing stat points in order to equip other types of weapon.
I’m assuming you’ve already considered this but I’ll add that this is definitely something that could make me stop playing or think twice before recommending to a friend. Having brick-mechanics enabled by RNG is not fun.
Thanks for adjusting the iframes on medium roll back up a little bit. I think it makes sense that it has fewer iframes than the quickstep, and even that it doesn’t have iframes for the whole animation, but I find myself getting hit frequently even when I thought I timed my dodge correctly.
On the issue of repair, I know I already made a feedback thread, but if repair costs can’t be reevaluated right now, can we at least take a look at the early game economy and how much coin players can reasonably earn early?
It feels absolutely abysmal. I can’t even afford to try multiple weapons because by lv4 buying one weapon erases about half of my savings after having explored most of the beach. Please consider making the basic weapons significantly cheaper or just put a chest with all of them once you rescue the blacksmith so players can try out and experiment without bankrupting themselves.
The durability costs also actively punish the player for trying to learn parry timings and take risks. It encourages avoidance and cheesy turtling gameplay or backstab spam because you want to avoid head on encounters as much as possible. It also discourages exploration because it’s been a frequent experience that I explore an area supposedly around my danger level and run into mobs that can 2-3 shot me because clearly these mobs are not meant to be fought at my level, so why are they in a low level zone?
What about dodge rolling onButtonPress, instead of onRelease or whatever bs way is coded right now. If you press the button for an extra milisecond it is considered as HOLD and you wont roll
Your proposal is illogical. In the described solution, you can’t do this:
If you press the button for an extra millisecond it is considered as HOLD and you won’t roll
Because you would roll immediately on press if it was onPress. So there is no solution to this while both movement actions are bound to the same button.
I personally adapted to this in the first 10-15 minutes of gameplay, and it felt natural after that.
Is there any way you guys look at performance any time soon again?
I really want to love this game, but unfortunately the performance kills it for me.
With a 4070 super and i9 2.8ghz I should be able to get at least stable 60 fps, no?
Changing graphic/dlss settings doesnt seem to change anything (maybe 1-5fps) and (its least for me) it is exactly the same issue since release and it is kinda frusrtrating ngl
The focus system seems frustrating to use now. I get that it was too good before because you could essentially spam rune attacks/spells but now it feels like you have to almost kill the monster or in some cases multiple monsters just to have enough focus to do meh damage with a rune attack. For the record, I’m using a dagger and bow and using whatever focus regen pieces I’ve found.
The potion/consumables system is too clunky. I can’t imagine you expect people to toggle through stamina, focus, etc potions. Then back to their oils, bombs, whatever. I played the initial early access with really only using the focus potions because they gave flat focus. The rest is just too clunky and I’m not sure what would be a good solution for that. It might help if the potions lasted 5-10 min each, not 180seconds. Maybe the better ones lasting 20-30min. The best 1hr. By the time you go through popping stamina and focus and putting oil on your blade you have to do it all again!!
There seems to be a massive jump in difficulty once you have to do the Black Trench/Nameless Pass. I noticed I’m 3 levels lower. Is that intended or should I be farming other areas before going in there? I see Nameless pass is being lowered to 12 in the patch notes. What about The Black Trench?
AS a new player I was wondering after reaching the city, is going to Nameless Pass was the intended next step in progression. Seems a little overturned. I spent 9 hours in the first zone, reached lvl 9 and I still feel underpower for that zone.
You raise some good points about the focus system and items. A thought I had about the items in general that would probably make for an easier time would having it be an item wheel that pops up, similar to the emote wheel, but for items. This way, it’d be much faster and easier to select what you need. I have to twist my fingers to be able to change items in-combat and at that point I just don’t really bother.
Really enjoying the new patch. Fist weapons were exactly what I wanted and it’s been a blast punching my way through Sacra. Being able to have some runes that are stamina based and others that cost focus also helps keep the system interesting, imo.
I am struggling against multiple foes, however. It feels like AI is incredibly aggressive, and it feels near impossible to get in hits and dodge all the attacks coming my way, which makes my leather armor play-style a bit gimped in comparison to Mesh/Plate just soaking the damage. I feel like I’m constantly retreating just to handle the barrage of projectiles and swings. Totally open to any advice from others on this; I recognize this could just be skill issue.
Also, good lord this game is pretty. The art team is knocking these environments out of the park. The Animal Crossing “bending world” style continues to be a phenomenal use of the camera, and I’m quite happy with more ambient music. Great vibes fishing and watching the wildlife!
EDIT: A small fix I found for my item/food selection woes was changing the L1 to be Food selection and R1 to be item selection. L2/R2 for rune activation, and moved parry to circle/B. Seems to be working alright. Still can’t sprint and select an item, but it’s progress!
They could just have the radial wheel for emotes when open allow you to cycle through several different wheels with L1/R1 or the side arrows/d-pad to assign consumables to those slots.
The emote wheel can toggle and stay open on a single R2 button press and L1 and R1 or the directional arrows only map to wheel switch when the wheel is open and go back to their usual functions when the radial menu is closed.
