Update #40 Release Notes May 13 2015

He came from the deep

The Mythical skin Deep Sea Lithoron has been released.



Features

Custom ability visual and audio effects.

Custom ambient sounds during various animations.



Rewards

Improved the contents of chests that can be opened with purchased keys.



Fixed bug where Twitter reward chests were not being delivered. If you re-register your account it will appear in your inventory.

Heroes

Atasha

Updated some of her Ability Icons to match the rest of them.

Fixed bug where Atasha's empowered abilities were not respecting the advanced casting settings. Only the normal abilities were. Thanks reddit!

Drengar

Fixed a bug where he would spam his vocal dialog whenever he was participating in the Valkryn's Watch quest.

Khagas

Fixed an incorrect piece of text in his Blinding Shot's buff tooltip.

Vallamere

Fixed an incorrect double description in his Two Handed Sword gear's tooltip.



Items

Orza's Soulbinder

Improved the visual effects of the active.



Maps

Sunken Forest (Siege Map)

The ritual chanting of the Witches in the Horen team's well is now audible.

The destroyed Horen tower now looks more "destroyed" to prevent any confusion.

Fixed bug where Wisp Queen could continue casting Aqua Jet while Stunned or Silenced.

Fixed bug where Heaven Commander in Divine Lost Army quest could ascend while he was disabled.

Fixed bug where you couldn't right click to capture a Necromancer's coffin that wasn't detected.

Heaven Escort quest now uses the proper capture bar visuals when the commander is channeling.

(Siege Map)

Match Making

Improved the match making algorithm so that it should be much quicker for parties to find matches.



Fixed some banning issues for clients who can't connect to games through no fault of their own (e.g. network reasons).

Tutorials

General

It should now take less time to complete both tutorials.

Your allied Ai Golems will now be "Hard Ai" and the enemy will remain "Easy Ai".

A warning dialog has been added to match searching if you haven't completed tutorials as you will be missing valuable Hero Gear.

Duel Tutorial

Hero kill victory condition reduced to 3 kills from 5

Minion kill victory condition reduced to 100 from 175

Enemy tower Health reduced to 2550 from 4200

Siege Tutorial

Now grants XP passively and has increased passive income.

Enemy Tower Health reduced to 1200 from 2550

Enemy Keep Tower Health reduced to 1000 from 2200

Quest order is now consistent instead of randomly generated (in order to guarantee shorter quests).



Performance

Numerous optimizations (with more to come soon!)



Disabled voice chat by default as this can be a real CPU hog while streaming.



Remove the "recommended" tag on virtual full screen. Many machines will actually perform substantially better with "exclusive fullscreen". If you are having FPS issues give Exclusive fullscreen a shot.



Added some loading screen optimizations. This should reduce cases of "Program is not responding". Note that if you do receive this warning the game will most likely still load.

Twitch

Fixed bug with displaying the incorrect Twitch viewer count in-game.



Fixed bug where you couldn't give out Twitch Gifts unless you logged in with your Twitch username in lowercase.



Added a "thumbs up" icon to the streamer upvote button.



Fixed bug where Twitch streamers where getting "unknown" has upvoted your stream.



The upvote button now displays as disabled if you already voted for the streamer.



Moved the default position of the Twitch window so it doesn't overlap the top bar. You will need to type "/resetlayout" in chat to get the new default position.

User Interface

New Dialogs

Added a new "Quit Match" dialog, that will show up whenever a player attempts to quit an unfinished match (or the Hero Select Lobby), asking for confirmation that they really want to abandon their teammates.

Server patches now nicely logout all users with a friendly message box on why they are being disconnected.

Options/Settings

Tooltips can be scaled in the options->hud dialog to make them easier to read.

Added a setting in the Controls tab of the Options, that toggles the in-game Camera's zoom being controlled by the mouse wheel.

Front End Chat

Auto joined chat channels will now auto-shard when they reach their new max size of 250.

Passworded chat channels are now supported. If you create a channel with a password it will be considered private by default (won't show up in the join channel dialog listbox).

Changed the chat member type sorting and name color coding to give steam friends higher sort priority than before. New priority order is: Self (Gold), Party Member (Blue), Steam Friend (Green), Developer (Red), Moderator (Pink), Community Contributor (Purple), Everyone else (Grey).

General

"Edit Hero" has been renamed to "Equip Hero"

Fixed bug in the Hero selection lobby where Hero ability icons showed up but no mesh was visible.

Added 'Community Contributor' as a specialized chat name colour, and added a 'Community Contributor' tag for Player tooltips.

The View Stats and reward boxes now come up at the correct time at the end of a match.

The Post Game screen now shows the proper defeat underlay in the top left corner.

Advanced casting icons for items and glyphs implemented, as well as tooltip icon for advanced casting button.

All ComboBoxes no longer respond to mouse wheel events when focused so that the nearby Listboxes can be scrolled.



Hud

Chat

Fixed steam chat not handling enter (would give invalid command error). Now just closes the window as what is probably expected.

Typing "/resetlayout" in chat works for all 3 chat windows (Match, Steam & Twitch) now (i.e: it will reset them all).



Replays

Revamp of the Top Rated Replays list box to be much nicer looking and shows heroes in teams.



Added Top Rated Replays listbox tooltip.

Languages

Updates to Russian text.

*** WARNING ***

Amendment

Fixed major performance issue caused by bug in General Chat.

All display related settings will be reset. This should be rare and steps were taken this update to make it more rare.