Version 41946 Release Notes for Sins of a Dark Age January 13 2015

New MatchMaking

Siege 5v5 Normal Blind Pick



Duel 1v1 Scrimmage Blind Pick

Select either Normal or Scrimmage (and Ranked in the future).



Normal games cannot be abandoned by players, but they will not affect your ranking. They are for playing a real game without the pressure of moving up or down the leaderboard.



Scrimmage games can be abandoned by players at any time. They are for playing around while waiting for a ranked or normal game.



Ranked games cannot be abandoned by players. Winning or losing these games affects your ranking. Ranked games are not yet available.

Select either Siege or Duel.



Siege: Two teams of five heroes each compete to destroy the enemy team's base. Includes quests and three lanes. Estimated duration: 30-60 minutes.



Duel: Compete in a battle of skill with one or two heroes on each team. The first team to kill enough enemy minions or heroes, or to destroy the enemy tower will win. Estimated duration: 5-15 minutes.

Siege: Select either 5v5 or 5vAi.



Duel: Select either 1v1 or 2v2.

The default pick is Blind: Heroes may be picked in any order. The choices are hidden from the enemy team.



In the future other Pick Modes (such as Open Draft) will be added.

Twitch

Sins of a Dark Age Twitch streamers can now give gifts to viewers. Each official streamer will receive a special button that will randomly select a valid viewer and give them a Sins of a Dark Age gift. These may include crafting material bundles, recipes, or even a Hero Skin! The more viewers you have the better the reward. Once used, the gifting power will go on cooldown. We hope this will help tighten the relationship between streamer, viewer and Soada.



To be eligible for a gift a viewer must own Soada, have logged into Twitch at least once from Soada, and must not be Viced. You do not have to stay logged into Twitch from Soada to receive gifts. You can receive them while watching streams from any device. Developers are also blocked from receiving gifts.



As this is a new concept, you should expect further improvements, reward adjustments, viewer threshold adjustments and other balancing changes. We would appreciate as much feedback as possible.



To become an official streamer please write streamer@ironcladgames.com. Please include your Steam account name and your Twitch account name. You must also log into Twitch from within Soada (Options->Twitch) at least once.



Official streamers are expected to behave politely and professionally during their streams and when playing Soada. We reserve the right to revoke your official streaming status.



Logging in to twitch will now auto close the dialog (and escape menu underneath).



Twitch chat right click now supports all common actions.



Added Twitch chat member tooltips.



Twitch chat members that are subscribed to a channel now sort above non-subscribers.



Removed in-game screen capture. See this developer blog for details.



The "Watch" button now has a banner indicating the number of live streamers to help direct attention to the live streams.



Further details: http://soada.wikia.com/wiki/Twitch_Integration

New Hero Kit Normalization

Rather than scaling back higher level players' hero kits to the same points as the lowest level player, all lower level players are now given incremental bonuses to all nine attributes that are proportional to how many fewer attribute points they have to allocate compared to the highest level player.

Heroes

No longer grants Attack Speed.



Now grants Slivus 6 (+6 per level) bonus damage on basic attacks vs heroes and 9 (+9 per level) bonus damage on basic attacks vs neutral monsters.



Movement Speed increased to 15% from 10%, but it now decays over 3 seconds.

Healing from damage dealt reduced to 20% from 25%.

Slow no longer becomes more powerful based on its duration.



The initial Slow and Damage amplification have been reduced, but now stack up to 4 times when Slivus deals damage to his poisoned target with basic attacks and abilities.



Slow per stack is 7.5%/10%/12.5%/15%



Damage amplification per stack is 1.25%/2.5%/3.75%/5%



Cooldown increased to 12 from 10 seconds.

Bonus damage changed to 5.25/6.375/7.5 Physical Damage per percent of target's missing Health instead of 0.286/0.333/0.4 per point of target's missing Health.

Linear acceleration, angular acceleration, and angular max speed all increased to improve responsiveness (in part to allow for better ADC behavior).



Added new voice dialog for Lithoron, Ziri, Lassidar, and Ermuk.



Fixed Grugg's Ham Fisted tooltip displaying Stun Duration instead of the correct Root Duration.



Fixed a bug where the Skalla's bleed would start as soon as the attack started rather than when it struck the target.



Fixed a bug where Lord Dekain's Plague Token was being applied at the start of the empowered attack instead of when it landed.



Added a new effect for Lord Dekain's passive (Festering Plague).



Grugg's Ham Fisted now displays different buff icons depending on whether his next attack will proc the passive effect or not.



Fixed Khagas's Bullseye taking one more attack to fully stack than intended.



Fixed Ziri skin names not showing up correctly during Avatar selection.



Added new Lore Books for Rachna, Serewyn, and Lithoron.



Added charge stacking notification buffs (next attack triggers bonus from x attacks).



Fixed a bug where abilities that create stationary effects (e.g. Lord Dekain's Toxic Bile, Lithoron's Tremor, etc) would not be visible even when their area of effect was partially revealed to the player.



Consecutive attack moves no longer cause your Hero's attacks to act erratically.

Units

Fixed Leaf Stingers having more Health and Magic Resistance and awarding more gold and experience than intended.



Fixed Hydra not granting stacks towards transforming Nerroth's Hide into Nerroth-Slayer's Mail.



Jungle creeps will now return to their spawn positions if they enter a lane.



Updated Horen ranged animations and sound effects.



Advanced Melee wave minions are now called "Demons".

Items

Items that trigger effects when abilities are used no longer do so for secondary activations of abilities (e.g. turning off Beroth's Flailing Vines, dispersing Lithoron's Stone Shield, etc).



Fix missing DeathSummary information for Nerroth's Fangs.



Adventurer's items can now be found in the in-game shop with the search term 'quest'

Quests

Slay the Dragon: Dragon's health reduced to 17600/25200/32800/40400/48000 from 18500/26500/34500/42500/50500



Divine Lost Army: Drop off points have been moved slightly closer to each team's side of the map.



Troll's Treasure: Earliest possible appearance raised to the third quest from the second quest.



Raise your Gryphon quest: Critter Meat can now be manually dropped



Fixed quest victory Gryphon's Gust ability not being cast.



Fixed tooltip rounding error with Necromancer quest.

Misc Gameplay

Ai Golems now use Hero Kits.



Ai Golem player slots now render their hero kit in the tooltip.



All heroes in "Try Hero" mode (players and the Ai Golems) now have proper hero kits, which allows player to have an actual set of "recommended items" listed.



Improved Bait Offering Altar effects.



Bait Offering Altar effects are no longer visible to players who are not in detection range.



Enemy heroes no longer spawn a minor alert announcing their death if they died to neutral units while undetected.



Hydra will now spawn a minor alert announcing its death if it died to the enemy team while detected.

FrontEnd

You can no longer right click on players to see their name while in the pre-game lobby.



Fixed bug where assembly dialog player icon states weren't being reset for the next time the dialog pops



Map region picker panel now has different colors for picked and hover over.



Can now create a party and invite players in one action using the right click menu.



Fixed a bug with opening the wrong Fellowship Bundle.



Fellowship Bundles now show who sent them in their tooltip.



Try Hero button now has proper tooltip and error text as to why it is disabled (usually because the player is in a game already).



Quick play has been removed from the home page to focus attention on the new match making options until the new homepage is done.



Profile panel's "Try Hero" button now correctly doesn't render when in the "Edit Hero" tab.

HUD and User Interface

Chat Window is now anchored in the bottom left corner and has room for more text.



Chat window, score screen, and shop can now be scaled in addition to the core HUD and minimap.



All HUD scaling elements are now scaled independently (i.e changing one doesn't affect the others).



The minimap can now be relocated to the bottom left of the HUD.



Capture progress bars are now properly hidden if the capturer is not detected by your team.



It is possible to bind a key to multiple commands again, but now a new dialog asks you what you want to do when you've done a multiple key binding (keep all commands bound to that key, clear all old commands bound to that key, cancel the new binding).



Focus on Friendly Hero inputs are now implemented and mapped to F1 - F5.



The text for "Starting Items", "Essential Items" and "Final Build" are now all prefixed by "Recommended".



"Hero Attack" keybinding renamed to "Hero Attack Move".



Hero Attack Move now has both 'A' and 'T' keys as default bindings.



Large Monster, Epic Monster, Plant Altar, and Beast Altar now appear as tags on tooltips for the appropriate units.



Pickup entities now have a yellow outline that pulses to help indicate their pickupability.



Fixed Refuge Damage Burst upgrade's tooltip formatting.



Removed obsolete "ControlGroupInput" and all related inputs.



Fixed a number of permanent passive buffs erroneously displaying a duration in their tooltip.



Fixed certain quest buffs erroneously displaying a duration value in their tooltips.



Removed the PH tag from Heartsap Amulet.

Optimizations and Performance

Added new graphic options to reduce the quality of unit, terrain prop, terrain surface, and effect textures. This will help with older video cards. More rendering options and optimizations are in progress.

Misc

AFK detection has been improved.



Various improvements to the Sunken Forest (5v5) map artwork.



Fixed bug where players wouldn't receive a virtue level until the next time they gained virtue points if their point total was exactly the number required.



Fix rejoining games sometimes playing incorrect effects.



Players can now relogin in ICO if disconnected.



Setting showChannelMemberJoinMessges is now disabled by default.



Lore text improvements.



Fixed various typos.



Fix bug with attacks on Dire Verics and Wood Imps were showing impacts far away from the mesh.



Fixed an implementation error with one of the Chronicler's lines for 2v2 Duel (At 4 hero kills, he said "the enemy hero cannot take much more" even though there are 2 enemy heroes.)



Fixed floating rocks at center bridge from disappearing.



Skins selections are now respected when entering Try Hero mode.

Warning

Keybindings will be reset. Sorry this has happened the last few updates but the system is still in flux.

Addendum

Fixed enemy towers potentially not showing up in quest status window.



Fixed Duel towers potentially not being displayed in the top bar.



Fixed AOE's affecting twice their intended radius.

Matchmaking has been redesigned to allow for future queue types, game types, player modes, pick modes and maps. Players can now define any combination of searches and store up to five pages of different search combinations. The default search page contains two searches:Players can design their own search items by choosing from the following options: