It’s been longer than I would have liked, but the Beastmaster is finally ready for the first round of testing and feedback! This patch focuses primarily on adding this new class and making sure it’s around the same playable level as the Adventurer. Other notable inclusions in this patch include the game’s first Ultimate ability, significant QoL improvements to how stats are viewed, more items, a new ailment, and more!

Now that this major patch is out of the way, minor incremental updates are on the way, adding new skills, Ultimates, items, uniques, and new content.

As always, if you want to chat about the game, feel free to join our growing Discord community: https://discord.gg/pRSdCcE

Beastmaster Class

The Beastmaster focuses less on direct combat and more on taming enemies or summoning friends to join him in battle. If you’ve enjoyed minion classes in other RPGs, chances are this class will be right up your alley. The Beastmaster’s three trees are designed to both stand on their own and compliment each other, depending on how you’d like to build him.

When you first create a Beastmaster, you’ll have immediate access to Taming Swipe. This skill behaves similarly to the Adventurer’s Swipe skill, but has the added effect of potentially taming a monster on kill, forcing it to fight by your side for a limited time.

Taming Tree

The Taming tree focuses on letting you power up Taming Swipe, adding multiple new fun effects. It also grants you access to Minion Recall, which allows you to pull your minions back to you on demand.

Hunting Tree

The Hunting tree is still somewhat sparse, containing just the Hunting Spear skill for now. Hunting Spear allows you to throw a single projectile which pierces through everything it hits. As you specialize into it, you might find ways to increase its damage as it pierces, shock enemies on hit, or even tame enemies! It’s also extremely easy to scale critical hit chance and damage on this ability.

Avatar Tree

Attune with various entities, summoning them to help you out. Instead of taming monsters, you’ll be able to create your own! This tree also includes some transformation abilities, and the game’s first Ultimate ability (more on that later!)

Ultimates

The Beastmaster Avatar tree contains the game’s first Ultimate, “Avatar of Inevitability”. Ultimate skills have their own special skill slot, and can only be learned once you’ve spent at least 30 points in that tree. Only one of these skills can be equipped at a time, and you cannot learn them via items.

New Elemental Ailment: Shock

This patch adds the missing Lightning ailment, Shock. Anything hit by lightning damage has a chanced to be Shocked, which increases the damage they take by 10% for 4 seconds. Shock can be stacked repeatedly, allowing for massive lightning damage scaling with good investment. Just be careful, monsters will have an easy time killing you this way as well!

Enemy Life Scaling

In Don’t Die, Collect Loot, enemies have a single base life value which is scaled by an exponent based on the current monster level. This allows content to quickly adapt to player power and incentivizes you to keep getting more loot. It turns out, however, that once you reach Inferno difficulty, the player starts scaling much faster than this exponent. To help combat this, Inferno-only monsters now have higher base life values, making the exponential scaling more powerful. You won’t notice much of a difference early on in Inferno, but players who enjoy pushing to monster level 99 certainly will.

Additionally, special version of Astral Incursions and Bosses have been added to Spicy and Inferno for similar reasons. Definitely give me feedback on how all of this feels! The game isn’t supposed to be ultra hard, but I still want it to be challenging enough to be fun.

Sound Effects

Endgame players rejoice, the sound engine has been re-written to support per-source channels. For the non-technically inclined, this largely means that you’ll no longer hear annoying loud blasts when you hit huge packs of monsters. There’s still a lot of work to be done here, but hopefully this will help!

Full Patch Notes

• Enabled the Beastmaster

• Added three new Beastmaster skill trees

• Added new elemental ailment, Shock

• Added a number of missing item skill modifiers to the Adventurer’s item mod pool

• Added all Beastmaster skill modifiers to the Beastmaster’s item mod pool

• Added 5 new base item types

• Added assorted minion-themed modifiers to the item modifier pool

• Added elemental damage scaling modifiers to the item modifier pool

• New skill: Hunting Spear

• New skill: Taming Swipe

• New Skill: Minion Recall

• New Skill: Avatar of the Night

• New Skill: Avatar of the Hunt

• New Ultimate Skill: Avatar of Inevitability

• Added a ton of in-run skills for Beastmaster

• Added support for specific skills to have their own elemental ailment chance bonuses

• Updated Whirlwind’s Lightning scaling tree to be more fun/interesting

• New Astral Incursion: Bubomic Rat

• Nerfed the attack rate of Airships during Airship bombardment

• Fixed a bug where Poison Immunity was checking Ignite Immunity instead of the proper value

• Fixed numerous text overflow issues

• Fixed a bug where allies Bees with no target would continue to telegraph their attacks until a target ended up in range

• Fixed some bugs with Chilled Ground

• Reduced early-game Loot Crystal life

• Added Inferno-specific base life for monsters

• Added unique Astral Incursions and Bosses for Spicy and Inferno

• Added support for global Area of Effect scaling, and some skills + item mods to match

• Added SFX source channel support

• Fixed Zen’s favorite channeled ability duplication bug

• Fixed a bug where the camera would behave erratically on bosses

• Fixed (another) bug that could trap you in a secret area

• Added support for healing damage number grouping