Most recent Patch Notes

Original Discussion Thread

Latest release (0.4.0.1 Thread)

TLDR
This mod overhauls everything's balance to be better, open build diversity and just be an overall more fun experience. Attributes (physique/cunning/spirit), class skills, items of all catagories(both items and their affixes), constellations, and now we're working on making enemies more challenging and interesting.

Introduction

Cornucopia rebalancing mod that overhauls aspects of the game in a way that makes it more fun, less frustrating,
and stays in line with Crate's overarching vision. If you've played DAIL or Grimarillion than you've been playing compilations built on top of Cornucopia's
balance changes! So why play Cornucopia? As a stand-alone experience you will find more nuances, and a more complete/whole experience. Our changes were not made with the other compilations in mind, and the other compilations have so much extra content that a lot of our changes become moot in the chaos of it all. Having played the others myself, I can tell you that Cornucopia is a very different experience that people who enjoy finding new ways to build and play their characters, will love! You will get to test and play out all of our new updates earlier than in any compilation. Should you provide us feedback (yes please) then you may end up shaping aspects of this mod, Grimarillion and DAIL!

That is to say that we want to avoid completely transforming any aspect
of the game when simple adjustments or slight additions will do just
fine. We will, however, overhaul skills that we feel are redundant or
have too fine a razor edge to balance properly within the meta we create.

But this Mod is about much more than just skills. Attribute points,
constellation stats and procs, Items (including prefixes and suffixes),
Mastery Bars, drop rates, quest rewards, monster stats and abilities,
crafting costs/rates/blacksmith bonuses, area level scaling, loot tables
and more: We will be looking through and touching upon all the above
where we feel improvement is possible.

Design Philosophy

Staying True to Crate's Vision
We want our mod to still feel like GD. Unlike old TQ
mods like Underlord and Soulvizier, (which were wonderful) we want this
mod to feel almost seamless for GD players. We want to create more
viable build possibilities for Ultimate, and make
items/skills/constellations more competitive with each other.

To elaborate with a specific example of how this applies: we have talked
at length about certain items where one or both of us were puzzled at
how it could ever be considered good. Eventually one of us would figure
out what we believe the intended build the item was designed to support
is, but realize that either a) Another item fills the slot better for
the same build, b) The item is not strong enough to support the build,
or c) There are not enough other items for other slots to support the
build. We can do some great work here.

Don't fix what isn't broken
Everything and anything can be "improved" from at least one player's
perspective. But many things function just fine as they are, and those
we will touch upon LAST if at all. We know many of you may
have specific changes you'd like to see, and we will read and consider
all of them. We totally want and appreciate feedback regardless of
whether or not we utilize it. However, we want to focus on bringing up the
quality of lower-tier aspects of the game to viable performance
levels before we dare bring already viable things up to great.

Fun > Balance
Let's discuss this on two levels. The first being that, very simply, we
both agree that an ARPG where you have lots of diverse enjoyable
play-styles that can get a little OP is more fun than having a few
restrictive ways to build that feel very closely competitive. We WILL
tune down (nerf) the most extreme outliers on the spectrum of balance, but it
is not our focus. Players should be rewarded for finding smart ways to
"break" the game's meta, not punished.

Secondly, "perfect" balance is impossible without making the game bland.
Some builds/skills/items/etc. will be better, some will be worse. That
is the nature of a fun ARPG, but we hope to make more instances where a
lower tier skill can be situationally better than a higher tier one.

What You Can Expect

We'd like to state right here, than you can 100% expect that at first this mod will make the game easier.
That will be a result of making Ultimate less build-restrictive. If we're improving the quality of "bad"
things in the game, the net power on the player-side improves. Some
quality of life changes we'd like to make should make the game a bit
easier as well.

And we know this will disappoint many of you who like a "challenge." But
hear us out: A stat wall is not the most interesting form of challenge.
Having to have ~80% resists to enjoy ultimate, or 10k+ Health, or
2k+ OA to feel even remotely comfortable in Ultimate is not a good
feeling, it just feels forced upon us.

Challenge is more fun in the form of enemy mechanics: Reflect mobs with
visual indicators of when not to attack, mobs that heal tanky dangerous
mobs, mobs and traps with curses and debuffs, enemy tactics, dodge-able
damage, etc. A stat wall is definitely necessary, but we think it's
currently too steep.

This mod has been in development for about a year already, and we've
already touched upon items, stats, skills and more. Next up we look to tweak enemies, act by act,
to make them harder and more mechanically interesting (new/improved abilities).


Thank you for the read, and looking forward to the road ahead in this development,
adoomgod & Ceno