Titan Quest II - Early Access - Content Update 1

[MegalomaniacNG]

Titan Quest II - Early Access Content Update 1

Northern Beaches Update Overview

Welcome to the "Northern Beaches" content update for Titan Quest II.
The highlights of this update include:

• New Chapter: Explore the Northern Beaches, mythic coasts where legends hunger for lost adventurers and mortals dare not tread. Fight your way through new quests and bosses to defeat the Ichtians once and for all. But beware, the ghastly fish-people have bolstered their ranks with new creatures and variants for a final stand.
  
• Mastery Tier 4 Upgrade: The 4th Mastery Tier is now unlocked. It contains new Actives and Passives for each Mastery. Also the Level Cap has been raised to Level 45.
  
• Item Update: We have added 11 new Unique Items. Additionally, we have implemented the Tier-System for Item Affixes to a lot more Affixes. This should make item progression more exciting.
  
• Fixes: We have made a lot of fixes across the board, including improvements to Savegame issues that some of you still had.

General

Combat and Masteries

Character Progression

• Increased temporary max Player Level to 45
  
• Added Tier 4 abilities for all Masteries

Abilities

• Vitality Damage now properly applies Staggered ailment
  
• Energy Drain Damage now properly applies Weakened ailment
  
• Ice Shards - Chaos: Fixed projectiles flying straight when an enemy is hovered, so the Modifier should now be more useful and work as intended

Other

• Each level-up now fully restores Health
  
• Changed "Keep Target for Repeated Casts" option to be turned off by default

Items

Affix Tiers: We have continued adding new Item Tiers to improve itemization, as mentioned in our last Minor Update. We will continue to add unique names and improve the system in future updates.

• Following affixes have now more Tiers and Names: +x Weapon [Type] Damage, +x Health, +x Health Regeneration, +x [Type] Armor, +x Free Barrier, +x Energy Barrier, x% increased [Type] Damage, x% increased [Attack, Cast, Attack and Cast] Speed, +x Energy

Uniques

• Added new Unique Items

Trygon's Trail: Item has been reworked to fulfill the promise of the item better:

• Replaced unique effect from "Increased Cooldown Speed to Poison Abilities and Projectiles Spells" to "Additional 100% chance to apply Plagued when hitting Frozen enemies"
  
• Changed base damage type: Pierce -> Cold
  
• Changed affix: "x% increased Pierce Damage" -> "x% increased Cold Damage"

Other

• The prices for items at the gambling vendor now have a fixed cost instead of allowing for slight variance in price.
  
• Adjusted the damage ratio for swords and axes to not be a 50:50 split between strike and pierce anymore, but favor one damage type. This way affixes and abilities that scale individual damage types have a stronger effect on them, when choosing the right ones.
  
• Simplified the base damage mix on inherently enchanted weapons to only include the elemental damage type and one physical damage type instead of two. This should also make scaling their damage correctly easier.

Enemies

• Improved collider shape accuracy
  
• Fixed some enemy and boss abilities not interacting with the Glancing mechanic correctly.
  
• Aristomenes: Fixed Health being a lot lower than intended. Health will now be in line with other similar bosses
  
• Added a new enemy type to the Morai temple (Living Statues)
  
• Added a new ability for Giant Eagles that allows them to swoop past the player when attacking

Input & UI

• Added hide UI functionality. This function allows you to disable the UI to take beautiful screenshots. The default key for this is set to F11.
  
• Extended gamepad interaction range: Non-hostile characters, items, etc are now targetable from a further range. This solves some issues where interactables were previously only properly targetable with mouse and keyboard
  
• Added Boss Memory Notification when sacrificing a Remnant item at a Ritual Shrine
  
• Fixed item tooltips not displaying gold value for lootable items on ground
  
• Added HUD notifications for new quest items
  
• Increased vertical space for input keys in spellbar

Balance Changes

Progression

• Player Progression: Lowered Divinity Requirements of Tiers to provide smoother progression in later Chapters: T3 18 -> 16; T4 36 -> 30

Masteries

Earth Mastery
Roiling Magma: We made improvements to the Vortex modifier to make it stronger and feel better to play.
-Reduced Projectile Speed: 90% -> 95%
-Increased Tick damage: 3/4/5 -> 4/5/6
Rogue Mastery
Flicker: The ability was underperforming, since it didn't have enough damage potential for the cooldown length. We also made it easier to use it as a utility ability for certain things.

• Increased Base Damage 10 -> 18
  
• Flicker now hits in a wider area so it is easier to hit and modifiers like Mark Refresh work more consistently
  
• Flow Gain: Reduced Cooldown increase +3s CD -> +1s CD
  
• Quick Slash: Increased Weapon Damage 100/110/120/130/140% -> 140/155/170/185/200%
  
• Cooldown Charge: Reduced Cooldown increase +3/6s CD -> +1s at all ranks

Items: We made several adjustments and improvements to certain item affixes and affixes that only appear on unique
Affixes

• Increased drop rate of Energy affixes on staves and amulets
  
• Increased Attack and Cast speed values at mid and higher level tiers
  
• Increased values of +x Energy Regeneration per second at all tiers
  
• Increased values of +x Energy at all tiers
  
• Increased chance to roll x% increased Cast Speed on Staves
  
• Increased chance to roll x% increased Attack Speed and x% increased Attack and Cast Speed on all Weapons
  
• +x Health Affix can now drop on Legs and Arms

Uniques
Global Changes:

• Increased base damage of unique effects generating Elemental Explosions when Overwhelm is consumed: 4 -> 15
  
• Increased base damage of unique effects consuming Overwhelm to create Elemental Explosions: 4 -> 20
  
• Fixed increased Base Ailment Chance effect granting +50% increased base ailment chance instead of 5%
  
• Dambreaker: Increased x% Chance to Stun for 1 second on Hit: 10% -> 15%

Creatures:

• Empusa Punisher: Increased Sword Volley ability damage

Bugfixes

Masteries and Combat

General

• Fixed an issue that could cause characters to get stuck in level geometry when using certain abilities
  
• Fixed targeting getting stuck on destructibles even after they have been destroyed when using the "Keep Target for Repeated Casts" option
  
• Fixed an issue that could cause ranged weapons to shoot incorrect projectiles if used too quickly after switching weapons
  
• Changed wording of "Cooldown Speed" in ability descriptions to "Cooldown Rate"
  
• Fixed crash that could occur when reducing the Maximum Effect Stacks (via Passives) while being at the Maximum

Core Abilities

• Barrier - Reflecting Guard: No longer reflects self-inflicted Damage back to yourself

Earth Mastery

• Earth Enchantment: Added missing Earth mastery skill tag
  
• Roiling Magma - Vortex: Added missing part in tooltip (less explosion damage)
  
• Stable Barrier Passive - Energy to Barrier Feat: Fixed tooltip not showing the value scaled by Barrier Conversion

Earthquake:

• Fixed Earthquake not correctly input queueing after other skills
  
• Stone Protection: Now properly grants CC immunity after reaching stage 1

Storm Mastery

• Cyclone - Personal Storm: Fixed visual stutters
  
• Arcane Shielding Passive: Fixed Barrier Regeneration not scaling with invested points
  
• Overcharge Passive - Duration Feat: Fixed a bug that caused Overload to increase cooldowns and other buff durations

Warfare Mastery

• Barrage: Added missing Damage scaling (now scales from 35% Weapon Damage to 52% at level 43)

Items

Affixes and Item Stats

• General: Fixed multiple spelling mistakes
  
• Potion: Fixed Plagued and Shock Cleansing affix not working.
  
• Staves Implicit Property: Renamed "+x% Global Damage Mitigation Penetration" to "+x% Resistance Penetration". The effect remains the same.
  
• Daggers Implicit Property: Fixed "x% Increased Attack, Cast and Cooldown Speed" implicit not working as expected
  
• Armors Implicit Property: Fixed incoherence between Dodge Recovery Rate and Dodge Cooldown Rate. Both now use Dodge Cooldown Rate

Uniques

• Raging Bull: Fixed tooltip wording "increased Weapon Damage" instead of "increased Weapon Attack Damage"
  
• Raging Bull: Fixed x% Stun Resistance affix not being present on the item
  
• Cuttlebone Standard: Increased Cast Speed buff is now correctly applied when gaining overload
  
• Megalos: Fixed x% increased Total Damage affix not being present on the item
  
• Thyrsus: Fixed x% increased Total Damage affix not being present on the item

Other

• Renamed Ichthian armor items to have shorter names

Enemies

Pan

• Fixed ability sequence sometimes breaking and restarting during the encounter.
  
• Increased Deafening Flute damage.

Input and UI

• Fixed a bug where input indicators for the alternate gamepad layout would be incorrect when opening up the inventory
  
• Fixed incorrect item icons in Morai Codex
  
• Added some missing ability modifier icons
  
• Fixed a bug with hotkey settings migration that could cause inputs to become unresponsive until the game was restarted once or the controls were reset manually
  
• Fixed binding an ability multiple times not being saved properly

Save Games

• Fixed an issue that could cause savegames to become partially corrupted if any (but not all) save files failed to be written to disk
  
• Reduced maximum auto-save frequency during gameplay to once per minute. The game will still always save when closing or returning to menu