Awaken, champions!

It’s been a while since the last patch, but Update 2 is finally here and it's packed with new features and content. This update focuses on reworking and tuning old mechanics, bringing in new ones, a new Shattered Dark ritual, items and abilities to offer a wide range of new build possibilities, and finally some quality of life features requested by the community.

The update took longer than I wanted and going forward during roughly the next month I will be experimenting with more frequent smaller content updates. I’m also still working on the game alone so it is good to set your expectations based on that. I’ve decided to remove Uber Akka from the roadmap for now as the game mode has its issues and is not really the kind of content most players are looking forward to. If I decide to revisit the mode in the future I will implement some more quality of life features to make it more convenient to build up your characters. That said, here’s the updated roadmap:


As always, let me know your thoughts on the new content either here on the Steam forums or in our Discord. And now let’s move to the actual content of Update 2...

New Shattered Dark Ritual: Tomb of Ulth Vuul

Deep within the mountain lies the long-forgotten Tomb of Grand Wizard Ulth Vuul and his servants, once said to have communed with powers beyond the stars. This new Shattered Dark Ritual introduces the second large map into Conquest Dark, along with new items and abilities to acquire, and a new enemy type.

New Events: Forsworn Champions and Aura’s Gift

In the Forsworn Champions Event another Fated One that has abandoned their cause now appears and tries to interrupt the player’s ritual. These champions are minibosses with random looks, armor, weapons, and abilities. They also bleed just like the player character.

With the Aura’s Gift Event, Aura, the Goddess of the Sun, spawns a prism at a random location on the map where the player must defeat a number of enemies to claim the offering inside before it disappears.

New Item Type: Unique Items

Unique Items are a new item type that can appear as a special roll on any rarity (Common, Exceptional, and Ancient) and are hidden unlocks gained by progressing through the game. Each rarity and item slot type has its own unique items. Unique Items do not have any proficiency requirements so all classes can obtain them. The update adds 16 Unique Armor Items to the game with more planned for future updates.



Note: In the previous roadmap Unique Weapons and Armor were mentioned as coming in Update 3. The system described there is not the same as the one implemented in this update and has now been renamed to Eldritch Weapons and Armor instead.

Reworked Altars

The goal for Altars has always been a system where you can infinitely dump resources to gain small permanent upgrades. With the previous design the altars quickly softcapped and players could not interact with the system without an excessive amount of grinding.

Reworked Altars now consist of multiple predetermined stats, and the stat and its amount are randomly chosen each time a player offers Corrupted Soul Fragments on the altar, working more as a ‘gambling’ system. When you get a set of stats you like you can bind them to keep them and safely make new offerings without losing the good binded roll.

An altar also has a Tier that increases each time a player discovers the same Altar in multiple world map locations. Altar Tier increases the total amount of stats affected by offerings and the maximum range that stats can roll in.

The number of altars has also been reduced and all Corrupted Soul Fragments used to upgrade the previous version of altars have been refunded.

New Weapon Sets, Abilities, Artifacts and More

• New Weapon Set: Brutal Flail & Battlefield Shield

• New Weapon Set: Lesser Arcane Missiles

• New Power Ability: Greater Arcane Missiles

• New Power Ability: Snake Shot

• New Passive Ability: Sunfire Beams

• New Movement Ability: Savage Kick

• New Artifact: Thrumming Femur

• New Artifact: Blood of Ulth Vuul

• New Runes: Gul (Rerolls, Infinite); Anh (Damage To Injured), Unh (Damage to Elites) and Onh (Damage to Healthy), Yiln (Additional Rune Slots, Reworked)

• New Origin: Aura’s Chosen

Gameplay

• Abilities are now acquired one character level earlier.

• Extended Normal Rituals now last until Tier 10 (up from Tier 5), allowing players to more efficiently farm resources and scrolls from these locations especially when combined with beneficial Ritual Modifiers.

• Extended Dark Rituals now have one additional boss in their spawning pool.

• Skipping Exceptional items now grants 2 reroll tokens and skipping Ancient items grants 3.

• Runes will now drop even if the player has filled all available Rune Slots. Picking up a Rune this way will automatically grant one Reroll Token. No need to save that last Rune Slot for rerolls anymore.

• Runes that change Ability Damage Type can now be used multiple times.

• Staggered Damage from a single source can no longer exceed a character’s maximum health. This does not affect the total amount of Staggered Damage that a character can accumulate.

• Losing a life or leveling up now removes all accumulated Staggered Damage.

• \[EXPERIMENTAL] Added an option to change game speed to 1x, 1.5x, or 2x. Separate keybinds can be used during gameplay to change the speed without having to enter the menu. On lower end machines increased game speed might cause performance issues and physics bugs.

• \[EXPERIMENTAL] Added an 'Enrage Timer' to boss fights activating after a certain amount of time has passed. Once active the player begins to slowly lose health with the rate increasing over time. The timer is set to 3 minutes for most bosses, 5 minutes for some end bosses and each phase of the Akka fight, and 8 minutes for Azgoroth the Doombringer.
  

  Developer Comment: Conquest Dark gives players a lot of freedom in how to build their characters, but this also leads to the possibility of building characters in a not very optimal way. One common complaint from players is that bosses have too much health, feel like sponges and the fights drag on for too long. Boss/enemy durability is always relative to how much damage your character does and in most cases the fights dragging on is a direct result of unoptimal builds or the character’s abilities/runes not being upgraded enough. This change now provides a resolution to these situations that ends the fight instead of allowing it to go on forever.
  
  It also fixes some corner cases where players delay killing bosses to collect excessive amounts of power. While this is not the intended way to play the game I understand it is something some players enjoy and that is why the enrage timer is disabled in Arena of Ikar to allow those days-long infinite runs.
  
  The change will also negatively affect some heavy defensive builds like damage reflection Oathkeeper. These kinds of builds will get new items and mechanics in the future updates to allow them to do proper damage to bosses.

Visuals

• Updated visuals for some enemy projectiles and AOE effects to make them easier to see. 

• Corrected lighting issues in some shaders.

• Adjusted lighting and visuals on The Pale Desolation map.

• Zarakesh Set has a new headpiece visual.

UI

• Players can now move back from the Rune Category Selection to choose another Ability to imbue the rune into.

• Rearranged unlock categories in The Stygian Archive so that items which can be upgraded are more easily accessible. Added an Upgradeable tag to all categories that can be upgraded.

• Added a new icon to Deadly Strikes mastery.

• Adjusted the look of multiple other icons.

• Staggered Damage is now displayed as a jagged edge on the player's health bar.

• Damage Meters now measure the actual damage done to a target’s health and barriers instead of the raw damage dealt by abilities. This gives a more realistic picture of how abilities contribute to killing enemies as overflowing damage is not counted.

• Added an option to make Zordolf Mode instant, skipping the selection screen animations.

• Added a hotkey and UI icon for Zordolf Mode. This can be toggled on and off with the default Z key. The Damage Meter default key is now X (previously Z).

• Zordolf can now browse and select runes beyond the first page when Zordolf Mode is active.

Balance Changes

General

• Increased the available time in Shattered Dark Ritual for each wave.

• Increased Shattered Dark Ritual experience requirements (Previous values were incorrectly left at those used for testing):

  • Levels 11–20 require 50% more.

  • Levels 21–25 require 100% more.

• Damage done increase and damage taken increase from holding Dark Soul Fragments reduced from 1% to 0.25% per fragment.

• Adjusted the placement and quantity of some rewards on World Map locations.

• Arena of Ikar resource and scroll drops further reduced from 50% to 25% of normal.

• Increased the base drop chance of Corrupted Soul Fragments from multiple sources by roughly 50%. Reduced the obelisk soul fragment bonus by 50%.

• Reduced the Common Soul Coin cost of upgrading Weapon Sets and Abilities by roughly 30%. Reduced the obelisk common soul coin drop chance bonus by roughly the same amount.
  

  Developer Comment: The intention of these changes is to increase the base rate at which players upgrade altars and abilities without using obelisk bonuses. Using obelisks is still the most efficient way to grind resources for upgrades.

Stats

• Damage to Elites base value increased from 15% to 25%.

• Passive Ability Damage base value increased from 15% to 25%.

• Movement Ability Damage base value increased from 25% to 100%.

Races

• Human racial bonus stat Chance to Spawn a Healing Soul lowered from 5% to 2.5%.

Enemies

• Reduced the cast speed of elite mages by 50%. Bosses and normal enemies are unaffected.

• Witch Smeller Mzawi now has a new ability effect for Twirling Skulls.

• Witch Smeller Mzawi Twirling Skulls damage increased from 50% to 100%.

• Giant type enemies Base Health reduced from 250% to 175%.

• Increased enemy teleport cooldown from 8 to 10 seconds.

• Herald of Kuu barrier recharge rate reduced by 50%.

• Enemy mass no longer increases per tier, making enemies easier to push back on higher tiers.

• \[EXPERIMENTAL] Enemy movement speed now scales less between tiers T1 and T5, and the maximum movement speed on higher tiers is lower.

• \[EXPERIMENTAL] Lowered maximum enemy Crowd Control Resistance from 95% to 75% (at Tier 10). This does not apply to special bosses such as Akka, which still has 90%.

Set Bonuses

• Cultist Set 3-set bonus Critical Strike Damage increased from 50% to 100%.

• Stalker Set 3-set bonus Attack Speed increased from 7.5% to 30%.

• Kharathia Set 3-set bonus Critical Strike Damage increased from 50% to 100%.

• Savage Set 2-set bonus changed to 50% Bonus Health.

• Savage Set 3-set bonus changed to 5% Damage Increased per Life Lost.

• Zarakesh Set 3-set bonus Increased Proc Chance increased from 20% to 30%.

Weapon Sets, Abilities and Artifacts

• Most Weapon Sets have had their stat bonuses adjusted or reworked. In general weapons are now more powerful than before.

• Oathbringer damage type changed from Primal to Solar.

• Oathbringer stat bonus changed from Chance to Stun with Primal Damage to Damage to Elites.

• Oathbringer damage increased from 80% to 150%.

• Oathbringer energy generated per hit increased from 12 to 15.

• Blade of Akka damage increased from 150% to 200%.

• Ricochet Shot damage increased from 250% to 300%.

• Holy Bolts damage increased from 125% to 150%.

• Execute damage increased from 250% to 500%.

• Arcane Orbs damage variance reduced from 50% to 25%.

• Leap impact area reach increased from 1.5 to 2.

• Shard of a Dying Star damage reduced from 5% to 3%.

• Removed Frost Arrow Barrage ability from the game. This ability was added before it was possible to swap the damage type of an ability with runes and is a now just a worse version of Fire Arrow Barrage. One of the duplicate trap abilities will be removed from the game later.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where lootable items could sometimes get stuck inside the Arena of Ikar walls.

• Fixed an audio bug that could trigger an error message.

• Fixed a bug where enemies would sometimes gain movement charge immediately after spawning. This was most noticeable with teleporting enemies.

• Fixed a texture bug on the enemy Savage Set.

• Fixed a bug that caused Band of Primal Power to use its previous proc chance of 15% instead of the displayed 10%. It now uses the correct value of 10%.

• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused gamepads to have twitchy menu movement.

• Fixed a major bug where the barrier recharge cooldown wouldn’t trigger when hit would bring barrier to 0.
  

  Developer Comment: This made Herald of Kuu especially hard to kill.