Skill System Change

One common piece of feedback I get is that the dominant strategy involves picking one skill (usually basic attack), forcing it into all 3 slots, and as a result you end up with virtually deterministic skills.

I originally tried to push this boring meta in another direction by adding “combo skills”, but this wasn’t necessarily obvious to the player. This patch includes an experimental change to attempt to incentivize more fun playstyles without making the game harder.

Now when you start a character, you’ll immediately have 3 free skills available. For example, the Adventurer starts with Melee Swipe, Be the Lion, and Shockwave. The first skill is free to use, and the other two cost mana, attempting to strike a bit of a gameplay balance.

Additionally, you’re now required to always have 3 unique skills equipped. I’ve upped the power of the mana-spender skills to help make them feel more enticing to use as well.

Legacy characters who have duplicate skills in slots won’t be auto-fixed. If you reset your tree or change your skills though, they’ll be locked into the new system, so if you want to keep them as-is don’t change their skill setups. On the other hand, if you want to migrate to the new system, simply hit “Reset” on the skill tree and you’re good to go.

This is a wild change, so I’m really interested in feedback on this one, especially around what makes the game more fun for you. The main goal is to make the game interesting, varied, and more fun without making it materially more difficult.

Anti-Shrines

A new type of shrine will now appear on runs, dubbed an “Anti-Shrine” (thanks EricKyleGeorge for this idea!). If you interact with one of these, you’ll be forced to make a trade-off. One half of the trade-off will be beneficial (more exp earned, more skill points earned, even more uniques dropped!), and one will be harmful (increased monster damage, increased scroll speed, more rare monsters, player resistances reduced, etc). Whatever choices you make will last for the rest of the run, so choose carefully!

Because these are an advanced feature, they won’t appear until Monster Level 10 on Normal difficulty. They can appear from the outset on Spicy or Inferno though, as players who’ve reached that point likely have the information they need to make informed decisions about modifying their runs.

Anti-Shrines are considered a type of Shrine, so you’ll see more of them and can modify them accordingly by using the Shrines Exploration tree.

Other Patch Notes

• Ported all Adventurer skills to use the updated skill system. This mostly has no gameplay impact, but upgrades you are offered for the Adventurer in a run will now show their stat impact directly

• Removed the 1 aura at a time restriction

• Buffed Mesolow to also add flat damage to Whirlwind

• Updated the Character Creation screens to show which skills classes start with

• Added 12 new item base types

• Fixed some bugs with Beastmaster item mods allowing for duplicate minion mods to show up. Existing items will not be impacted by this change, enjoy your weird legacy items!

• Fixed some controller issues when interacting with the Skill Tree NPC

• Tweaked the dpad repeat rate for controllers

• Added a new prototype skill, Hunting Shuriken. Note that this skill is unfinished, it won’t have the scaling tools other skills do yet!

• Fixed a bug where the player could keep sliding during a level up