We're about to enter the third week of the Beta for The Fall of Oriath. We're expecting our next wave of changes to be deployed in the later part of next week. This update will also include Act Eight! In the meantime, we have our second weekly Beta report which discusses what our upcoming plans are regarding game balance, Act Eight and fixes to some known issues.

Since our first Beta update last week, we've received a lot of feedback from players about the content they're playing. This has been really helpful! We're looking at your feedback and how you're playing and using this data to make changes prior to release.

Act Eight Deployment

Originally we had planned to deploy Act Eight this week. However, when we were assessing the quality of Act Eight, we found several areas that we wanted to improve prior to getting your feedback. You can only get first impressions once!

Since we're pushing the Beta release of Act Eight to next week, this also pushes the intended wipe until that time as well. The following week (i.e. two weeks from now), we will also update Act Six and Seven with more improvements.

Balance Changes

Rory has provided some notes on balance and upcoming gameplay changes:

• There will be many adjustments to gems in relation to Damage over Time balance. The Decay Support Gem will do significantly less damage, 50% less damage at gem level 20, and its duration will be reduced to 8 seconds.
• Essence Drain will do more damage, up to 25% more at gem level 20.
• Deadly Ailments will grant up to 39% more ailment damage and only 20% less damage with hits, bringing it more in line with other support gems.
• Unbound Ailments values will be reduced.
• More Burning Damage will have reduced damage bonuses.
• The Perfect Agony keystone will grant 30% of Critical Strike Multiplier and 30% less hit damage (It is currently by far the best way to build ailment damage, to an extreme degree).
• Brutality will grant up to 59% more damage at gem level 20, higher than it is currently but it will also prevent dealing Chaos Damage, so will only deal Physical Damage with the supported skill.

The above changes are planned because the supports and keystones were mandatory to produce worthwhile damage values for Damage Over Time builds, and we'd prefer to keep the bonuses more consistent with other support gems to provide more flexible support choices in builds wherever possible.

Flameblast will have a separate bonus to spell damage and ailment damage per stage, because it is by far the most effective way to apply ignites. With these changes, we will be able to balance ignite around a broader selection of skills, rather than having to balance the ailment around Flameblast.

We're almost happy with the potential levels of ignite and poison damage available as a result of heavy investment at higher levels, so we will be working on fine tuning these options and the tools to influence them throughout progression. We're going to be making more extreme changes to Bleed in the weeks to come, including the potential of a new Bleed-focussed keystone.

The Labyrinth

Next week's deployment will include access to all the Labyrinths. The following week's deployment will include a rework of the Labyrinths, which will centre around shortening the experience of the initial Labyrinth and gradually introducing elements up to a full Endgame Labyrinth. It also includes a variety of improvements based on player feedback.

The Fall of Oriath Release Window

We understand that players are very keen for us to try to predict a final release date for The Fall of Oriath so that they can lock in time off work. Instead of predicting dates, we'd like to try to offer a transparent look at our current thoughts. We previously mentioned "mid-July" as our estimated release date. Given the team's growing ambition (and a desire to make sure problems the community have identified are fixed properly prior to release), it looks like it may be up to a few weeks longer. Whether this means late July or early August is too early to predict at this stage. We'll keep you updated in subsequent posts.

Deploying the new Microtransaction System

We are working through the problems we encountered with this upon its initial deployment. As soon as we have a fix, we'll deploy it again. This has been slowed down by various factors like last week's promotional work. We're very sorry about the delay and are working hard to get it up as soon as possible. It will be deployed and working before 3.0.0 releases (hopefully well before).

Hideout Decorations and Crafting Benches in Beta

Giving players access to their hideout decorations and crafting benches is another issue we have been working on and expect to have a solution for soon. Hopefully earlier than the microtransaction system issue (though they are potentially related).

____________________________________________________________________________________________

We wanted to thank the community once again for their hard work and dedication to providing feedback on the current Beta content. This information has been extremely valuable to us in ensuring quality content come release time.

If you're interested in joining the Beta, please consider checking out the supporter packs for The Fall of Oriath. Thank you for your support and have a great week!