Combat#
A bar for your bow and a bar for your melee weapon. If you wear a bow and a melee weapon together, each now has its own keys 1 to 4: key 1 is that weapon's special, keys 2 and 3 its two abilities, key 4 its ult. The bar shows whichever weapon is fighting. Keys 5 to 0 stay the same for both.
Maple Bow
Steel Daggers
- Swap button on the left of the bar, key `. Press it to fight with the other weapon until combat ends. It shows a bow or a sword for the weapon that's fighting.
- Auto-swap button under it. On, your bow fires past 5 m and your melee weapon takes over inside it, as before. Off, you keep whichever weapon you swapped to, in and out of combat. It's saved on your character.
- The swap buttons only show when you wear a bow (with arrows) and a melee weapon. Otherwise the bar closes up.
- The page flip moved from ` to -. If you'd moved it to another key, it stays there. Swap Weapon can be rebound in Settings like any other key.
- A bow with a tool in your main hand, like a smithing hammer, now uses the bow's bar, so it can take Hobble and Disengage.
Why: keys 2 and 3 followed your main hand. A bow worn with a hammer could never take Hobble or Disengage, and with daggers and a bow you had one bar for both, so the Disengage you set for your bow was still there on your daggers.
How weapon swap works
- The weapon that fights picks the bar. With auto-swap on, that's your bow from 5 m out (or with no target) and your melee weapon inside 5 m.
- A swap holds until the fight ends, then auto-swap takes over again. Swap outside a fight and it holds through your next one.
- Held on your bow, nothing fires inside 5 m. Held on your melee weapon, you run in to melee range.
- Turn auto-swap off and your weapon stays where you last put it until you swap again, through logouts too. Turn it back on and the 5 m rule takes over at once.
- Your bow's abilities move to the new bow bar the first time you log in. A bar you haven't used before starts with only Heal and Ward from the bar you came from, never a weapon ability.
- Drag an ability onto a bar that can't hold it and it says which bar can: "Hobble goes on your bow's bar or your daggers' bar."
- Bows don't have an ult yet, so key 4 is empty while your bow fights, even with an orb or Bound Blade in your main hand.
Try it: Wear a bow and a pair of daggers, put Disengage on the bow's bar and Dash on the daggers', and press ` to swap.
A smaller action bar. Slots are 42 px (were 48) with 4 px gaps (were 6), so the bar is 510 px wide, 542 with the swap buttons (was 590).
- Venom now stops resting and skilling with every tick, like any other hit.
- Bulwark on plate now takes 10% off an NPC's orb special too, such as Hespera's Exsanguinate or an NPC mage's Fire Blast.
- Ability cards say what kind of damage they deal: orb, Lantern and Blink Strike ranges read "magic damage", and Aimed Shot, Impale and Crippling Sweep read "weapon damage".
- Every ability card now shows how it's used at the top, such as "Instant", "1.5s cast" or "1s windup, rooted", with what you need for it on a line of its own. Stats have one name on every card (always "hitpoints").
- Dash and Disengage look like real leaps now: you cover the ground while your feet are off it.
Heals and Wards roll like hits. Heal and Ward, on yourself or an ally, and every Bloom pulse now land somewhere around the card's number, the same way a hit does. Their cards show the range, like "Restore 85–127 hitpoints". On average they give the same as before. Potions and food still heal an exact amount.
Why: damage rolls, so spell heals and shields roll too.
Healing Blast heals less. With the Restoration orb it now heals 70% of the damage it deals (was 120%: all of the damage, plus the orb's 20%). Bloom isn't changed.
Why: it was far too strong.
Magic gear gives max mana, food gives the regen. Robes, capes, cloth gloves and boots, and the Seer's and Witch's Hoods no longer give mana regen. They give 50% more max mana instead: a full wool set gives 114 (was 76), a full merino set 570 (was 380). To make up for it, Well Fed now gives 3 mana every 5 seconds per point of food strength (was 2), so a full dish gives 12 per tier (was 8). NPC casters wear the same robes, so their mana pools grow too.
Loot tracker#
See what your kills drop. Open the new Loot button in the side panel, beside DPS, Effects and Farm. It counts everything that drops for you from your kills, with its value in silver.
- Session shows this session's kills and loot. Creatures and Items show all of it, by NPC or by item. Click an NPC to see what it dropped, and hover an item to see where it came from. Player suggestion
- Slayer tasks lists your current task, then each task you've handed in, with what it dropped.
- Rare drops lists each rare drop you've had, with the NPC, the kill number and the day.
- Search by NPC or item, and sort by value, count or most recent.
- Slayer hand-ins now say what the task dropped: "Handed in: 33 × Giant Rat · +65 points (15 + 50 bonus) · loot worth 1,240 silver". Your Slayer master names the most valuable items.
How the loot tracker counts
- Only kills count. Gathering, chests and quest rewards don't.
- In a party, it counts only what dropped for you.
- Value is each item's listed silver value, not what a shop pays. Silver counts as itself, as soon as it drops.
- A session starts when you log in. Each character has its own tracker.
- An NPC shows only once you've Sighted it in the Codex.
- Creatures, Items and Rare drops go back through your kill history from before this update. Slayer tasks start with this update: a task you already hold counts its loot from your first login on 0.6.1.
Try it: Open the side panel, press Loot, and go kill something.
NPCs#
Hard bosses are bosses in their own right. The Goblin Chief's and Varric's Hard fights now have their own kill count, their own fastest-time boards on the High Scores and their own collection log page. Only the rare-drop guarantee is still shared with the normal fight.
- Hard fights weren't timed before, so their fastest-time boards start empty.
Boss kills pay a 50% XP boost. When a boss dies, you get half of your fight's XP again, counting the bonus for its level. Before, you got all of it again, but not counting the level bonus. That pays a little less on every boss today, and the gap is smallest on the strongest:
- The whole kill pays, compared with before: Goblin Chief 25% less, the Lampwarden and Varric 22% less, Ugrot 19% less, Goblin Chief · Hard 16% less, Hespera 13% less, Varric · Hard 10% less, the Snuffer 6% less.
- Slayer XP for a boss task kill drops by the same amount.
Why: the boss bonus should grow with the boss's level. Now it's a share of all the XP a kill pays, so higher bosses get more of it.
How boss kill XP works
- Every hit pays combat XP for its damage, as on any NPC.
- When any NPC above level 1 dies, you get a level bonus on top: the higher its level, the bigger. Varric (25) adds about 9% of your fight's XP, the Snuffer (66) about 67%.
- A boss then adds half of the two together. Say a Varric fight earned you 1,000 XP: the level bonus adds about 85, and the boss bonus adds half of 1,085, about 540, for about 1,630 in all (was about 2,090).
- Only players counted for the kill get the end-of-fight XP, and a wipe or reset loses it.
Varric's Duellist's Guard no longer blocks spells. Orb bolts and specials, Crystal Shatter, Lightless Lance, Fire Blast's splash, every ult and burns all go through. Weapon hits, weapon specials, glaive splash, Blink Strike's blade and arrows are still blocked.
Why: Duellist's Guard is a melee guard. It stops weapons, not spells.
Hespera the Bloodwitch
- Crimson Lance comes faster: each beam's line on the ground starts as the last beam hits, so all three land in about 4.8 seconds (was 9.2). The beams are 5 m wide (were 4).
- Coven Acolytes: two come for each player in the fight (was one).
Why: one Acolyte each was too easy to kill.
Slayer#
Boss tasks go by level. A Slayer master gives a boss task when the boss's level, or its Hard fight's level, is in their band, the same way ordinary tasks work.
- Edric Thorne (levels 1–30): the Goblin Chief, Varric and the Lampwarden.
- Osric Fenn (levels 31–70): Ugrot, Hespera and the Snuffer, and the Goblin Chief (Hard 40) and Varric (Hard 55).
- Pick the version yourself. A boss task counts every version of the boss: fight the normal one, or pick Hard at its Arena Ward if you have its Slayer level. Each kill pays the Slayer XP of the version you killed.
- Ugrot (32) and Hespera (47) moved from Edric to Osric. If you hold one of their tasks but don't have Slayer 30 for Osric yet, it's cleared at no cost and you're paid for the kills you've made.
Why: tasks go by the NPC's level, and bosses now do too. A boss with a Hard fight in Osric's band is his task as well as Edric's.
Worn gear#
Robes give more max mana and no mana regen. Every robe piece, hat, cape, gloves and boots now gives half as much max mana again, and none of them give mana regen. Mana regen now comes from Well Fed, which gives more of it.
- Robe top and cape max mana: Wool 20 → 30, Hemp 30 → 45, Flax 40 → 60, Stinkreed 50 → 75, Toetoe 60 → 90, Sunthread 80 → 120, Merino 100 → 150, Bogsilk 120 → 180. Hats, bottoms, gloves and boots rise by the same half.
- Seer's Hood 15 → 22 max mana, Witch's Hood 17 → 25, both with no regen now.
- Well Fed mana regen is +3 every 5 seconds per point of strength (was +2), so a full dish gives half as much mana regen again.
- Osmund's Ring keeps its mana regen.
Why: food is what refills your mana, the way it refills your health, and magic gear makes your pool bigger.
World#
Plain earth, big pavers. Gravel is gone: every gravel patch in Alderwic's yards and lanes is now path dirt, with a worn-grass edge where it meets the grass. Alderwic's street is laid in large pavers instead of small setts.
Why: none of the gravel we tried looked right, so yards and lanes are painted earth.
- Slopes: the pebbly earth on steep slopes used to switch on and off in 4 m blocks, so a bank went bare beside its own earth. Now the edge where earth starts wanders up and down the hill, and every slope steeper than 32° is earth.
New birches. Every birch is now one of four new birch trees, 14 to 18 m tall, each turned its own way, so a birch wood isn't the same tree over and over.
Thinner woods. Trees stand further apart now: birches at least 8 m from each other and 16 m from any oak or maple, pines at least 5 m apart. That leaves 796 birches to chop (was 1,236) and 2,246 pines (was 4,958).
Why: trees are the hardest thing in the world for your computer to draw, and fewer of them make the game run much faster.
Grass grows where the ground is lush. Meadow grass is thickest on the lush green patches, thinner on the dry ones, and gone from pebbly slopes, so the ground underneath shows through.
Why: grass covered every bit of the meadow evenly, like a carpet, and hid the ground.
Climb Alderwic's guard towers. Click the ladder on any of the four guard towers to climb up to the archer platform, and click it again to come down.
A faster game. This update makes the game run faster, most of all on Low and in busy places.
- Trees and grass are much quicker to draw. The game now works out which leaves and grass blades are in front before it colours anything in, so it no longer paints the same spot over and over. On Low, the meadow takes about a third less work to draw.
- Grass: each grass clump is now trimmed close to its blades, so meadow grass takes about a tenth of the work it did.
- Tree leaves: meadow trees have the same leaves with less empty space around them, so they're quicker to draw. Up close they look a touch less bushy.
- Potato has no grass. Grass is the hardest thing for slow computers to draw. On Potato the painted ground shows the meadow instead, and the Grass setting's lowest step is now Off.
- The ground no longer paints a second layer over itself to hide its repeating pattern. That's quicker, but from far away you may spot the pattern repeat.
- Campfires in Reaver and goblin camps no longer cast shadows on Low and Medium. On High, the two nearest within 30 m still do, the same as fires players light.
- Characters hidden behind a building aren't drawn until they come into view. You still see their names and health bars, they're still on the minimap, and you can still click them.
- Busy towns run much faster. Characters far away used to be animated one at a time, 30 times a second. Now your computer does them all at once, every frame, so towns run faster and far-off characters move more smoothly.
- Shadows from moving characters, and the lights shining on things, take less work.
- Fewer stutters in town: the game leaves about half as much memory to clean up while you play.
Why: a fast game comes first. A look that slows the game down has to earn its place, and Potato is for the computers that struggle most.
Interface#
One label over everything you can use. Hover a tree, rock, fishing spot, bank or anything else in the world and its name, stock bar and stats now sit together in one stack, like an NPC's nameplate, just above the part you click. A quest arrow sits on top of the stack.
- The stock bar on trees, rocks, fishing spots and mushrooms is now the same bar NPCs have for health, without the "Timber 100%" text.
- Hover shows the name, bar and stats. While you're gathering from it, you see its name and bar. Hold to highlight shows the name, plus the bar on anything with stock.
- Things without stock, like banks, fires, plots and doors, just show their name.
Play in browser#
- Low memory setting: textures now draw one step softer than Potato, using much less memory. Computers with 4 GB of memory or less start on it.
- Phones and tablets always get the softer textures, whichever graphics setting you pick. Potato on a phone used to bring full textures back.
Why: phone browsers close a tab that uses too much memory. Softer textures leave the game more room.
Inventory#
- Your coin pouch now sits on the panel's top-right edge, on every tab, and the panel is 22 px shorter.
- Sort moved to a right-click on the Inventory tab button: Sort bag, then Confirm sort.
Fixes#
- Compact HUD: switching it on or off left the Quests and Spellbook tabs blank until something on them changed.
- Chat: a second [gz] or [rip] within 2 seconds was lost. It now waits a moment and sends.
- Varric: his Hearthguard could arrive on a hut roof and never come down, so Varric waited forever. They now arrive on ground they can walk from.
- Varric: players who joined while he was vanished could see him standing among his Hearthguard, and his target dying brought him back early. He now stays out of sight, and doesn't move, until he comes back.
- Loading: walking into forest could freeze the game for over a second while it set up every tree's click shape. That work is now spread over many frames.
- Settings: a game left open in another window, like a browser tab, put back settings you'd changed elsewhere (the DPS meter turned itself back on).
- Action bar: cooldowns of a minute or more were cut to "0:…". They now show in full.
- Death: a death after venom wore off could still be blamed on venom.
- Nameplates: as an HP bar faded out, its inside looked darker than its rim, the name jumped sideways, and a hovered bar's rim flashed from brass to black. It now fades evenly and stays as it was.
- Markers: the quest and shop marker over an NPC sat at the wrong height when the UI scale wasn't 100%.
- Graphics: since August, Medium and High drew every texture at half its sharpness. They're full sharpness again.
- Trees: zooming the camera in or out made every nearby birch change its look at the same moment. Trees now change detail as you walk, never as you zoom.
Questions or thoughts on this update? Talk about it on Discord ›