Mega Patch Notes - Medium and Major Arkheron Changes From February to July

NEWS News
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These notes include all the medium and major changes in Arkheron from February until June. July’s changes can be found here.

This list excludes all the balance changes that were made to items. You can find their current values in-game in the ‘Learn Tab’.

These notes do not include all the performance improvements that were made to Arkheron during this time period. You can read about these here.

CUSTOM GAMES
The ability for players to create their own custom games have been added to Arkheron. Players are now able to create games with up to 45 players and 5 spectators with direct friend invites or party codes.

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SPIRES
Added a new 3v3 arena style game mode.

ANCHOR ABILITIES
[New Anchor Ability] Full Heal - Channel for 2.5 seconds to heal yourself to full.
[New Anchor Ability] Self Revive - Channel for 2 seconds when knocked down to pick yourself back up with 100 health

COLOR BLIND OPTIONS
Added Color Blind Settings that allow players to choose between three options (Protanopia / Deuteranopia / Tritanopia), adjust the intensity of the filter, and choose if it affects UI only or everything in game.

UI / HUD

  • Status Effects & Damage Over Time now displays a radial timer showing their duration (replacing the previous silence-only timer). Through this change, Banished, Weakened, and Vulnerable have been updated to status effects. Note that this change does not show when in an Area of Effect (like Irenna’s North Wind Amulet).
  • Statuses noted in this way: Stunned, Rooted, Slowed, Blinded, Silenced, Bound, Exhausted, Tethered, Banished, Weakened, Vulnerable, Damage over Time.
  • There is now a button to swap the positions of your two equipped weapons in the UI from the inventory screen.
  • There is now an icon placed on the map to mark where you died so that it’s easier to find your body after you’ve been resurrected.
  • Added a party icon to the footer so players can easily see their own mute, unmute, speaking status.
  • Added new loading screen tips.
  • The game mode selector has refreshed visuals.
  • Font size has been scaled up. We may increase it further, but we need to stay mindful of localization.
  • Ability names now include button bindings.
  • An upgraded level is now represented with the symbol instead of a text string.
  • Item Cards in the F1 menu and Training Room have updated visuals.

GAMEPLAY CLARITY
We’ve been working to improve hit registration on the networking side. Specifically, we’ve updated ‘mispredicts’.

What is a mispredict?

  • On the client, we predict your actions ahead of the server and we also do remote prediction of enemy characters.
  • When you hit someone, we play some hit effects (visual and audio effects).
  • When the server confirms that you did hit them, we send that to the client and play more hit effects and update the health bar showing the damage.
  • A mispredict is when those two things don’t agree.

False Positive = The client predicted a hit, the server said no - “I saw the effect but it did not damage!”
False Negative = The client missed the hit, the server said yes - “I saw effects and damage but maybe they were late?”

The changes
Melee Lag compensation has been implemented. This means that the server can compensate for your lag and more closely match what you saw versus the ground truth to reduce mispredicts.
Remote Prediction Smooth has been improved to prevent mispredicts while lerping between states.
Mispredicts in stats have been added to track what players are seeing and how many mispredicts are occurring.

These changes are just part of an overall effort to improve the experience of hit registration in Arkheron.

HIT REGISTRATION

  • Screen shake has been added for hits. This can be toggled on or off in Settings.

  • Predicted Presentation: This shows a player a predicted version of the game state before final server confirmation. This helps abilities feel more responsive while reducing cases where something looks like it fully happened on your screen, only for the server to disagree a moment later.

We’ve added Predicted Presentation to more ability trees, including:

  • Dahla’s Curtain Call
  • Irenna’s Spiral Strike
  • Vaton’s Disquieting Metamorphosis
  • Edani’s Outburst Crown
  • Penelope’s Porcelain Parasol
  • Tsu’Bo’s Run Free Amulet
  • Slide Amulet
  • Elusive Crown
  • Leodin’s Radiant Crown, Phase Dash, and Mending Hands already had this.

GAMEPLAY MISC

  • Updated various projectile hitboxes such as Karriv’s Shovel Swing, Echo Bow’s Wave Shot, and Penelope’s Eternal Ability, “Look How I Shine” to only register damage in areas in front of the wielder.
  • Scimitar has received a pass to improve combat clarity. The hit ranges have been modified with reliability as the focus. Its speed and movement has been smoothed with updated visual effects.
  • Self-revive can now be properly interrupted or blocked by execution, and blocks teammates from using self revive.
  • Rescue / Execute mutually block each-other, the first one to activate blocks the other but interrupts the rescuer’s channel and teammates can be executed again.
  • Added the new unlockable Floor 2 point of interest names to the map: Dark Study and Collapse
  • Add monsters to The Collapse
  • Hollow’s Darkling Staff Wall segments will no longer fail to spawn or leave gaps.
    Directional hit effects have been added for all weapons to help hits feel more satisfying. Only the person doing the damage will see the visual effect. We will continue to update these over time.
  • There is now more loot in Floor 2 treasure rooms.
  • We’ve added a ‘nearest Beacon’ indicator. Now when it’s time to head to a Beacon, the game will automatically show an offscreen indicator to your nearest Beacon and how many meters away it is. The indicator will automatically hide if the Beacon is within view.
  • There is now an indicator on the map for fragments.
  • Big projectiles are now split into three projectiles. It still functions as one large projectile but now if you fire toward terrain, it can block just a portion of your projectile letting some of the projectile pass through, rather than blocking the entire projectile.
  • End of match display shows “Placement” text instead of “Elimination” text.
  • Allied summons (Yah’towah and Grimwold’s Static Turret) now display their health bars to allies, not just enemies.
  • The end-of-match banner now recognizes a wider range of placements. In addition to the gold Victory banner for first place, there is now a silver banner for second, bronze for third, and a green rank display for placements 4 through 8. Ninth place or below still shows as Eliminated.
  • Enemy Dahla phase dashes can now be heard when they are very close to you and/or facing toward you.
  • We’ve made a small update so that your character model’s facing direction no longer snaps back toward the camera for certain abilities where that behavior did not matter. This only affects specific abilities that do not involve aiming or spawning/summoning something. Movement and locomotion speeds were not changed here.
  • Reloads that are started by attacking while out of ammo will no longer be interrupted if you leave that state before the reload is complete. This behavior is now consistent across all reloading weapons.
  • Rynshi and Tsu’Bo’s set bonuses now trigger when they are under a TOTAL pool of 100 (Health + Fortitude + Extra Armor). For example, this could be 50 Health and 50 Fortitude.
  • Heal-over-time now updates your healing bar smoothly. Previously, it increased in small chunks; now it displays as a smooth gradient.
  • This applies to Healing Ward, Essence Crown, and Dahla’s Amulet. For Dahla’s Amulet, we’ve moved the channel bar back to better match when the actual heal occurs. Visual effects will also ramp up more slowly so it is easier to read when healing begins.
  • There has been no change to the actual start time here, this is moreso a clarity update.

NEW MECHANIC - BREAKOUT
We know CC in any game can be brutal, so we wanted to give players a little more counterplay. These abilities no longer queue until the stun or animation ends. Instead, they now break you out instantly for a potential life-saving play. Keep in mind that this still uses your cooldown, so it may be something you want to save for especially sticky situations.

Note: This is a new mechanic, and we’re still exploring which abilities it fits best on. Let us know how it feels to use, and whether it feels clear when someone uses it against you.
The following items can now break out of stuns:

  • Elusive Crown
  • Edani’s Outburst Crown
  • Leodin’s Sanctuary Amulet
  • Grimwold’s Oscillating Regeneration Crown (rewind only, not teleporter placement)
  • Tsu’bo’s Run Free Amulet
  • Penelope’s Porcelain Parasol - Under the Weather
  • The stuns these items can break out of:
  • Dahla’s Dancing Blade - Twisting Thorn
  • Dahla’s Eternal Ability - Curtain Call
  • Irenna’s Sword “Caretaker” - Krurian Handshake
  • Edani’s Pulling Claws - Irresistible Pull
  • Edani’s Lunging Hook - Startling Lunge
  • Rynshi’s Wrath Cleaver - Savage Leap
  • Rynshi’s Fury Bracer - Sadistic Throw
  • Rynshi’s Vortex Amulet - Vortex
  • Ravah’s Talonflight Crossbow - Unload
  • Leodin’s Eclipse Hammer - Righteous Swing
  • Leodin’s Eternal Ability - Sky Strike
  • Grimwold’s Charged Rings - Chain Reaction
  • Vaton’s Serpent Staff - The Pillars (knockback)

NEW DAMAGE TYPE: SEARING

Searing Damage deals 50% damage to Fortitude and 150% damage to Health.

MATCH FOUND / REVIVAL NOTIFICATION

  • When a match is found, or you’re revived from the dead - the taskbar icon for Arkheron will now flash.
  • Under gameplay ‘options’, you can now enable a setting that pushes the game window to the front of your screen when either of these events occur.

MOVEMENT TAG
We’ve changed a few abilities with the ‘movement’ tag so that they have the intended interaction with other crowd control abilities.

For example, previously you couldn’t Root or Slow targets while using Leodin’s Righteous Swing because it was tagged as ‘moving’ which means it could not take new hits. With this adjustment, you can now ‘root’ someone while they’re in mid-air.

Those abilities are as follows:

  • Ravah’s Talonflight Crossbow - Unload
  • Rynshi’s Fury Bracers - Sadistic Throw
  • Leodin’s Eclipse Hammer - Righteous Swing

QUICK-CAST SETTING
In your client gameplay options, you can now enable ‘quick cast’ to change the behaviour of how modal aim abilities work.

The current version (with quick cast set to off), you press your ability button to enter modal aiming, then press attack to fire the ability.

With quick cast set to ‘on’, if you press and release your ability button you will immediately fire it at the default aim position. You can hold the ability button down to aim, it will still fire when you release it.

The default aim position is the position of the UI reticle for that ability. Currently, we do not show these for crowns or amulets which creates more of a blind fire with quick cast enabled.

You can cancel the modal aim by swapping weapons or dodging.

FLOOR 2 CHANGES
Added two new experimental points of interest on the map to improve loot opportunities, especially for matches starting on Floor 2:

  • Forbidden Halls: “Dark Study” - A paid room available for 800 fragments.
  • Stacks: “The Collapse” - A paid treasure room available for 600 fragments.

Updated Sneaky Passage:

  • Added additional loot
  • Added monsters
  • Added an Ascension blocker to prevent players from landing directly inside.

AUDIO

  • End of game victory and defeat screens have new music.
  • Updated the dash sound effects.
  • Added a new evade sound. It’s more subtle and swooshy than the rattley anchor one.
  • Adjusted hitmarkers - they should make the damage to health bars feel very clear without being annoying or causing fatigue. Let us know!
  • Updated / Polished Karriv’s sound effects - most of his sound effects got a fresh sweep on sound effects.

SETTINGS
We’ve added voice volume sliders for party and team members. The volume slider has been added to:

  • Party view menu
  • Social menu
  • Party and Team channel member (this is new)
  • Custom game member menu

Additional updates to the sound settings menu:

  • Reordered entries in the sound settings screen to optimize for quick high level volume and device changes.
  • Replaced the “Voice Mode” dropdown with “Push to Talk Enabled”
  • Added the Push to Talk keybind right below “Push to Talk Enabled” for convenience (redundant with the setting in the keybinds screen).
  • Added a new Advanced header where we pushed down a lot of the miscellaneous sound settings.
  • Exposed Noise Suppression and Echo Cancellation as configurable options. These were already autoenabled under the hood before this change.
  • There is now a default audio output device setting that matches your system default device
  • Push to Talk is now the default voice mode for new users. This should not affect existing users.

FRIEND CODES
You can now add any player as a game friend via code, without needing them to already appear in your social panel.

The “Add Friend” button at the bottom of the Social Panel now opens a new “Add Friend” sub-panel.

In this new sub-panel:

  • You can see your own Friend Code, along with a button to copy it
  • You can enter another player’s Friend Code and send them a friend request
  • Any successful friend requests will appear in the “Invites” tab in the Social Panel

ETERNAL EMOTES AND EXECUTES
Transforming into a full Eternal now gives you that Eternal’s unique emote and execute.

ITEM DISPLAY UPDATES

  • Weapons that do multiple hits on a single input will now show that damage with a + between hits. For example, Dahla’s Blade first has two 15-damage attacks, followed by a third attack that hits for 10 damage twice. Previously, this was shown as 15 / 15 / 10 / 10. It will now display as 15 / 15 / 10+10.
  • All items now display flavor text
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