Σ 2.2.0 Announced

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Disclaimer: this topic is a teaser and everything is subject to change. The full patch notes will be released 2 days prior to the new season.




Sescheron's Destroyer


Defeat Baal's emissary to stop the invasion of Scosglen

A new quest awaits you in Scosglen. Baal has assembled the Dulra Aegis, a powerful artifact allowing him control over the land and its climate, and he must be stopped. An unknown ally has left clues spread around the area to help you assemble your own artifact, which will allow you to fight his first emissary, Sescheron's Destroyer. Can you put an end to this madness?

  • New level 135 Dungeon Quest, located in the Frozen Crest
  • Entering the quest requires you to assemble the Dulra Catalyst and Reality Piercer, obtained from Eleventh Eye - a powerful new miniboss located in the Scosglen Cemetery
  • In the quest area there are relentless Winter Storms, pulsing Thunders and Fire Prisons, making your elemental resistances and dodging abilities vital in surviving
  • Defeating the Boss rewards you with a further upgrade to your Dulra Aegis, and has a chance to drop Relics and Unique Mystic Orbs

In addition, there are many other Scosglen related changes, such as monster and corrupted boss rebalance, improved drop biases, revamped treasure box outcomes, corruption changes and more.



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Oskill Overhaul


Per community request, many oSkills are being revamped with unique scaling mechanics

oSkills are one of the fan-favorite features of Median XL and you, the community, have made us aware of how much they matter to you. We've decided to add oSkills in our seasonal "Patron Build Rework Poll" and it won by a good margin. Therefore, the upcoming 2.2 patch features a multitude of changes to them, bringing new interesting and unique ways to build around them. There are over 10 revamped oSkills, but in this topic, we will only tease a few of them which introduce exciting new mechanics:

  • Chaotic Spark: new lightning oSkill that scales in multiple ways from casting speed. Also has a unique built-in "on cast" Charged Nova proc.
  • Pentagram: now a "melee spell" with revamped mechanics. This demonic skill rewards your sacrifice and has reduced cooldown & provides physical resists for having up to 300 unspent stat points, a nod to Median 2008's (in)famous "Attribute Challenge".
  • Guard Tower: revamped to work as a stand-alone skill, massively increased weapon damage, has more targets, and further scales if Fortress is active.
  • Death Star: now deals damage based on the combined poison damage per second of all your skill and item sources, modified mechanics by adding a pulsing Area of Effect.
  • Searing Glow: skill has a different role depending on the amount of successfully corrupted items the character is wearing. If zero it will act as a holy debuff skill, while if you choose the evil path, it will increase in strength for every corrupted item in your gear.



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Relic Rework


Revamped the way Relics are obtained, used and scaled

Since their introduction, relics were intended to be a scarce endgame item that could fulfill multiple roles: build enabling (through granting oSkills), build enhancing (through orange stats) or "stat sticks" (provide a high amount of a single stat). The main dilemma was that if individual relics are good on their own, they would become balance-breaking when stacked.

For example, if a relic provides +30 to Flamefront, it would work as a stand-alone build enabler, but then it becomes ridiculously strong when stacked, i.e. it would only take 2-3 additional copies to hit max Skill Level of 150. While if the relic is only +10, it balances out when stacking but then it stops being good if used alone. For this reason, we're moving in the direction of limiting each relic to one copy - this allows us to make relics stronger on their own with no fear of insane scaling/power creep if stacked. And that also means they can drop more often!

  • Relics are now charms, freeing much-needed socket space in the endgame
  • There is a limit of 3 relics per character, and each individual Relic is limited to one
  • Relics can now drop anywhere, including normal, and their required level has been lowered from 120 to 75
  • Defeating Baal on Hell difficulty for the first time now rewards you with a Relic, improving access and rewarding replayability. Non-ladder and single player characters can claim it for existing characters as well!
  • Relic stats will be revamped in accordance to having a more defined role as "enhancers" and "enablers", and won't necessarily be limited to 2 stats anymore

WARNING: non-ladder and single-player characters will need to unsocket their relics before patch is live. Due to them no longer being socketables, the game will eat them.



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Quality of Life


Improvements to Runewords, Corruption, and other convenience changes

Finally, no patch is truly complete without improvements in terms of convenience and accessibility.

  • New inventory button to comfortably collect all items in their containers (crystals, shrines, runes...) with a single click!
  • Added in-game ping to the automap game information
  • Non-runeword white and grey items can now be unsocketed, allowing recovering runes when Scrabble goes wrong
  • Corruption improvements:
    • Success chance nearly doubled, partly because they were lower than intended due to a bug (22% rather than 33%, now increased to 40%)
    • Runewords can now be corrupted as well
    • Fixed issue where corruption success chance is linked to lucky/lottery success (to be confirmed)



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And more!


Celebrating our 30th online Season...

We're amazed to reach our 30th season on TSW and this is possible thanks to the support and activity from the community throughout so many years, this is a massive milestone for us. If you are excited to play 2.2, our beta season has launched yesterday which you can access by supporting us at Patreon. If not, you may consider joining our Discord community for sneak peeks to keep you entertained until the big day.

Unfortunately, not everything is good news as the world succumbs to War. Our hearts go to the people of Ukraine and we pray for a peaceful resolution and an end to all the violence and fear. In such times of global distress, we take our roles as game developers seriously and will continue to do our small contribution to the world by providing entertainment and allowing people to escape the sometimes tragic and overwhelming aspects of reality. We've received multiple letters over the years about how Median helped people cope with issues, and we just want it to be known that we hear, care, and this strongly motivates us to keep going. We love all of you, and hope that better times are ahead. See you next season!

KhaldonB
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Let's qoooo
kamolider
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hype
datdudejay
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patch notes when
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AzureGladiator
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Wow! The relic changes and auto-sort features sound amazing :thumb:
jprincipe
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Excellent
Milkshake
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Can we get a time for the reset to plan ahead?
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Lynderika
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Look like very good changes all around ! And thoses big eyes in the header look scary

Milkshake wrote:Can we get a time for the reset to plan ahead?

Previous seasons usually started by around ~20UTC

datdudejay wrote:patch notes when

> The full patch notes will be released 2 days prior to the new season.
Milkshake
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Lynderika wrote:
Milkshake wrote:Can we get a time for the reset to plan ahead?

Previous seasons usually started by around ~20UTC


I'm aware what time previous ones started at. I'm asking for a specific time this one will start at.
bongoking
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bye bye my dear relic :-P Image