Thank you all for your valuable feedback and for sharing your experiences with Striving for Light!

Update 0.9.10 brings a massive wave of new features, major improvements, and balancing changes—particularly for melee combat and the rogue character. We're also redesigning the Pathfinder UI, adding dodge cancelation and dodge from a standstill for a more intuitive experience and reworking co-op mode to allow greater freedom of movement.

These changes are rolling out early to ensure thorough testing and further refinement before the 1.0 release, so we encourage everyone to try them out and share their thoughts!

We still have plenty of rough edges to polish for the 1.0 release and further improvements and redesigns planed (like condition damage rework), so fear not, if you do not find your feedback addressed in this patch.

New Features

• New Co-op Player Camera System: The existing co-op camera system has been completely reworked to make co-op feel more organic and give both players much more freedom of movement. The new camera system now features a fluid zoom-out when you move further apart from your co-op partner.
• New Pathfinder UI: The Pathfinder user interface has been completely reworked, as the Pathfinder system was quite confusing to understand and had plenty of downsides, especially when playing with a controller.

The new Pathfinder system not only allows map crafting with permanently visible map stats, but it also introduces unique icons for each negative map stat and a new condensed view that grants you a sleek overview of map stats without cluttering the screen. You can seamlessly toggle between the detailed and condensed view. A new feature coming with the reworked Pathfinder UI is grouped map mods, allowing you to see which map mods have been applied multiple times. These map mods can now also be inspected using the controller, which was not possible before.

Apprentice NPCs: Heleja, Darokin, and Goladir have found new apprentices! When playing character classes that are town NPCs, you will now find apprentice NPCs in town that take over their roles. This means you can still unlock weapons when playing Goladir, unlock skills when playing Heleja, and gamble when playing Darokin. This was a necessary change, as character unlocks are now possible even when not everything has been unlocked yet.

This is what a canceled dodge looks like if you immediately release the dodge button:

And this is the full dodge range in comparison if you keep the dodge button pressed:

Major Changes and Improvements:

• Increased base movement speed of all player characters.
• The maximum zoom level has been increased so that you can zoom out even further.
• Added a co-op icon on the co-op stone in town to indicate where you can start the co-op game mode.
• New Pathfinder tutorial.
• Boss projectiles now get destroyed when you are defeated. This will further prevent boss ability stacking in pinnacle boss fights.
• Projectile modifiers that extend projectile range now also increase the max distance for triggering projectile on-hit effects.
• Removed mouse warp to the top left screen position on various world events when playing with controller input. Instead of mouse cursor based tooltips these UI elements now use tooltips based on their screen position, allowing the mouse pointer to say unchanged.
  

Balancing:

• Reduced boss shield duration scaling in rifts to result in overall shorter shield durations.
• The Rogue now has increased base damage stats with only -30% melee and ranged damage (previously -50%).
• Increased melee damage skill nodes now increase melee damage by +80% (previously +70%).

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused Trembling Ground to be triggered twice.
• Fixed a bug that caused Trembling Ground to deal 10 more damage than your current melee damage.
• Fixed a parallax background effect pop-in on the Pathfinder for ultrawide screens.
• Fixed rift boss shields so they are no longer applied to the first boss encounter in your maps.
• Fixed a potential crash on game startup when failing to receive server time.
• Fixed translations for exit button labels.
• Fixed triggering zoom when navigating dialogs on controller input.
  
• Fixed a bug that allowed respecing of close to center skill nodes that should not be respecable.

Thank you, everyone, for your immense support. Without you, the game would not be what it is today.

Like recently announced we are doing a price adjustment for the 1.0 release which will become active on the 18.2.25.

If you enjoy the game, leaving a Steam review is an incredible way to show your support and help us reach more players.

We truly appreciate each and every one of you!