37053

Version 37053 Release Notes for Sins of a Dark Age - May 20 2014

General Gameplay

• Slow Removal effects no longer apply to area-sourced slows like Slag's Tar Ball or Serewyn's Grasping Roots (though they are still affected by Slow Reduction).
• Added new effects for each form of teleportation (Portal, Recall etc) so players can distinguish which is being used.
• Scalar Damage Reduction is now applied after Damage Block rather than before it.
• Crit Damage Block improvement - now only reduces the bonus damage from a crit itself instead of erroneously also reducing the base damage or post crit bonus damage components of damage that was a critical strike.
• Net result of previous two changes is Grugg's Guarded Stance, Ancestral Plate and its derivative items, Imperial Aegis and Huntsman's Wraps hero gear should now block a little less damage compared to before.
• Bonus attack speed now directly scales your attack's execute, commit, and stop times rather than only doing so once the cooldown was reduced to below your stop time. This has two significant effects over the previous implementation: 1) kiting/chasing should be easier since your window to kite without losing DPS isn't shrinking extra fast at low amounts of bonus AS. 2)Last hitting should be marginally easier since your time to damage gets smaller immediately rather than only at large amounts of AS.
• Fixed bug where minions and creeps sometimes wouldn't attack.
• Fixed bug where various units couldn't be selected properly with the cursor when players attempted to target them.

Quests

Raise Your Gryphon

• Fixed a bug where the quest Reward Gryphon's mini map icon was not rendering above all other minion mini map icons.

Slay the Dragon

• Improved Dragonheart Gauntlet sound effects (made them louder and more epic to suit the visual effect)
• Kill Dragon Quest now uses the objectiveSummaryIcon in it's objective summary (instead of the Dragon unit's icon itself)

Tower Siege

• Added small wood icon (collected from Wood Imps).

Misc

• Improved Quest Item and Rewards icons.

Heroes

Lithoron

• Made Lithoron's voice more intelligible.

Skalla

• New weapon for Tundral Skalla.

Bataar

• Added armor rattling sounds to Samurai Bataar.
• Added Staff Slam Hit sound effect for Bataar.

Vallamere

• Added some new sounds for Forsaken Vallamere (Shield Bash, Chivalrous Defense).

Torrace

• Added different fidget sound for Skylance Torrace.

Ermuk

• Fixed Razor Vine Trap from not always activating correctly.

Skalla

• Fixed Crippling Trap from not always activating correctly.

Beroth

• Added new sound effects for Founder Beroth.

Serewyn

• Added new Serewyn ability artwork

Slivus

• Added custom voice effects for Direbone Slivus.

Glyphs

• Added new Glyph window. Further graphical improvements will be coming soon.
• Fixed bug where selecting a glyph from one slot would place the selection in the wrong slot.
• Added hotkeys to open the glyph upgrade windows. Ctrl-D/F
• Added new visual effects for Blink and Portal.
• Improved visual effects for Bulwark, Cripple and Anguish.

Items

Lycan's Fangs

• Revised the tooltip for Lycan's Fangs, which incorrectly described the item's active as an on hit effect.

Crystalline Barrier

• Crystalline Barrier will restore more mana for a given amount of magic damage recieved since the restore is now based on damage received before MR reduces it instead of after.

Runethief's Spellpick

• Stealing Magic Resistance from the same target will now refresh the duration on the instance of stolen Magic Resistance rather than stacking the amount stolen.
• Magic Resistance gained by stealing from multiple targets will now stack.

MiniMap

• Quest big dots are slightly smaller with a smaller glow.
• Quest small dots are slightly bigger and have a smaller glow.
• Quest rings no longer have glow.
• Quest tower icons have smaller glow.
• Quest Hero glow underlay no longer has a gap between it and the hero icon.
• Unit mini-map icon rendering has been split up to render some units before quest icons and others after.

Community

• Fix bug with players accidently missing assembly getting banned. Now only players who consistently decline will get banned.
• Improved the balance of match made teams.
• Whispers (Private Messages) are now redirected over Steam if the account is not logged into Soada.
• Players can now receive Steam chat messages from friends in game.
• Improved Vice algorithm.

Frontend

• Further refinements to chat message formatting.
• Attribute bars in the hero kit editor now display tooltips.
• HeroDialog now renders above the PlayerDialog.
• Implemented the new hover underlay and the moved the selected overlay to replace the icon overlay in the player/account listbox items.
• Names in the "Member List Box" in the channel member and party member chat windows are now constrained to a max amount of characters.
• Fix blinking upgrade animations.
• Added Character Selection Voice Overs for heroes with unique Voice Overs per skin. More to come.
• Changed friendlist mouseover selection to glowing underlay.

Parties

• Postgame play again button not disabled if can't create match search. This prevents button going invisibile / visible when joining / leaving party.

Misc

• More optimizations.
• Numerous text clarifications and consistency fixes.
• Fix typo on gameinput label "Playback decrease".

For the official and most up to date Steam version of these patch notes, see: http://steamcommunity.com/app/251970/discussions/7/540741859722804765/