Hello, this release contains a few bigger updates that I’m really excited for:

• Initial Rogue class release! The rogue is available, with its base 5 weapons and 5 evolutions. To play as the rogue, complete a run with the warrior class. The rogue’s kit emphasizes movement. To support this, the rogue comes with a built in Teleport ability, that can be activated to teleport the orc in the direction he’s walking, turning him invincible and moving through enemies in the way. The remaining 5 weapons for the rogue will be coming to an update real soon!
• New round start sequence! When starting a new run, the enemies will no longer appear instantly. Instead, pick your weapon of choice off the the pedestals in front of you. This will let new players vary their starting weapons more easily, as it could take awhile to unlock the Weapon Master feature. The Weapon Master feature is still available to be unlocked, which will now add a ‘?’ weapon to the middle pedestal, letting you select from any available weapon at the start of the run.
• Rework of Armory mods! With our last release, we had a lot of Mod cards available for all weapons in the armory. However, this resulted in a lot of ‘junk’ mod cards, which were cards such as Midas Touch that you simply wouldn’t ever equip. This watered down the Armory system, and made it a lot less fun. To fix this, we’ve removed all the junk cards across our weapons, and only left in Mods that we could see people using. We’ve also set a goal of having at least 3 Rare mods and 1 Contraband mod card per weapon, which are Mods that change the behavior or performance of the weapons in signficant ways. This update contains all the rare mods for the Claws as well as the rogue weapons, but we will be doing more updates in an upcoming release to fix this up for all other weapons, as some weapons only currently have 1 or 2 rare mods.

We’ve also had an interesting balancing problem – some players have found the game too easy, while others have found it too hard. This has happened due to our scaling mechanisms, which if you’re outscaling, it feels too easy, but becomes way too hard when you fall behind. We’ve done a series of balance changes that hope to fix this balancing problem:

• Reduce XP scaling per wave from a bonus 20% to 15%. This reduces the total amount of XP in the final waves, while not affecting the initial XP amounts in the early waves. This will help prevent players from getting too overleveled too early, which results in a run that isn’t that fun.
• Adjust how we do health scaling. Enemies currently are given bonus HP based on your current wave, combined with your current player level. This has been adjusted so more of their HP scaling comes from your player level than before, with less coming from the current wave. This should make it easier to catch-up for players that have fallen behind in the scaling, while making it harder for players that are pulling ahead. We’ve also made the player-based health scaling not start to apply until level 10. Which should make it less likely for enemies to start feeling too tanky too soon, which would sometimes happen as early as wave 2!

And finally, this update includes a bunch of small bugfixes and quality of life changes, that should make the game more intuitive for new players:

• Change the Javelin to trigger its bonus effect after 5 javelins, not only when they would die from the bonus damage. This will make the weapon way more intuitive for players, as it was hard to explain its previous effect.
• Projectiles now update their stats instantly when their associated weapon levels-up or you get a global attribute increase (such as from the Fury passive or the Juice power-up). This will mean projectiles like the Net and Cannonball will get their stat increases instantly, instead of needing to wait until the next time you attack with it, which is much more intuitive.
• Reduce the amount of elephants in the final wave. These are the most deadly part of the wave, so they should be present, but we had too many and sometimes they would completely surround you, ending you instantly, which felt unfair.
• Preload some of our shaders, which should reduce some stutter that would occur the first time it was loaded in a run (such as the first time you use the Quake weapon).
• Add a random position variation to damage numbers, which should make them easier to differentiate when you’re hitting an enemy with a lot of attacks at once.
• Fix the ‘click to skip’ pop-up on the Treasure chest so it dismisses correctly if you sat through the whole chest animation.
• Make Quake always one-shot breakables, like crates. It’s an earthquake, after all!
• Remove the collision effect from shieldbearers. This effect had made it impossible to walk through shieldbearers, which was a fun idea, but ultimately wasn’t very noticeable, just frustrating.
• Slightly reduce the amount of sound effect when picking up large amounts of XP gems, which could sometimes be much too loud.
• Double the size of the Noble exclamation mark, which should hopefully be much more noticeable in the middle of a hectic run.
• Add a default weapon mod for the Claws, which is available for new players at Rank 1. This will let people play around with adding/removing a mod right away, hopefully explaining the Mod system better.
• Reward player stats when picking up a chest at max level, like we do with XP ups. This should help incentivize chest pick-ups even at max level.
• Attempt to preload assets for the Gachaball, which should help prevent a game stutter that can occur when you first are awarded this weapon.
• Fix the outlines on Archers so that they’re able to flash white when they are damaged, yet still keep the outline on them if they’re firing. Previously, they would lose their outline.