Spell Disk New Items Update

Dear Spell Disk Community,

The New Items Update is here! It's the biggest content updates we've uploaded so far. We've also made some significant adjustments and optimizations in this patch. We hope you enjoy playing Spell Disk!

NEW DISKS

The Old Healing Disk (obtain mana per health or shield gained) is back again with a different name. It has been renamed Shield Heal Disk, as its old internal code name was overridden by the reworked Healing Disk in 7.0 version. Also, we fixed an exploit where repeatedly equipping and unequipping the max-health artifact activated this disk.

NEW SPELLS
Added new spells, including 7 new summon minion spells! We tried to add various new spells without disrupting the elemental/damage-type balance among all spells, so you won't feel forced to build a certain damage-type build to have a better chance at defeating the bosses.

NEW ARTIFACTS
Added new unique artifacts with entirely fresh powers and new functions!

SPELL CHANGES
Spell sound effects have had random pitch added to reduce the repetitiveness of the sound effect in certain cases.
Dozens of spell sounds were changed, with a primary focus on audio clips with high-pitched noises.
Reduced the effectiveness of some upgrades that provided too much power compared to other upgrades, but improved or removed some ineffective item upgrades for spells.
Balanced various old spells that provided too much on-hit value. Increased damage and affliction to account for the longer hit intervals.
Omni-elemental strike's graphic has been updated. The new animation has a slight delay but will have a greater area, thus overall buffing the spell.
Conducted lightning's graphic has been updated, and the collider size has been increased.
Sword spin now individually accounts for its maximum effect.
Minor balance adjustments to various spells.

DISK CHANGES
The description of disks was checked and improved again.
Added a specification that minions also help activate most of the enemy-related disks.
Minor balance adjustment to various disks.

ARTIFACT CHANGES
Improved the icon image of all artifact items. Overall, we tried to minimize the items that are too similar in their glance value by differentiating them, and slightly increased the size of the original sprites to better represent what they're portraying.
Implemented graphical improvements and reworks of artifact objects.
Added or fixed sound effects for most artifacts that created visible objects.
Snake ring (removing attack delay between combo attacks) also increases attack speed as long as the combo attack is continued.
Bard glove reworked its function to give weapon attack damage and attack speed, as its function was too similar to another artifact.
Sprinter boots' description has changed. Instead of a percentage, it provides how many more dash counts it will give. Also, the effectiveness of it has been reduced from 3 to 2.
Executioner Scythe's time delay has been significantly decreased. The required health threshold for the artifact to activate has been reduced. The rarity is increased to five stars.
Phantom Rapier now shoots three piercing attacks at once.
Hidden Bomb artifact now creates multiple explosions instead of one.
Spitting skull's projectiles pierce through all enemies. Its stun power has been slightly reduced.
Noble Sleeve now changes the fully charged attack's elemental type to all elemental and deals additional affliction based on the damage of the charged attack.
Shuriken artifact has been reworked to actually throw shurikens when performing the last combo attack.
Various artifacts that provided too little value compared to other artifacts have been improved.
Rarity of various artifacts has been adjusted.

BALANCE AND DIFFICULTY CHANGES
The mechanics for item pool exhaustion have been changed. In older versions, once a player has obtained or rerolled enough items, they would start to encounter default base items, which are inferior versions of the respective item types. This wasn't intended as a punishing mechanic but rather as a safety measure to manage the extreme case of item pool exhaustion. However, these items appeared more frequently than we anticipated. Therefore, we changed the item library mechanic so that the game resets the item pool once it has been exhausted. This change will be noticeable in two ways: you will no longer encounter items you have not picked up until you've exhausted the entire game item library. Therefore, encountering the same item you've skipped will be much less likely in the same run. Additionally, you'll see less of default base items in your playthrough of the game.
Seed variations for item generation logic have been reworked. Due to the permanent upgrade that provides "luck" to players, having a perfect seed number where all generated items are the same is not possible. However, this new logic change can make the item pool provide items in a reliably reproducible manner.
Difficulty adjustments have been made to time-limited levels. We observed that players would frequently wait for the enemy spawn sequence, making the difficulty too easy compared to other types of levels. Several enemies may now spawn at once (although that will create a greater delay before the next spawning group), periodically without the maximum population limit. Additionally, the number of spawned enemies will be roughly the same as any other level, so you will no longer potentially lose gems due to not defeating enemies fast enough. The time required for the completion of time-limited levels has also been reduced.
Players will no longer gain After-Attack-delay (which occurs whenever you complete a combo attack or a charged attack) if their charged attack was cancelled without creating a charge attack, with the hammer being exception. Hammer's charge attack works in a special way that requires certain delay between the actions, so it is still there and we felt the invulnerability period of the hammer's charge attack is strong enough to warrant a minor setback.
New image and sound effects when the player is hit with enough shields. You'll be notified whether or not your shield was enough to block off.
Assassin Outfit's base stamina regeneration has been increased. The max stamina has been reduced to be consistent with other outfit's max stamina.
Warrior Outfit's ability now gives temporary shields upon activation, which scales with how much stamina was spent to perform the dash ability. The Warrior Outfit's base stamina regeneration has been reduced to be the same as the other outfits. Warrior's max base stamina has been reduced to be the same as other outfits. The effectiveness of the dash ability has been increased to account for reduced max stamina.
Pumpkin accessory to work (explode) whenever player's hit.
The Swamp map's (Survivor Mode) walking mushrooms start with a cooldown for their attack action. Destroying them fast enough will result in fewer spore projectiles, whereas in the old version, they started shooting as soon as they spawned.

OTHER CHANGES & BUG FIXES
Significantly optimized the damage number game objects in the game. Unless disabled in the settings menu, they were the primary cause of frame drop issues. We refactored and customized how the game handles this game object to prevent creating and destroying a new instance (which can be performance-heavy) if the player exceeds 300 hits per second. Implemented an internal template to reduce the number of required text objects for colored damage numbers from elemental hits from 1000 to 200, thereby saving a meaningful amount of memory and resources.
Resolution change will reset the camera to the default zoom value if the zoom is too close to the player. Changing resolution outside of the recommended 16:9 value often caused a zoomed in camera issue, and this change was implemented to reset the camera value when that happens.
Survivor's item obtain UI was adjusted to fit inside the screen while using a resolution different from 16:9 resolution.
Damaging player's minion will no longer count toward 'total damage' statistic at the end of the game session.
New hit effect images were added in for player taken hit effects.
Fixed an issue where dash stamina stopped regenerating in some cases.
Fixed an issue where the collider for collecting gems wasn't reset after using the gem caller artifact.
Reworked the colliders of the exit stairs of the Summoning Chamber, which should prevent players from getting knocked back into the wall in rare cases.
Fixed the colliders in the second boss rooms.
Fixed incorrect directional information on finished-type disks. Some spells provided default rotational information (0 degrees) instead of its current rotation, so that has been fixed.
Fixed some rare issues that occurred when the heal-on-death mod and the spike ball chase appeared at the same time.
Pressing the Reset To Default button in the Setting menu will reset a lot of new features that were later added in (Spell Visibility, Game Settings, etc.)
Fixed a bug where the spike ball modifier would not appear in the Summoning Chamber levels.
Fixed an issue where all attack damage was being increased instead of weapon damage on survivor classes with weapons.
Fixed minor graphical issue with the outlines on certain items.
Minor optimizations on various spell and disk logic.