Greetings, Defenders! I know many of you have been wondering when the second CDT Update 2 is coming out.
We are happy to announce the release date has been set for this Thursday, August 4th! Look for the full patch notes when the update comes out. Thanks for helping us work through the beta, and we look forward to the release with you!
Greetings, Defenders! I know many of you have been wondering when the second CDT Update 2 is coming out.
We are happy to announce the release date has been set for this Thursday, August 4th! Look for the full patch notes when the update comes out. Thanks for helping us work through the beta, and we look forward to the release with you!
Greetings Defenders!! After working through many obstacles, it has finally arrived!!
The Community Development Team is proud to announce that our second content update is ready for Public Beta testing! There are lots of new features, content and improvements made at the request of the community. So please take some time to look through the changes and enjoy testing.
To join in on the fun and provide us your valuable feedback, follow these simple steps!
Right-click on Dungeon Defenders in your Steam Library
Click on the "Betas" tab
Select "community_beta_branch" from the list.
The download should begin automatically or at least get queued for download. Note that you can not change this setting while the game is running.
New Content
Embermount Volcano campaign map with Phoenix Boss
Embermount Tavern Theme
Phoenix feather plaque when beating Embermount
New enemy - The Harbinger
4 New weapons (1 for each class)
Two new pets in Embermount Survival
Moon Pet added to Moonbase Survival
3 New accessories - Brooch, Mask and Bracers
Steam Trading Cards (will be released when Update 2 goes live)
Cosmetic Accessory Set Bonuses: Crystal, Embermount and Palantir
News page updated
Improvements
Electric auras can damage the tavern dummy
Items rated as transcendent or above have a “god beam” showing over the item to make picking them out of the pile easier. Beam only shown on items not filtered from the minimap by quality
The highest damage dealt to a target by chained proximity mines will be dealt instead of the first to deal the damage
Maximum starting wave is now set per map (23 on 25 wave maps, 28 on 30 wave maps, 33 on 35 wave maps, 38 on 40 wave maps)
Camera rotation is locked when in top down placement mode (building / repairing / upgrading)
New Setting - Can move while building (disables movement while in top down placement)
New Setting -Enable tower dynamic lighting (significant performance benefits when disabled.) Affects traps and projectile towers (most notably inferno traps and fireball towers) Requires restarting DD after enabling to take effect. Disabling requires a new tower of that type to be built.
Cursor placed relative to the hero in the placement casting state
Removed slight frame rate dependency from many damaging towers. All projectile towers, Lightning Tower, Slice’n Dice, and Proton Beam. Every point in tower rate counts. There are no breakpoints.
New item comparison calculation for armour and accessories
Items can be renamed when at their maximum upgrade level at the cost of one upgrade
Item naming character limit has been increased to 36
Added a report issue button to the pause menu
Palantir, Greater Turkey Hunt, CD, Temple of Love, Winter Wonderland, and Silent Night accessory multipliers now match those awarded by lab assault
Moonbase now has a survival mode
Added confirmation message when hitting 42 on Moonbase DDR machine
Initiate Enemy Drain ability, Spider Minion web, and Wheel of Fortuna buff/debuff enemies resistance factor applied to the training dummy
Jester’s Move Tower and Wheel abilities can be used in the tavern
Trap/Aura selection priority is identical for repairing. Selection will be based only on current health percentage.
Trap/Aura upgrade priority favours traps when upgrades are equal, otherwise whichever tower has the least upgrades.
Instant upgrade will favour towers that can be upgraded over repairing towers that are at their maximum upgrade level.
Traps and auras can overlap spawns and show a warning when doing so
BucBay - Repositioned the hero spawn points to face the main crystal and open area instead of the dead end.
Golding an enemy (by Djinn / Wheel) increases its power by a percentage so the power boost scales into higher level games
Djinn ability casting durations depend on difficulty (enemy gold beam and tower desummon). That is to say, buffing/desummoning takes more time on a lower difficulty
Summoner minions can move sensibly over short distances with no pathfinding mesh present (ie. when placed on walls, they won’t always jump off before moving along)
On Nightmare difficulty, the 50% of loot that was not receiving wave/difficulty multipliers has been replaced with fully scaled items
Party Popper tower animation scaling reduced so it doesn’t spaz out with only a few points in tower rate
EV beam collision is now much more consistent between pre/post placement
Armour vs. weapon comparison skewed more in favour of armour to bias the drop removal priority
Traps on uneven terrain can now trigger on any walking enemy inside its radius
Slow ogre spawns on some maps on NM difficulty are much improved in many cases
Armour type drops rates boosted by 25% for random equipment drops.
Character health over 1 million is displayed using the high value format to 4 significant figures (eg. 1.234 M) to prevent the health value running off screen
Excess equipment removal function has been rewritten. Fixed an unconfirmed issue which removed many more items than intended under some circumstances, and it is much faster.
Excess mana removal function rewritten. Introduced a biasing system to keep tokens with a larger value around for longer. Large tokens will still be deleted eventually. This is not a bug, but a design decision that was made to prevent players waiting until the end of the round to collect mana and not being significantly penalised for doing so.
Multiple upgrades can be applied to an item in a single click when using “pro mode”. No key down - 1 upgrade per click. Shift down - Applies up to 9 upgrades per click. Ctrl down - Applies up to 50 upgrades per click
Predicted stat value will account for the number of upgrades to be applied
Invasion shows the current phase number in the UI
Inferno trap damage and attack rate updates for (de-)buffs in real time
Bug Fixes
Proton beams and inferno traps with high attack rates now deal damage every tick. Multiple proton beams can also damage the same target because of this fix
Public games being played on a different version no longer visible in matchmaking
Items with all negative stats no longer show as an upgrade if no equipment is present to compare to
Large auras (>18 units in radius) are always picked up immediately when entering upgrade/repair/sell casting modes
Fix lightning tower not being able to chain off an enemy if it kills it in the same tick
Fix for semi-random interval between first and second shot after reloading a gun
Fix for other heroes banked mana being displayed incorrectly in the pause menu
Fixed ghost pillars in Hall of Court
Palantir no longer warns of fish wyverns
Old One’s belly crystal can be attacked by all weapons
Instant upgrade will no longer attempt to repair towers that have health above the normal repair threshold
Fixed south west doors on Buccaneer Bay that wouldn’t animate on wave start..
Fixed unintended increase in high level armor dropping
Fixed Ogres dropped by Goblin Copters damaging crystals in CD and WW.
Fixed Djinn casting time being accelerated by ensnare auras
Enemies set to golden state don’t retrigger the Wave 10 and Wave 20 survival difficulty spikes
Prevented any item spawning with negative damage, upgrades, or ammunition (observed as 1/1 upgrades, 10 damage, or 1 ammunition spawning too frequently)
Summoner minion collision on client games now matches the host (no more rising out of defences)
Phase shifted summoner can no longer be killed by explosive attacks exceeding 100,000 damage
Fix items with 8 negative stats being evaluated as godly
Possible fix for a wave skipping bug
Fix double multiplication bug causing items in the tavern shop to show up with much higher than intended prices
Mix mode skeletons will now always timeout if they get stuck in an unrevived state
Moonbase gravity is not dependant on frame rate
Tavern XP bonus doesn’t award a “score”
In Local/Open game modes, having the mod missions selected will not lock out the Shards and Lost quests buttons
Loot multiplier scaling now increases with every wave of a map (integer division…)
Fix stretched Squire masks
Fix for wyverns, djinn, and goblin copter pathfinding logic stalling and appearing stuck. Fixes the infamous CD wyvern along with almost every other stuckage for these three enemy types
Fix floating damage numbers disappearing offscreen when attack rates continuously exceed 10 times per second
Fix health decay rate for proton beam depending on the attack rate
Possible fix for goblin copters forgetting to drop their ogre when the drop zone is reached
Possible fix for DEW / Spider targeting when there are no targetable players on larger maps
Jester “Move Tower” ability now uses the same placement rules as when the tower is being built.
Fix mapname not being visible to clients in the tavern in some circumstances
Fix accented ‘U’ in Uber maps being incorrectly formatted and not showing as an accented ‘U’
Fix projectile speed multipliers on Moonbase Quietus reward being unexpectedly low
Fix issue preventing item particle effects showing up correctly while dropped on the floor (to be used for new items)
Fix weapons equipped to the series EV not always hiding all particle effects correctly
Fix map selection UI jumping to Deeper Well if a player joins the game when looking at the Lost Quests maps
(Partial) Fix for repair/upgrade auto selection finding a tower out of range
Fix for minimap quality filter breaking for qualities above Ultimate
Balance Updates
Tower Buff Beam - Base boost values increased while upgrading effectiveness has been reduced. Fully upgraded buffs are nearly identical, but unupgraded beams are significantly more powerful and the scaling with stats is much more noticeable
Slice’N Dice and Lightning Tower - Higher damage output. Damage per tick now increases with the attack rate stat so that damage output continues to scale into lategame (including buffs and debuffs). Scaling revised to account for this.
Bowling Ball Tower - Faster attacks. Animation time exponent increased from 0.8 to 1.0 (significant increase in high end attack rate). Bowling ball tower damage had fallen well behind at high levels due to it’s below average animation duration scaling. Increasing the scaling exponent to 1.0 brought the damage up to comparable levels and makes it easier to compare across towers for future changes.
Deadly Striker Tower - Slightly slower, more powerful attacks. Animation time exponent increased from 0.67 to 1.0. Attack Rate exponent reduced from 0.77 to 0.6. Damage scaling exponent increased from 1.1 to 1.36 Base damage decreased from 350 to 300. An even worse case than the bowling ball tower for the attack rate being restricted by the firing animation. Overall attack rate scaling was reduced to compensate for the faster animation and keep the tower in it’s niche (slow, high damage). Damage scaling increased to bring it closer to other towers at high stats (because of a quirk in how damage is calculated, base damage remains the same even though it was decreased)
Magic Missile Tower - More powerful attacks. Damage scaling exponent increased from 1.105 to 1.15. Single target towers need to do more damage than multi target towers. The MMT wasn’t, so it gets a small buff. Darkness, Inferno, and Gas traps - Base charges increased to 3 from 1/2/2. Trigger radius scaling reduced to match cloud radius scaling
Ethereal Spike Trap - Base charges increased from 2 to 4. Attack radius now scales with trigger radius so it can always hit the enemy that triggered the trap. Damage now scales much, much faster, starting off at ~3.5x a proximity mine trap, and ending up around 10x the same trap
Proximity Mine Trap - Base charges increased from 2 to 4
Mana Bomb and Purity Bomb - Significant increase in damage scaling. Blocked in assault challenges due to combination of absurdly high damage and long range
Greetings Defenders!! After working through many obstacles, it has finally arrived!!
The Community Development Team is proud to announce that our second content update is ready for Public Beta testing! There are lots of new features, content and improvements made at the request of the community. So please take some time to look through the changes and enjoy testing.
To join in on the fun and provide us your valuable feedback, follow these simple steps!
Right-click on Dungeon Defenders in your Steam Library
Click on the "Betas" tab
Select "community_beta_branch" from the list.
The download should begin automatically or at least get queued for download. Note that you can not change this setting while the game is running.
New Content
Embermount Volcano campaign map with Phoenix Boss
Embermount Tavern Theme
Phoenix feather plaque when beating Embermount
New enemy - The Harbinger
4 New weapons (1 for each class)
Two new pets in Embermount Survival
Moon Pet added to Moonbase Survival
3 New accessories - Brooch, Mask and Bracers
Steam Trading Cards (will be released when Update 2 goes live)
Cosmetic Accessory Set Bonuses: Crystal, Embermount and Palantir
News page updated
Improvements
Electric auras can damage the tavern dummy
Items rated as transcendent or above have a “god beam” showing over the item to make picking them out of the pile easier. Beam only shown on items not filtered from the minimap by quality
The highest damage dealt to a target by chained proximity mines will be dealt instead of the first to deal the damage
Maximum starting wave is now set per map (23 on 25 wave maps, 28 on 30 wave maps, 33 on 35 wave maps, 38 on 40 wave maps)
Camera rotation is locked when in top down placement mode (building / repairing / upgrading)
New Setting - Can move while building (disables movement while in top down placement)
New Setting -Enable tower dynamic lighting (significant performance benefits when disabled.) Affects traps and projectile towers (most notably inferno traps and fireball towers) Requires restarting DD after enabling to take effect. Disabling requires a new tower of that type to be built.
Cursor placed relative to the hero in the placement casting state
Removed slight frame rate dependency from many damaging towers. All projectile towers, Lightning Tower, Slice’n Dice, and Proton Beam. Every point in tower rate counts. There are no breakpoints.
New item comparison calculation for armour and accessories
Items can be renamed when at their maximum upgrade level at the cost of one upgrade
Item naming character limit has been increased to 36
Added a report issue button to the pause menu
Palantir, Greater Turkey Hunt, CD, Temple of Love, Winter Wonderland, and Silent Night accessory multipliers now match those awarded by lab assault
Moonbase now has a survival mode
Added confirmation message when hitting 42 on Moonbase DDR machine
Initiate Enemy Drain ability, Spider Minion web, and Wheel of Fortuna buff/debuff enemies resistance factor applied to the training dummy
Jester’s Move Tower and Wheel abilities can be used in the tavern
Trap/Aura selection priority is identical for repairing. Selection will be based only on current health percentage.
Trap/Aura upgrade priority favours traps when upgrades are equal, otherwise whichever tower has the least upgrades.
Instant upgrade will favour towers that can be upgraded over repairing towers that are at their maximum upgrade level.
Traps and auras can overlap spawns and show a warning when doing so
BucBay - Repositioned the hero spawn points to face the main crystal and open area instead of the dead end.
Golding an enemy (by Djinn / Wheel) increases its power by a percentage so the power boost scales into higher level games
Djinn ability casting durations depend on difficulty (enemy gold beam and tower desummon). That is to say, buffing/desummoning takes more time on a lower difficulty
Summoner minions can move sensibly over short distances with no pathfinding mesh present (ie. when placed on walls, they won’t always jump off before moving along)
On Nightmare difficulty, the 50% of loot that was not receiving wave/difficulty multipliers has been replaced with fully scaled items
Party Popper tower animation scaling reduced so it doesn’t spaz out with only a few points in tower rate
EV beam collision is now much more consistent between pre/post placement
Armour vs. weapon comparison skewed more in favour of armour to bias the drop removal priority
Traps on uneven terrain can now trigger on any walking enemy inside its radius
Slow ogre spawns on some maps on NM difficulty are much improved in many cases
Armour type drops rates boosted by 25% for random equipment drops.
Character health over 1 million is displayed using the high value format to 4 significant figures (eg. 1.234 M) to prevent the health value running off screen
Excess equipment removal function has been rewritten. Fixed an unconfirmed issue which removed many more items than intended under some circumstances, and it is much faster.
Excess mana removal function rewritten. Introduced a biasing system to keep tokens with a larger value around for longer. Large tokens will still be deleted eventually. This is not a bug, but a design decision that was made to prevent players waiting until the end of the round to collect mana and not being significantly penalised for doing so.
Multiple upgrades can be applied to an item in a single click when using “pro mode”. No key down - 1 upgrade per click. Shift down - Applies up to 9 upgrades per click. Ctrl down - Applies up to 50 upgrades per click
Predicted stat value will account for the number of upgrades to be applied
Invasion shows the current phase number in the UI
Inferno trap damage and attack rate updates for (de-)buffs in real time
Bug Fixes
Proton beams and inferno traps with high attack rates now deal damage every tick. Multiple proton beams can also damage the same target because of this fix
Public games being played on a different version no longer visible in matchmaking
Items with all negative stats no longer show as an upgrade if no equipment is present to compare to
Large auras (>18 units in radius) are always picked up immediately when entering upgrade/repair/sell casting modes
Fix lightning tower not being able to chain off an enemy if it kills it in the same tick
Fix for semi-random interval between first and second shot after reloading a gun
Fix for other heroes banked mana being displayed incorrectly in the pause menu
Fixed ghost pillars in Hall of Court
Palantir no longer warns of fish wyverns
Old One’s belly crystal can be attacked by all weapons
Instant upgrade will no longer attempt to repair towers that have health above the normal repair threshold
Fixed south west doors on Buccaneer Bay that wouldn’t animate on wave start..
Fixed unintended increase in high level armor dropping
Fixed Ogres dropped by Goblin Copters damaging crystals in CD and WW.
Fixed Djinn casting time being accelerated by ensnare auras
Enemies set to golden state don’t retrigger the Wave 10 and Wave 20 survival difficulty spikes
Prevented any item spawning with negative damage, upgrades, or ammunition (observed as 1/1 upgrades, 10 damage, or 1 ammunition spawning too frequently)
Summoner minion collision on client games now matches the host (no more rising out of defences)
Phase shifted summoner can no longer be killed by explosive attacks exceeding 100,000 damage
Fix items with 8 negative stats being evaluated as godly
Possible fix for a wave skipping bug
Fix double multiplication bug causing items in the tavern shop to show up with much higher than intended prices
Mix mode skeletons will now always timeout if they get stuck in an unrevived state
Moonbase gravity is not dependant on frame rate
Tavern XP bonus doesn’t award a “score”
In Local/Open game modes, having the mod missions selected will not lock out the Shards and Lost quests buttons
Loot multiplier scaling now increases with every wave of a map (integer division…)
Fix stretched Squire masks
Fix for wyverns, djinn, and goblin copter pathfinding logic stalling and appearing stuck. Fixes the infamous CD wyvern along with almost every other stuckage for these three enemy types
Fix floating damage numbers disappearing offscreen when attack rates continuously exceed 10 times per second
Fix health decay rate for proton beam depending on the attack rate
Possible fix for goblin copters forgetting to drop their ogre when the drop zone is reached
Possible fix for DEW / Spider targeting when there are no targetable players on larger maps
Jester “Move Tower” ability now uses the same placement rules as when the tower is being built.
Fix mapname not being visible to clients in the tavern in some circumstances
Fix accented ‘U’ in Uber maps being incorrectly formatted and not showing as an accented ‘U’
Fix projectile speed multipliers on Moonbase Quietus reward being unexpectedly low
Fix issue preventing item particle effects showing up correctly while dropped on the floor (to be used for new items)
Fix weapons equipped to the series EV not always hiding all particle effects correctly
Fix map selection UI jumping to Deeper Well if a player joins the game when looking at the Lost Quests maps
(Partial) Fix for repair/upgrade auto selection finding a tower out of range
Fix for minimap quality filter breaking for qualities above Ultimate
Balance Updates
Tower Buff Beam - Base boost values increased while upgrading effectiveness has been reduced. Fully upgraded buffs are nearly identical, but unupgraded beams are significantly more powerful and the scaling with stats is much more noticeable
Slice’N Dice and Lightning Tower - Higher damage output. Damage per tick now increases with the attack rate stat so that damage output continues to scale into lategame (including buffs and debuffs). Scaling revised to account for this.
Bowling Ball Tower - Faster attacks. Animation time exponent increased from 0.8 to 1.0 (significant increase in high end attack rate). Bowling ball tower damage had fallen well behind at high levels due to it’s below average animation duration scaling. Increasing the scaling exponent to 1.0 brought the damage up to comparable levels and makes it easier to compare across towers for future changes.
Deadly Striker Tower - Slightly slower, more powerful attacks. Animation time exponent increased from 0.67 to 1.0. Attack Rate exponent reduced from 0.77 to 0.6. Damage scaling exponent increased from 1.1 to 1.36 Base damage decreased from 350 to 300. An even worse case than the bowling ball tower for the attack rate being restricted by the firing animation. Overall attack rate scaling was reduced to compensate for the faster animation and keep the tower in it’s niche (slow, high damage). Damage scaling increased to bring it closer to other towers at high stats (because of a quirk in how damage is calculated, base damage remains the same even though it was decreased)
Magic Missile Tower - More powerful attacks. Damage scaling exponent increased from 1.105 to 1.15. Single target towers need to do more damage than multi target towers. The MMT wasn’t, so it gets a small buff. Darkness, Inferno, and Gas traps - Base charges increased to 3 from 1/2/2. Trigger radius scaling reduced to match cloud radius scaling
Ethereal Spike Trap - Base charges increased from 2 to 4. Attack radius now scales with trigger radius so it can always hit the enemy that triggered the trap. Damage now scales much, much faster, starting off at ~3.5x a proximity mine trap, and ending up around 10x the same trap
Proximity Mine Trap - Base charges increased from 2 to 4
Mana Bomb and Purity Bomb - Significant increase in damage scaling. Blocked in assault challenges due to combination of absurdly high damage and long range
A word from Acen and the Community Development Team:
"Greetings Defenders,
While things didn't go according to our original schedule, we are still moving forward and closing out the last items to get the beta ready for you. So today the CDT would like to present this teaser video for your viewing pleasure as we continue to work to get the beta out to you. We hope you will enjoy the new content and improvements and will keep you informed when the beta is ready for you to test.
A word from Acen and the Community Development Team:
"Greetings Defenders,
While things didn't go according to our original schedule, we are still moving forward and closing out the last items to get the beta ready for you. So today the CDT would like to present this teaser video for your viewing pleasure as we continue to work to get the beta out to you. We hope you will enjoy the new content and improvements and will keep you informed when the beta is ready for you to test.
Greetings from the Community Development Team, Defenders! We are now into February of the new year and we continue to press on with the task of providing you new content and changes to enjoy as you defend Etheria. We have a couple of things we would like to share with you today to get you ready for what is coming.
When is the next update?
First up is the question that many are asking and direct at us quite frequently. Our usual response is "soon" since it is hard to get exact dates in place for various reasons. However we would like to let you know that we are targeting mid February to release the public beta.
What is in CDT Update 2?
As many may know by now, we are bringing Embermount Volcano over from DDE. Along with the new map comes a new tavern theme, new enemy, new weapons, accessories and pets. Here comes one of the pets trotting in now.
There are also plenty of QoL fixes and some rebalancing of a few towers that have needed it.
How can I help?
Help us test! This update is packed full of content and changes that need to be checked by you, the community. We would love to think that the release will be perfect, but we know bugs happen. So please give it a good run through when it is released and report any issues back to us.
Dev Help Needed!
We are in need of a visual effects artist. While the team is great at many things, this is one area where we could use some help. If there is someone in the community who is willing to share their talents in creating visual effects with Unreal Cascade, we would be grateful to have you on the team. The community would be grateful too.
New Community Event: Depths and Bubbles Event
There is a new event planned for Feb 12th - 14th. Please check out the details in the Depths and Bubbles thread.
More to Come
There is definitely much more come. Be on the lookout for futher news and opportunites for you to vote and share your opinions about what you think will make Etheria even better. We are already planning Update 3 for you so please keep the ideas flowing and submitting them to us.
I will leave you now with a couple of screenshots from the upcoming Update 2 for you to enjoy and see what is coming your way.
Happy Defending!!!
- Community Development Team
The Community Development Team is a group of volunteer community members dedicated to adding new content, adjusting balance and fixing bugs in the Ranked version of the game. If you'd like to help out, head to the Community Development forum!
Greetings from the Community Development Team, Defenders! We are now into February of the new year and we continue to press on with the task of providing you new content and changes to enjoy as you defend Etheria. We have a couple of things we would like to share with you today to get you ready for what is coming.
When is the next update?
First up is the question that many are asking and direct at us quite frequently. Our usual response is "soon" since it is hard to get exact dates in place for various reasons. However we would like to let you know that we are targeting mid February to release the public beta.
What is in CDT Update 2?
As many may know by now, we are bringing Embermount Volcano over from DDE. Along with the new map comes a new tavern theme, new enemy, new weapons, accessories and pets. Here comes one of the pets trotting in now.
There are also plenty of QoL fixes and some rebalancing of a few towers that have needed it.
How can I help?
Help us test! This update is packed full of content and changes that need to be checked by you, the community. We would love to think that the release will be perfect, but we know bugs happen. So please give it a good run through when it is released and report any issues back to us.
Dev Help Needed!
We are in need of a visual effects artist. While the team is great at many things, this is one area where we could use some help. If there is someone in the community who is willing to share their talents in creating visual effects with Unreal Cascade, we would be grateful to have you on the team. The community would be grateful too.
New Community Event: Depths and Bubbles Event
There is a new event planned for Feb 12th - 14th. Please check out the details in the Depths and Bubbles thread.
More to Come
There is definitely much more come. Be on the lookout for futher news and opportunites for you to vote and share your opinions about what you think will make Etheria even better. We are already planning Update 3 for you so please keep the ideas flowing and submitting them to us.
I will leave you now with a couple of screenshots from the upcoming Update 2 for you to enjoy and see what is coming your way.
Happy Defending!!!
- Community Development Team
The Community Development Team is a group of volunteer community members dedicated to adding new content, adjusting balance and fixing bugs in the Ranked version of the game. If you'd like to help out, head to the Community Development forum!