Highlights

New Zone: Barovia

It all starts with Neverember's request to appease a noble patron, but soon after, you find yourself in the haunted realm of Barovia. Though the sun may never fully shine here, the day is still much safer than the night. Protect the village from the monsters in the mists, help the townsfolk regain hope, and prepare to face the ruler of this realm.

Ravenloft Developer Blog: Story & Zone

Barovia - A Developer's Perspective

Ravenloft Developer Blog: Creatures of Barovia

Ravenloft Dev Blog - Rewards To Die For

Developer Blog: Undying Lockbox

New Campaign: Ravenloft

Advance through the storyline surrounding Barovia and gain three objects of power to prepare yourself to fight Strahd. A new set of four boons accompanies this campaign, along with a straightforward approach from the mists to Castle Ravenloft.

Ravenloft Campaign Developer Blog

New Dungeon: Castle Ravenloft

Once you have gained the necessary artifacts and assisted the townsfolk, you will be given the opportunity to enter Castle Ravenloft itself. Battle against hordes of vampires, waves of werewolves, and enjoy the ball! It will be your best opportunity to defeat Count Strahd von Zarovich.

Castle Ravenloft - Developer Blog

Developer Blog: The Art of Castle Ravenloft

Reimagined Hunt Experience

The monsters in the mists are much cleverer than before. This time, the hunt will take you across Barovia! Bring a wanted poster to Madam Eva to choose your target, present up to three Tarokka cards for added challenges with added rewards, and embark on an instanced hunt alone or with your friends.

Developer Blog: The Monster Hunts of Barovia

Astral Diamond Refinement Changes

Astral Diamonds are now more easily accessible across a player's entire account! The Shared Bank, accessible at the bank in Protector's Enclave, can now store Astral Diamonds. In addition, regardless of character, an account can refine up to 100,000 Astral Diamonds per day.

More info in the patch notes below, and at: Official Feedback Thread: Astral Diamonds

Loot Experience Update

The Need / Greed prompt will now appear much less frequently, saving precious screen space. All items that are not Bind on Pickup, and would previously have made this prompt appear, will now cause all party members to auto-roll Need if they could use it, and Greed if they cannot.

More info in the patch notes below, and at: Official Feedback Thread: Need/Greed Rolling

Updated Bonus RP Event

The Bonus RP event has been improved! Not only are more Refinement Points awarded at a time, players may also spend Astral Diamonds to boost their RP drop rates even further, up to five times the normal rate. In addition, players now receive bonus rewards for reaching certain milestones on the way to the event's cap!

More info at: Official Feedback Thread: Bonus RP Event Changes

Quest Path Improvements

Updates have been made to the algorithm that automatically selects which quest is tracked for the Quest Path. Players will still be able to override this through their Quest Journal or double-clicking on quests in the Quest Tracker, but the default should now be more intuitive.

More info at: Official Feedback Thread: Quest Path Prioritization and Party Update

Random Queues

Thanks to the feedback we've received, we've adjusted Random Queues to be more in-line with the desires of the community. The queue categories have been adjusted to match various bands of difficulty, regardless of type. The "once per day" bonuses have also been made once-per-account rather than once-per-character, and the value of those bonuses has increased.

More info at: Official Feedback Thread: Random Queues

Level Scaling Adjustments

The level scaling algorithm has been updated! When players are level-scaled up or down to the level of a dungeon, skirmish, or other content, this should bring the difficulty more in-line with the experience of players who engage in the content at level. In addition, Enchantments will also scale to a maximum rank depending on the content. This will make low-level dungeons less of a breeze for high-level players, but should still be fun.

More info at: Official Feedback Thread: Level Scaling Adjustments

Known Issues

General

In level-scaled content, Companion gear and enchantments are scaled to a level and rank lower than expected. In addition, under certain circumstances, armor and weapon enhancements also may temporarily stop functioning in level-scaled content.

Release Notes

Content and Environment

General

A new Leaderboard season is now active.

Campfires in Rothé Valley can now properly be used to swap loadouts.

Neverdeath Graveyard: Dragon Attack: Party members can now properly leave the instance once it's complete.

Fiery Pit: Rocks Fall: Reinforcements now run in to this Heroic Encounter rather than simply spawning.

Lonelywood: The quest path can now properly lead to one of the Untapped Resource nodes.

Maze Engine: Depths of Madness: Linu La'neral now consistently goes prone when reduced to zero HP.

No Crevice Untouched: The second campfire in this instance now properly allows respawns.

Protector's Enclave: The Foundry door near the marketplace has moved across the street, as Lord Neverember has claimed the property on some legal pretext or another.

Soshenstar: A scrying stone and sahha ball are no longer stuck behind collision.

The "2x Seals" event no longer mentions retired Seals.

Various items that grant Lore entries on pickup now properly do so when accepted from the mail or account shared bank.

Various typos and text-VO inconsistencies have been addressed or improved.

Various objects have had their collision adjusted. Player-facing changes should be minimal.

Dungeons, Skirmishes, and Trials

The required item level for the skirmish "Merchant Prince's Folly" has been reduced to 9,000, down from 10,000.

Events

Protector's Jubilee: The quest, A Heartfelt Thanks, no longer incorrectly completes for all party members rather than just the one who claims the crate. It should now be safe to claim a Thank You Crate while in a party.

The names of the Campaign Currency events have been shortened to "2x Currency: [Campaign]"

Combat and Powers

Boons

Elvish Fury: The tooltip for the buff icon now properly says 135 power instead of 20 power.

Elvish Fury: This boon now properly lasts 45 seconds to match its tooltip, down from 60 seconds.

Classes and Balance

Great Weapon Fighter Spinning Strike: The rank 4 version of this power should now correctly increase movement speed. The stamina bar no longer has a chance to become stuck.

Guardian Fighter Bull's Charge no longer sends enemies prone in PvP. PvE functionality is unchanged.

Hunter Ranger Piercing Blades: Now deals damage based on post-mitigation damage instead of pre-mitigation damage.

Scourge Warlock The stamina bar no longer has a chance to become stuck.

Trickster Rogue Shadow of Demise now deals 75% of the damage that triggered it as a 5-second Damage over Time (DoT) effect. When Shadow of Demise ends, it now deals 75% of the damage dealt over its duration, increased from 50%. However, this value is now calculated based on mitigated damage, rather than damage before mitigation. As a result, compared to before, Shadow of Demise deals less damage against enemies with high damage reduction, and more damage against enemies with low damage reduction. Shadowborn: This feat now provides a bonus of 7/14/21/28/35% on your next strike after stealth, increased from 5/10/15/20/25%. Smoke Bomb: This power's CC now works with diminishing returns in PvP.



Enchantments and Enhancements

In an effort to make weapon enchantments simpler to understand and to make their tooltips more accurate, we've updated the damage values of certain weapon enchantments. Weapon enchantments that added additional percentages of damage to a player's attacks have been adjusted to match their tooltips. Many weapon enchantment damage percentages had been modified by the speed of the power. This modifier has been removed, and the net result should be negligible or a slight increase in some cases for these weapon enchantments. Affected enchantments include: Terror, Lightning, Lifedrinker, Holy Avenger, Frost, Flaming, Feytouched, Dread, Bronzewood and Bilethorn.

Thunderhead Enchantment: Stun duration changed to be 2.5 seconds for ranks 7/8/9/10/11.

Thunderhead Enchantment: Stun duration changed to 3 seconds for ranks 12/13.

Thunderhead Enchantment: Rank 13 has had its chance to proc increased to 55% (up from 50%).

Thunderhead Enchantment: Fixed an issue where the Sparks portion of Ranks 11/12/13 did not properly have an Internal Cooldown.

Thunderhead Enchantment: Internal Cooldown of Sparks reduced to 2 seconds (down from 10 seconds).

Thunderhead Enchantment: Fixed an issue where this could proc multiple times in a row.

Thunderhead Enchantment: Fixed an issue where this could deal damage twice to enemies in close proximity.

Item Powers

Batiri Shaman Mask: This item's effect now has a 100% chance to trigger and has an internal cooldown of 3 minutes.

Boots of the Alpha: This item's effect now has a 100% chance to trigger and has an internal cooldown of 45 seconds.

Cambist's Gauntlets: This item's effect now has a 10 second internal cooldown, and the coin cost is now 5 silver, increased from 3 silver 50 copper.

Chitters' Fangs can no longer multi-proc before its internal cooldown sets in.

Item powers and artifact powers now more consistently go on cooldown if animation-cancelled after the powers take effect.

Mane of the Manticore can no longer multi-proc before its internal cooldown sets in.

General

The Dragonborn trait tooltip now properly states that it boosts Critical Strike, not Critical Severity. The functionality has not been changed.

Enemies and Encounters

General

Omu: The Tyrant now vomits more consistently. Gross.

Throne of the Dwarven Gods: Thoon Hulks are now immune to crowd control while using their charge power.

Items and Economy

General

+5 gear from Illusionist's Gambit now have an Offense slot instead of an Overload slot. Overload Enchantments that were slotted into this gear will be mailed back to the character who owned them.

Bag of Holes is now in the "Miscellaneous" Auction House category.

Decanter of Atropal Essence, when awarded in Cradle of the Death God, is now Bind on Equip.

Draconic Guises: These items have had their stats increased to better match similar dungeon rewards.

Merchant Prince's Folly now drops the companion and mount significantly less frequently.

Power Points can no longer be gained after the character already has 124 of them.

Relic Armor and Restoration items have been removed from the Seals store, and moved instead to the Storm King's Thunder campaign store. In the move, the costs of Restoration items have been adjusted.

Seals of the Brave are now awarded instead of Seals of the Protector.

Seals of the Brave no longer have a weekly cap.

Strongholds: The Barracks now uses Adventurer's Shards of Power rather than Conquerer's Shards of Power.

Vivified Primal Armor: The item level of this gear has been raised to 535, increased from 510.

Artifacts

Apocalypse Dagger: This artifact is now part of a new set bonus.

Blood Crystal Raven Skull: This artifact is now part of a new set bonus.

Thayan Book of the Dead: This artifact is now part of a new set bonus.

Zen Market

Knox's Adventure Recruitment Order has been changed to Knox's Veteran Recruitment Order. Characters created through this order will be outfitted with improved gear and more campaign completion tokens.

Retrain Token purchases have been reduced in price. See "Character Sheet - Retrain" in the UI notes below.

The Uncommon-quality mounts that were removed from the Zen Market can now properly be reclaimed from the Zen Market if they had previously been purchased.

User Interface

General

The login screen has updated music.

The "Uncommon" (Green) quality color is now a little darker to improve readability on light backgrounds such as the Quest Journal.

Various cosmetic fixes have been made to an assortment of interface elements.

Astral Diamond Changes

The Shared Bank can now store refined Astral Diamonds. Any character on an account can deposit or withdraw from this bank.

The individual character limit on refining Raw Astral Diamonds has been removed, and instead, there is now an account-wide cap of 100,000 Astral Diamonds refined per day.

Developer note: This is intended to improve quality of life and AD gain potential for most of our players, while slowing down the overall amount of AD flowing into the Astral Diamond Exchange. This does lower the AD income potential of players who log into many different characters to accumulate AD, but we hope the gameplay experience is improved by removing that as a perceived requirement to maximize efficiency.

Auction House

The green triangle now correctly only appears on the column that's being used to sort.

Bank

Companion Upgrade Tokens can now be deposited into and withdrawn from the Shared Bank.

Character Select

The Character Select screen has been overhauled. An options menu can now be pulled up for each individual character, a character can be marked as a "main," and characters can now be sorted.

Character Sheet

Boon categories now highlight if the character has unspent Boon Points in that category.

The Powers tab no longer flashes on any screen when the player has maxed-out Power Points.

Weapon and Armor Enhancements can now have their visual effects disabled.

Character Sheet - Retrain

All occurrences of "respec" in the game have been changed to "retrain" for consistency. Sadly, this will result in our autocorrect giving us a little less respect.

Powers, Feats, Ability Scores, and Boons are now retrained separately.

In addition, individual boon trees can be retrained separately.

When retraining Feats, Boons, or Ability Scores, the interface now leaves the points where they had previously been spent, allowing for easier individual tweaks. Players who want to start fresh can do so by switching character sheet categories or closing and reopening the interface after initiating the retrain.

Astral Diamond costs to retrain at level 70 are 60,000 AD for each category, or 10,000 for a single boon tree.

Retrain Tokens are now priced at 100 Zen, down from 300. Players who already possess purchased Retrain Tokens will be granted two additional tokens for each that they own.

Retrain Tokens are now tracked in the Wealth tab of the inventory, if the character has any available.

When removing lower-tier Feat Points that have been applied but not committed, the interface will now display a prompt to automatically remove any higher-tier Feat Points rather than simply telling the player that they cannot.

Convert RP

Equipment no longer shows a "compare to equipped" tooltip when selecting gear for RP conversion.

Guild

The guild activity log now properly shows join messages after a related player has left the guild.

Home Page

The Home Page has been overhauled to be more clearly useful for event awareness and in-game feature information.

When playing for the first time after a long break, players will have the option to teleport a character back to a safe area so they can catch up on changes to the game.

HUD

The "Set Loot Mode" option now always appears on your portrait's context menu.

Inspect

When inspecting companions, equipped gear now consistently displays.

When inspecting companions, the level requirement for certain slots is no longer inaccurate.

Journal and Quest Tracker

The Journal now shows the number of party members who are on a given quest.

The Journal now shows which quest the party leader has selected, if they have manually selected a quest to show the Quest Path.

If the Quest Path is locked to an instance's quest, the quest tracker will now consistently show the Quest Path indicator when appropriate.

While in a group, the player can now direct their Quest Path individually.

Quests are no longer automatically shared with party members when trying to set a Quest Path.

Mail

If the player has written text into the Body field, attempting to close the Mail window will cause a confirmation prompt to appear.

Options

Calculations for certain automatic graphics settings have been adjusted.

The GPU slider should now have finer controls on the lower end of the spectrum.

Queues

If a player is in a queue with one character, then logs on with a different character, the initial character is now removed from the queue. This removal can potentially incur a leaver penalty if leaving that queue normally would do the same thing. This change should not affect Private Queues.

The Leaver penalty now affects an entire account, rather than just the character who left.

Vote Kick no longer becomes stuck under certain circumstances, such as kicking offline players.

Zen Market

All categories are now displayed with two columns, rather than three. (This was already true for some locales.)

If a player would have purchases bound to their account from the Zen Market, there is now a second prompt to warn them in case they accidentally advance through the first one.

Art, Animation, and Effects

Character Art

Brown-furred werewolves no longer have a seam and mismatching gray feet.

Chitters' Fangs no longer clip into certain characters' heads.

Energon: This companion now has a slightly more readable portrait.

Pilgrim and Tyrant shields no longer clip into Guardian Fighters' arms.

Various clipping and skinning issues have been addressed.

Visual Effects

Certain chain lightning effects now show less complex visuals for players who didn't cast them. This should improve performance in certain cases.

Duelist's Flurry: This power no longer affects the camera when enemies or summoned companions use it.

"Frozen" effects are no longer quite as huge on Undead Demilich and Greater Demilich enemies.

Galeb Duhr: This companion's stone-throwing power no longer hits performance quite as hard as it used to.

Scourge Warlock: Tyrannical Threat's visuals will now appear less complex to players who didn't cast it. This should improve performance a little bit in cases where multiple Scourge Warlocks are playing at the same time.

Spider egg sacs no longer awkwardly fall over when destroyed.

Localization

General

The Water Archon companion's "Wave" appearance is no longer necessarily localized with the same word as the "Wave" emote.

Performance and Stability

General