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This month is a little light on content as we've spent a good chunk of time diagnosing and working on a number of micro optimizations. The hope is that these micro optimizations add up for folks (especially on the lower end of our system requirements). We are working on a few more performance optimizations which we hope to have ready within the coming weeks!
Added +Mental Damage to King's Potions.
Increased Stoneclaw Scorpion spawns in Gimstone Canyon.
Increased Stonecoat Extractors, Menders, and Seekers in Grimstone Canyon.
Increased the drop rate of the tablet for the Alchemy quest.
Removed redundant "Cloth" name in some outfitter recipes.
Sentinel Weaken no longer requires combat stance.
Updated to the latest Unity subversion. This includes minor bug fixes and performance updates.
Improved visual stability of a number of props when using any dynamic resolution option. If you continue to notice specific props "shimmering" please send us a /report so I can get them fixed!
Adjusted Halt VFX visuals.
Fixed Hearth VFX not lasting for the full 60 seconds for non-subscribers.
Fixed missing Mandrake and Silk naming for crafted cloth.
Fixed missing "Summit" prefix for some log types.
Fixed spelling error on Revenant's Reaver.
Fixed Copperhead placeholder not being marked correctly.
Fixed color on normal scale vambraces.
Fixed a potential exception in the crafting UI that could stop a craft.
Fixed some exceptions on IKControllers during tear down.
Fixed a long standing motion vectors vegetation shader bug on macOS and Linux.
Adjusted compilation flags for macOS and Linux binaries to improve speed and stability.
Updated macOS and Linux to both use instanced indirect for vegetation rendering.
Reduced mesh complexity of grass to reduce gpu strain.
Reduced grass density across the board by 20%.
Unified grass LOD distance for all biomes and all scenes.
Different quality settings now clamp which vegetation LODs are allowed to render shadows. In other words: lower quality settings result in fewer far range vegetation rendering shadows freeing up cpu and gpu time.
Removed a number of obsolete shaders from the build freeing up vram.
Removed vegetation masks on all collectable resources. This should significantly reduce the amount of vegetation flickering seen at dawn and dusk.
All tree imposters (far distance) are now rendered with instanced batching. This can free up a significant chunk of cpu time in tree heavy scenes such as Redshore / Freehold.
We are currently in the midst of implementing gpu occlusion culling for the vegetation system which is looking to claw back another good chunk of cpu/gpu time. Unfortunately, it didn't make it in time for the patch; hopefully it will be ready at some point August. In other words: more perf optimizations to come!
Removed a number of unused shader references (reduced build size and memory footprint).
Adjusted material for Halt's VFX.
Set appropriate culling layer and static shadow casters on resource nodes.
Removed out of date billboard rendering pass in our vegetation system.
Fixed a rare exception in the crafting UI.
Fixed an exception on IKController on teardown.
Fixed color on white scale vambraces.
Increased drop rate for Alchemy Quest's tablet.
Sentinel's Weaken no longer requires combat stance.
Added mental damage to King's Potion.
Updated Unity Engine minor revision to the latest version. This brings some minor bug fixes and performance improvements.
Optimizations:
Reduced the density of grass by 20% in all zones.
Reduced the complexity of rendered grass.
Adjusted the LOD distance factor for rendered grass to be consistent throughout scenes.
Potato & Performant quality now only renders a single mesh for grass (no LOD).
Restricted which vegetation LODs can render shadows for lower quality levels. This can significantly improve shadow performance in areas with many trees depending on your quality setting.
Potato & Performant: only render shadows for the nearest LODs
Balanced: only render shadows for the nearest 2 LODs
High Fidelity: no change
Removed motion vector pass from Rock shader.
macOS & Linux:
Adjusted compile flags to improve code execution speed.
Enabled instanced indirect vegetation rendering for both platforms.
Fixed a shader compile error that was causing dynamic resolution instabilities that showed as shimmering vegetation. Things should be much more stable with Unity STP dynamic res enabled.
Every adventurer deserves a well-earned rest, and this month we're making that a little easier with a new gathering bank, a hearthstone-like ability, and rested experience, along with a number of fixes and minor updates.
Keyboard Character Rotation
Added "Keyboard Turn Sensitivity" slider to the Controls options tab.
The rate at which your character turns should no longer be framerate dependent.
Sheathe Weapon after Combat
Added a new toggle to the Gameplay options tab which defaults to on.
Added a new delay slider corresponding to how soon after combat your weapons are sheathed that defaults to 2s. Setting this slider to the maximum value of 15s will restore the previous functionality of sheathing your weapon after combat flags drop.
Resilience is no longer a combat only stat. In other words: it will now work outside of combat stance.
Reduced stamina wound accumulation rate while in combat by 25%.
Increased combat stance movement speed by 10%.
Movement speed reductions when on high angle slopes is now ramped up and down. This should result in a much smoother experience traversing the world.
Fixed Ashen Mire pet sorting name.
Fixed prep duration for the challenge in Forgotten Depths.
Fixed a rare bug that could cause a challenge to not properly reset.
Fixed missing gambeson prefix on crafted hauberks.
Fixed grammar error in Heimar quest.
The island region of Redshore across the lake was severely underutilized and lacked content. We are attempting to rectify that with a new challenge "Redshore Bluffs". This is our most challenging challenge to date meant for players level 46+. It also includes a brand new friendly NPC mechanic being used for the first time!
Keys for this challenge may not drop where you think they do, so keep an open mind. Also note that mobs within this challenge \can\ and will respawn.
This month we are making some much needed QoL improvements to the crafting experience within Newhaven City.
Added a Personal Gathering Stash to the Newhaven City banks. This container acts just like your personal stash except that it only accepts items that can be placed in the gathering bag.
You can now place dyes, patterns, and refined materials into your gathering bag & stash.
Within Newhaven City you can now refine or craft using materials that currently reside in both your personal and gathering stashes. This should reduce the amount of running back and forth while using the crafting stations within the city.
Thanks to the robust research you all have done over the past 3+ years the Academy has finally discovered the art of returning back to Newhaven City through the ley lines! They have instructed all of you how to use this technology so no further action is required to access it!
The requirements to hearth back to the city are as follows:
Must have an Ember Stone.
Must have the Ley Pylon in the city discovered.
Ley Pylon must be active.
Must be at an Ember Ring.
Minimum cooldown of 1hr must have elapsed since last use.
Must have the appropriate amount of Ember Essence.
Cost is proportional to the last usage time (in other words, the longer you wait, the cheaper it is):
1hr = 100EE
2hr = 50EE
8hr = 20EE
24hr = 5EE
Travel Essence will always be used first if available.
Note that Hearth execution times are reduced for subscribers:
Subscribers: 30s
Non-Subscribers: 60s
You can check the status of your Ember Stone Hearth at any time by either the tooltip of your Ember Stone on the equipment page, or typing the chat command "/hearth status". To use your hearth simply right click the stone on your equipment page, or use the "/hearth" chat command.
While you're away, your adventurer will be resting too! When you return, you'll find a rested experience bonus waiting, giving you a head start on your next adventure. You will also find that your Ember Stone has absorbed essence during your time away.
Rested XP and Essence work as follows:
Must log out at an Ember Ring to accumulate while offline (even in Newhaven City).
Caps after 6 days.
At login your rested time will be converted to Ember Essence and added to your Ember Stone. If you are fully rested (6 days) then your Stone will be filled to 100%.
While rested you earn +50% adventuring experience from Npc kills (not tasks).
Fully rested coverage varies per level:
100% at level 1
20% at level 49
Rested XP will show on the XP bar as an orange bar behind the normal blue bar.
"You gain adventuring \rested\ experience" will show in your combat log if the +50% bonus was applied. (verbiage likely to be adjusted in the future, it's too late now the builds are finished!)
Every character has been marked as fully rested for this patch!
Fixed rested xp bar going blank after turning in a Bulletin Board Task.
Ember Hearth tooltip improvements.
Added Ember Hearth VFX & Animations.
Character's have been copied over from live as of June 10th @ 9am central time.
Fixed a number of rested XP bugs both server and client side.
Ember hearth tooltip formatting fixes.
Left or right clicking on your Ember Stone in the equipment UI will begin the hearth process if available.
Character's have been copied over from live as of June 8th @ 11am central time.
Fixed typo on Purple Trite Mushroom Oil recipe.
Fixed missing gambeson prefix on crafted hauberks
Reduced stamina wound accumulation rate by 25%
Added Ember Stone Hearth
Available if you have an Ember Stone & the City's Ley Pylon discovered.
City's Ley Pylon must be active in order to use.
Can only be used at an Ember Ring.
Essence cost scales with your last usage (values still being tweaked):
1hr = 100 EE
2hr = 50 EE
4hr = 40 EE
8hr = 20 EE
24+hr = 5 EE
Ember Stone tooltip on your equipment sheet has more information on current state.
Can dump current state to chat by the command "/hearth status"
Can use by using the command "/hearth". Still working on the UI for this.
Will always use Travel Essence first if available.
No VFX/Anims currently
Added the concept of "Rested"
Logging out at an Ember Ring allows you to accumulate "rested" time on your next login.
Rested time does not accumulate while in game.
Rested time accumulates to a max of 6 days.
When you have rested time you receive a +50% bonus to XP earned
shows as an ember-colored bar behind your regular xp bar.
only applies to npc kills (solo, group, etc)
does not apply to tasks
does not apply to gathering/crafting
earning xp through npc kills uses your pooled rested time.
When logging in after accumulating rested time your Ember Stone will be credited with Essence. 6 days of rested time will fill your stone.
All characters on QA have been set to "fully rested" so on login you should expect:
a full Ember Stone
rested xp shown on your experience bar
In addition, I have activated the Ley Pylon in the city so you can begin experimenting with the Ember Hearth.
One final note: all of these new features are experimental and not final. We may decide to not move forward with one or all of them, so please provide feedback!
"Sheathe Weapon after Combat" delay slider can now go down to 1s. Default value is now 2s.
Fixed a bug preventing players from re-entering combat stance after auto sheathed.
Fixed some rocks in Grimstone Canyon not having the global snow flag.
Adjusted how the Adric Inhibitor works: it now eases in & out rather than instantly applying. This should result in much smoother transitions and be less jarring. Note that easing out is much faster so that you return to max speed very quickly.
Refactored Sheathe weapons after combat delay slider. Range is 2s-15s, defaults to 4s.
Please do some testing here and let us know what you think the best "default" value is. We'd like to get this set to something that feels smooth for new players.
Resilience is no longer a combat stance only stat.
Slightly eased up on the combat stance movement penalty.
(internal updates for unannounced features)
Character's have been copied over from live as of June 2nd @ 2pm central time.
Dyes, patterns, and refined materials can now be placed in the gathering bag.
Added a new "Gathering Stash" in Newhaven City. This stash functions similar to the personal stash except that it can only store materials suitable for your gathering bag.
Crafting stations in Newhaven City can now pull directly from both your personal stash and the newly added gathering stash.
Fixed Ashen Mire pet sorting name (sorted as Mire Ashen).
Fixed prep duration for Mire challenge in Forgotten Depths (now 60s)
Internal updates to Redshore Bluffs (will not be available on QA)
Added "Sheath Delay" slider to the gameplay options menu. "Sheathe Weapons after Combat" is now enabled by default, with a default delay of 4s. The goal of this feature is to improve the fluidity of gameplay when moving in and out of combat. You can disable this option, or tweak the delay to be anywhere from 1.5s up to the full 15s.
(note that most dungeons are currently enabled, ping me on Discord if you'd like one enabled)
This month's patch is a bit lighter as our efforts have been focused on two separate water related activities. However, we were able to sneak in some updates along with a new challenge.
Adjusted LODs for rocks in Grizzled Peaks & Ibaxus.
Added Arrows & Bolt projectiles for auto attack only. Enabling these for abilities is a bit more complex and may come at a later date.
Added an Ember Ring to Redshore Island. It will show on the map with a down arrow to indicate that it is way off the map.
Additional Skybox fixes for macOS.
Fixed some rocks and wooden elements missing wetness and snow materials.
Fixed a stuck spot in Grimstone Canyon
Fixed item links not working for items with a comma in their name.
Fixed the "you do not have that task!" bug that is frequently encountered in Northreach.
Fixed incorrect text on the gate in Cragscale Manor.
Fixed a spelling error in a Consortium lore doc in the city.
Fixed a bug that allowed players to acquire two unique items if they win two loot rolls.
Have you ever wanted to fight the large Mire within Forgotten Depths? Now you can! While clearing the zone you are likely to find a key to the cage. Gather your friends for a splitting good time!
NOTE that the current prep time for this challenge is erroneously set at 30 seconds. We should have this fixed (60s) next week.
We had intended to include a new challenge on Redshore's island, but some last minute issues came up that we didn't have time to resolve before the patch. To avoid any issues we're punting this one until June's patch. Note that the bluffs themselves have been partitioned off until the challenge is ready.
We fully recognize that inventory management has always been a sticking point for Embers Adrift, especially at higher levels with multiple tiers of materials. We are cooking up some long term solutions but those require a significant reworking of the system.
As a stop-gap solution we are looking to add a gathering bank to the city that would function similar to your gathering bag in the field (restrictions on items that can be placed inside). In addition, we will be re-evaluating the rules for what can go in your gathering bag/bank and potentially loosening those a bit.
Finally, we are exploring the possibility of allowing you to craft in the city using materials from the new gathering bank. We make no promises yet, but are hopeful we can get this working for you all.
While I was streaming the creation of the Guild Bank, I have found that it slows me down considerably and is not something I can continue doing if I ever want to the feature to be completed. My goal is to wrap this up and get it on QA sooner than later for testing.
Development continues on two water based activities that we hope to bring to you soon. I don't expect this to land in June, but know that we are working on it!
Fixed a rare bug that could cause challenges to never reset.
Fixed a bug with resource nodes preventing them from being looted if all loot was not removed on the first pass.
Fixed missing snow textures on Ibaxus ruins.
This month we are introducing a new type of content to Embers Adrift we refer to as "Challenges". These are timed events held within sealed locations throughout the world, and represent our approach to brining instanced-style content to a non-instanced game world. There are also a handful of updates and fixes included!
Doubled the Chat and Combat queue message limit.
Reduced Knave set count requirement from 5 to 4.
Venom Strike tooltip now indicates that it does chemical damage.
You can now hold shift while viewing an item comparison tooltip for items that have an alternate slot (earring, rings, etc) to view the alternate equipped item.
Updated ability ground indicators to show the AoE radius for others when the AoE emanates from your target (i.e. Halt).
Fixed Central Ibaxus icon assignments for some items.
Fixed trained wolves calling friendly NPCs to attack the player.
Fixed spiced tea not being prefixed with "Spiced".
Fixed targeting reticles not showing on Grimstone Canyon rocks.
Fixed a bug with lights that get disabled never re-enabling their shadows.
Fixed some potential Skybox bugs that may have been causing black screens on macOS. This should reduce the frequency of this occurring.
Fixed some issues with the Dryfoot Stronghold nav mesh.
Fixed spelling error on foreclosure notice in Newhaven City.
Fixed audio playing on startup for switches, doors, etc.
Fixed Lingering Strikes from triggering itself.
Fixed some wood planks not showing wetness/snow.
Fixed a potential race condition with NPCs that would allow the player to immediately loot the animal as if it were skinned, even if the player did not have the skinning profession.
Each challenge can be entered by one player, or a group of up to six. Entry requires a key, dropped by NPCs within the same zone. Keys are "unique" meaning that you can only carry one of each at a time (each challenge requires a different unique key). Consuming this key for entry locks the challenge to your group, preventing other players from entering for the duration.
Once inside, you will face a series of timed steps. Some challenges present clear objectives; others simply require you to push forward to the next area. Complete each task and you will earn additional time. Run out of time and your group will be removed and the challenge will be reset, making it available for others.
Clear all steps and you will find an individual chest with loot tailored to your specific class or potentially a Vanity Pet.
Upon first entering a challenge you will have 60 seconds to prepare; this time allows for buffing up and getting everyone into the preparation area. Challenge content scales to whoever is present when the preparation time has elapsed. Solo adventurers, small groups (2-3 players), and large groups (4-6 players) are all supported. Bringing more people increases the difficulty and improves your chances at better rewards. These challenges are appropriate for players of any level, as the level of creatures spawned will adapt to the highest level adventurer in the group.
Only one key is required for an entire group to enter!
Currently there are three challenges available:
Name
Location
Level Range
Est. Time Required
Blind Bear
Northreach
10-50
15m
Ramparts Run
Dryfoot
20-50
30m
Stone Breach
Dryfoot Fortress
36-50
50m
(with more to come in the future!)
Some notes to keep in mind:
One key is required per attempt.
You can only hold one key at a time in your inventory.
The entrance to each challenge will have a tooltip telling you the name of the challenge, required item, and estimated time required to complete. If the challenge is occupied it will state that and the estimated time remaining on the current step.
The server considers the person who consumes their key as the "keymaster" and owner of the challenge.
If for example, the player who used their key is kicked from their group within the prep area before the prep time is concluded, then all other players will be ejected and the challenge will proceed as solo content for the keymaster.
If the player who used their key disconnects during the prep time and does not return, then everyone will be kicked and the challenge will reset.
Once the challenge moves to the "In Progress" phase then the allowed character list is locked.
Using the /stuck or /rope commands within the challenge will remove your character from the challenge. This is to prevent potential exploits with the isolated regions. Try not to get stuck.
Upon entering the challenge a new UI element will appear showing the title of the challenge and the time remaining for the current phase.
Some challenges will also provide instructions here so keep an eye on it.
Keep an ear out for the "quest updated" noise which will fire when something significant happens.
This UI element can be moved by holding down the Move UI key (whatever you have bound).
There is an Exit button (similar to the group window) which will prompt you if you would like to request an exit. Upon accepting the confirmation you will be teleported out of the challenge in 10s and unable to re-enter until the challenge is reset.
You can right click this UI element and select "Request Exit" which has the same functionality as the exit button.
If you log into the game inside of a challenge area then you will immediately be ejected. This includes logging in after a disconnect. This policy is in place to prevent exploits.
Releasing after being knocked unconscious while in the challenge will remove you from the challenge.
If you release during a challenge your backpack will appear outside of the entrance.
Enemies within the challenge:
Do NOT respawn after killed.
Do NOT drop loot.
DO award experience.
Most challenges have a number of "checkpoints" that require the full group to be present. Some examples:
In Blind Bear there is a step that asks you to return to the platform to regroup - this will not proceed until the entire group is on the platform.
In both Ramparts Run and Stone Breach you will find pressure plates within some of the towers. In order to trigger these and move on the weight of your full group is required.
Loot from the chest in each challenge does NOT scale. The loot will be appropriate for the minimum level of the challenge.
Challenges required a number of new technical additions which will help us move forward with other features (i.e. Fishing):
Additive Loot Tables: this is mostly a back-end thing, but it allows Adric to "add" items to existing loot tables saving him immense amounts of time while giving him more fine grained control over drops. This was especially useful when adding challenge keys to different npcs.
Unique Items: these are non-tradable, non-bankable items of which you can only have one at a time. This is to prevent farming them, and to encourage their use upon acquisition. Currently this is only employed for challenge keys, but may be expanded in the future for other purposes.
Unique Loot Chests: these function similar to regular chests, but the contents of which are unique to the individual and hence do not trigger loot rolls. Everyone in your group may get something different at the end of each challenge. This tech will be particularly useful for fishing.
Targeting Layers: while you are participating in a challenge you exist on a different "targeting layer". This means that anyone NOT on the same targeting layer cannot target you, and you cannot target them (including NPCs). This prevents outside interference with challenges (i.e. aggro issues from other areas). The potential to expand upon this tech is huge and we hope to do more interesting things with it.
Fixed some navmesh issues in Ibaxus that were causing some mobs to spawn underground. Thanks again for the continued /reports!
Fixed snow UV tiling issues for terrains. More work to be done here in a future patch.
This month's patch is a little lighter than usual as most of our efforts have been towards an upcoming feature. In the mean time enjoy a few updates and fixes!
Updated line-of-sight animator culling algorithm to be more responsive.
Buy-It-Now price is now more consistent when posting items to the Auction House.
City Monolith duration has been increased to 5 days.
Improved pet context menu interaction timing. Your character should no longer turn around when right clicking your pet in world space.
Added VFX to Humanoid NPC heals.
Added VFX to Bear Swipe attacks.
Added Chemical Damage to King's Potion.
Warden's Assist Alchemy I additionally increases stats.
Reduced range on Cor'duun Aegis protective buff.
Corduun'Ali Phase 2 will only start using Alchemy Infusion when below 50% health. A more proper "reset" will come at a later date.
Combat chat filter improvements: Warlord Songs and Healing will always appear as long as their filter is enabled. However, if you also have any additional combat filters active (My Combat Out, My Combat In, Other Combat), Warlord Songs and Healing will be further filtered to only show from the combat sources you have selected.
Fixed some navigation issues in Dryfoot.
Fixed typo on Marshal's Pressure tooltip.
Fixed skinning level on Queen of Harts.
Fixed NPC Premeditate to buff the NPC instead of the player.
To address some hardware failures with our live server we are currently in the process of migrating to a different host. We anticipate the game being down for 12-24hrs while we work though this.
Whew that was a ride! We finally got all of the kinks worked out and have opened the servers once again. You need to grab the latest patch (~5mb) which updates the connection protocols on the client so that it can talk to the new servers.
The server died yesterday around 3:15pm CDT. The new server uses data from 3:00pm CDT. This loss in 15m is necessary to ensure that the data is not corrupted during the database restoration process. We are working on a way to compensate you all for your patience during this outage. Thank you all so much for your support!
Performance should be nearly identical to how it was previously. If you encounter oddities please let us know asap in the #qa-chat channel in our Discord so we can investigate.
Fixed an issue with Central Ibaxus Buckler stats.
Fixed an issue with grass textures in windy environments.
Fixed over-the-shoulder camera zoom not saving between sessions or zoning.
Fixed locomotion footstep audio playing while characters are jumping.
Fixed wet/snow footstep audio playing while swimming.
Fixed 1H weapons not replacing ammo when holding shift to equip (Strikers only).
Fixed consistency issues with holding shift and right clicking to equip jewelry & armor. Any time you hold shift and right click to equip it should go always target the alternate slot.
Fixed issue with not being able to right click to equip items if the cosmetic tab was selected.
Login scene AFK detection script is now disabled by default. If you would like to enable this functionality there is now a toggle in the Performance options tab: "Reduce Framerate on Login Scene"
The latest patch introduced some performance regressions and issues that we are rectifying in this hot fix. Additionally, we were able to perform a shader optimization pass and free up about 2GB of RAM while the game is running; enjoy!
Reverted Unity Engine to the previous sub-version to address a number of performance regressions, mainly:
STP should again work on MacOS.
Physics colliders should no longer cause framerate issues in certain scenes.
Fixed shader compilation issues on macOS and Linux causing visual artifacts with some vegetation.
Fixed an issue with the targeting reticle not showing on vegetation and rocks for Windows clients.
Adjusted border vegetation LOD bias in Highland Basin/Hills to improve performance.
Performed third party shader optimizations reducing the game's memory (RAM) footprint by ~2GB.
Added tooltip for Ley Pylon to the map icon highlight (upper right).
Allow shift+click to replace ranged ammo items for Strikers wanting to swap a weapon in.
Renamed "Graphics" options tab to "Display".
Added a new "Performance" options tab. Which now includes:
Enable Cloth Sim
Rain Collision
Shadow Casting Lights
Thread Count
Rendering Budget (previously "Overall Quality")
Cloud Quality
Volumetrics Quality
Humanoid Textures Quality
Vegetation Density Quality
View Render Distance
Shadow Render Distance
Vegetation Render Distance
Tree Billboard Render Distance
"High Quality" tree billboard toggle has been removed as it is now the default.
This month brings one of the most significant atmospheric updates: a dynamic weather system featuring rain, snow, thunderstorms, and seasonal climates that breathe new life into the world. It also includes an upgraded Unity engine, bug fixes, and a number of minor updates.
Added back a rock wall in Grizzled Peaks that somehow got disabled.
Added a new wound texture for nameplates that is less pixelated and has brighter stripes. Hopefully things makes things a bit more legible.
Added new Exile and Blighted camps to Highland Hills.
Added an AFK detection script to the login scene which impacts login, selection, and creation. This script caps the framerate to 10fps if no input is detected (from keyboard or mouse) for 2 minutes OR the application is not focused. When either the application becomes focused or input is detected your framerate preferences are reinstated.
Disabled Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO). It looked terrible on grass blades at certain times of the day and provided little visual benefit while chewing up cpu cycles.
Guards now ignore event mobs; this should make future GM events a bit less chaotic.
Context menu at Monoliths is now sorted roughly by progression rather than the order in which they are discovered.
Updated the Unity engine to the latest subversion. This brings a host of fixes and minor improvements.
Ibaxus:
Fixed spelling error on Ibaxian Pendants.
Fixed Central Ibaxus crossbows having incorrect colors.
Fixed an issue where armor values of Central Ibaxian Adornments changed depending on the input Shaped Adornment.
Fixed an issue where incorrect icon showed on Central Ibaxian Adornments and Relics.
Lower ibaxus recipes now accept higher tiers of Shards of Creation.
Ibaxian Artifact Assembly recipe can now be used at the portable crafting station.
Fixed target reticle from not projecting onto the terrain at certain angles.
Fixed floating rocks in Grimstone Canyon.
Fixed text in the Ridge Mystery quest in reference to Highlands Basin vs Highland Hills and the Highlands.
Fixed name of Bat vanity pet.
Fixed spelling on Cassiterite recipe.
This patch introduces dynamic precipitation in the form of rain and snow. Each region features a unique biome with monthly temperature ranges, humidity levels, and precipitation probabilities. Biomes also define wetness/snow accumulation rates, drying rates, snow melt rates, and wind characteristics.
The weather simulation is deterministically driven by the synchronized game world date time. Each frame, we interpolate biome parameters based on the current month and time of day (diurnal cycle). These values determine the precipitation threshold, which we compare against a sampled procedural noise. When the noise value exceeds this threshold, precipitation occurs. Temperature then determines whether precipitation falls as rain, snow, or a combination of both.
Both server and client perform these calculations identically to ensure consistency. The server additionally tracks ground wetness and snow coverage (the only new network synchronized data), and evaluates storm conditions to trigger lightning strike events.
Finally, clients independently simulate cloud cover and wind intensity using additional noise layers for atmospheric variety. The figures below illustrate clear, rainy+wet, and snowy+snow conditions.
To increase immersion, new footstep audio has been added for wet and snowy ground conditions.
A new toggle has also been added to the Gameplay Options tab for "Rain Collisions". Toggling this off can boost performance in heavy rain.
Please note: This feature required extensive material updates throughout the game, and some props may have been missed. You may occasionally encounter rain/snow indoors or wetness/snow on interior surfaces. We are evaluating the best solutions for these edge cases, though they are lower priority for now. Please use /report to flag any issues and we will address them in future patches.
Fixed spelling error on Ibaxian Pendants.
Fixed Central Ibaxus crossbows from not having an appropriate color.
Precipitation:
Continued prop updates to support precipitation.
Rain & Snow particle system optimizations.
Improved rain collisions.
Added "Rain Collisions" toggle to the options menu so that they can be disabled for a performance improvement.
Added rain and snow footstep audio to augment current audio.
Ibaxian Creation Shards can now be rolled on individually change has been reverted.
Lower ibaxus recipes now accept higher tiers of Shards of Creation.
Removed a number of unused shaders from the build (optimization).
Precipitation:
Adjusted render ordering of bodies of water. Let me know if there are any issues. We are currently aware that raindrops do not always render over the water - this is something we are looking into. This change however, should fix issues with waterdrop ripples not showing on the water.
Negative lightning strike effects are no longer applied inside of Newhaven City.
Continued prop updates to support precipitation.
Updated all gatherable resource materials to support precipitation.
Rain and wetness now brings ground fog in zones that support it.
Fixed target reticle from not projecting onto the terrain at certain angles spots.
Fixed spelling on Cassiterite recipe.
Guards now ignore event mobs. This should make future GM events a bit less chaotic.
Disabled Feb 12th cloud optimization that was causing visual issues at the edge of objects where they met the sky.
Improve wind volume discontinuities when moving into and out of storm conditions.
Sample prevailing wind directions from each zone settings individually rather than a constant.
Being struck by lightning now has consequences...
Context menu at monoliths is now sorted roughly by progression rather than the order in which you discovered them.
Continued prop material migrations to support precipitation.
Prop shadow casting optimizations.
Added new Exile and Blighted camps to Highland Hills.
Continued material updates to support precipitation.
Reduce max collider count for rain particles. When heavy rain is active this can be very expensive. Still lots of tweaking to do, might add an option to disable this completely.
Added an AFK script to the login scene (login, selection, and creation):
If no input is detected from mouse or keyboard for 2 minutes then the framerate is capped to 10fps. When input is detected the framerate limiter reverts to your whatever you have selected in the options menu.
If the application is not focused then we also limit the framerate to 10fps.
Fixed issue where Armor values of Central Ibaxian Adornments changed depending on the input Shaped Adornment.
Fixed issue where incorrect icon showed on Central Ibaxian Adornments and Relics.
Fixed text in the Ridge Mystery quest in reference to Highlands Basin vs Highland Hills and the Highlands.
Fixed name of Bat vanity pet.
Ibaxian Creation Shards can now be rolled on individually.
Ibaxian Artifact Assembly recipe can now be used at the portable crafting station.
Characters have been copied over from live as of February 12th @ 9am CST.
Updated the Unity engine to the latest minor revision. This includes security updates, bug fixes, and minor optimizations. Please be as thorough as possible in your testing so that we can catch any issues before we push this to live in just under 2 weeks. In other words: test everything if possible :)
Disabled Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO). It looked terrible on grass blades at certain times of the day and provided little visual benefit overall while chewing up cpu cycles.
New wound texture for nameplates: less pixelation and brighter stripes, hopefully this make sthings a bit more legible.
Minor optimization in cloud rendering technique.
Precipitation!
Once again rain and snow has been enabled!
Updated a number of prop materials to support precipitation. This is an ongoing process.
Lightning events have been added to the weather sim during storms.
Added curves for wetness & snow on prop materials to better match terrain accumulation.
This month's patch includes a number of fixes, balance adjustments, and the first pass at our weather simulation. In addition, we are continuing to move all in-game textures to a higher quality compression format so this patch may be a bit chunkier than previous ones.
Target dummies in Newhaven City are now functional.
Renamed options tab "Input" to "Controls".
Moved all camera options to the Controls tab.
Added "(click to accept task)" text to bulletin board envelopes.
Added a tooltip to components in the crafting window.
Added level 40 Elk Tea.
Added level 40 Mandrake Tea.
Added Dense Skinning nodes to Highlands.
Added the remaining pieces of the Timeworn Set to loot tables.
Added a Woodsman spawn in Northreach where quests say one should be.
Added weather (WIP) to the Time tooltip & window.
Increased vanity pet consumable execution time from 1s to 10s.
Increased culling distance on Ravenrock skull torches.
Increased damage of non-mace Ibaxian Supporter/Defender Hatchets, Swords and Curved Swords. Slight increase to Quarterstaves as well.
Increased "Type" dropdown menu size on the Auction House.
Reduced mail & auction house costs for stacked items by a factor of 10.
Reduced drop rate of Mantor's Hatchet. This piece was originally only meant to come from Dryfoot with its handful of Drolsc. With the substantial quantity of Drolsc in Grimstone canyon the drop rate of this item had not been adjusted to account for the larger draw pool. As such the item had been far too common.
Reduced amount and difficulty of the random spawning Basilisks in Basilisks Run. These frequently would get interpreted as rooms respawning too quickly, but now should be more the nuisance that they are intended to be than halting groups in their tracks.
Reduced amount, difficult and respawn rate of roaming Redmanes in Grimstone Canyon, these mobs were often unavoidable in the narrow canyons and made leveling in the area harder than desired.
Clarified tooltip for Lingering Strikes to indicate that it deals Chemical damage.
Returned the more menacing icons for large bears.
Updated vanity pet max speed so that they are less likely to be left behind when buffed and/or on a path.
Adjusted rock LODs in Grizzled Peaks & Ibaxus (still a WIP).
All far tree imposters have been rebaked at lower densities to reduce memory and rendering overhead.
Fixed mobs with intro animations (Emberflies, Ants, others) from getting stuck if those intro animations played when you were not looking at them.
Fixed death animations replaying when you enter a scene if the npc/player was dead/unconscious.
Fixed animation culling line of sight checks to be to the overhead position of the mob.
Fixed an issue where auto run would not disable when looting or interacting via keybind.
Fixed collected pets not being linkable in chat.
Fixed an issue with the /inspect chat command.
Fixed a bug where the "can craft" value was incorrect after acquiring new supplies.
Fixed typo on Raven calls for help.
Fixed typo in Banton's quest text.
Fixed typo in a Blightroot Grove lore doc.
Fixed typo in Redshore Ridgeback task.
Fixed name of Knight Relic Curved sword.
Fixed issue where multiple levels of Rejuvenating Hymn could stack.
Fixed an issue where some quest items were not included in loot rolls. This impacts Notes/Pages which previously were not rolled as well as the Unsettling Staff.
Fixed issue that caused Knight's Alchemy Duel to not always Enrage the target.
Fixed Defender NPC Resistant buff to now be more similar to players.
Fixed a bug where you would die while using a teleporter (i.e. shaper room) while in the air (i.e. jumping).
Fixed a stuck spot in Grizzled Peaks.
Fixed border colliders in Grizzled Peaks colliding with the camera.
Fixed offhand attack chance and positional bonuses no longer showing on the class tooltip.
Fixed Hollow grinding audio to be under the Environment audio slider.
Fixed mixer group on Ember Rings, camp fires, Ember Drifts, and torch audio to be under the Environment slider.
Slightly increased Ember Ring fire audio volume.
New fire audio clip for Ember Rings.
The Highlands have been split into two independent zones:
Highland Basin: the southern portion of the zone. There have been some minor area expansions where the border has been pushed back. Level level range of this zone has been expanded slightly as well. The monolith has been moved to a midway point between the east lake and the tree fort.
Highland Hills: the northern portion of this zone. A few water features have been added to break up the monotony and add some additional character. Each lake has a series of boat teleporters (similar to Meadowlands & Highland Basin) that will help you get around more quickly. The level range of this zone has also been expanded slightly. A new Monolith has been added just south of the main camp.
With the addition of a new Monolith the Ley Pylon in the city has had an additional control added.
Basin & Hills both have an independent Ley Compass that you will have to find and track.
NOTE you characters have been migrated to account for the new zone.
If your character was in Highlands it has been moved to the safe spot within Highland Basin.
If you had a corpse in Highland it has been returned to you.
The new Monolith in Highland Hills will need to be discovered before it can be used.
Added new camera recenter options for the horizontal and vertical axis as dropdowns in the Controls tab. These settings dictate how the camera responds to being rotated away from center with left mouse drag. The three available modes are:
None: no recentering occurs. up until now this has been the default behavior.
When Moving: when your character begins to move, the camera starts to recenter. This is now the default behavior to more closely align with player expectations from other MMOs.
Always: As soon as you release your left mouse camera drag the camera will begin recentering.
Most UI window open states are restored upon zoning. This means that if you have your inventory open when you zone, it should remain open after the zone. If we missed a window that you would expect to remain open let us know!
Weather V1: This patch includes the core components of the new weather sim. Precipitation (snow + rain) is not quite ready and has been disabled. However, you should begin to notice varying cloud densities and wind speeds. Higher wind speeds should correspond to increased motion in vegetation, clouds, and spiderwebs, along with increased wind audio. We expect V2 to include precipitation and storms - at which point we will dive in a bit more to the nuances of how the weather sim works under the hood.
If you try and cross the bridge in NHV it will teleport you back to the starting spot and deliver some emote flavor text.
Sentinel
Night Watch now triggers on loss of health rather than upon getting hit. This change will allow Sentinels to better heal groups taking damage from sources that previously would not trigger properly such as damage shields. Note that the heal will not trigger if the damage causes the target to become unconscious (health drops below 0).
Duelist
Triage was overperforming as a quick group heal, and has been adjusted to be more effective on targets with lower health, but less effective on targets with higher health. Ideally the usage does not change much, but adds a bit more nuance to the usage of the ability to favor low health recovery than topping targets off.
Alchemy 2 version of Triage previously had this scaling health effect component and now the effect is greatly increased (x5) compared to the base execution.
Serration, Combined Strike and Alchemy Hemorrhaging Strike
These damage over time effects now scale with the Duelist's Physical +DMG stat. The highest type of physical +dmg that the duelist has will be the value used for determining the % increase to damage. The +dmg value at the application time of the dot is used for the calculation of the entirety of the effect.
Warlord
Open Wound no longer has a trigger count and the effect will trigger an unlimited amount of times for its duration. Triggered damage has been increased at higher levels. Alchemy versions have been updated to increase the duration rather than increasing the trigger count. We hope these changes work to keep the identity of Open Wound while making its usage worthwhile into higher levels and raid situations. As before only a single application of Open Wound may be present on a mob at one time.
Brigand
With various abilities that didn't scale well with weapon damage Mark would often quickly fall out of favor with Brigands. The general idea of Mark should remain the same that its a preparation of damage that can be done while targets are stunned or while targets in incoming.
Mark is now "Premeditate" and instead of it being applied to a target to deal instances of extra damage it is now a buff on the Brigand themselves. Ability attacks from the Brigand will trigger additional weapon damage plus a static bonus for a set count of attacks.
Alchemy 1 version of Premeditate deals extra damage.
Alchemy 2 version of Premeditate removes the trigger count and allows the additional damage on Ability Attacks to continue for the full duration.
Warden
Removed the trigger count from Quillback Spines, it will always last its full duration. Additionally increased the damage values at higher levels.
Knight
Enrage as a mechanic is a bit unique in the MMO space and is something we think might be a bit too confusing as new players are learning the game. Enrage forces a mob to attack the player who applies the effect, however it does not change threat values at all. We think this has caused some confusing usage of the ability and the demotion of Knights to being nothing more than off-tanks as their primary ability can only temporarily maintain threat, making it looks like they always "lose threat" because Enrage was only ever a temporary target change. We are hoping to change the way these abilities work to be more consistent with player expectations of what a forced change of target means.
Enrage and Duel now move the Knight to the top of threat list along with the temporary forced duration of Enrage.
Recent feedback has been provided related to the imbalance between the Defender classes and their defensive cooldowns. We want to maintain a health split between the classes and make sure each feels unique but also generally balanced in their own way.
Bulwark now gives 100% block chance and additionally increases Physical Damage Resists and Physical Status Resists by 35%
Alchemy 1 Version of Bulwark adds resist to all damage types
Alchemy 2 Version of Bulwark shares the effect with your group.
Marshal
Similar to the Knight Section, Draw Fire now sets the Marshal to the top of the threat list immediately as well as forcing mob targeting for its duration.
Similar to the Knight Section, Parry now it balanced against other defensive cooldowns:
Parry now gives 100% parry chance, 35% damage resists and additionally grants the Marshal Advantage for its duration
Alchemy 1 Version of Parry adds resist to all damage types and regenerates stamina.
Alchemy 2 Version of Parry adds 100% Riposte and faster stamina regeneration.
Juggernaut
Similar to the Duelist Perforate and Rip now scale their over time damage components with the juggernaut's +DMG. The highest +dmg value of the Juggernaut will be used to determine the extra over time damage of the effect at the time the effect is applied.
Note that Alchemy versions of Perforate will not increase the amount healed with +dmg, only the damage dealt will be increased.
With the move of the +dmg component to Momentum, Roar's stamina cost was a bit too high for its new purpose. Stamina cost reduced by 5 across all levels.
Fixed an issue with map initialization for Highland Basin.
Reduced max wetness on vegetation.
Rebaked Newhaven Valley/City/Northreach imposters to 80%.
Adjusted rain and wind audio priority.
Added "(SERVER)" to execution failures in the logs. This does not show in the client, only in the logs for troubleshooting.
Adjusted spawn controller polling rate jitter on the server.
Rain ripples now show on terrain.
Rain ripples no longer move with the camera.
Updated weather description in the TimeUI/Tooltip.
Reduce max wetness for vegetation.
Optimized textures for some Newhaven City walls.
Updated Highlands map to reflects recent changes. There are some odd bugs we are investigating with the initial opening of the map + Ember Ring teleports.
Adjusted spawns in Highland Hills near the Monolith + moving Ember Drift locs.
Populated new area in Highland Basin
Enabled precipitation response for overland terrains.
Enabled precipitation response on a number of ruins and other misc props. More to come. This involves a new shader which requires a bit of profiling to make sure it isn't bloating the memory footprint of the game.
Adjusted wetness strength curve on Rock shader.
Characters were migrated from Live to QA as of September 21, 2026 at 9am Central.
Night Watch no longer prevents the player from dying (I thought the name was reverted to Overprovision, I was wrong!)
Updated some older rocks to use our unified rock shader.
Added snow support to our unified rock shader.
TimeUI window now includes weather (WIP).
Highland Hills has now been split into two zones and is open for testing:
Highland Basin: the southern portion of the zone. There have been some minor area expansions where the border has been pushed back. Mob spawn adjustments still a WIP to fill these areas. Ideally we would extend the level range of this zone by 1 or 2. The monolith has been moved to a midway point between the east lake and the tree fort.
Highland Hills: the northern portion of this zone. A few water features have been added to break up the monotony and add some "texture" to the visuals of the zone. Each lake has a series of boat teleporters (similar to Meadowlands & Highland Basin) that will help you get around more quickly. A new Monolith has been added just south of the main camp.
NOTE you characters have been migrated to account for the new zone.
Discoveries from the southern portion are now moved to the Basin in the database.
If your character was in Highlands it has been moved to the safe spot within Highland Basin.
If you had a corpse in Highland it has been returned to you.
The new Monolith in Highland Hills will need to be discovered before it can be used.
Map update to reflect the new water features is a WIP.
Enabled precipitation in the weather sim. Each zone has a unique weather parameters with varying temperatures, humidities, and precipitation chances. This update enables:
Rain + Snow VFX.
Rain audio (this works similar to wind with varying intensities)
Rain & Snow accumulate based on the intensity and duration of precipitation events. This is a server-side variable synchronized across the network and will be reflected in rock and vegetation visuals. Terrain and props are up next - still a heavy WIP.
In progress hoping to make it in time for the patch next week:
Footstep audio change based on ground wetness / snow cover.
Shrink grass more during the winter so it pokes up through the snow less.
Rebake all zone imposters at 80% to reduce performance impact.
Water audio adjustments in Highland Hills
Ley Compass path adjustments in Highland Hills & Basin.
Adjusted rock LODs in Grizzled Peaks & Ibaxus.
Increase vanity pet consumable execution time from 1s to 10s.
Fixed spelling error in a Blightroot Grove lore doc.
Fixed spelling error in Redshore Ridgeback task.
Increased culling distance on Ravenrock skull torches.
Fixed a stuck spot in Grizzled Peaks.
Fixed border colliders in Grizzled Peaks colliding with the camera.
Fixed offhand attack chance and positional bonuses no longer showing on the class tooltip.
Fixed Hollow grinding audio to be under the Environment audio slider.
Added a light directional proxy that smoothly transitions between day and night rotations for vegetation rendering. I'm hopeful this might ease rendering issues at the day/night transition. However, it may very well do nothing at all...
Fixed name of Knight Relic Curved sword.
Internal work on Highlands. We anticipate opening this zone back up for testing in coming days.
Updated mixer group on Ember Rings, camp fires, Ember Drifts, and torch audio to be under the Environment slider.
Slightly increased Ember Ring fire audio volume.
Night Watch has been reverted to Overprovision. New tech has been implemented so the triggered effect happens on any health reduction (fall damage included). This has not yet gone through rigorous Adric test process so there may be issues. My code changes could also break everything...
Target dummies in Newhaven City are now functional.
Fixed a bug where the "can craft" value was incorrect after refreshing supplies
Balance adjustments to Night Watch.
Note that it is currently planned for this skill to be reverted back to the trigger method, with the current iteration (AoE non-group heal) potentially returning as a new skill at a later date. We are in the midst of fixing the trigger inconsistencies.
New fire audio clip for Ember Rings (may require further level balancing).
If you try and take the bridge in NHV it will teleport you back to the starting spot. Will likely improve this with an emote and potentially a black out screen.
More internal work on Highlands.
Internal updates to Highland Hills. The zone is currently under construction and unavailable on QA. Apologies!
Eye of the Storm changes below have been reverted.
Reduced stamina cost on Roar.
Increased "click to accept task" font size on bulletin board tasks.
Slowed the max camera recenter time to be less jarring.
Updated tooltips on new camera recenter options.
Adjusted low wind audio levels.
Adjusted cloud calculations.
Updated vanity pet max speed so that they are less likely to be left behind when buffed and/or on a path.
Fixed a bug where you would die while using a teleporter (i.e. shaper room) while in the air (i.e. jumping).
Slight damage increase on Ibaxian Quarterstaves to compare better to recently upgraded 1-handers.
Fixed missing Advantage on Alchemy Parry.
Fixed stacking type on Alchemy Eye of the Storm.
Fixed Alchemy Duel to always Enrage and not be chance based.
Brigand Premeditate execution time reduced to 1 second.
Sentinel Night Watch now prevents movement during execution.
Berserker Eye of the Storm haste/damage values reduced. Alchemy versions now all regenerate stamina instead of granting +Avoid.
VFX and audio updates for Premeditate and Night Watch.
Fixed Night Watch only healing group.
Fixed weak cloud response to wind.
Included threat increase on Order of Tribune Alchemy 2 enrage.
Reduced max volume on low and medium wind audio tracks.
Add recenter target and recenter speed sliders to control options tab.
Happy New Year! Character have been copied from Live as of January 7th at 10am Central. We are currently looking into splitting Highland Hills into a North & South zone so that we can expand and improve each.
Fixed death animations replaying when you enter a scene.
Fixed an issue where auto run would not disable when looting or interacting via keybind.
Fixed discovered pets not being linkable in chat.
Fixed animation culling line of sight checks to be to the overhead position of the mob.
Fixed an issue with the /inspect chat command.
Fixed typo on Raven calls for help.
Fixed typo in Banton's quest text.
Fixed issue where multiple levels of Rejuvenating Hymn could stack.
Fixed an issue where some quest items were not included in loot rolls. This impacts Notes/Pages which previously were not rolled as well as the Unsettling Staff.
Mobs that have intro animations (Emberflies, Ants, etc) should no longer get stuck (i.e. in the sky) if they played those intro animations when you weren't looking at them.
Renamed options tab "Input" to "Controls".
Moved all camera options to the Controls tab.
Reduced mail & auction house costs for stacked items by a factor of 10.
Expanded Type dropdown menu size on the Auction House.
Added "(click to accept task)" text to bulletin board envelopes.
Added a tooltip to components in the crafting window.
Added level 40 Elk Tea.
Added level 40 Mandrake Tea.
Added Dense Skinning nodes to Northern Highland Hills.
Added Dense Skinning nodes to Southern Highland Hills.
Added the remaining pieces of the Timeworn Set to loot tables.
Added a Woodsman spawn in Northreach where quests say one should be.
Returned the more menacing icons for some bears.
Clarify in tooltips that Lingering Strikes deals Chemical damage.
Increased damage of non-mace Ibaxian Supporter/Defender Hatchets, Swords and Curved Swords.
Reduced amount and difficulty of the random spawning Basilisks in Basilisks Run. These frequently would get interpreted as rooms respawning too quickly, but now should be more of a nuisance as intended rather than halting groups in their tracks.
Reduced amount, difficulty and respawn rate of roaming Redmanes in Grimstone Canyon. These mobs were often unavoidable in the narrow canyons and made leveling in the area harder than desired.
Added new camera recenter options for the horizontal and vertical axis as dropdowns in the Controls tab. These settings dictate how the camera responds to being rotated away from center with left mouse drag. The three available modes are:
None: no recentering occurs. up until now this has been the default behavior.
When Moving: when your character begins to move, the camera starts to recenter. This is now the default behavior to more closely align with player expectations from other MMOs.
Always: As soon as you release your left mouse camera drag the camera will begin recentering.
Most UI window open states are restored upon zoning. This means that if you have your inventory open when you zone, it should remain open after the zone. If we missed a window that you would expect to remain open let us know!
Weather V1: This patch includes the core components of the new weather sim. Precipitation (snow + rain) is not quite ready and has been disabled. However, you should begin to notice varying cloud densities and wind speeds. Higher wind speeds should correspond to increased motion in vegetation, clouds, and spiderwebs, along with increased wind audio.
Each zone should have a different variant of wind audio clips. It is currently tied to the Environment audio slider, let me know if the levels are off. Volume should increase as wind intensity increases, but the mixing may not be quite there yet.
Based on recent feedback we've made changes to at least one ability for each class to improve its usability and improve game balance. All of these are subject to change before hitting live!
Sentinel:
Feedback around the triggered heal mechanic of Night Watch is that it is too inconsistent to reliably be used as a group heal. The trigger system has various restrictions that makes accounting for all incoming damage types problematic. As such the ability has been reworked to better suit the Sentinel's ability to heal in groups (and raids) while maintaining the role of being a multi-target heal that is distinct from the ones available to the other Supporters. Feedback on QA is requested and further adjustments and balance to the ability may be made before these changes go live.
Night Watch is now a longer execution-time targeted aoe heal. It heals your defensive target and all targets nearby that target. One of the unique qualities of this ability is that it is not limited to your own group for its effectiveness and heals all friendly targets.
Alchemy 1 version of Night Watch now includes a Heal over Time portion to the effect and makes it unable to be interrupted.
Alchemy 2 version of Night Watch allows the effect to persist through unconsciousness (the heal over time will revive unconscious players on the next tick of the heal)
Duelist:
Triage was overperforming as a topping off heal, and has been adjusted to be more effective on targets with lower health, but less effective on targets with higher health. Ideally the usage does not change much, but adds a bit more nuance to the usage of the ability to favor low health recovery than topping targets off.
Alchemy 2 version of Triage previously had this scaling health effect component and now the effect is greatly increased (x5) compared to the base execution.
Serration, Combined Strike and Alchemy Hemorrhaging Strike
These damage over time effects now scale with the Duelist's Physical +DMG stat. The highest type of physical +dmg that the duelist has will be the value used for determining the % increase to damage. The +dmg value at the application time of the dot is used for the calculation of the entirety of the effect.
Warlord:
Open Wound no longer has a trigger count and the effect will trigger an unlimited amount of times for its duration. Triggered damage has been increased to match higher values at higher levels. Alchemy versions have been updated to increase the duration rather than increasing the trigger count. We hope these changes work to keep the identity of Open Wound while making its usage worthwhile into higher levels and raid situations. Open Wound still only allows a single application to be present on a mob at one time.
Brigand:
With various abilities that didn't scale well with weapon damage Mark would often quickly fall out of favor with Brigands. The general idea of Mark should remain the same that its a preparation of damage that can be done while targets are stunned or while targets in incoming.
Mark is now "Premeditate" and instead of it being applied to a target to deal instances of extra damage it is now a buff on the Brigand themselves. Ability attacks from the Brigand will trigger additional weapon damage plus a static bonus for a set count of attacks.
Alchemy 1 version of Premeditate deals extra damage.
Alchemy 2 version of Premeditate removes the trigger count and allows the additional damage on Ability Attacks to continue for the full duration.
Berserker:
Eye of the Storm's original intent was to provide an alternative to Wind Up in terms of usability. However, Wind Up still remained universally better due to the haste reductions on Eye of the Storm. The approach here is changing to be an alternative to Fury rather than Wind Up offering a different sacrifice to obtain the damage and haste from the buff.
Eye of the Storm has been refactored to fully reduce the players movement, but offer the same benefits of Fury without the daze effect. Fury and Eye of the Storm effects will no longer stack (but Windup and Eye of the Storm will now stack).
Warden:
Removed the trigger count from the Quillback Spines, it will always last its full duration. Additionally increased the damage values at higher levels.
Knight:
Enrage as a mechanic is a bit unique in the MMO space and is something we think might be a bit too confusing as new players are learning the game. Enrage forces a mob to attack the player who applies the effect, however it does not change threat values at all. We think this has caused some confusing usage of the ability and the demotion of Knights to being nothing more than off-tanks as their primary ability can only temporarily maintain threat, making it looks like they always "lose threat" because Enrage was only ever a temporary target change. We are hoping to change the way these abilities work to be more consistent with player expectations of what a forced change of target means.
Enrage and Duel now move the Knight to the top of threat list along with the temporary forced duration of Enrage.
Defensive Cooldowns
Recent feedback has been provided related to the imbalance between the Defender classes and their defensive cooldowns. We want to maintain a healthy split between the classes and make sure each feels unique but also generally balanced in their own way.
Bulwark now gives 100% block chance and additionally increases Physical Damage Resists and Physical Status Resists by 35%
Alchemy 1 Version of Bulwark adds resist to all damage types
Alchemy 2 Version of Bulwark still shares the effect with your group.
Marshal
Similar to the Knight Section, Draw Fire now sets the Marshal to the top of the threat list immediately as well as forcing mob targeting for its duration.
Similar to the Knight Section, Parry now it balanced against other defensive cooldowns:
Parry now gives 100% parry chance, 35% damage resists and additionally grants the Marshal Advantage for its duration
Alchemy 1 Version of Parry adds resist to all damage types and regenerates stamina.
Alchemy 2 Version of Parry adds 100% Riposte and faster stamina regeneration.
Juggernaut:
Similar to the Duelist, Perforate and Rip now scale their over time damage components with the juggernaut's +DMG. The highest +dmg value of the Juggernaut will be used to determine the extra over time damage of the effect at the time the effect is applied. Note that Alchemy versions of Perforate will not increase the amount healed with +dmg, only the damage dealt will be increased.
This update introduces Vanity Pets and a full Cosmetic Equipment Layer, expanding customization options alongside a number of fixes, improvements, and optimizations.
As we close out 2025, we want to sincerely thank our players for their continued support and enthusiasm throughout the year. We are grateful to be building this experience alongside such a wonderful community and are excited to share these new features with you. We wish you a happy and safe holiday season and look forward to creating even more content for you in 2026!
At the bottom of these patch notes, you will find a look back at many of our accomplishments from the past year.
Makeup is now rendered on top of face paint for female characters.
If you have a text filter field active and hit escape, it will now be cleared & deselected rather than closing the window (Auction House & Merchant).
Increased the border size of upper right icons to reduce rendering artifacts.
Reduced size of upper right icons slightly.
Reduced emission levels of Snare VFX.
Added a number of color variants for NPC avatars.
(Makeup rendering over face paint and complexion)
Fixed some lingering issues with equipment layer visuals.
Fixed issues with complexion, paint, and makeup for darker skin tones.
Fixed Spelling on Vicious Bite.
Fixed a number of spelling mistakes in lore documents and quests.
Fixed issues with missing rock collisions.
Fixed Shifting Strike Alchemy 2 to properly give effect to group.
Fixed various effects not properly triggering Night Watch. There remains some cases where Night Watch doesn't properly trigger such as against Damage Shields and we will be looking at reworking Night Watch to make it more consistent in all combat scenarios.
Fixed gathering nodes being embedded in rocks. Some resource nodes may no longer make contact with the ground - if that happens please report your position so we can investigate!
Fixed missing avatars for some NPCs.
Fixed two level up messages showing in chat on level up.
Fixed stuck spots in Newhaven Valley, Newhaven City, Northreach, Meadowlands, Dryfoot, Dryfoot Stronghold, Redshore, Redshore Ridge, Grimstone Canyon, Grizzled Peaks, and Ibaxus.
Further reduced the number of textures loaded into memory at any given time for humanoid characters. This should free additional VRAM. Note that the "Humanoid Textures" setting will now only impact gear worn by humanoids; it will have no impact on skin texture resolution.
Shadow culling now occurs relative to the camera. This improves shadow stability when far from the world origin.
Set Eye of Ibax's light source to static shadow casting. This should reduce some CPU overhead when the sun is below the horizon.
Reduced the max shadow distance from 300 to 200 meters. This reduces the overall CPU overhead of shadow rendering and improves distant shadow quality.
Reduced the number of shadow cascades at high qualities from 4 -> 3 to reduce CPU overhead.
Reconfigured shadow settings for the different quality settings to be more consistent with one another. Adjusting your quality setting will also adjust your shadow qualities.
NPCs will now disable their animators when beyond 30m when you have no line of sight. In regions like Freehold these were causing significant CPU usage due to the complexity of humanoid animators when compared with non-humanoids. There are still performance problems in this region we are investigating, but this should help.
Corrected some building components to be marked as static shadow casters.
Note that with the above shadow changes differences in regions with & without shadow may become much more apparent. We are actively looking into ways to reduce this visual discontinuity and improve things in general. In other words: expect more tweaks in the coming patches.
Vanity Pets are charming companions that follow you on your adventures throughout the world. Currently, ten pets can be purchased from various merchants, with an additional thirty available as drops, and more will be added in future updates. When danger arises, your pet will step aside and vanish until you summon it again. Subscribers are able to use pet emotes and enjoy shorter summon times when interacting with their companions.
The Vanity Pet UI can be accessed via the button in the upper right control panel or via the default keybind (P).
Within this UI a pet can be selected, summoned, or dismissed. Summoning your pet takes 5s for subscribers and 10s for non-subscribers. To swap to a different pet, simply hit the select button on your desired pet. There are three chat commands that can be used in chat window or macro bar:
Summon your selected pet:
/pet summon
/ps
Dismiss your active pet:
/pet dismiss
/pd
Emote (subscribers only). The available options are listed on the pet's tooltip and varies by pet. (Note that these emotes will play for all remote clients as well):
/pet emote
/pe
A few additional notes:
Your pet has a right click context menu with options for dismiss & individual emotes.
Other's pets have tooltips that display the pet's name.
If your pet gets too far from you it will teleport to your side.
Pets cannot be damaged or targeted.
On entering combat pets are automatically dismissed.
Remote players will see your pet, but may not agree on their exact position due to the way we are synchronizing data across the network.
Remote players will see your pet disappear when you are beyond a certain distance from them. They will automatically re-appear for those players when you get closer.
Pets have nameplates! Two toggles have also been added to the interface options:
Show Pet Names for Your Pet
Show Pet Names for Other's Pets
Current availability:
1 from Marta in Newhaven City for event currency (this purchase will grant the pet to all of your characters)
10 from various merchants throughout the world
30 from various mobs as drops
Dropped pets are not dropped from bosses.
Dropped pets are tradable and can be placed on the Auction House.
A new category has been added to the Auction House's dropdown filter for pets.
We fully expect the dropped vanity pets take a while to both discover and acquire.
We have heard your cries and now bestow the gift of a full cosmetic layer! This new layer is available to all active subscribers.
For non-subscribers, the layer will not be visible on your character and items cannot be placed into these slots; however, any existing items may still be removed (similar to the previous cosmetic slot).
Like other adornment layers, these visuals can be toggled on or off all at once by right-clicking the Cosmetic tab and selecting the appropriate option.
Visual priority of items is determined by the reverse order of layers: Cosmetic -> Ibaxian -> Base
In addition, we have added a new collection of equipment to the event merchant in Newhaven City (Marta). "Valtane's Vain Collection" is a collection of Valtane's favorite pieces, all of which have visuals which match Valtane's Vanity... in that they remove the visuals! These new pieces are ideal for slotting into your cosmetic layer to remove the visuals of that slot. All visible slots except for pants & shirt are available. Note that Valtane's Vanity still comes from the original source and is not replaced by any items on Marta.
Note that the old cosmetic slot has been deprecated and will be removed in a future update.
As 2025 comes to a close let's take a look back at some of what we've accomplished:
Content:
New world boss in Dryfoot
Crafting V2
New VFX:
NPC execution
Player teleport
Others' disappear
Ibaxus
Essence Wells + Ember Vein Adornments
New Player Experience Revamp
Ember Stone + Alchemy can be earned at level 1
Pick a class right from the get go with more unique starting skills.
Minor revamp to Newhaven Valley.
XP Curve Adjustments
GEL improvements
Vanity Pets
Cosmetic Equipment Layer
UI:
Auction House
Separated Alchemy I and II cooldowns
Compass
Macro Bar
Resource node overhead nameplates
Revamped player stat panel
Loading screen improvements
Resizable map window
Tech:
STEAM launch
Unity 6 upgrade
Support for various upscalers (STP, DLSS, FSR)
Follow Command
Optimizations
IL2CPP
UI Performance improvements
Application startup improvements
Terrain rendering optimizations
RAM & VRAM utilization reductions
Shadow optimizations
This month's patch includes a number of fixes, updates, and an optimization pass. We have some fun things cooking for next month so stay tuned!
Updated Snare VFX.
Increased rapier damage.
Added new loading screen lore captions.
Improved consistency of spawn rate for Essence Gorgers .
Bulletin Board Task "Club Scouts" added location hint to description.
Supporters now have 1 additional health!
Resilience functionality has been revamped for players. It continues to grant the player a chance at a death save. However, each successive death save puts a stacking debuff on the player reducing their resilience by 5 for a few minutes.
Juggernaut's No Time to Die has been updated to grant increasing amounts of resilience for each rank. It starts at +175 and increases up to +230. With the -5 per stack debuff on each save NTTD will start having a chance to fail after 15-26 consecutive saves depending on its rank, but more saves are possible with more +resilience gear.
Added recipes for Imbued Silver and Iron Hauberks.
Updated Crafted Hauberk stats, it was found that these were not on par with other imbued crafted items.
Added more auto follow cancel types that show on the tooltip. If your auto follow is cancelling hover over the "You are no longer following anyone" chat message for an indicator as to why. Currently those abbreviated reasons are:
CameraMovement: happens if you move the camera in while in first person perspective while auto following.
AutoRun: happens if you engage auto run while following.
Executing: happens if you execute an ability while following.
Movement: happens if you hit a movement key while auto following.
MovementMouse (new): happens if you are attempting to move by holding the left+right mouse buttons while auto following.
Confused (new): happens if your character becomes confused while auto following.
TooFar: happens if your auto follow target gets too far.
NotMemberOfGroup: happens if your auto follow target is no longer a member of your group.
Added hunting log entry for Grubs.
Marshal's have a new ability Concussive Strike that unlocks at level 3; existing Marshals will need to talk to their trainer in Newhaven City to obtain it. This ability is a short daze that interrupts NPC executions. Alchemy versions turn it into a longer lasting AoE Daze with the Alchemy 2 version being unresistable.
Warden abilities Venom Shock, Lingering Strikes, and Viperid Toxins now all scale with +Chemical Damage. The majority of the game is not currently itemized for +Chemical Damage, this is currently mainly going to impact Ibaxus where Warden ability damage has fallen behind.
Warden's Viperid Toxins now give the Warden a small amount of threat based on damage dealt.
Brigand ability Mark now deals physical damage and scales with the Brigand's +Damage stats. The bonus amount is an average of all your +Damage stats.
Added new skylights in dungeons (EV's, Forgotten Depths, Aquifer). Previously these were a solid color matching the time of day. These now render as skyboxes with clouds and stars.
New cobweb shader. Cobwebs should have a bit of emission at night and a tiny bit of motion as if they were swaying in the breeze. In a future update they will react to varying wind strengths.
Fixed incorrect stat amount on "Essence Guardian Ring Adornment".
Fixed incorrect text emote from Essence Grub AoE Root.
Fixed an issue where Emberflys would not be visible if they spawned outside of the camera frustum.
Lower level Quillbacks no longer count for Stinging Quillbacks Bulletin Board Task.
Reduced the size of some non-collision rocks in Redshore.
Nav mesh cleanup in Dryfoot Stronghold.
New Ibaxian Recipes available from Archibald "Ibaxian Reclamation". These recipes allow you to get that tier's artifact back from a shaped adornment.
Fixed issue where Inner Armor Ibaxian Adornments would lose their Role requirement after being shaped.
New Ibaxian Runes added for +Chemical Damage
Striker set bonus now includes additional +Chemical Damage
Parry/Block cap values have been increased to 100%
Most of the “obvious big wins” in client optimization have already been addressed. This leaves smaller, incremental improvements that we will be progressing through over the next few months.
Before migrating to Steam, we had to be very mindful of our client size. We paid for bandwidth, and our old launcher wasn’t great at delivering efficient deltas, so we compressed most textures using a lossy format to keep the download size down at the cost of visual quality.
Now that we're on Steam, those bandwidth constraints are largely gone. With this patch, we’ve begun moving our textures to a higher-quality compression format. This increases disk usage, but improves texture quality across the board. We are still in the process of migrating all of our textures so expect the client to grow a little in the next few updates. Also note that this patch will be a bit chunkier because of these changes.
We have also started the process of optimizing memory consumption (both RAM and VRAM) throughout the game. This has led to a number of changes:
Disabled some HDRP features that were allocating VRAM.
Reduced texture resolutions on a number of items. We tried to only do this in instances where there was no substantial visual difference. If something looks a bit off let us know.
Reduced the size of a number of UI icons.
Added icons to a number of sprite atlases (reduces draw calls).
Adjusted import settings on a number of meshes to reduce memory consumption. Let us know if there are issues with collisions or non-collisions with objects.
Adjusted audio compression settings for a number of audio clips.
Humanoids:
New tech to cap specific texture channel resolutions. This allows us to maintain detail while reducing VRAM overhead.
New tech added that allows different humanoids to share textures. Previous to this patch all humanoids generated unique merged textures at runtime. This caused VRAM usage to skyrocket when a large number of humanoids were present (Newhaven City, Freehold).
To allow humanoids to share skin textures we unfortunately had to remove the "Muscle Tone" slider from character creation / editing. Each body type will now show as if the muscle tone slider was in the middle.
New skin shader to accommodate texture sharing.
New eye shader to resolve some visual issues and accommodate texture sharing.
Depending on your system settings and your character's location these changes could have a significant positive impact on performance, especially for those who have struggled with zoning into Newhaven City.
Dungeon skylights no longer render Ember Drift decals.
Rewrote the cobweb shader to be a bit more dynamic and responsive to the wind (will be more visible when weather comes).
Updated Eyeball shader to play nicer with particle systems.
Resized a number of icons to reduce memory footprint in prep for more texture atlases.
Numerous texture quality settings updates.
Lower level quillbacks no longer count for Stinging Quillbacks Bulletin Board Task.
Increased rapier damage.
Added additional auto follow cancelled types (mouse, confusion).
Added hunting log for grubs.
Characters have been migrated from Live as of Nov 18, 2025 at 1pm Central.
Fixed incorrect stat amount on "Essence Guardian Ring Adornment".
Fixed incorrect emote text from Essence Grub AoE root.
Fixed issues with Emberfly spawning animation not playing if they were out of the camera fustrum.
New Snare VFX
Improved consistency of spawn rate for Essence Gorgers.
Improved location description for "Club Scouts" Bulletin Board Task.
Supporters now have 1 additional health!
Resilience functionality has been revamped for players. It continues to grant the player a chance at a death save. However, each successive death save puts a stacking debuff on the player reducing their resilience by 5 for a few minutes.
Juggernaut's No Time To Die hs been updated to grant increasing amounts of Resilience for each rank. It starts at +200 and increases to +250. With the -5 per stack debuff on each save NTTD will start having a chance to fail after 20-30 consecutive saves depending on its rank. More saves are possible with +Resilience gear. These value are subject to balance changes.
Fixed an issue where inner armor Adornments would lose their role requirements after being shaped.
New Ibaxian recipes available for Archibald for "Ibaxian Reclamation". These recipes allow you to get that tier's artifact back from a shaped adornment.
New Ibaxian Runes are now available for +Chemical Damage.
Striker's Ibaxian set bonus now includes +Chemical Damage.
Parry/Block cap values have been increased to 100% in Ibaxus.
Marshal's have a new ability Concussive Strike that unlocks at level 3; existing Marshals will need to talk to their trainer in Newhaven City to obtain it. This ability is a short daze that interrupts NPC executions. Alchemy versions turn it into a longer lasting AoE Daze with the Alchemy 2 version being unresistable.
Warden abilities Venom Shock, Lingering Strikes, and Viperid Toxins now all scale with +Chemical Damage. The majority of the game is not currently itemized for +Chemical Damage, this is currently mainly going to impact Ibaxus where Warden ability damage has fallen behind.
Warden's Viperid Toxins now give the Warden a small amount of threat based on damage dealt.
Brigand ability Mark now deals physical damage and scales with the Brigand's +Damage stats. The bonus amount is an average of all your +Damage stats.
Added new skylight shader for dungeons. You can now see clouds and stars through them!
Now that we are on Steam our previous bandwidth limitations have eased a bit. This has allowed us to start digging into our texture compression formats and favor higher quality at the expense of higher bandwidth & disk space. Expect the next few patches to be slightly heftier in size due to these changes.
In addition, we have started make our way into the weeds when it comes to further optimizing the client. We're at a point where all of the "obvious big wins" have already been taken care of and all that is left is the little things. For the next few patches expect continued incremental improvements that while are not much on their own, hopefully will add up to significant gains.
Disabled some HDRP features that were eating up VRAM but were not used in the game.
Adjusted texture settings used for the skydome to free up VRAM.
Adjusted import settings and sizes on a number of UI element textures. (ongoing)
Adjusted a number of UI image atlases to further reduce draw calls. (ongoing)
Adjusted import settings on a number of meshes throughout the game. (ongoing)
Adjusted compression and memory state settings on a number of audio files. (ongoing)
Humanoids
Currently, all Humanoid textures (skin/hair/equipment/etc) have been updated to higher quality texture compression. It will take some time, but we will eventually extend this to all other textures in the game.
Shaders for Eyes and Skin have been rewritten and optimized.
Reduced max resolution of mask textures.
Capped max resolution of hair material.
Implemented a render texture caching system that allows humanoid characters to "share" textures for skin and hair.
To properly implement the texture caching system mentioned above we unfortunately had to remove the muscle slider from character creation. In our test case (Newhaven City) the above measures saved upwards of 600MB of VRAM. On the surface this may not seem like much, but for lower end cards with limited resources this could make a huge difference.
Fixed a visual issue with show/hide helm toggle.
Fixed missing 2H mace visual for Ore Crusher.
Fixed an issue with MacOS builds having some incorrect internal data.
Updated corrupted data files message to direct the player to validate integrity of game files through Steam (removed references to the old launcher).
Removed 2^ rat spawn from Aquifer solo loop
Changed Defender themed EV Ring Adornment to include ranged damage to be equal to the other damage option.
Todee has been feeling a bit under the weather as of late. He's now feeling much healthier!
A few small fixes!
Fixed misaligned Essence Well dungeon room in Crawling Burrows.
Fixed lower level mobs spawning in Blightroot Grove.
Fixed Alchemy Blinding Strike base damage.
Fixed stuck spot in Derelict Sanctuary.
Fixed hole in the wall in Derelict Sanctuary.
Fixed some swimmers in dungeon rooms.
Increased Blinding Strike base damage.
Removed Rat spawn near respawn point in Grimstone Canyon.
Basilisks in the Ember Veins now count for Dryfoot Bulletin Board Tasks.
Minimum level of the first Patch reagents now have a required level equal to that of when Duelists get Patch.
Added set bonus for Blackened Iron armor pieces.
Crab meat recipe now requires appropriate level spices.
Adornments:
Removed role requirements on Ember Vein Adornments.
Are no longer created damaged. If you have any damaged Adornments equipped you will have to repair them individually as the "repair equipped" button will not repair them.
This month's patch includes a number of fixes, updates, and new Ember Vein content. We have some fun things cooking for November/December so stay tuned!
Updated our internal input module to the latest version.
Updated PvP buff tooltip to indicate that it applies to resists.
Updated the background color on the Ibaxian Adornment equipment page.
Updated the Macro Bar to no longer consider the +/rotate buttons to be part of the window. This means that they can once again be off screen.
Added context menu items for "Add" and "Rotate" to the macro bar and macro buttons.
NPCs no longer use Bleeding Strike. They now use abilities introduced in the recent NPE.
Added tooltips to Adornments when worn and either no base item is present, or you are in a zone where the item is not active.
Adjusted verbiage on Adornment set bonuses to say "Active" rather than "Equipped".
Disabled seasonal scenes and associated quests.
Disabled NPC turnip heads.
Updated cursor on equipment tab hover.
Improved tooltips on equipment tabs if you can toggle visibility (Ibaxian Adornments).
Disabled old Specialization quests. These should no longer show in your quest log.
Disabled Gathering & Crafting "Coming Soon" area of the Bulletin Board UI. These will return at a later date.
Auto follow cancel chat messages now have a tooltip with a reasoning for the cancellation. The verbiage is short as this tooltip is mainly to help us debug.
Reduced eye material smoothness value slightly.
Added a loading tip indicating that Alchemy enhanced abilities deal Ember damage.
Fixed Defender armor not allowing runes to add more of the armor's base stat.
Reworked the Jailer/Morte fights to reduce Drolsc strength, make the fight mechanic more visual, and have it be present immediately in the fights.
Reduced "Kindle" debuff.
Reduced likelihood of getting adds during boss encounters.
Reduced proc chance of Lashing Vines.
Increased the number of recipes from recipe chests.
Fixed an issue that was preventing subscription purchases from going through.
Fixed an issue where your Ember Stone would be hidden after zoning.
Fixed invalid default Anti-Aliasing selection. SMAA is now enabled by default.
Fixed tooltips for subscription perks not showing on the activate subscription dialog.
Fixed tooltips for Adornment set bonuses showing incorrect active values if the base item was not equipped.
Fixed mailbox not updating cost when adding items to a stack.
Fixed chat links for some recipes not showing correctly.
Fixed stuck spots in Ibaxus, and Highland Hills.
Fixed more ladders in Grimstone Canyon.
Fixed missing stats on class tooltip.
Fixed an issue where batch crafting would continue after reopening the crafting UI.
Fixed an issue preventing NPCs not removing combat effects while resetting.
Fixed an issue causing NPCs to regenerate health & armor too slowly while resetting.
Fixed timing issue with Alchemist Ember Impact ability VFX.
The ever growing instability within Ember Veins has cumulated in the appearance of several Essence Wells. These represent a potent, concentrated source of Ember energy, drawing both opportunity and danger.
Characters have been restored from Live as of October 22nd at 9am CST.
Reverted No Time To Die haste clamping. We are investigating other methods of resolving this issue in a future patch (not October's).
Consolidated shared stat EV adornment pieces.
Group Essence well Adornments are a higher tier than the solo loop adornments.
Fixed "Invalid Zone" tooltip on adornments.
Added more info to set bonuses for adornments indicating that the base item needs to be be present.
Changed the verbiage on adornment set bonuses from "Equipped" to "Active".
Reduced Abundance of reagent drops from Essence Grubs.
Updated placeholder for Essence well named - these now have a chance to drop the item while the named will always drop the item.
Reduced 3^ density around Essence Wells.
Essence Drinker has been upgraded to an Essence Gorger.
Fixed issues with Ember Stone visuals not initializing after zoning.
Fixed issue with new EV mobs dropping quest items.
Fixed issue with some mobs dropping the wrong item for their EV.
Fixed timing issue with Alchemist Ember Impact ability VFX
Reverted to the previous Unity version. The most recent Unity update introduced a critical logging bug that kills server performance, fills up hard drives, and ultimately crashes zones.
Updated PvP buff tooltip to indicate that it applies to resists.
NPCs no longer use Bleeding Strike. They now use new abilities introduced in the recent NPE.
Disabled visuals on Ember Vein adornments. You can also no longer toggle the visuals on/off for this equipment layer.
Updated the background color on the Ibaxian Adornment equipment page.
Added tooltips to Adornments when worn and either no base item is present, or you are in a zone where the item is not active.
Haste is now clamped to 100 for No Time To Die's cooldown, similar to Auto Attack.
Now buff nearby creatures.
Added VFX around the essence wells and adjusted lighting.
EV Adornment equipment has been reduced to Superior Tier
EV Adornments that shared stats across all roles no longer have a Role requirement.
Some Essence Well locations have been updated to isolate them from existing content.
Ore & Mushroom spawn locations added to Essence Well rooms.
Spawn rate and density have been adjusted for Essence Wells. These rooms should now be more difficult.
Characters have been copied over from live as of October 15, 2025 at 8pm CST.
Fixed missing QA label in the upper right.
Fixed default anti-aliasing value being invalid. SMAA is now enabled default.
Fixed tooltips not showing for subscriber perks on the subscription dialog.
Fixed tooltips on adornment layer set bonuses showing as active when they should not be because the base layer equipment item is not present.
Fixed mailbox not updating cost when attached item count changed.
Fixed an issue preventing resetting NPCs not wiping their combat effects and regenerating too slowly.
Unity engine updated to the latest minor revision. This includes a recent fix to a critical security bug along with other misc. bug fixes and improvements.
Updated our internal input module to the latest version. Last time we tried this there was an issue on Windows boxes where the ALT+# key binds were not functioning - this should be resolved.
Disabled seasonal scene overlays and associated quests.
Reworked the Jailer/Morte fights to reduce Drolsc strength, make the fight mechanic more visual and have it be present immediately in the fights.
Reduced "Kindle" debuff.
Reduced likelihood of getting adds during boss encounters.
Reduced proc chance of Lashing Vines.
Fixed Defender Armors not allowing Runes to add more of the Armor's base stat.
Increased the number of recipes from recipe chests.
The ever growing instability within Ember Veins has cumulated in the appearance of several Essence Wells. These represent a potent, concentrated source of Ember energy, drawing both opportunity and danger.
This abundance of raw essence has attracted mutated creatures. These have taken on the unique properties of the Ember Veins in which they feed making them uniquely dangerous.
Rumors talk of their focused energies unlocking new potential for Drifters. These new Adornments give additional benefits while fighting within the Ember Veins and enhance existing gear rather than replace it.
Tiny patch today to fix a few critical bugs.
Fixed a tooltip display issue for stats when over the armor weight limit.
Fixed some unnecessary allocations with internal IDs (optimization).
Fixed an issue where some NPC damage shields would trigger a player damage shield, which would trigger the NPC damage shield, which would trigger the player damage shield, which would...
This patch includes some last minute fixes before the Steam sale. Enjoy!
Fixed tooltips on class icons in the skills UI and action bar from showing base role data.
Fixed progression notifications from showing for abilities that you cannot use.
Fixed incorrect level requirements being shown on some ability tooltips.
Fixed an issue causing the incorrect level to be used for triggered effects.
Fixed some nav issues in Ibaxus (NPCs under a building).
Ant Bulletin tasks from Dryfoot which involved going into Crawling Burrows have been removed. If you had these tasks they will be removed and allow you to obtain a new one.
Marshal's Halt improved Hand IK to prevent arm twisting animations.
Berserker's Impact now increases damage multiplier by tier.
Sentinel's Night Watch heal over time component now has a unique icon.
Knight's Ibaxian set bonus aligned with their Grizzled Peak set bonus.
Increased AoE range on weapons with 360 degree arcs. These are now 1m greater than their autoattack range.
This patch marks a major milestone for the game, bringing some of our biggest changes yet. We’ve overhauled the new player experience by eliminating base roles, introducing Alchemy earlier, and weaving in more class fantasy so every character feels unique from the start. We’re also celebrating our third anniversary of being live with a host of improvements, fixes, and quality-of-life updates to make the game better than ever.
Next month we will be celebrating our third anniversary of being live! That means we are spinning up our usual seasonals:
Ichabod has returned to Newhaven City with new goodies!
Enabled seasonal scenes.
Turnip heads can now drop from humanoid enemies.
Humanoid enemies may now occasionally equip turnip heads.
We want to bring the excitement of Alchemy, the bizarre nature of Ember, and the Ember Veins closer to the start of the game, giving players an early taste of our unique fantasy elements.
Alchemy quest can now be obtained and completed starting at level 1.
Added a new tutorial popup upon unlocking Alchemy.
Ember Stones are now obtained during the Alchemy unlock quest.
Added a new tutorial popup upon the acquisition of an Ember Stone.
Previous quest elements in Meadowlands (including Archie) have been disabled.
We want each class’s flavor to come through immediately, reducing reliance on generic role abilities so that every character feels and looks unique from the start. To work towards that goal a number of generic role abilities have been replaced with more thematic class abilities:
Bleeding Strike for Strikers has been replaced by:
Berserkers gain a new ability "Impact" which is a slow but inexpensive 2x weapon damage attack.
Brigands gain a new ability "Shifting Strike" which in addition to dealing damage, gives the Brigand a strong +Positional buff for a period of time or after 2 ability uses.
Wardens gain a new ability "Snare" which in addition to dealing damage slows their target's movement.
Assailing Strike for Supporters (except Duelist) has been replaced by:
Duelists keep Assailing Strike making armor damage core to their offensive style.
Warlords gain a new ability "Dread Tone" which deals damage, armor damage and reduces the target's outgoing damage.
Sentinels again a new ability "Guarding Strike" which deals damage, armor damage, and reduces damage to themselves
Threatening Strike for Defenders (except Marshal) has been replaced by...
Marshals keep Threatening Strike
Knights gain two new abilities: "Order of Iron" that deals additional damage on each autoattack and "Order of the Tribune" that generates additional threat on each autoattack.
Juggernauts gain a new ability "Momentum" which deals damage and gives a stacking +dmg buff, this buff stacks up to 5 times.
In addition to the skill replacements above, many skills have been brought down to lower levels changing which abilities classes start with. Everyone gets "Strike" and the following:
Berserker starts with:
Impact
Assault
Brigand starts with:
Shifting Strike
Stun
Warden starts with:
Venom Strike
Quillback Spines
Duelist starts with:
Combined Strike
Assailing Strike
Warlord starts with:
Dread Tone
Rejuvenating Hymn
Sentinel starts with:
Blinding Strike (previously named Distracting Strike)
Restoration (previously named Replenish)
Juggernaut starts with:
Momentum
Breach
Knight starts with:
Enraging Strike
Order of Iron
Marshal starts with:
Threatening Strike
Halt
Other miscellaneous changes worth noting:
You can no longer forget an adventuring role, spec, or class. To play a different class you must use a different character.
New characters now start with different equipped weapons and armor based on selected class.
Various theming elements of each class have been adjusted, such as icons and descriptions.
Players must select a portrait at character creation.
Disabled Ally the trainer in Newhaven City. She has finally earned enough to retire.
Juggernaut's Breach Alchemy descriptions no longer mention "Momentum" to avoid confusion with their new skill.
Sentinels have had three of their abilities renamed to focus on a stronger theme and class identity:
Replenish -> Restoration
Distracting Strike -> Blinding Strike
Overprovision -> Night Watch
Additional Balance changes:
Increased damage on Halt, Halt by default no longer disables auto attack, Halt now also has additional hit triggers before being removed by default.
Juggernaut Roar base ability no longer gives a +dmg increase (this has moved into Momentum).
Warden Assist has moved up to level 30 in order to bring Quillback Spines down to a lower level.
Assist now grants the entire group Advantage for a duration instead of just your defensive target.
Sentinel now gets an additional 5 Armor Weight starting at level 1
Characters without a base role or specialization will be required to select a class before they can enter the game. A new button "Select Class" will show on the character nameplate, which will show a new dialog with your selection options (this choice is FINAL and cannot be reverted).
With no base class you can select from all 9 available classes and will start at level 1.
With a base role but no spec you will be able to choose from the 3 subclasses of your base role. If you are below level 6 then your class level will match your current level. If you are above level 6, then your class level will be set to level 6 and will need to play catch up.
All other characters will undergo a "live migration" process on their first zone in which will add, remove, and replace skills depending on your specific class configuration.
Most camps have been reduced to 1^ in difficulty. The Ancient Bear camp remains 3^.
Regular named mobs have been reduced to 2^ difficulty (rewards are unchanged). This excludes Misha and Knave of Harts.
Increased respawn rate of cave bears.
Increased frequency of Frenzied mobs near the newbie area.
Wayward Mangrove has been brought closer to the newbie area, while it is non-aggressive it does assist the Mandrakes if you are not mindful.
The Crawling Burrows Ember Vein has been moved from Dryfoot to Newhaven Valley. The content and rewards within have been updated to reflect the lower level (~lvl 5).
Added a new tutorial popup describing Ember Veins upon entering the Crawling Burrows.
Added well travelled roads to the main thoroughfare (just past the newbie camp).
Beardin now accepts any type of diseased hide.
Johan's intro kill quest has been removed.
Fixed an issue preventing Ibaxian Recipe chests from spawning in Central Ibaxus.
Fixed missing stats on Central Ibaxus Juggernaut Curved Sword Relic.
Fixed issue where Movement Resists were being added twice for Ibixian Adornment outer armor.
Fixed issue while shaping Central Ibaxian Relics that was causing the wrong Relic to be considered for setting Class Requirements to equip.
Central Ibaxus Shaped Relics should more consistently inherit stats from the supplied Lower Ibaxus Shaped Relics.
Crusader Arribac's allies no longer share a respawn timer.
Disciples of Ruto in Ibaxus have had their Energy Leech ability reduced and the self-haste component removed.
Updated Central Ibaxus weapons (Greater Ibaxian Relics) to have enhanced emissions.
Reduced potency of abilities from Corduun Seekers and Excavators.
Reduced Daze duration on Ibaxian Slagjacks.
Ibaxian Adornment Outer Armor pieces now consider all resist runes to give their full effect
Added new NPC reset tech that restricts mobs to a defined volume. Mobs will reset if they or their targets leave the volume, and they will ignore incoming damage from players outside of it (will show as avoid). This system was applied to Ibaxian encounters meant to be fought in specific areas, such as Arribac (+allies), Morte (+allies), and his Jailers (+allies).
Added VFX to player teleports (see gif below).
Added VFX to Other's disappearances (see gif below).
Added VFX for Ashen spawns & deaths.
Added a context menu option to character select buttons to remove characters from the Ember Ring visually on selection.
Added an option to disable visuals for adornment layers. This is available via context menu on the adornment layer tab within the equipment UI.
Added toggle to the gameplay options to enable/disable world boss death announcements.
World boss death announcements are now shown in the emotes channel.
Marta is now selling items from her fall lineup.
Damage over time should now show damage types in the combat log tooltips.
Disabled the depth-of-field effect on character selection. Hopefully this gives your GPU a little break.
Player Damage Resists now impact damage over time abilities per-tick damage calculations.
Meadowlands Lake Brown Bears have been reduce to 1^ difficulty.
Reduced respawn rate in Grimstone Canyon fishing village and Stonecoat camp.
Crafting intro quest should now be a bit more resilient (back end improvements).
GEL now uses the player's actual level for XP calculations against yellow and lower mobs (actual chevron color), while orange and red mobs use the GEL level (GEL icon color). This provides "the best of both worlds", combining the old method with the newer one.
Fixed stuck spots in Grizzled Peaks, Ibaxus, Grimstone Canyon, and Highland Hills.
Fixed spelling errors in Watchful Other and Ageta dialogs.
Fixed missing tooltip on the Login with Steam button when Steam fails to initialize.
Fixed the macro bar not considering the bottom buttons as part of the window. In other words: they can no longer be pushed off screen.
Fixed an incorrect death broadcast from Wolf Wildfire in Ibaxus.
Fixed a bug that could prevent the finalization of a subscription purchase through Steam.
Fixed a bug that could cause abilities to swap places in the skills UI when they were swapped on the action bar.
Fixed a bug that could cause duplicate scenes to load from character selection.
Fixed a bug with default chat settings not being present.
Fixed Noble Elk recipes incorrectly requiring level 25.
Fixed multiple player ability animations that could fail to play.
Fixed typo on Hardtack.
All characters from Live have been copied over to QA from September 20th @6pm central.
Increased emissions on Central Ibaxus Greater Relic Scepters and Shields.
Increased respawn rate of cave bears in Newhaven Valley.
Adjusted VFX from Mandrake poison VFX.
Warden's Venom Strike Alchemy I no longer snares the target. It now receives a damage increase.
Increased the base effectiveness of the Warden's Snare ability.
Fixed missing levels of Brigand Stun Alchemy.
Knight's receive Order of the Tribune starting at level 3. This order has increased threat on auto attacks.
Increased text size for class descriptions on creation and class selection dialog.
Added audio to Ashen spawn & death VFX.
Fixed an issue with default chat settings not being present.
Fixed a rare bug that could cause duplicate scenes to load from character selection.
Added an EV tutorial popup.
Alchemy Quest update:
If the quest is started at Banton in the Academy then you must first find the bag of Ember Stones in the Crawling Burrows before other objectives are available.
If you go to the bag of Ember Stones first then that will also start the quest.
Interacting with the bag of Ember Stones in the EV will grant you your first Ember Stone. This will allow you to naturally fill your stone as you proceed with the Alchemy quest (as it was previously).
This new flow should also resolve an issue with the UI not updating when completing the quest.
Fixed a bug causing abilities in the skills UI to move around if they were moved on your action bar.
Fixed missing material on Ember Stones inside of the bag in the Crawling Burrows.
Added audio to player teleport and Other dissolve VFX.
Trim role descriptions on character creation and the select class dialog.
Updated Ashen spawn and death VFX (still WIP).
Updated VFX for ant abilities.
Updated a number of NPC defensive ability VFX.
Updated Order of Iron VFX.
Adjusted spawn & death Ashen VFX (still WIP).
Adjusted VFX for Shifting Strike.
Cleaned up some ability animations that weren't showing with a bow.
Alchemy quest no longer has level requirements. Alchemy can be acquired at any level.
Fixed Alchemy quest starting clickable in Crawling Burrows EV.
Fixed new characters starting with 2 separate stacks of smelling salts.
Weaken Alchemy 2 no longer stacks with Dread Tone.
Dread Tone Alchemy 2 additionally extends duration of the effect.
Updated Ibaxian Runestone descriptions for runes that now have full effect on outer armor.
All characters from Live have been copied over to QA from September 17 @10am central.
Increased damage reduction on Dread Tone (ability balance is still in flux based on recent feedback)
Ibaxian Adornment Outer Armor pieces now consider all resist runes to give their full effect (Rune tooltip not updated yet).
Fixed issue where Movement Resists were being added twice for Ibaxian Adornment outer armor.
Reduced potency of abilities from Corduun Seekers and Excavators in Ibaxus.
Updated Central Ibaxus weapons (Greater Ibaxian Relics) to have enhanced emissions.
Fixed issue that was preventing characters from getting their class skills if they had not picked a spec yet.
Added VFX when a player teleports somewhere via Monolith or Ley Link (WIP).
Added VFX to Ashen creature spawns and deaths (WIP).
Disabled depth-of-field effect on character select screen. Hoping this reduces GPU chugging here.
Adjusted class description flyout sizes and positions.
Trimmed class descriptions (WIP).
All characters from Live have been copied over to QA from September 16 @10am central. This means that newbie characters from the previous week of QA are no longer with us - thank you for testing!
With this test we have the following focus items:
Characters without a base role or specialization will be required to select a class before they can login. You will see a button "Select Class" on the nameplate, which will bring up a new dialog with your selection options.
With no base class you can select from all 9 available classes and will start at level 1.
With a base role but no spec you will be able to choose from the 3 subclasses of your base role. If you are below level 6 then your class level will match your current level. If you are above level 6, then your class level will be set to level 6 and will need to play catch up.
On first login for all other characters they will undergo a "live migration" process which will add, remove, and replace skills depending on your specific class configuration.
For QA we ask that you verify that you are not missing any skills and the migration (as outlined in previous notes from below) went through as expected.
Other changes:
Updated dialogs for various trainers, Beardin, and the Alchemy quest.
Reduced emission on Retaliate VFX.
Others now play a dissolve-like VFX when they vanish.
Adornment layer visuals can now be toggled on/off via context menu option when right clicking the Adornment tab.
GEL now uses the player's actual level for XP calculations for mobs yellow and below (actual chevron color). Orange & Red uses the GEL level (GEL icon color). This is basically "the best of both world" in the sense that it uses a mix of the old method and the newer method.
Changed Warlord starting look - now have gloves instead of a single vambrace.
Increased Dread Tone range to match Heavy Crossbow range.
Corrected stamina cost for Order of Iron at higher levels.
Prevent multiple sources of Dread Tone from stacking.
Fixed issue preventing Dread Tone from listing details in the tooltip.
Fixed issue preventing Alchemy Order of Iron from triggering from Ripostes.
Fixed issue while shaping Central Ibaxian Relics that was causing the wrong Relic to be considered for setting Class Requirements to equip.
Central Ibaxus Shaped Relics should more consistently inherit stats from the supplied Lower Ibaxus Shaped Relics.
Updated various Ant ability VFX.
Fixed missing stats on Central Ibaxus Juggernaut Curved Sword Relic.
Re-enabling zoom slider on character creation.
Fixed the macro bar window to properly include the + button so that it cannot be moved off screen.
Fixed typo on Hardtack.
Auction House duration now correctly shows "Days" on QA.
Beardin now accepts any type of diseased hide.
Order of Iron now bypasses active defenses.
Added Alchemy for Impact.
Added Alchemy for Dread Tone and adjusted range.
Adjusted Dread Tone, removing the Damage over Time component and adding a Damage Debuff on the target.
Adjusted stamina on Order of Iron
Reduced healing amount of worker ants in Crawling Burrows EV
Reduced number of Glyph Ants that spawn outside of Crawling Burrows EV
Reduced social aggro range of ants that spawn outside of Crawling Burrows EV
Further increased spawn chance of Frenzied mobs in newbie area.
Followup quest rewards for Ember Essence updated to be low level potions.
Brigand ability Shifting Strike limited to increase positional bonus for the next two attacks.
Disciples of Ruto in Ibaxus have had their Energy Leech ability reduced and the self-haste component removed.
Further reduced respawn rate for Fishing Village and Stonecoat Camp in Grimstone Canyon
Fixed some environmental issues in Grimstone Canyon.
Updated Alchemy and Alchemy descriptions for new abilities (still WIP)
Fixed Alchemy not being available after completing the Alchemy quest at level 6.
Other misc Alchemy quest fixes.
Alchemy Quest updated for the new level 5 EV. The quest can be started the normal way (talking to the NPC in the academy) or via a clickable just inside of the EV. Note that we have not yet tested these changes internally, so have at it and make sure to /report any bugs.
Fixed an exception that could cause Steam transactions to not finalize.
Fixed the Login with Steam tooltip not showing when Steam could not initialize.
Disabled Archie and corresponding quest clickables in Meadowlands.
Fixed spelling issues in some quests involving the Grotto.
Fixed some stuck spots in Ibaxus and Grizzled Peaks.
More fixes to Noble Elk recipes.
Lake bears in ML are now 1^.
World boss death announcements are now funneled to the emote channel.
Added an option toggle to disable world boss death announcements.
Enabled seasonable scene to celebrate the 3rd anniversary of the launch of Embers Adrift.
Re-enabled turnip heads on humanoid NPCs both to wear, and as drops.
Updated VFX and animations on new skills.
Wayward Mangrove is now bigger.
Fixed a Staff/Polearm animation that was failing to play.
Warlord's Dread Tone now scales with weapon damage.
Knight's Order of Iron now scales with weapon damage, only triggers on auto attacks, and has had the base damage increased.
Juggernaut's Alchemy for Breach has removed mention of "Momentum" to avoid confusion with the new skill.
Marshal:
Concussive Strike has been replaced with the original Threatening Strike. In order to see this change you will have to re-create a Marshal
While the daze was a good fit for the Marshal's kit, replacing their most used ability for damage/threat with an ability which might be held for CC purposes caused too much conflict. As Threatening Strike is no longer a shared generic role ability it was an easy choice to maintain playability and balance.
Sentinel
Blinding Strike now deals additional armor damage.
Guarding Strike is now obtained at level 1.
Guarding Strike cooldown has been reduced to 20 seconds, resists now only benefit the Sentinel directly and lasts for 20 seconds or 2 hits.
Restoration is now obtained at level 8.
Resuscitation Alchemy II is now usable on non-unconscious targets.
Has an additional 5 armor weight that it receives starting at level 1.
This class has been falling behind other classes with pacing. The above changes addresses a few concerns, such as getting 2 heal abilities back-to-back. Their early game solo kill speed, and doubling down on their class identity as a defensively minded supporter.
We would like to invite the community to comment, test, and provide feedback on our upcoming changes to the new player experience which focuses on initial class selection, class identity, changes to Newhaven Valley content, pacing and balance.
Given the focus of this test we are settings things up on the dev server a little differently:
The QA server is a blank slate. You will have to create a new character for testing.
Your shared storage and the auction house will be empty.
All Steam logins are considered a subscriber so that you can create 9 characters.
The only zones currently online are: Newhaven Valley, Newhaven City, Northreach, Central Veins 1+2, and any Ember Vein accessible from NHV & Northreach.
The QA zone is offline.
At a later date we will bring over data from Live so that you can all test character migrations (ability changes, players without a spec selecting a class, etc).
Please join us in our #qa-chat discord channel to discuss and provide feedback.
Note that for new/changed abilities the Animation/VFX and Alchemy versions are not all finished yet.
We want to bring the flavor of each class more immediately to the game and reduce the presence of generic role abilities, each character should immediately feel and look unique.
We want to bring the excitement of Alchemy, and the bizarre nature of Ember, Ruptures and Ember Veins closer to the start of the game to make sure players get an early taste of the unique fantasy the game has.
We are taking extra care to try and align with new player expectations in regards to what a class' role and fantasy is within the world.
Characters now start with different equipped weapons and armor based on class selected.
Removal of the Base Roles, characters select their Class (previously specialization) during character creation.
Rearrange skill grant order to prioritize early game class feel and fantasy.
For example Brigands starting with Stun
Earlier access to Emberstone and Alchemy:
Emberstone will now be part of the reward for the Alchemy unlock quest.
Alchemy unlock quest is being revamped for NHV. This step is not yet complete and unavailable for testing.
A few generic role abilities have been replaced with more thematic class abilities.
Bleeding Strike for Strikers has been replaced by...
Berserkers gain a new ability "Impact" which is a slow, but inexpensive 2x weapon damage attack
Brigands gain a new ability "Shifting Strike" which in addition to dealing damage, gives the Brigand a strong +Positional buff for a period of Time
Wardens gain a new ability "Snare" which in addition to dealing damage slows their target's movement.
Assailing Strike for Supporters (except Duelist) has been replaced by...
Duelists keep Assailing Strike making armor damage core to their offensive style
Warlords gain a new ability "Dread Tone" which deals damage, armor damage and has a dot effect.
Sentinels again a new ability "Guarding Strike" which deals damage, armor damage, and reduces damage to their defensive target
Threatening Strike for Defenders has been replaces by...
Marshals gain a new ability "Concussive Strike" which is a fast attacking ability with a short Daze which can be used to interrupt mob abilities (see September 10th above)
Knights gain a new ability "Order of Iron" that deals additional damage on each hit.
Juggernauts gain a new ability "Momentum" which deals damage and gives a stacking +dmg buff, this buff stacks up to 5 times.
Various theming elements of each class have been adjusted, such as icons and descriptions.
Sentinel's have had many of their abilities renamed to focus on a stronger theme and class identity
Replenish -> Restoration
Distracting Strike -> Blinding Strike
Overprovision -> Night Watch
In addition to the skill replacements above many skills have been brought down to lower levels changing which abilities classes all start with. Everyone gets Strike and the following:
Strikers:
Berserker starts with:
Impact
Assault
Brigand starts with:
Shifting Strike
Stun
Warden starts with:
Venom Strike
Quillback Spines
Supporters:
Duelist starts with:
Combined Strike
Assailing Strike
Warlord starts with:
Dread Tone
Rejuvenating Hymn
Sentinel starts with:
Blinding Strike (previously named Distracting Strike)
Restoration (previously named Replenish)
Defenders:
Juggernaut starts with:
Momentum
Breach
Knight starts with:
Enraging Strike
Order of Iron
Marshal starts with:
Concussive Strike (see September 10th above)
Halt
Additional Balance changes
Increased damage on Halt, Halt by default no longer disables auto attack, Halt now also has additional hit triggers before being removed by default.
Juggernaut Roar base ability no longer gives a +dmg increase (this has moved into Momentum).
Warden Assist has moved up to level 30 in order to bring Quillback Spines down to a lower level.
Assist now grants the entire group Advantage for a duration instead of just your defensive target.
Most Newhaven Valley camps have been reduced to 1^ in difficulty, the Ancient Bear camp remains 3^.
Regular named (excludes Misha and Knave of Harts) in Newhaven Valley have been reduced to 2^ in difficulty, but rewards remain the same.
Increased frequency of Frenzied mobs to show up near the newbie area.
The Crawling Burrows EV has moved from Dryfoot into Newhaven Valley, the content and rewards within have been updated to reflect the lower level (~lvl 5).
Wayward Mangrove has been brought closer to newbie area, while it is non-aggressive it does assist the Mandrakes if you are not mindful.
Meadowlands Lake Brown Bears have been reduced to 1^ in difficulty.
Reduced daze duration on Ibaxian Slagjacks.
Crusader Arribac's adds no longer share a respawn timer.
Player Damage Resists now impact damage over time abilities per-tick damage calculations.
Fixed Noble Elk Recipes incorrectly requiring level 25
Fixed issue preventing Ibaxian Recipe chests from spawning in Central Ibaxus
Fixed Robust Leather recipe component name.
Fixed missing tooltips for Mental, Chemical, and Ember damage stats.
Fixed an initialization issue with stat tabs on your equipment sheet.
Fixed an issue with ability low level indicators not properly updating after leveling.
Fixed Healing filter logic to work similarly to the Warlord Song filter: enables/disables healing messages in conjunction with the MyCombatIn, MyCombatOut and OtherCombat filters.
Fixed skinning level on Wolf Whelp.
Noble recipes reduced to level 15.
Ibaxus
Fixed a few stuck spots.
Fixed some building colliders not conforming to the building shape.
Fixed an issue that prevented the jailer's portcullis from opening.
Fixed an issue where certain mobs received additional armor penetration.
Fixed Hunter's spotlight not disabling on death.
Reduced social aggro on crabs.
Reduced respawn rate on 2^ and 3^ mobs.
Reduced health on 2^ mobs.
Adjusted Central Ibaxus respawn timers to more closely match Lower Ibaxus.
Mandrakes are again non-hostile.
Cor'duun Sentries drop Artifacts and Runes again, but have a much longer respawn timer.
Hunter mob respawn at much slower rates.
This month's patch has a number of QoL improvements, bug fixes, and design adjustments.
IL2CPP is now the default build configuration (detailed here). For those of you who were running the live_il2cpp branch you will need to revert back to None to get the most up to date client built with IL2CPP tech.
Fixed stuck spots in Newhaven Valley, Northreach, Dryfoot, Highland Hills, Redshore, Redshore Ridge, Grizzled Peaks, and Ibaxus.
Fixed issues with Berserker Assault animations sometimes not playing.
Fixed initialization issues with friend & guild lists + show offline button.
Fixed a bug with input fields locking character movement after a window was closed.
Added dithering effect to most vegetation when the camera is in close proximity.
Added arguments to the /played command. You can now do "/played all" to show total played time for all characters on your account. In addition, you can specify another character on your account to get the played time for that specific character (i.e. "/played drindin"). Supplying no arguments (just /played) will function as it did previously.
UI:
Added specific loading tips to some loading images regarding those images.
Added a confirmation dialog when deploying a portable crafting station while missing your bag.
Added a confirmation dialog when attempting to apply a consumable when that consumable's effect is already applied.
Escape now closes confirmation dialogs.
Added a "Can Use" toggle to merchant windows.
Chat window:
Revamped the saving & loading procedure for chat windows so that they are more reliable.
Added "/resetchatwindows" chat command to reset all chat windows to the default layout of 1x chat and 1x combat window in the bottom right of your screen.
Added "Healing" filter to combat tabs.
Note: if you run into any issues we recommend running the above reset command for a fresh configuration.
Loot window:
Added a Loot All button.
Added a Loot All keybind (unbound by default).
Map window:
Can now be resized to be slightly larger, or considerably smaller.
The aspect ratio of this window is locked to prevent scaling issues with the map. Keep in mind that this behavior is a bit different than other resizable windows (like the chat window).
Auction House Buy It Now:
Now shows a reduced price when you are the current highest bidder. The total cost remains unchanged. However, if you are the highest bidder you can now pay the difference between your bid and the buy it now amount.
A "lower buy it now" indicator has been added when this is in effect - the tooltip shows the original price.
Design:
Increased 3^ mob experience reward by 20%.
Slowed respawn rate of Stonecoat + Drolsc camp in Grimstone Canyon.
Increased spawn chance for Blightroot and Deeproot Mandrakes/Mangroves within Blightroot Grove.
Stricter leashes on mobs within Shrieking Barrows to reduce the chances of 2^ mobs wandering into the 1^ loop.
Increased leash range on Freehold mobs that were resetting too quickly.
Most Smuggler camps in Newhaven Valley reduced to 1^ camps.
Wayward Mangrove path moved to the newbie area in NHV.
Mandrakes now spawn in the newbie area in NHV.
Increased threat for Knight's Bash, Marshal's Pressure & Sweep.
Warlord ability Despair alchemy versions now additional enhance the healing reduction debuff.
Quarterstaff of the Glacier stats changed to more Supporter focused stats.
Stags, Does, and Elks now have a chance to drop Tea leaves as loot (they still drop from skinning).
Ibaxus:
Fixed an issue which was preventing Supporter Outer Armor from receiving haste from runes.
Fixed an issue preventing Mandrakes from being hostile.
Fixed missing set bonus on Greater Ibaxian inner armor Adornments.
Reduced the amount of Resin required for Ibaxian Adornment/Relic reconstruction.
Reduced the cost of Resin.
Reduced armor requirements for fighting in Central Ibaxus.
Increased Ibaxian Shard drop counts.
Increased stat values provided by Greater Ibaxian Runes.
Increased armor on Inner Armor Adornments by a small amount.
Added stats to Defender Outer Armor Adornments. These continue the flavor of bonuses from GP1 armors.
Added more diversity to crab types.
Crabs in Ibaxus are now more social.
Greater Ibaxian Adornments/Relics now require a Shaped Ibaxian Adornment/Relic as part of the Artificing recipe. Note that the item is consumed in the process.
Greater Ibaxian Runes sell for slightly more than their lesser versions.
Ibaxian Ashen are now correctly resistant to Alchemy Effects.
Cor'duun Sentries no longer drop Runes or Artifacts.
Cor'duun now drop coin.
3^ mobs have an increased chance to drop runes and artifacts.
When you group with other players, our Group Elevated Level (GEL) system helps lower-level players keep up with their higher-level group mates. GEL temporarily raises your effective combat level (up to +5 higher than your adventuring level) so that you can better land hits and contribute against more difficult enemies.
Previously, experience rewards while GEL'd were calculated based on your real level. This ultimately led to lower-level players getting poor experience returns when compared to other activities. With this month's update, experience rewards will now be calculated using your GEL level when comparing against the enemy's level. That means your experience gains will better match the challenge of what your group is fighting. Here is a practical example:
Before (old system):
Drindin (level 20) groups with Undone (level 26).
GEL raises Drindin's effective combat level to 25.
They defeat a level 27 NPC.
Drindin's is effective in combat.
Drindin experience reward is calculated based on a level delta of +7, which results in diminished experience as if the NPC was level 17 (light blue). (note that experience for level deltas of +3/+4/+5/... is diminished)
After (new system):
Same scenario: Drindin (level 20) + Undone (level 26).
GEL raises Drindin's effective combat level to 25.
They defeat a level 27 NPC.
Drindin is still effective in combat.
Drindin's experience reward is calculated based on a level delta of +2, which results in non-diminished experience as if the NPC was level 22 (yellow).
We fully recognize that this doesn't solve all of our problems, but we believe it is a step in the right direction. It is also worth noting that while this is not exactly a "catch up" mechanic, lower level players should progress through their level at a faster pace than their higher level group mates. This is because higher levels require more kills to progress when compared to lower levels.
We're working hard on revamping the new player experience for next month's patch. The plan is to start players off with a specialization and allow them to acquire their Ember Stone + Alchemy at level 6. Please stay tuned as we will need some heavy QA testing.
Also note that next month's patch will come a week earlier on September 23rd!
Characters were copied over from live as of August 18th at 9am CST.
Fixed some potential exceptions with the Map.
Updated the "/played" command to support arguments of "all" or another character name.
Adjusted dither distance on vegetation.
Updated multiple camps in Newhaven Valley to have more of a focus on 1^ mobs.
Stricter leashes on mobs within Shrieking Barrows to reduce the chances of 2^ mobs wandering into the 1^ loop.
Stags, Does, and Elks now have a chance to drop Tea leaves as loot (they still drop from skinning).
QA auctions no longer expire more quickly than Live.
Auction House Buy It Now update:
Now shows a reduced price when you are the current highest bidder. The total cost remains unchanged. However, if you are the highest bidder you can now pay the difference between your bid and the buy it now amount.
A "lower buy it now" indicator has been added when this is in effect - the tooltip shows the original price.
Ibaxus
Cor'duun now drop coin
Increased Artifact drop rates on 3^ mobs
Thanks to everyone who tested the recent Defender threat changes. While we believe our most recent change helped in a number of ways, it also created some new issues that were not anticipated. In light of that we are working on a more long term solution to the off-tanking problem. In the mean time however, we have adjusted the threat generation on a number of abilities:
Increased Threat on Knight ability Bash
Increased Damage and Threat on Marshal ability Pressure
Increased Threat on Marshal ability Sweep
Increased Healing reduction on Warlord's Alchemy Despair
IL2CPP is now the default configuration for client builds. For the next monthly patch our plan is to make an alternate non-IL2CPP branch available for a short period of time, before fully deprecating these build configurations.
Wayward Mangrove path moved to the newbie area.
Mandrakes now spawn in the newbie area.
Increase Ibixian Shard drop counts.
Added dithering effect to most vegetation when the camera is in close proximity.
Added a confirmation to deploy a portable crafting station when you are missing your bag.
Added a confirmation to overwrite a consumable effect of the same type.
Added custom loading tips for a number of loading images.
Added Can Use toggle to merchants.
Chat window improvements:
Revamped the saving & loading procedure for chat windows so that they are more reliable.
Added "/resetchatwindows" chat command to reset all chat windows to the default layout of 1x chat and 1x combat window in the bottom right of your screen.
Added "Healing" filter to combat tabs.
note that loading into QA might have an impact when swapping back to live as the saved chat window data is shared
Loot window improvements:
Added a Loot All button.
Added a Loot All keybind.
Map window improvements:
Can now be resized to be slightly larger, or considerably smaller.
The aspect ratio of this window is locked to prevent scaling issues with the map. This behavior is a bit different than other resizable windows like the chat window.
(see updates from August 18th above)
To address feedback regarding off-tanking we are doing a slight rework to how Defenders generate threat. Currently on Live Defenders have certain abilities which have increased threat multipliers making them necessary for tanking. However, they are also quite impactful for damage - if the off tank is holding off on using these abilities to keep their threat low they are also reducing their damage output.
We are testing some new changes on QA that adds an additional self-buff component to the Defender ability Provoke. Its current functionality remains fully intact, but using it will additionally buff the Defender with a character stat +threat multiplier which is effective across all abilities.
Our goal is to allow Provoke to be the opt-in for Defenders who are active as a group's main tank and those off-tanking can use their full kit with a reduced risk of pulling aggro.
Accompanying this change is the removal of additional threat multipliers on individual abilities. Some abilities whose increased threat was the only distinguishing factor have been slightly reworked:
Defender's Threatening Strike has been renamed to Heavy Strike
Knight's Bash has been changed to have a chance to land a durable stun.
For testing on QA any standard group content is appreciated so we can adjust the threat multiplier numbers based on feedback before these changes are released.
About
This page aggregates Steam news feeds, patch notes, and developer announcements for Embers Adrift, sourced from official Steam community posts.
Major updates, balance changes, and seasonal events often correlate with player-count spikes — cross-reference announcements here with the live charts on the main Embers Adrift statistics page.
Articles link back to Steam for full changelogs. SteamScope refreshes news entries as new posts are published to the game's Steam hub.