Void Hunters Alpha Patch Notes

Since the hotfix earlier this week, there have been whispers on the wind that another patch would be coming before Easter. And here it is!

This update that is rolling out has a mix of stability improvements, economy tweaks, balance adjustments, and a whole host of bug fixes. The full changelog is below for everything included in this patch and we will provide comment on a couple of them

• Fixed PC version of the game freezing on the loading screen on the selected Nvidia 16XX & RTX 20XX GPUs after 2nd tutorial fight
• Fixed backend stability when loading the session

Now this is big topic amongst the community. Once you have done the campaign and got the vast majority of the stars (I only have 2 left). The only thing really to do is Hunting Grounds. We must remember this is an alpha, and Artifex Mundi are learning just as much from this experience as we are. But only being able to do one hunting ground every 5hrs didn’t feel fantastic. Especially as many of us, including myself, actually want to be able to play for more than 30 minutes in a 24 hour period.

The full changes below are mostly positive. Lowering the shop prices and giving us energy in daily tasks is brilliant, tying that in with the increase regeneration rate all feels pretty good. Whether its enough to satisfy the vast hoards playing this game remains to be seen but I’ll take it.

The only thing that was a bit of a head scratcher for me is the reduction in trophy drops. This is actually the big bottleneck for me personally when it comes to progressing my units to be able to take on the harder content. I have the XP, I have the gold, I don’t have the trophies and this was largely due to not being able to do many Hunts. With gear being able to be moved freely I can just use the move the sets around onto the characters when I want too. I can’t move trophies so we will keep an eye on this one.

• Increased energy regeneration from 1 per 15 minutes to 1 per 10 minutes.
• Reduced maximum energy from 192 to 144.
• Lowered shop prices for energy and updated energy packs to 25 energy at 25 / 50 / 100 / 200 Gems.
• Added 25 energy to daily task rewards.
• Added energy rewards to Hunting Grounds Mastery Tier 2–7 completion rewards, providing enough energy for 1 Hunt on the next tier.
• Reduced overall reward value from Hunting Grounds and slightly adjusted drop distribution toward more gear and fewer trophies.

This is the other big topic that I’m keen to see the impact of. We’ll gloss over the Bruno and Tombs part, they are really just quality of life/UI stuff for the most part. The changes are:

• Adjusted Bohdan balance, reducing the bonus from missing allies, lowering Counter Rate in Trait 2, and reducing healing in Skill 1.
• Slighty increased Campaign enemy diffuculty progression in the last two locations
• Added the Healer tag for Bruno and fixed the missing Healer tag for Tombs.

Bohdan has been a solo menace since closed alpha. His kit is designed for him to work alone and his title even suggests the same thing. This is further exxaggerated in Hunting Grounds where you can pile all the boons onto him to further empower what he is already doing. From experience in other games, the problem with a character like him is he’s either a living god or complete rubbish so it will be tricky for the team to get right.

So what has changed and what impact will it have on him?

Before the change Bohdans “I Can Take Them” passive read “On Battle Start Bohdan gains +25% Attack, Defense, Max Health and 2 Untouchable for each empty ally slot.”

This is being reduced down to 15% respectively. A reduction of 40% isn’t nothing, it does impact his survivability and will effect him in some of the challenge mode content. But I do think a well built Bohdan will still perform well in challenges, you will just have to further invest in him. For Hunting Grounds I still think he will be just fine, especially if you get the right boons.

His Counter rate has also been fixed. He currently has 20% counter rate for each missing ally, this is going to what is should have been which is 10%. This I believe will have a far bigger impact to him than the stat changes. The constant counter attacks he had is normally his get out of jail free card, killing the enemy before they can really overrun you.

His heal has also been nerfed. On paper, it sounds looks like a cautious nerf, the team at Artifex Mundi are clearly aware that Bohdan is a problem and have taken steps to reduce his power. I feel like they have done it in a way that doesn’t punish those who have already massively invested in him too much. Although testing will need to be done to confirm or deny this

There has also been a whole host of bug fixes. The one that stands out to me is fixing the hunting grounds 4. Whilst the list of players effected isnt huge, not being able to play hunting grounds (the only thing to do really after campaign) is less than ideal. So I am glad to see this get resolved. Full list below:

• Fixed a crash in Hunting Grounds 4, Mastery Tier 6 related to St. Hermeida.
• Fixed a blocker in the Bandits encounter in Hunting Grounds that prevented players from mastering the location.
• Fixed summon visualization for Huntress, which could cause the game to crash.
• Fixed a PvP exception related to invalidated battles and compensation handling.
• Fixed a progression-related exception caused by replaying stages, earning additional stars, and quickly skipping stage flow.
• Fixed Tiche’s Void trait crash.
• Fixed combat seed generation in exploration and Campaign encounters, so replays now use unique seeds.
• Fixed Owyn’s trait incorrectly calling Special 1 without an additional target.
• Fixed Voltz – Succumb to the Void combat mechanic description.
• Fixed Ygravain’s resurrection animation.
• Corrected Eleazar’s token name
• Fixed animation issues affecting Lilith and Robin.
• Fixed a black bar appearing at the bottom of the screen on iPad.
• Fixed a single-frame flicker when switching scenes.
• Fixed the Debuff tag being displayed incorrectly as SETag1.
• Fixed a visual issue causing the highest score in Ranked Challenges to display across two lines.

Thats it for today.

There is definitely a lot they have managed to squeeze in. I look forward to jumping back in and seeing what the difference is with the energy changes and the changes to Bohdan. But now its over to you…