In the week since the launch of the Return of the Ancients has gone live, there’s been one major update and a slew of rapid hotfixes making massive changes to the game. Find out what’s important to know from all of these updates.
Update 0.5.1 Change Highlights
New Elemental clusters were added to the INT, INT/STR, and INT/DEX near Jewel Sockets. These not only provide great effects, such as Ice Storm in the middle of the INT section making you immune to Chilled Ground, but give a lot more potential to Time-Lost Jewels socketed nearby to have more scaling potential.
The Atziri’s Communion Lineage Support is also a massive new addition, allowing a Spirit Gem to be reserved with Life instead of Spirit. This allows Acolyte of Chayula, among other classes, to reserve a percentage of Life instead of Spirit. This also has particularly strong synergy with Lich, as a Spirit gem that costs 100 Spirit, will instead reserve 66% of Life by default, effectively locking you to Low Life and enabling effects like Pain Attunement.
The Cold, Fire, and Lightning Attunement Support Gems as well as Ice Bite and Innervate can now support Spells as well as Attacks. This is a considerable buff to early game Casters, as they lacked good damage supports that didn’t come with a penalty such as Controlled Destruction or Considered Casting.
Rare Abyss Monsters were made less threatening and easier to kill, but also less rewarding. This overall isn’t a bad change, as some of the Abyss monsters could get crazy strong, and the loot nerf doesn’t seem to impact them all too much either.
Full 0.5.1 Patch notes are available on the Official Forums.
0.5.0 Hotfix Highlights
Many of these early hotfixes were aimed at stability and progression blocking issues. There were a few important changes made though worth highlighting.
Hotfix 6 made Anomaly Maps impossible to fail, not only making it easier to obtain Passives for Jado’s Spycraft, but the Lineage Supports from these special maps as well.
Hotfix 10 added the ability for Jeweller’s Orbs to be applied to Skills granted by items. This means you can fully support them by getting a level 20 version of the skill on the item or applying a Perfect Jeweller’s Orb.
Hotfix 11 capped the cost reduction of rerolling Ritual Rewards to 90%, preventing them from being being entirely free. This ensures that both Deferring and Rerolling cannot be entirely free, making it a bit tougher to fish for the more valuable rewards.
Hotfix 12 capped Flicker Strike’s chance to not consume a charge at 75%. This prevented a case of a nearly immortal build running rampant. While mid-league nerfs are never a fun thing, this needed to be adjusted to prevent it from being potentially abused by botters.
0.5.1 Hotfix Highlights
While fewer in number, at least for now, there are some important changes in 0.5.1 Hotfixes that need to be highlighted.
Hotfixes 3 and 4 in particular tackled an economy disrupting bug that was allowing Hinekora’s Locks to be guaranteed with some exploit. 0.5 has one of the more stable economies of Early Access so far, and I’m glad they’re keeping it that way the best they can.
Hotfix 5 finally fixed Ancient Inscriptions from Hilda’s Hunting and Disengage Safeties from Doryani’s Science to now work properly. This means Hilda will now properly scale Explicit Modifiers on Maps as Doryani can now properly Irradiate Maps. Both of these are important to endgame faming and enable a variety of strategies.
Hotfix 6 adjusted the Abyss Modifier, Amanamu’s Void, to reduce it’s uptime and making it easer to pull the Elite out of the Void for better rewards.
Additionally, Rituals Rarer and more valuable Omens (Sinistal/Dextral Erasure and Annulment Omens, Omens of the Blessed, Omens of Sanctification) now only require an Area Level of 79, meaning Irradiating T15 Maps (or corrupting them to T16) is no longer required to find them. This will make it significantly easier to farm these high-end crafting omens and make them more accessible.
