Bludgeons

This rework introduces 9 new unlocks to the Bludgeons tree.

As the parent tree to Maces, Staffs, and Flails, it was important to include bonuses that contribute to a variety of builds while maintaining thematic coherence.

So, what defines the Bludgeons playstyle? While Blades focus on attrition through blood loss (DoTs) and avoidance (Parry/Dodge), Bludgeons excel at crowd control, defense reduction, and chaotic bursts of massive damage.

Conceptually, the tree contains two distinct paths:

On the left path, you will find debuffs and utility, such as "Head Trauma" and "Pest Control":

The right path embraces chaos, featuring abilities like "Smasher's Delight" alongside a new set of passive upgrades that buff all stances.

At the peak of the tree sits the capstone: Ripple Devastation. This grants a chance to trigger a cascading ripple on all Bludgeon abilities. The resulting "Vibration" is a powerful debuff that spreads to adjacent enemies, continuing the devastation even if you leave the fight.

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Maces

Alongside the Bludgeons rework, the Maces skill has been updated to a skill tree format.

Maces are the kings of on-hit mayhem, capable of dealing double-hits with "The Beatdown" and gaining massive bonuses to stuns and cripples.

7 new ability upgrades have been added, reinforcing this theme while introducing new mechanics. Take Heroic Slam, for instance:

Love sending enemies flying?
 -> Turn walls into AOE damage with Concussive Echo.

Need to fuel for your follow-up?
 -> Refund energy for every enemy hit with Heroic Return.

Likewise, the High Grip stance has been revitalized with two new upgrades, allowing you to specialize it into a defensive "Blurring Speed" buffer or a "Swift Economy" engine for relentless attacks.

With a total of 58 focus points to spend, Maces is now one of the most expansive skill trees in the game. We'll let you discover the rest in-game!

Other Changes

• Updated Cave Wyrm attack sound to make it less annoying and sound more like water.
• Added sound effect for entering a stance: battle trance, fancy footwork, hold firm, mortar stance, unleash fury, street sweeper.
• The travel skill can now also be discovered by entering a desert biome.
• Introduced price scaling for the Chivalry rewards purchased from Altars of Ahnais. Prices now scale up based on the number of times this type of reward was already purchased. This prevents easily raising maximum health by a large number. When stacked, these purchases were more powerful than intended.
• Significantly increased chance of starting town Nerton being connected to the Greenhaven road network (in some cases, due how the map generates, it's still possible to start isolated).
• Changed ranged attack behavior: clicking to attack a distant enemy will now stop movement and attack as soon as the target enters range, rather than walking all the way to the target.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed issue related to how harvested plants display in Fog of War. Before the adjustment, when harvested plants or other map features were refreshed (becoming harvestable/ripe again) while in the fog of war, they would vanish from the map until rediscovered.
• Fixed energy bar in some circumstances not refreshing immediately.
• Fixed weight adjustment (e.g. from Grit enchantment) not shown in storage and shop UI.
• Fixed hotbar ability icon not refreshing when stance is deactivated.
• Fixed game crash due to destruction of larger multi-tile entities such as spider nests or FireStorms. In certain circumstances, these entities could spawn partially out of bounds of the map, which would cause a crash when the entity is later removed or destroyed.
• Fixed enchantment scrolls not being marked as studied when learning the enchantment.
• Fixed books in the inventory not marked as studied if the inventory pane was not open when a book study finishes.
• Fixed item Ayin's Plate having wrong art.
• Fixed numerous female armor items, displaying with male arm, instead of the intended female arm sprites.
• Fixed archery ability "Power Draw" not having any effect when Power Draw was already active. Before the fix, when you activated Power Draw with its effect already present from a previous usage, it did nothing, essentially wasting the activation. Now the effect's duration is refreshed.
• Fixed visual bug related to how leg armor was layered on top of other sprite components, causing the hands or arms to become obscured.
• Fixed upgraded renew ability not showing text "Cures Mutation" as intended (yes, Renew can cure mutation).
• Fixed quest "Blooming Dread" quest log displaying out of order.
• Fixed quest "Item Delivery" quest log missing the location name.
• Fixed quest "Advertising Assistance" quest log missing details for non-english languages.
• Fixed quest "Gremlin Terror" quest log missing the next entry after killing the Gremlin Chief.
• Fixed 6 different quests not showing in the quest log as completed, despite being non-repeatable (our intent is for dynamically generated quests which repeat to not show as completed, to avoid spamming the quest log with repeats).
• For quest "Oracle's Lure", added recently added items as another possible solution to the puzzle (since they made sense).
• Fixed upgrade "Unstoppable" not upgrading the base ability "Wild, Wild Swings" as intended, if the ability was upgraded.
• Fixed upgrade "Unstoppable" issue, causing the the damage received amount to calculate incorrectly.
• Fixed upgrade "Unstoppable" stacks accumulating indefinitely, carrying over stacks from previous battles.
• Fixed unable to sleep if player only had magic skills unlocked and no other skills.
• Fixed unable to sleep when you have travel weariness but hadn't discovered or unlocked any skills, you couldn't use a bed to rest to get rid of the travel weariness.
• Added scrolling to fix skill options going off the screen on the level-up window.
• Fixed buffs from abilities "Second Wind", "Renew", and "Surge of Replenishment" acting on the player for one less turn than intended. The reason was, player's health gain is processed at the start of the player's turn, while status effect turn refresh happened on the end of the player's turn, and status effect were removed before they could act one last required turn. This was fixed by marking these status effects as effects to reduce on start of turn.
• Repeat attacks will no longer trigger if the target is killed on the first attack. This prevents attacking of already killed targets (Note, for multi-target ability attacks there can still be spurious repeat attacks).
• Repeat attacks will no longer trigger when the target is knocked back out of range by the initial attack.
• Fixed combat log reporting a target's death twice if they were killed by a repeat attack.
• Fixed upgrading a Stance ability triggering its exit effects (e.g., Exhausted) even if the stance was not currently active.
• Fixed inaccuracies in systems that rely on time tracking (weariness reduction, study gain) when moving with modified movement speed. Previously, moving faster or slower than default speed could result in the game calculating time passed incorrectly for these systems.
• Fixed previously added character perk "Spot Weakness" inaccessible.
• Fixed interface issue where sub-panes (such as the Mastery Details view) would not properly reopen after loading a quick save.
• Fixed negative resistance values not functioning as intended. Negative resistance (e.g., on Faydes) now increase incoming damage, as intended.
• Fixed an issue where abilities with zero energy cost would incorrectly gain cost if the player possessed ability cost reduction stats.
• Fixed map generation issue causing spider nests to sometimes spawn in inaccessible locations.
• Fixed several map generation algorithms to prevent disconnected rooms or cut-off entrances (affecting Gremlin Fortresses, Auditoriums, Grand Hallways, and Inner Core layouts).
• Fixed an issue where stairs to the next floor could fail to generate in the Gremlin Fortress (Floor 2) due to blocked placement.
• Fixed the treasure gate in the Gremlin Fortress not properly blocking passage to the reward room.
• Fixed forced movement (Ctrl+Click) on the overworld stopping unnecessarily when enemies are visible, even if configured to ignore them.
• Fixed an issue where interactable features in caves (chests, crystals, harvestables) could spawn in inaccessible locations.
• Weight from the Grit enchantment is now also affected by Quartermastery's equipped item weight reduction bonuses.
• Fixed escape key order of operations. Now when escape key is pressed, the side-pane closing before open windows (such as the workbench).

• Fixed a potential crash related to a negative height exception occurring when alt-tabbing or resizing the game window.
• Fixed an issue with the ability picker where it would sometimes display an empty row or fail to appear when right-clicking hotbar icons.
• Fixed the creature info box sometimes displaying an empty "Status Effects" section when no effects were present.
• Fixed several Bludgeons and Maces abilities applying in unintended circumstances.
• Fixed pathfinding when interacting with map features to prefer directly adjacent tiles, as was always intended. Pathfinding will now only fallback to diagonally adjacent tiles if no directly adjacent ones are avaiable.