Patch Notes/3.11.0

2023-07-15

This is a rather big patch where we aim to oversee all aspects of the game for an even more immersive gameplay loop with as much variety as possible.

End game still does not exist, but hold on to your artifacts as we plan to make Update 12 introduce the first end game mechanics.

Ability Power

Possibly the biggest new addition in Update 11 is the mechanic Ability Power! No longer will certain abilities scale off your damage, which has now been renamed to "Damage", but instead it will scale off of your Ability Power.

Ability Power rolls on all armour pieces as an implicit, and can be enhanced both with a new trinket, and a new prefix on gear simply called +Increased Ability Power%.

This mechanic will enable much more freedom for us when developing abilities, as well as much more freedom for BYLANS not having to hold their main weapon when casting these abilities. We are very excited to see how the community reacts and changes their builds with this omega addition!

Gear Update

With the introduction of Ability Power, and with it being an implicit on armour pieces, we have changed the way implicits work on armour. An armour piece will always roll Armour and Durability, but instead of always rolling "Crit Hit Resistance", it can now roll;

• Helmets: Ability Power, Crit Hit Resistance, Lucky Hit Chance
• Chestplates: Ability Power, Crit Hit Resistance, Mana, Block Chance
• Leggings: Ability Power, Crit Hit Resistance, Mana
• Boots: Ability Power, Crit Hit Resistance, Movement Speed

This should make the base identification of gear a bit more varied, even end game, and provide a much bigger diversity in gameplay. Crit Hit resistance also rolls higher values allowing the player to negate any critical hits from mobs inside vaults.

Before level 20, gear will always roll Ability Power as their "bonus implicit" and mobs can not crit.

We also have new modifiers; +Ability Level and +Ability Power%. The first can roll on chest plates and leggings, and increases the level of an ability as long as the player has learnt that ability. The range is 1-2 with legendary rolls of 3-4. Abilities also support "over-level", which means that you can in theory get +8 in any ability from just your gear! We also raised the min rolls significantly with some modifiers while levelling up.

In addition to adding AP(Ability Power) to your arsenal of gear, you can now craft and find Wands to create the perfect mage build! Wands are your source of off-hand AP-adding +1 to an ability or +AP%-and can also roll on-hit clouds unlike the Shield and Idols.

We also decided to make all vault gear including tools not fully break when they run out of durability. Instead, much like vanilla's Elytra, they simply stop working but can still be repaired using repair cores.

New

• Added a new vault gear modifier for Wands and Helmets: Increased Area of Effect
  • Increases any range/radius ability with a %

Changes

• Recycling gear got a buff:
  • Faceted focus chance went from 5% across the board to
    • 100% on omega gear
    • 75% on epic gear
    • 50% on rare gear
    • 25% on common gear
    • 0% on scrappy gear
  • Wild focus was removed and replaced with Netherite scrap
• Fixed a bug where shields still rolled Critical Hit Resistance prefix
• Vault Gear Affixes updated
  • We realise that the suffix competition is a bit too high for it to be satisfying at the moment, and some inconsistencies exist in terms of what is a suffix and what is a prefix. We made the following changes to make gear rolling feel more variable and fun!
    • Made Knockback Resistance & Durability Prefixes instead of Suffixes
    • Made Healing Efficiency a suffix instead of a prefix
    • Added AP% Increase to Boots and Helmets
    • +Health and +Mana% can not roll together, but Healing Eff can now roll with +Health, allowing mega Life Leech builds
• Chaotic Focuses now reroll its target with a full random range, instead of constantly rerolling high chance affixes such as Armor, Healing Eff, Health, Damage etc.

We hope all of these adjustments will make gear crafting, acquiring and rolling even more fun and varied depending on your playstyle!

Abilities

Having a lot of abilities is a good thing, and with the newly introduced Ability Power mechanic, we have more freedom to diversify builds and abilities. While we have added 2 new abilities, update 11 also says goodbye to the very popular (and wrongly scaled) Thunderstorm specialisation of smite. We loved the idea of Thunderstorm but couldn't find a valuable way to scale it in the format it was in, and therefore it was moved out to its own ability: Storm Arrow.

Abilities that scale off of Ability Power (AP):

Storm Arrow, Nova, Poison Nova, Charm, Smite, Archon, Fireball, Volley, Totem of Hatred

New

• Storm Arrow, a high damage, high cooldown & mana ability that is really useful in tricky situations with stronger mobs and dungeons. The player fires a storm arrow that calls a Thunderstorm cloud to form above it, blasting mobs underneath it for tremendous damage, scaled off of Ability Power.
• Storm Arrow: Blizzard, a high crowd control ability with the power of encasing mobs in the glacial prison for the player to shatter instantly. Just like it's parent, an arrow is shot by the player that calls upon a Winter cloud, rapidly blasting mobs in its range with massive glacial spikes, applying massive slow and freeze as well as Hypothermia
• Fireball, a skill shot ability scaling off of Ability Power with a long range and fairly quick projectile speed, landing a blasting area of effect damage on impact - but beware, fireball will damage players inside its explosion
• Fireball Volley, a specialisation of Fireball with higher damage but much smaller impact radius. Rather than exploding on impact, volley bounces and scorches any mobs it passes through, until it eventually explodes. The scorch deals 25% of its damage and the explosion, if well aimed, can be very deadly.
• Fireball Fireshot, a specialisation of Fireball with lower damage with no radius but a much lower cooldown for faster casting.
• Empower: Entropy Bind, creates a slowness aura around the player.
• Battle Cry, Added a new ab(ONK)ility! Drain the essence from mobs around you in a radius. Every essence drained generates a Battle Cry stack. Mobs have different essences depending on mob type, where Champions have the highest amount of essence. The next attack will apply these stacks to the enemy on on-hit: Base Ability increases Physical Damage
  • Battle Cry: Spectral Strike, Spectral Strike specialisation adds AP to the next on-hit attack
  • Battle Cry: Lucky Strike,Lucky Strike adds Lucky Hit chance to the next on-hit attack

Removed

• Smite: Thunderstorm, we could not find value in scaling this specialisation and its effect was moved to Storm Arrow
• Execute, we felt like this ability has been in a very weird spot and haven't seen any play in previous updates. We also understand that this ability all of a sudden becomes very "must have" in Update 11 with the introduction of Champion mobs - but since this ability has no skill expression, we feel it's better to remove it for now and rethink it from the ground up.

Changes

Overall you will find minor small adjustments to most abilities and their values, some buffs, some nerfs, but the ones with major changes are listed below

• Rampage was changed from 8 levels to 4 levels, mainly to be able to scale Rampage: Chaining purposefully. We also changed all values in the base rampage with the goal of it acting more as a physical damage boost toggle for a short amount of time, aimed to take down strong targets such as Guardians, Champions or Dungeon mobs.
• Stonefall: Surefoot, first of all we changed its name to Stonefall Hero's Landing, which is way cooler, and then we changed its damage to scale off of Ability Power, while slightly buffing the values, we hope that it now sees more value and play.
• Shell: Porcupine, changed to be 30% durability damage reduction while active instead of scaling 15-100%
• Smite: Archon, this ability now scales off of Ability Power and while we were at it we lowered the cost per bolt to make it more viable as a damage enhancer and now gives the player a 30% durability damage reduction while active.
• Javelin: Pierce, all javelin abilities will stay physical damage scaling, but the piercing javelin specialisation was just a bit too strong to compare with any other specialisation and as such we lowered the amount of piercing targets from 4-8 to 3-6.
• Javelin: Sight, the idea of this ability was very cool, but it was simply too weak. We therefore gave it a bit of a rework, not only did we up the radius it searches, but we also made it mark the chest types with their own colour (which can be changed in the accessibility menu) and lowered its mana cost.
• Javelin: Scatter, Now pierces mobs (increases with levels in ability) and splits/bounces on terrain
• Nova, first of all, both Nova Blast (the base) and Nova Poison both scale off of Ability Power. With that change, Nova Blast moved to being even less skill based in terms of usage. We like the idea of rewarding good plays from the player, and as such we changed how Nova Blast's damage is calculated; The further away from the center of the blast a mob is hit, the less damage that mob will take. This should make this ability more skill expressed and provide for more epic instances of "great nova aim".
• Taunt, Lower mana cost to 20 across all levels. It now applies Vulnerability to mobs, which increases damage with 10% per level of vulnerability. This increases both physical and ability damage. Levelling up the ability increases the stack level of Vulnerability, as well as the radius of Taunt
• Taunt: Charm, the damage scaling that charmed mobs get is now based off of Ability Power, making this a very strong defensive ability to turn mobs on each other without ever having to hold your main weapon.
• Totem, Spirit heavily, upped mana regeneration, radius and lowered the mana cast cost, but increased cooldown
• Frost Armor, now Chills mobs when player gets hit and charges extra mana cost

Talents

• Daze got buffed to increase damage against stun mobs with 25,50,75 and 100% (up from 20,30,40,50)
• Lucky Hit: Fatal Strike + Cleave was recalculated so that a fatal hit doesn't apply to the cleaved targets.
• Frostbite Champions hit by Frostbite receive 25% shatter damage.
• Witchery has been buffed making the threshold for mana be 80% (instead of 100%), similar to Stoneskin
• Blizzard renamed to Frozen Impact, and buffed 10-25% (prev 5-20%) and requires a mob to be Chilled instead of Slowed
• Frostbite now has 8 levels (prev 4) and the range is 2-5-20% over 3 seconds, (prev 5-20% scaling 1-4 seconds)

Patreon Armour Sets

We have included the super special Champion & Goblin set for our top tier patreons! These will be available to players who help us out on Patreon and the VHSMP members to showcase, they are amazing!

Trinkets

We have spent a lot of time trying to make sure that every single trinket has a niché and that combinations of red and blue trinkets can be made with great satisfaction. This has meant quite a few changes to existing trinkets as well as a few new ones!

• All trinkets now share the same recipe price for a craft;
  • 1 Trinket Scrap
  • 64 Vault Diamonds
  • 192 Alexandrite Gems
  • 32 Vault Gold
• All trinkets now share the same probability of discovery as a baseline
  • In addition, a new discovery system was built, which favours the player to discover a new trinket over a dupe. This doesn't mean that it's guaranteed, and when a player only has a few undiscovered trinkets it is still more mathematically likely to get any of the ones the player has discovered, but it will aid in discovering all trinkets and make early discovery more enjoyable
• Crafted trinket uses set to 12 (down from 20)
  • With the overall ease of discovery, as well as the cheaper and buffed trinket recipe, and the inclusion of the Trinketer expertise, we decided to make the uses less, in order to keep focus high on the joy of finding trinkies.

New

• Cufflinks, +50% Increased Cooldown Reduction [Red Slot]
• Spellbook, +50% Increased Ability Power [Red Slot]
• Clover, +25% Increased Lucky Hit Chance [Red Slot]
• Stone of Jordan, +1 to all Learnt Abilities [Blue Slot]
• Wings, grants Elytra flight ability [Blue Slot]

Changes

• Phylactery
  • New Art!
  • Moved to Red slot
  • Mana Regeneration increased by 50% (down from 100%)
• Cat
  • Added a high dodge chance (75%) to any incoming arrow projectiles.
• Velara's Petal
  • Moved to Blue slot
• Night Vision Goggles
  • Changed name to Treasure Goggles
  • Removed the Night Vision effect
  • Highlights chests and coin stacks, with their associated individual colour in a radius of 16 around the player
  • Moved to Blue slot
  • Treasure Goggles now render chests a bit lighter
• Wendarr's Hourglass
  • Moved to Blue slot
• Ender Anchor
  • Moved to Blue slot
• Idona's Dagger
  • Changed art and name to Idona's Pendant
  • Changed it to double existing soul chance, instead of adding 250% flat soul chance
• Crystal Ball
  • Moved to Red slot
  • Total Mana increased by 100% (up from 50%)
• Gluttony Pendant
  • Added the ability to "instantly" drink vault potions
• Carapace
  • Moved to Blue slot
• Burger
  • Moved to Blue slot
  • Experience gained increased to 100% (up from 50%)
• Glue
  • Changed art and name to Slimey (our beloved)
• Tenos' Pouch
  • Changed name to Tenos' Necklace

Expertise

We are overall very happy with the expertise system, and as we have collected more data since its introduction, we learn what works and what doesn't. Below are the changes/additions that were made in Update 11, but in addition to that we also made the Neuralizer considerably cheaper to craft. While still being an expensive item that should require a bit of thought process before going through with it, we feel that it's now more reasonable than before.

New

• Fortuitous Finesse, the player gains +1-2% chance of identifying a legendary modifier on gear - which may not sound much, but with a base of 3%, maxing this expertise for 2 points moves the chances from 1 in 33 to 1 in 20.

Changes

• Marketer, while this expertise had huge power for someone who constantly ran vaults and checked the black market, it could also be a "feel bad" when missing a good offer. Therefore we gave the player the control of the offers by making Marketer offer a re-roll possibility to the black market table, and it now has 3 levels, for a total of 3 re-rolls per cycle.
• Mystic is an incredibly strong Expertise and we felt the need to slightly nerf it in order to compare with other expertises, we gave it another level and split the levels up to be 12,24,36 instead of 20,40

Black Market

For some reason, "purchasing" things in action RPGs is very satisfying - at least we think so, but we didnt feel that the Black Market was quite up to par, so we gave it some improvements;

• Offers and prices now scale with level
• The black market now has a "Soul slot", where the offers are always better, this slot is highlighted with a nice glow and shine, so make sure to always check your rolls!
• The list of items sold was completely remade with the aim to "feel better".
• Gear purchased in the black market can now be legendary

Champions

Every mob in the game has a chance to spawn as a Champion. Champions are buffed mobs compared to their standard version, with more base health, armour and damage, and have random affixes based on game difficulty. Affixes can buff the Champion itself, or debuff the player with an aura, or buff mobs around it with an aura.

Champion mobs have a champion icon above their head to indicate that you are facing a Champion and of course these mobs will also drop some nice rewards upon killing them, ranging from common+ gear all the way to omegas, trinkets and treasure keys!

The goal for introducing Champions is to make gameplay more diverse inside a vault, and make every fight slightly less predictable.

Dungeons

It has been our intention for a long time to find a better, more intuitive way to introduce dungeons. In Update 11 we have completely overhauled the way dungeons work.

First of all, all dungeon POI's were made into regular, rare POI's with normal mobs and fizzle spawners. As their replacement, we instead made Dungeon Spots in each common room where a Dungeon Door can spawn. Dungeon Doors can be opened by hand and will give the player a clue to what type of dungeon it is, but, rather than making dungeons loot specific we made them mob specific, and the mobs are now Dungeon Mobs. Dungeon Mobs are stronger than their counterpart, with more health, higher damage and higher critical hit chance. Every Dungeon will also spawn 1 guaranteed Champion Mob, and a raised chance for Champions overall. To begin with, we have made Skeleton, Zombie, Spider, Illager, Piglin and Witch dungeons, and each dungeon will randomly select a size from small to large.

The new Dungeons have much more loot than their previous ones and depending on the size of the dungeon the chance for a Modifier Archive or any other special interaction block is much higher.

The goal with this introduction is to make Dungeons be fully "opt-in", and for them to provide a "true challenge" where the player will have to fight their way through them in order to gain the rewards. With the dungeons being mob focused, we also hope to see more value of weapons increasing mob specific damage!

Thorns

Ever since Thorns got introduced back in the early second edition, we haven't felt completely happy with it. The mechanic has always felt a bit chunky, and despite several buffs and thought processes, we haven't been able to get it quite right, until now (we hope).

In Update 11 we say goodbye to "Thorns Chance", as any Thorns Damage will now always proc when the player gets hit. This in our opinion will allow for much more variations in build, and does certainly (in internal testing) come across as a very strong mechanic.

In order to make this balanced, Thorns Damage, which only rolls on shields, now no longer rolls alongside Block Chance, but competes for the same implicit slot. That means that the player will have to make a choice if their shield should be Blocking or Thorning.

It should be noted that Block Chance can be acquired on chest plates as well as on shield prefixes, so a player can acquire both if focused.

Digsite

This room was in dire need of a buff, and man did we buff it!

Digsite is now the rarest room in the game, can no longer be crafted (but can be found as an inscription), and instead of hiding wooden chests in yellow concrete, the room is now filled with Treasure Sand!

The Treasure Sand in this room has a different loot table than the one found in Treasure Rooms, and it focuses on everything found in special chests, from gear, to trinkets, to jewels, to catalysts and fragments. In testing we found this room super exciting to find and explore.

Themes

We love the idea of themes being special, and in this patch we have introduced the Blood Moon theme. It has yet to get unique mobs, but it does have a raised chance of Black Opal and Painite gems - and it looks fantastic!

We have also introduced 2 new mushroom variants, which hopefully means that players will see that theme more frequently!

Chaos Vaults

We feel that Chaos Vaults wasn't quite chaotic enough, and as such, we added a chance of cascading modifiers, and made the roll range 30-50 modifiers, instead of the static 30. We are still not sure if this will be the last iteration of Chaos Vaults and have a few plans for what we want to do to further enhance them.

Bounties

Bounties now roll with a rarity, the rarity is displayed on the border of the bounty. The higher the rarity the better the reward, but the bounty could also be a bit bigger.

Challenge Rooms

Challenge rooms are slowly but surely, one by one, getting a bit of an overhaul as we learn what is fun vs challenging vs both fun & challenging.

The Dragon Room and Wild West have both got some love in Update 11. The first one played very poorly where the player was not incentivised in killing the mobs, but rather slow them down or cheese them in a hole, and then loot. We changed this by changing up the unbreakable spawner to slow fizzle spawners, this means that the player can clear the room eventually, or continue to crowd control them while looting. We also blocked the ability to dig a nice hole for the mobs by raising up the bedrock layer.

The Wild West room was moved to fizzle spawners throughout the entire playthrough (previously turned to perma-spawners at lvl 50)

Uber Pylons

Uber Pylons now spawn inside the vaults rarely, these pylons give the player a massive buff for a longer duration of time, players can distinguish these pylons with their graphics being two coloured and massive particle rays.

Completion Crates

Completion crates have been buffed across the board. They now also vary in their reward. The worst completion crate, which is equal to how completion crates were before is Monolith, they then scale in terms of difficulty > Guardians > Elixir > Scavenger

Objective Changes

Monoliths are now much more frequent in higher level vaults, but the player needs to find more of them.

Elixir Lodestones are now much more frequent (from 15% chance per room to 30% per room)

Obelisks no longer spawn 5-10 Guardians above level 50, but 5-7

Accessibility Additions

When we overhauled the ability system we lost the functionality of scrolling abilities, this has now returned and can be toggled on/off in the accessibility menu. In addition we added a cooldown display setting, allowing the player to see what abilities are on cooldown on the center, or left, of the screen.

We have also removed vanilla's on-hit particles and vanilla's despawn particles, which makes fighting mobs a lot cleaner and easier to see

Vault Bestiary

We have now added the foundation of the Vault Bestiary, an information database GUI for all mobs in the game. We are still working on setting up lore, themes etc - but the base function is there!

Effects

• Vulnerable, each amplifier stack of vulnerable on a mob makes them receive 10% additional damage from all sources.
• Chilled, acts like the slowness effect but now only chilled mobs can be frostbitten.

Bug Fixes/Other

• Gear rendered inside chests are now cached, giving a massive FPS boost to the game when browsing chests (Thanks to Rizek for the concept and suggestion!)
• When out of mana and trying to cast an ability the game now notifies the player of out of mana with a sound
• Changed the handling of negative potion effects affecting player
  • When attempted to be affected by a negative potion effect the player will get immune from that potion effect for 80 ticks (4 seconds)
  • This will make Avoidance modifiers much more valuable
  • This will remove "stacking" of negative clouds affecting the player