Update 0.5.3.0  is all about performance improvements. To make it short for everyone who is not interested in technical details: 

Yes the game has now substantially improved performance, especially noticeable in the endgame. It should make the game feel more responsive in general. Here is a showcase on how substantial the performance improvements are:

Now here are the details. With the update comes a lot of under the hood changes which required a substantial part of the code-base to be rewritten. This was a lengthy process which was already prepared many updates before. As always we do a lot of testing but there might be some more crashes or bugs due to the substantial code-base changes. If you encounter any issue please let us know we are looking forward to fix them as soon as possible.

[Tech] Skill Batching: Skills are now batched which leads to a substantial performance increase. Furthermore damage and attributes are now also packed into one skill effect instead of multiple ones. This also keeps the screen much more readable by reducing the amount of active skill effects.

[Tech] Pooling: Objects are now pooled which improves performance on builds with huge amounts of projectiles and skill effects.

• New fire fields of phoenix and corrupted enemies on void map to substantially improve performance especially on low end GPUs.
• Improved projectile spread on scattering skills.
• Improved shadows of bleeding blade / bleeding swirl skill to prevent them covering a lot of the screen on increased area of effect size.
• Improved glaring light effect culling to only display one effect at the time. This also leads to a substantial performance increase when multiple glaring light effects are active.

• Flattened enemy HP scaling curve and reduced exponential scaling slightly. The enemy HP scaling curve now sits in between the old and the recently introduced new scaling curve with a more flattened start on endgame.
• Reduced gatekeeper HP of bleak worm and ancient tree to 100 (was 120)

• Fixed a bug which caused Ancient Tree to never spawn in endgame gatekeeper arenas
  
• Plenty smaller bugfixes

Thanks for everyone providing helpful feedback, which is what drives the development forward! You are invited to join our discord and participate in the ongoing development of Striving for Light!

Join the official Discord!