Hey Packmates!

It has been a while coming but this is the first big balance patch for the game since the Packmates Playtest released. A lot of this is based on the feedback you have provided us and we are incredibly grateful to those of you who have taken the time to drop in and provide your feedback or chat with us!

As these are some pretty big changes some things may not be quite right, we will closely monitor the new balance and make changes where necessary in the coming days.

System Changes: (Damage Mitigation 2.0)

The damage mitigation in Packmates previously felt unreliable. Some enemies ended up feeling like they hit much harder than others because of damage types with very little ability to counter it, while also being difficult to understand. The damage mitigation system has now been completely reworked and should feel a lot more fair and less random.

• Added new Physical and Magic Defense attributes. These reduce incoming damage, providing more effective health.

  • E.g. Having 100 health and 8 physical defense would mean that against physical damage it would take 108 damage to reduce your health to 0.

• Enemies have been given defense attributes which is denoted by the appearance of their health bar.

  • An Orange health bar means they have high Physical Defense

  • A Purple health bar means they have high Magic Defense

  • A Red health bar means their physical and magic defense values are the same

• Barrier is now a temporary overshield that lasts for 4 seconds by default.

• The Fortify status now increases Physical Defense by 30%

• The Ward status now increases Magic Defense by 30%

• The Sunder status now reduces Physical Defense by 30%

• The Volatile status now reduces Magic Defense by 30%

• All items have been updated to match the new mitigation system.

Enemy Balance Changes:

One piece of feedback has been that enemy counts were too low to make some item options feel meaningful as well as the pace of the game feeling a bit slow, as such enemy counts have been increased and should aid in making different playstyles and items stand out.

• Increased enemy spawn counts

• Slightly reduced health of some common enemies

• Slimes in Act 1 now move slower

• Slimes in Act 1 now deal physical damage instead of magic

• Elementals in Act 2 now deal magic damage instead of physical

Item Changes:

• Increased range and area of the Oak Quarterstaff weapon

Other Changes:

• Increased player starting gold from 60 to 80

• Reduced gold drops from enemies to balance out economy from spawn rate increase

  • This should end up being roughly the same gold gain as last patch

• Removed a floating rock that blocked the camera on the Cavern map in Act 2

• Unlock tree nodes no longer display a cost if they are already unlocked

• Updated Hero Select to include a sneak peek of new heroes

Fixes:

• Fixed Barbed Wire item having the incorrect sprite when dropped

• Fixed tooltip flickering when hovering a Hero subclass

• Fixed Unlock popup sprite loading issue

• Fixed Unlocks menu not being able to be closed with the Esc key

• Fixed Frozen Twinblade name missing localization in the Unlock tree

Thank you all so much for playing! If you have not already come join our Discord where you can chat with us and other players and provide feedback!

Join our Discord

Hope to see you there!

~ Aureliq