Hey everyone!

Here in a few hours we’ll be putting out Patch 5.0, which includes the new Shard Dungeons and completes our Sprint Three content. For more details on the Shard Dungeons system including how it all works, please take a look at the preview blog post we posted a few days ago.

Here are the patch notes:

Introduced Shard Dungeons , our new high-level content for advanced players. Each time you enter a shard dungeon you’ll take on a scaled-up version of our existing dungeons, where the monsters have increased health and damage. Work your way up the ladder tackling more and more difficult content for better rewards!

, our new high-level content for advanced players. Each time you enter a shard dungeon you’ll take on a scaled-up version of our existing dungeons, where the monsters have increased health and damage. Work your way up the ladder tackling more and more difficult content for better rewards! Introduced Mutations , which are special effects which are active while doing Shard Dungeons. There are Major and Minor mutations. As you advance up the ladder of the Shard Dungeon levels, you will find more and more of these activating to increase the challenge of your run.

, which are special effects which are active while doing Shard Dungeons. There are Major and Minor mutations. As you advance up the ladder of the Shard Dungeon levels, you will find more and more of these activating to increase the challenge of your run. Complete the Shard Dungeon in less than 30 minutes to receive an upgraded shard. If you don’t complete it in 30 minutes you are still eligible to receive loot at the end of the dungeon run, so it’s always worth finishing the dungeon if you can!

Slow effects on monsters now have a diminishing return if the monsters has been slowed for more than 10 seconds continuously while trying to reach a target. The duration of the buff is not affected (to avoid affecting combos and tilesets), but the monster will begin to regain movement speed even though the Slow buff is applied.

Introduced two new Tiers of Armor to the game, which will drop from Shard Dungeons 1-5 and 6-10 respectively. This is Epic-level Armor with a new look inspired by the Tadu Mines. Armor will scale linearly in the Shard Dungeons from Levels 20.3 through 21.

Weapons will also scale from 20.3 through 21, however the Epic-level weapons retain their same model.

Introduced new Legendary weapons to the game. You have a chance to get Legendary weapons beginning at the Level 3 Shard Dungeon. Your chances to get a Legendary weapon increase significantly with each additional shard level.

Legendary weapons receive two random affixes from the same available pool as Epic weapons (see note below).

You receive one Guaranteed Roll per day for the Shard Dungeons as a whole. Every time that you are eligible to receive a drop at the end of a shard dungeon, if you haven’t used your Guaranteed Roll yet for the day you will be asked if you want to use it. If you do so you will get a guaranteed drop from the current Shard Level you are doing.

Notes on Shard Dungeon Loot

A few things to note specifically about looting in the new Shard Dungeons:

You will not receive any loot while running the shard dungeon from enemies directly. Instead, once the dungeon is complete (by killing all the bosses in the dungeon as well as a set amount of other enemies), you will receive a Boss Chest at your current location (note that right now these literally spawn right where you are so you’ll have to move to actually loot it, but we’re working on that.).

This “initial roll” has the same chance to give you a drop as the combined chance of killing two bosses. Or, put another way it’s double the chance of a normal boss drop.

In addition to that, a random member of your party will be guaranteed to get a drop from this initial roll if you have a 4+ player party. Everyone’s chance at this guaranteed drop is 100% equal, it does not take into account contribution done during the dungeon run.

After receiving either an equipment drop or “pity dram” from the initial roll, you can choose to spend your Guaranteed Roll to get another Boss Chest if you desire. Note that if you spawn this second chest before looting the first, the tooltip may not appear outside of the chest – it still has an item inside of it, though.

With the changes we made to the loot system last week, if you get DC’ed after the boss chest has spawned you can still re-connect and receive the chest. However, you must be connected and inside the dungeon when the last boss/enemy is killed to “complete” the Shard Dungeon in order to get the loot drop, so keep that in mind.

In addition to the above, the Shard Dungeon “marks” who is in the dungeon currently once at least one boss is killed and 40% of the other enemies are defeated. Only those people in the dungeon at that time are eligible to receive loot at the end of the dungeon. So if you need to replace a member of the party after that point, they can help you finish the dungeon but they will not receive any loot.

A Note on Legendary Weapons

We have decided to revert back to our original plan of having Legendary Weapons receive two random affixes from the pool of available Epic affixes. We started down the path of having a specific affix for each Weapon and it just wasn’t working well for what we wanted to do…the mechanics were very class-specific and at that point felt like they should just be part of the Talents system if that’s what we wanted to do.

However, at the same time introducing the need to grind to a) get a Legendary weapon, b) have good secondary stats, and c) get not one but TWO ideal affixes is just a little too much RNG for anyone. So in the next couple of weeks we will be introducing a system which allows you to spend Shards from breaking down weapons to re-roll the Affix(es) on your existing weapons. We don’t have all the details yet on how exactly this will work, but generally speaking your goal for now should be to concentrate on getting the best-stat Legendary weapon you can and then saving any shards from breaking down gear so that you will have them available to spend to re-roll the Affixes later. This system will also work for Epic-level gear as well.

A Note on Balancing

We have tuned this content, I hope, to be rather difficult. We will be monitoring the progress of the various groups attempting the content throughout today and this weekend and make further tuning changes as needed to make sure that the content is challenging but doable. So please feel free to share your feedback on how you’re finding the content as you start playing today, and we’ll go from there.

Thanks and I hope you’re all looking forward to the new content!