Grim Dawn Post-funding Update #31: Build 13 Live

The latest post-funding update for Crate Entertainment’s Kickstarter-funded hack’n’slash Grim Dawn brings the news that the latest build of the title is now live for those with alpha access. Given the update is pretty short, I’m going to quote from the build changelog instead:

Animation:
– All new player character run animations.
– Player character animation set for the Nightblade mastery.
– Slightly cut down the delay on ranged attacks before you can move again to provide a more responsive feel.

Game:
– Nightblade mastery now available!
– Burrwitch Outskirts has been reworked to provide a more distinct environment shift from Wightmire, more of a change of enemies and more interesting and varied flow.
– New sound effects for pistols, rifles and crossbows. – Probability to Hit System: Fixed legacy bug that was ca
using critical hits and misses not to be calculated properly, created a new equation to provide better scaling at higher levels, rebalanced player and enemy offensive and defensive ability.
– Adjusted enemy skills to try to smooth some of the damage spikes people have been experiencing.
– Standard skill throw speed increased 10%
– Physical and pierce damage bonuses from cunning slightly increased
– Demolitionist: Reduced Mortar Trap cooldown from 60 to 48
– Demolitionist: Changed Blast Shield to be self-targeting only
– Demolitionist: Increased damage on Firestrike and Explosive Strike
– Demolitionist: Increased damage on Stun Jacks and Full Spread damage
– Demolitionist: Decreased cooldown on Canister Bomb and Grenado
– Demolitionist: Revised damages, significantly increase damage and reduced radius of Grenado and mods
– Demolitionist: Revised damages and increased damage on Cannister Bomb and mods
– Demolitionist: Flashbang confusion chance now increases with skill level
– Demolitionist: Blast Shield cooldown reduced from 24 to 18 seconds
– Demolitionist: Temper modifier values rebalanced
– Demolitionist: Added new skills Ulzuin’s Chosen, Unquenchable Flame, Vindictive Flame and Ulzuin’s Wrath, bringing Demolition up to an equivalent number of skills / points as other masteries.
– Soldier: Blade Arc cooldown removed, mana cost reduced and damaged reduced accordingly in order to differentiate it from Blitz. Blade Arc will now provide more spammable AoE damage that is efficient against crowds but not as much against single opponents.
– Soldier: Blitz damage reduced and cooldown slightly increased. This should reorient it a little more toward crowd control and mobility rather than straight up AoE damage.
– Soldier: Field Command converted from duration to toggled buff. Bonuses changed from protection and attack speed to %protection, %OA and %DA.
– Soldier: Added %Physical Damage bonus to Fighting Form
– Soldier: Increased %Weapon Damage on Forcewave (also fixed bug that was causing %Weapon damage not to work on this skill type)
– Soldier: Changed Will to Live to use new %Healing plus an absolute heal value and removed regen over time
– Soldier: Internal Trauma skill now actually causes internal trauma damage
– Soldier: Adjusted Overguard to give a big boost to shield recovery and then had the block chance scale over time. The more frequent chance to block should make the skill a little more effective at lower levels
– Soldier: Added chance for fear to Warcry
– Occultist: Increased Curse of Frailty slowing effect from 33% to 50%
– Occultist: Added a small amount of gradually increasing % heal to the Raven’s Mend ability.
– Occultist: Increased Eye of Dreeg physical and poison damage at mid/high levels.
– Occultist: Increased Sigil of Consumption vitality damage.
– Occultist: Adjusted scaling on Wightfire to increase higher level damage.
– Occultist: Added absolute elemental damage to storm spirit and slightly reduced %elemental – Occultist: Slightly increased raven’s storm orb damage scaling.
– Adjusted Pet control modes (Aggressive, Defensive, Normal). Defensive mode now greatly favors attacking enemies that are attacking the player.
– Dramatically increased the probability of Focus items generating a % dmg suffix, over other stats.
– Rare Affix balance pass to selectively raise / add bonuses to some of the more underwhelming rares. This wasn’t a comprehensive effort, we’ve been going through them as they come to our attention, so there may be more to come in the future.
– Epic item balance pass
– Adjusted the level drop range of epic items and the level requirements of epics in the 1-25 range. Epics now start at a minimum level requirement of 14, stats adjusted to match. You may encounter some new epics within the Alpha that you cannot equip yet.
– Slightly increased the % dmg values on low level armor and accessories.
– Increased % pierce dmg on gear.
– Rings, Amulets and Medals now have base stats. The different varieties of accessories provide different base bonuses.
– Rings, Amulets and Medals can now drop as white quality.
– The Warden’s door now re-opens when he is defeated.
– Removed level requirement from common armor and adjusted physique requirements to compensate. Often by the time players met the level requirement, they had already exceeded the physique requirement, such that characters with higher physique were not gaining as much benefit from their investment by being able to equip higher protection armor early then other builds since they were gated by level.

Tech:

– Improved speed of the Lua binding layer.

Bug Fixes:

– Fixed a bug resulting in incorrect lighting when there were no visible lights.
– Fixed a bug where pathing obstacles could be placed incorrectly on animated objects located offscreen.
– Fixed a bug in wave based attack skills where weapon damage was not taken into account correctly.