Release 55 (12-Aug-2022)
- Resting until healed took quite a while in late game when you had hundreds of Health points. Optimized to be at least a bit faster.
- Companion tactics. You can now command a companion to prefer ranged tactics instead of the default tactics. Ranged tactics means that the companion tries to maintain distance to hostiles and use mostly ranged weapons. Default tactics uses both melee and ranged weapons, and wont't try to maintain distance to hostiles. Ranged tactics is indicated with a "R" letter on the companion image in the companion list. Default key for changing tactics is ALT + 1 - 9 (companion number) or ALT + 0 to change tactics of all companions.
- You can use "ranged attack and retreat" tactics if you set behavior to REGROUP and tactics to RANGED on all characters. Can be very useful in some situations, like when retreating from a group of oozes that would otherwise destroy the party with their acid attacks.
- Companions follow the player better in corridors. Companions no longer try to follow the player / chase enemies through unexplored areas.
- New talent: "Seeker Shots". With this talent you can target anything that you see within your shooting weapon's range. There's a -3 modifier to attack per each obstacle in the line of fire. Can not be used with Dualshot or Multishot.
- Tweaked autoammo a bit, so that regular or everlasting ammunition will be used against creatures with a "harmless" or "mostly harmless" challenge rating. There was a small bug in the previous implementation and it didn't take challenge rating into account, so autoammo would waste better ammo on harmless creatures. Autoammo can be toggled with CTRL + Q.
- Hoopak can be used for reach attacks and shoot attacks. If the DPR of the shoot attack is higher than the DPR of a reach attack, then a shoot attack is made when distance to target is 2 (or at distance 1-2 if you have the "Close Combat Ranged" talent).
- The area of effect of "Chain Lightning" talent and wand changed to "chain". Targets can now try to dodge the effect.
- Dodging vs spell damage now takes the spellcaster's Magic-skill into account. The higher the caster's Magic-skill is, the more difficult the spell is to dodge.
- Removed kick attack from playable character races. Unarmed fighting isn't really a thing for the player character, and previously punch + kick attacks in the beginning of the game were more powerful than most weapons.
- You can see skill and talent progression when you mouse over the Mind-ability in the character sheet.
- In-game Zorbupedia has a talent progression table in the talents info section.
- Changed weapon enchantment a bit:
- You can now safely enchant a weapon with 4 enchantments, and every enchantment point above 4 decreases the enchantment chance by 15 percentage points. Plusses, extra elemental damage points, holy-/returning-/vampiric-properties, and on-hit effects count as enchantments.
- With the "Expert Enchanter" talent you can now safely enchant weapons with 9 enchantments. Every enchantment point above 9 decreases the enchantment chance by 15 percentage points. This talent enables armor enchanting without any restrictions.
- You can no longer enchant a weapon with a "Scroll of (element) Weapon)" if the weapon already has that damage element.
- New enchant scroll: Scroll of Returning Shield. You need the "Shield Bash" talent to throw a returning shield.
- New item: Carillo Express Card. Included in the items from the "Silver Spoon" talent. With the card, you will automatically get discount from the regular shops in Carillo. The card has charges which can be used to teleport the party to the Carillo teleporter. The card vanishes once the charges run out.
- New item: "Unearthed Arcana" book (Halaster's diary) has finally some content. Some new text added to "Dungeon Master's Guide" as well.
- New item: Wand of Wind. Conjures forth a strong gust of wind, which extinguishes lightsources and disperses cloud effects in 15 tile radius. Environment lightsources (torches, braziers, etc.) and lightsources carried by creatures are affected. Creatures whose lightsources are extinguished won't be able to relight them for a small duration (10-15 rounds).
- New item: Arrow of Extinguishing / Bullet of Extinguishing. Ammunition that can extinguish lightsources. Environment lightsources (torches, braziers, etc.) and lightsources carried by creatures can be targeted. A creature whose lightsource is extinguished won't be able to relight it for a small duration (10-15 rounds). If you have enabled autoammo then this ammunition will be automatically chosen when the target cursor is on an environment lightsource.
- New character archetype (quickstart character type): "Noble". Has the "Silver Spoon" talent which includes the new Carillo Express card.
- Small adjustments to character archetypes.
- Some new monsters. The nastiest new one probably is the "Sentinel", which on a successful hit teleports the target to the most dangerous location on the level.
- The magic lamp djinni's inventory has now ammunition and some random devices (wands, horns, figurines). The djinni's inventory is different on each summoning, so you might have only one chance to buy certain items.
- Companion / monster AI tweaks.
- Death splash animation on by defaut. If you want the old skull death animation, uncheck "Death splash animation" from the settings. Several new death splash animations added.
- Fixed a bug where items from the "Silver Spoon" talent weren't always created.
- Fixed a bug where the rising indicator text was rendered over a wrong creature tile.
- Fixed a rare bug where the dungeon level was completely explored, but no XP award for exploration was given.
- Lots of other small tweaks here and there.
- Leaderboard has been reset. The previous leaderboard can be found here.
Finally wrote some text to Halaster's diary, you can read it online
here. Spoilers obviously!
www.zorbus.net
