The Rising Phoenix Update Available Now!

This update and message is brought to you by the Community Development Team. The CDT is a group of volunteer community members dedicated to bringing new content and experiences to Dungeon Defenders!
The Rising Phoenix update is here! Time to grab some snacks, sit down and enjoy yet another free update made possible by you, the community. The CDT would like to thank you for your help with testing and providing feedback to make this release happen. We hope you enjoy! (And if you're interested in helping the CDT with the next update, or if you have a suggestion of what the CDT should do next, let us know in the CDT forums!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfRekaUKPJ4
New Content
- Steam Trading Cards, Wallpapers, Emoticons, Badges
- Embermount Volcano campaign map with Poenix Boss
- Embermount Tavern Theme
- Steam Achievement and Phoenix feather plaque when beating Embermount
- New enemy - The Harbinger
- 4 New weapons (1 for each class)
- 3 new pets in Embermount Survival
- 3 New accessories for Embermount - Brooch, Mask and Bracers
- Story line cut scenes for Embermount
- Moon Pet added to Moonbase Survival
- Cosmetic Accessory Set Bonuses: Crystal, Embermount and Palantir (based on hat, mask and bracers)
- News page updated
Improvements
- Items rated as transcendent or above have a particle 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
- Added toggle key (b) for particle beams
- Updated minimap colors for ult+ and ult++ (orange and red respectively)
- Electric aura’s can damage the tavern dummy
- 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 (24 on 25 wave maps, 28 on 30 wave maps, 32 on 35 wave maps, 36 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
Balance Updates
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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
Bug Fixes
- Possible fix to lock down hero info and equipment info UI istances to help prevent future chances of item stealing
- Fixed Diamonds spawn
- Fixed level 60 armor dropping on low difficulties
- Fixed flying enemies not correctly triggering traps
- Fixed Pure Strategy on Embermount and Buccaneer Bay
- 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 aura’s (>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 apprentice / squire / huntress weapons spawning with incorrect (high) quality ratings
- Fix items with 8 negative stats being evaluated as godly
- 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 map name 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