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Embers Adrift

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LIVE January 24th; what's new?

Undone

Codemaster
Stormhaven Studios
What's new?
This week brings a number of quality-of-life improvements, revamped active defenses, and the highly anticipated hair visuals upgrade.

Bug fixes / improvements:
  • Tech
    • If you are hit by an attack and do not have an offensive target you will automatically target the perpetrator.
    • Sitting characters will now automatically stand if:
      • they are hit by an attack
      • they attempt to execute an ability or use a consumable that requires standing
  • Environment / Art
    • Fixed: missing collider in an Aquifer room
    • Added colliders to blocked doorways in Redshore Ridge
  • UI:
    • Window lock state is now saved through sessions.
    • Removing the close button from chat tabs. They can now be closed via a new context menu option (right click on them and select "Close Tab")
    • Map window will now say the name of the zone at the top
    • Added new portraits for toads and quillbacks.
    • Added a new combat chat tab filter for Warlord songs. For new players this will be selected by default. For everyone else this filter will be unselected by default; if you want to see Warlord songs in your combat log you will have to toggle it on.
    • Experience bars will now color the current "tick" red to more clearly illustrate what your red bar is working towards.
    • Allow exposure compensation slider (in graphics options) to go down to -1 for those who are still having visibility issues at night.
  • Design:
    • Wild Wolf armor: fixed faulds & pauldron visuals. They now match the Feral Wolf color.
    • Fixed incorrect tinting on the "Rolling Pin" weapon icon.
    • Fixed color of White Consortium Gloves
    • Fixed missing stats on Feral Claws
    • Reduced damage on Serrated Bristle effect (Sawtooth Quillbacks)
    • Increased respawn rates for some overworld locations ("pull" camps).
    • Stamina Regen values for Ramie, Elk, and Mandrake Tea increased (rates now match Deer Tea)
    • Ability changes
      • Inner Fire: changed to 3s tick and health/tick adjusted to meet previous totals
      • Guts: increased cooldown
      • From the Shadows: now expires after the next attack, but will disable auto-attack on use.
      • Rejuvenating Hymn: level 46 version updated to 5s ticks to fall directly on the 30s mark, also reduced value to match current progression path.
      • Aid: starting stamina cost reduced from 20% to 15%
      • Flash Powder: execution time reduced to 1s
      • Pursuit: added a large threat component
      • Roar: added self-damage buff
      • Frightful Visage: increased range, number of targets, and reduced stamina cost.
      • All Warlord group buffs are now dismissible (if you so choose)
      • Brigand's Sharpen Edge is now Abet: increases flanking for you and your defensive target instead of buffing your pen
New stuff:
Active Defense Revamp
This week we are enabling the new active defense system which brings a bit more nuance to avoid, parry, and block. Avoid remains relatively unchanged and provides a full mitigation of the incoming attack (a thread reduction component will likely come at a later date). Parry now provides a fixed damage mitigation, the attack suffers a disadvantage, and you have an opportunity to counter-attack with a riposte. Block now mitigates incoming damage based on a dice roll from your equipped 2H weapon or shield.

To accommodate these changes shields and 2H weapons now have a "Block Value" which represents the range of damage you can mitigate (%) upon a successful block. More data has been added to the combat text to denote these events including "Defended", "Parried", and "Blocked" preceded by the amount mitigated. Finally, a number of itemization changes have been made:
  • Parry % values increased for all items and skills.
  • Block % values increased for all items and skills.
  • Polearm base Parry increased from 5% to 7%
  • Crafted Belts can no longer add Mental Damage Resist, but instead will add +Block.
  • Shield base block & parry values are now:
    • Bucklers: 10% Parry & 10% Block
    • Kite Shields: 0% Parry & 15% Block
    • Heater Shields: 0% Parry & 10% Block
  • All Shields and 2-Handers now have a set "Block Value" which represents what % of damage is mitigated by a successful block
    • Buckler 10-15%
    • Kite 25-35%
    • Heater 30-40%
    • Long Swords 5-15%
    • Great Swords 15-25%
    • Great Axe 0-10%
    • Quarterstaff 15-25%
    • Maul 0-10%
    • Polearm 10-20%
  • The following items have had resist stats replaced with +Block:
    • Black Chitin Belt
    • Dark Leather Belt
    • Brookhollow Belt
    • Belt of the Fallen
    • Patrolman's Belt
    • Black Chitin Ring
    • Fiery Chitin Ring
New Hair Visuals
As we teased last week new hair visuals have arrived. There are no new styles yet; but we were able to resolve the transparency issues which results in a much more "solid" look. This also allows players to select lighter hair colors without it looking extremely odd in certain lighting conditions. These new visuals impact eyebrows, eyelashes, top/side/back, and facial hair.

Remember that you can edit your character's appearance at any time from the selection screen by right clicking on their nameplate and selected "Edit Appearance".
DEGSZ4E.png


Works in progress:
To see a full list of what is currently in progress head on over to this thread. I will do my best to update this list on a weekly basis and highlight the differences from the previous week with bold font. Note that what is listed here and in the linked post is not necessarily everything that is currently in progress. Below I will highlight some of the upcoming changes in more detail.

Threat Changes (1-2 weeks)
At its heart Embers Adrift is a resource management game. You are continuously managing stamina, health, threat, and situational awareness. A recent feedback post has brought to our attention that higher level defenders are having trouble keeping aggro in groups. Ideally, defenders would constantly be on a "knife's edge" when it comes to threat - we want it to be something you have to continually work to maintain so that your role remains interesting and challenging. As you can imagine however, balancing threat from a design perspective is a game of spinning plates and trying to keep everything in balance with one another. Changing one attribute too quickly could very easily throw things out of wack and make the experience too easy, or too difficult. To that end, we have identified a number of issues and potential resolutions that we will be implementing in the coming weeks.

One of the issues brought up in the aforementioned post is that 1H weapons are not viable for threat generation when compared with 2H weapons. Given the relationship between damage and threat defenders typically roll with 2H weapons for higher damage output which yields higher threat output. A number of solutions were proposed by the community but we feel that the most straight forward one is to add a threat component to shields. Adding threat components to 1H weapons just complicates things for others who can also potentially use those 1H weapons. In theory, adding additional threat to shields should allow 1H weapons to be a viable threat generating solution while also allowing them to take advantage of the additional defenses that shields offer.

I think it is important to mention here that the business of threat management is not solely the responsibility of the defender; strikers bare some of the responsibility as they are outfitted with tools to mitigate how much threat they generate (fading strike, attacking from a distance, role -threat from the sides & behind). The last change we plan on making this round is adding a "dynamic threat" component to both Provoke and Fading Strike. This new component is analogous to the bonus a healer gets when their target is low on health. The basic gist is as follows: for defenders NOT currently on top of the threat list their provoke will receive a threat bonus, and for strikers currently ON TOP of the threat list their fading strike's threat reduction will receive a bonus. This should make Provoke and Fading Strike much more tactical in their usage and give both defends and strikers a bit more control over their spot on the aggro list. More details on how this all works will be shared in future patch notes.

There is likely a lot more that we can do beyond the additional changes we have planned. But as I mentioned above we need to make changes slowly to ensure things do not get too out of balance. Once our new QA environment becomes available we will likely throw more changes in there for testing and feedback.

Patch Size (ongoing)
I promise I am still working on this!

We are working on migrating our scenes to a new loading system that will reduce the overall size of patches. At the moment all scenes are lumped together into a large ~3gb file. Any time data within this file changes it must be redownloaded - even if those changes are small. By breaking our data up into smaller chunks those downloads will ideally be minimized to smaller individual files moving forward. The end result will be saving us bandwidth (money), and saving you download time on patch day. The tech required to do this loading has been implemented. The work remaining is breaking the scenes up into individual files along with creating the shared bundles that contain assets used by multiple scenes.

This work is taking much longer than initially anticipated due to the large dependency trees within scenes (we are packing resources into shared "bundles" which requires us to identify what goes in each to prevent duplicates).

Known Issues:
  • Resource nodes may occasionally tell you "invalid target". This means that your client thinks a resource node is there but the server does not. We are still investigating the cause of this.
  • Occasionally a loot roll may be skipped entirely and a carcass will be given. When this happens please provide any relevant details as we are still trying to track this one down.
  • Deconstructing crafted items returns junk 100% of the time.
  • Not all clothing/armor has visuals
  • Dragging a group-nameplate in the group window will set the wrong pivot point for the group window and the whole thing will drag a bit weird.
  • Typing chat text may occasionally become invisible. Unfocus your chat window and trying again a few times typically resolves this.
  • Sometimes when you respawn you don't end up at the proper Hallow --> if this happens please report the position where you died via the "/report" command or "/debugposition" (if using debugposition you'll need to paste the value here)
  • MacOS:
    • Zooming the camera while holding the right mouse button can cause your chat window to scroll. This is not intended behavior.
    • At some camera angles the sun may go dark. This should not happen frequently but is readily reproducible at some locations. Investigating a fix.
 
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The hair changes are a huge face lift. I didn’t realize how goofy the old style looked compared to how it will now lol.
 
I think I would have rather buffed one handed weapons and give defenders and support tools to effectively gain threat. As a sentinel there are times I want no threat and times I want all the threat.
 
So brigand penetration buff changed to abett which is double the CD half the duration and gives 5 less stats.... Garbage change
 
So brigand penetration buff changed to abett which is double the CD half the duration and gives 5 less stats.... Garbage change

Penetration for Brigand is in an odd place. Given some of their best abilities have PEN built it is was often the case that extra PEN was superfluous which made Sharpen Edge a bit of a waste and out of place. The flanking one does have a longer cooldown, but is a lot more flexible and allows for multiple avenues (HIT/PEN/DMG) depending on your preference rather than forcing the buff into a stat which some felt useless to them. Additionally the ability buffs both you and your defensive target (so 50 flanking total) aligning it with the brigand helping to coordinate group efforts towards killing a CC'd target. Any feedback on its uses, impact and feel are appreciated but I think it's applications are much more varied than Sharpen Edge and it synergizes better with the Brigand's role in a group setting while maintaining usefulness in solo situations.
 
To further address the threat issue with tanks. Particularly in regards to holding aggro from the Berserker class(as brigands rarely have threat issues and wardens damage ramps up through dots so again, rarely has threat issues) The problem with tank threat isnt only at high levels its across the board. Newer characters are still learning their classes and usually simply not using their abilities and cooldowns optimally so at lower levels the problem does not manifest because those people simply don't care.
 
Penetration for Brigand is in an odd place. Given some of their best abilities have PEN built it is was often the case that extra PEN was superfluous which made Sharpen Edge a bit of a waste and out of place. The flanking one does have a longer cooldown, but is a lot more flexible and allows for multiple avenues (HIT/PEN/DMG) depending on your preference rather than forcing the buff into a stat which some felt useless to them. Additionally the ability buffs both you and your defensive target (so 50 flanking total) aligning it with the brigand helping to coordinate group efforts towards killing a CC'd target. Any feedback on its uses, impact and feel are appreciated but I think it's applications are much more varied than Sharpen Edge and it synergizes better with the Brigand's role in a group setting while maintaining usefulness in solo situations.
My main issue is that sharpen edge allowed for full uptime penetration buff the entire time I was in combat if I managed the buff and my stamina properly I was rewarded.
It's nice that you are adding group utility but you are doing so by nerfing my character in ALL combat, solo and group. 20 sec uptime on a 1 min cooldown feels HORRIBLE.
Player count is low and I'm forced to play solo more often then I'd like to so nerfing an ability that used to be a huge flat buff not a good move especially when the trade off is added utility for grouping.....
 
This is good, thank you
  • If you are hit by an attack and do not have an offensive target you will automatically target the perpetrator.
  • Sitting characters will now automatically stand if:
    • they are hit by an attack
    • they attempt to execute an ability or use a consumable that requires standing
 
My main issue is that sharpen edge allowed for full uptime penetration buff the entire time I was in combat if I managed the buff and my stamina properly I was rewarded.
It's nice that you are adding group utility but you are doing so by nerfing my character in ALL combat, solo and group. 20 sec uptime on a 1 min cooldown feels HORRIBLE.
Player count is low and I'm forced to play solo more often then I'd like to so nerfing an ability that used to be a huge flat buff not a good move especially when the trade off is added utility for grouping.....
im pretty stoked about this change actually. it means that the brigands and the wardens can both give the tanks a sweet boost to threat gen. wardens with assist giving advantage and now brigands being able to give them flanking. and it doesnt only apply to this situation though it will be the most useful this way in our group dynamic. but it will also be pretty cool as a warden to get a nice bonus from the brigands for my dps while i can also give them advantage at the same time. ive already been thinking about TONS of uses for this.
 
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