Titan Quest II Early Access ‘Spirit Mastery and Crafting’ update now available

The “Spirit Mastery and Crafting” update for the Early Access version of action RPG Titan Quest II is now available, publisher THQ Nordic and developer Grimlore Games announced.

Here are the details:

Major Topics

Spirit Mastery

Masters of Spirit call on the forces of the Underworld to summon shades of the dead and cast otherworldly spells, drawing from their own life force to sustain their advance.

• Spirit contains 10 new Actives and 26 new Passives.
• Watch Spirit Mastery in action in the Showcase trailer.

We are also taking a first step towards a larger change when it comes to our Passives, starting with Spirit. The goal of the following changes is to create more interesting choices with Passives when making your builds:

• More Passives: We added more Passives than in previous Masteries. This way we are able to offer more choices between slightly different effects that can provide bonuses for similar builds.
• Reworked Feats: In the past each Passive could only have 3 Feats. We removed that restriction. This should create fewer situations where your Feats were almost “pre-determined” by your specific build direction. Instead it offers more actual choices based on the specific area your build might want help in.

We hope that this will allow for more interesting and nuanced build crafting. For now this new approach is only present in Spirit, but we will try to add it gradually to the older Masteries as well, if you guys enjoy the approach.

One potential downside of this is that the addition of these new choices makes getting an overview for Passives a little more difficult than in the past. We are aware of this and will try to offer solutions here in the future.

We can’t wait for your feedback on this new approach and Spirit in general.

Crafting

Crafting will allow you to perform different actions on items to adjust some of their rolls. You can:

• Replace an affix with a random different one (following item-rules)
• Reroll the values of an affix
• Add affixes to items if the item has fewer than its possible maximum
• Level up an entire item to your level

Crafting in ARPGs is an important part, but also much discussed for good reason.

• If it becomes too easy to control, the chase for items itself moves into the background, which hurts the core gameplay of hunting for exciting loot.
• If it is too hard to control outcomes, it becomes a very unsatisfying and grindy experience.

Crafting’s role also changes during different phases of the game. How it is used during leveling and campaign play should be different compared to later stages of a character’s progression. For this reason we went with a straight forward system that hopefully manages to strike a good balance here. It should be easy to understand, but offer the right amount of control. The goal is to:

• Early/Midgame: We want to encourage players to do some crafting during earlier stages of character development. You will be able to cheaply get some initial improvements instantly, but soon reach a point where it’s best to wait for the next natural upgrade you find instead of spending further resources.
• Lategame: In later stages of the game you have the ability to focus more efficiently on farming for resources and thus will be able to try to get the perfect rolls for your items, but still might want to look for a new base if you don’t get the desired results after a while.

Both of these are achieved via the escalating costs for crafting and which materials are used at which stage of crafting an item.

We are looking forward to your feedback on this feature, the costs, ways to obtain materials and so on. We will continue to fine-tune this in the future.

Other Larger Changes

• We have increased the base movement speed of the player. We have heard the complaints about the game feeling slower, especially early on. This change will hopefully improve this. We tried to make sure to strike a balance here, as we still want players to have a good feeling of progression when investing into Movement Speed via gear and builds.
• We have taken a look at item rewards and decided to improve certain drop rates, mostly relating to Epic items and Relics.

Changes to Gameplay and Balance

• Masteries
  • Noteworthy Points
    • We have taken another look at the Doom mechanic and made a significant change to make it more viable. Doom’s duration does not get reset anymore when adding a new stack, which makes it much easier and more comfortable to get its main damage to trigger.
    • With Spirit we have added the new Execution mechanic. This will be rolled out with further support throughout other Masteries in the future. For now we have added it only to Rogue’s Trickshot.
    • With Lifesteal becoming more important with Spirit we have made an iteration to its balance. In its old form Lifesteal was almost irrelevant in Early Game but in later stages it was carried a lot by the damage amount itself, so didn’t require much investment. We made changes so that Lifesteal is now stronger early but falls off more if not invested into in later stages. We have added strong investment options for Spirit and will add more to Warfare and Rogue in the future.
    • We have added the option to also reserve Life instead of Energy for many abilities. This will support a new “Low-Life” playstyle introduced with Spirit and also potentially free up some of your Energy for certain reservation-heavy builds.
  • General Mastery Changes
    • Critical Hit Base Damage Multiplier: 2 -> 1.5
    • Super Critical Hit Base Damage Multiplier: 3 -> 2.5
    • Enhanced Area Modifier: increased Area Size 50/100/150/200/250% -> 30/60/90/120/150%
    • Increased Vitality Damage starting lifesteal from 10% to 20%
  • Earth
    • Added new Main skill tag to Earthquake, Fissure, Flame Volley, Ignite, Roiling Magma and Volcanic Eruption
    • Earth Enchantment: Enabled Health Reservation modifier
  • Forge
    • Added new Main skill tag to Armor Eruption and Minefield
    • Forcefield: Enhanced Device Damage mod changed to Enhanced Summon Damage
    • Tempered Arsenal: Enabled Health Reservation modifier
  • Rogue
    • Added new Main skill tag to Bladespin, Grenade, Lethal Strike, Scattershot and Trick Shot
    • Lethal Strike: Lethal Strike can now Execute
    • Preparation: Enabled Health Reservation modifier
  • Storm
    • Added new Main skill tag to Call Lightning, Cyclone, Frostbite, Ice Nova, Ice Shards and Lightning Bolt
    • Storm Nimbus: Enabled Health Reservation modifier
  • Warfare
    • Added new Main skill tag to Barrage, Heavy Attack, Rain of Arrows, Stomp and Sweeping Strike
    • Battlefield Awareness: Enabled Health Reservation modifier
• Items
  • We have made affixes to reduce cooldowns more available on Items as this was not supported well enough for cooldown skills to become more viable.
  • We have improved Rare Chest item rewards. Note that this does not mean that all chests now give correct feeling rewards, as in many cases we might still need to change the chest itself to the correct type in future updates. But it’s a first step to improving chest loot.
  • Improved boss item rewards
  • Removed Hippocampos Scapula as a fixed rewards in the Hippocampos repeatable fight
  • Megalos: Now requires Cunning instead of Fitness
  • Doubled Relic drop chances from Elite, non-Boss creatures
  • Improved loot drops from non-boss elite enemies
• Quests and World
  • Added a new teleporter in the southern part of the Wild Lands Desert Borderlands
• User Interface
  • Player Stat Display: We have added more detailed stat displays for Ailments, Armor and Resistances.
  • Moved hide helmet option into character specific setting category
  • Appearance codes to share your character creations are now much shorter
  • Jump hotkey is now fully player mappable
• Other Changes
  • Improved movement targeting logic, which could sometimes prevent movement even when clicking on a valid target location
• Multiplayer
  • Reservation is now also visualized in multiplayer for other players in the HUD
  • Map zoom factors are now saved per character

Bug Fixes

• Masteries
  • Fixed a bug where Shocked or Staggered flagged targets as Bleeding or Chilled instead
• Warfare
  • Doom Horn – Crushing Spirit: Fixed additional damage happening on some non-hit damage instances
• Items
  • Fixed Relics and Charms using incorrect sounds
  • Fixed item stacks (e.g. Gold) not being combined on pickup if flags (new/junk/locked) do not match
  • Relics – Herakles’ Might: Fixed leftover Buff UI
  • Fellblade: Fixed unlock for Burn – Rupture not working
  • Crimson Viper: Fixed unlock for Bleed – Rupture not working
• Creatures and Bosses
  • Fixed a longstanding error in the scaling formula for monster damage that resulted in our expected player resistances not being considered for non-physical monster damage. As a result of this fix non-physical monster damage scales faster between level 5 and 37 now as intended. At level 21, monsters deal 50% more non-physical damage, at level 37+ monsters deal 100% more non-physical damage than before.
  • Fixed skippable fight in Nemesis’ Temple
• Quests and World
  • Eight Faces Event: Fixed reward for this quest to be more appropriate.
  • Fixed reappearing glow effects on the wolf statues at the Forgotten Temple
  • Fixed the interaction of a Moirai statue
  • Fixed an issue where it could be impossible to destroy a brazier in “The Wild God” quest.
  • Fixed the quest blocker when exiting Donele’s dialogue in the Prison of Retribution
  • Fixed camera view being obstructed by rock formation in the Family Crypt
  • Fixed camera view being obstructed next to the altar in Widow’s Cave
• Multiplayer
  • Fixed character transformations sometimes not being visible to clients in multiplayer
  • Fixed an issue that could cause dialogue options to not be displayed to clients in multiplayer, preventing the dialogue from progressing.
  • Fixed an issue where an area from the “Secrets in the Sand” quest could be inaccessible to clients in multiplayer
  • Fixed possible crash on clients when a dialogue starts while one of the participants has not finished loading in
  • Players’ death echoes will now be removed when they leave a multiplayer session
• Other
  • Fixed items without requirements being displayed as unusable when placed into an inventory slot that previously held an item whose requirements were actually not fulfilled.
  • Interactions with destructibles will no longer trigger the combat state
  • Fixed a problem with the random number generator that could lead to the same outcome on damage events and repeated/periodic triggers of gameplay effects
  • Fixed an error in the Damage roll formula that caused a bigger random range in very few cases
  • Fixed an issue where switching between potions could lead to charges no longer regenerating
  • Fixed an issue that could cause big characters to become stuck when going around corners
• Performance and Stability
  • Fixed memory leak related to Flame Volley Orbit modifier
  • Fixed memory leak related to ability buffering
  • Fixed a possible crash when returning to the Main Menu
  • Fixed an issue that could cause the game to freeze during dialogues
  • World rendering will now be suspended while in any fullscreen menu, to give your GPU some time to relax
  • Removed option to use unlimited frame rate in menus, as this can put extreme stress on the GPU while world rendering is disabled

Titan Quest II is available now in Early Access for PC via Steam and Epic Games Store. A full release is planned for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC.

Watch a new trailer below.

“Spirit Mastery” Deep Dive