Portalborn — Recovery, Hazards, and a Better-Looking World — Portalborn News

Hello everyone!

This one is mostly about the time between fights — and a fair amount of it is groundwork.

Hero classes are going to need hazards that threaten a level-100 character, shrines worth walking to at any level, and a recovery rate that can be tuned rather than guessed at. All three of those were built on flat numbers from early in the project, so none of them could be extended without first being given a shape. That's what this update does. The changes are real and you'll feel them now, but the reason they're happening now is that hero content needs something solid to sit on.

Changes

Constitution now shortens how long you take to recover health out of combat.
Standing in a hazardous room no longer stops you healing between fights.
Hazard damage now scales with your level instead of being a fixed trickle.
Shrine blessings scale with your level.
Boss chambers now read differently depending on where you are.
The class advance button and its related messages now all use the same word.

Fixed:

spirit_leech said its healing only applied below a health threshold. It heals on every cast.

Recovery between fights

Out-of-combat health recovery used to be a flat 2% per second for everyone. Whether you were a level-1 mage in cloth or a level-100 tank with two hundred Constitution, empty to full took about fifty seconds.

Constitution now shortens it. A low-Constitution character at level 50 takes around fifteen seconds; a high-Constitution one takes around five. Level barely matters — it's your Constitution that decides.

Two reasons. Constitution only ever did one thing: it made you harder to kill. That's worth points, but it never gave you anything you'd notice between fights. And a flat rate can't be tuned — there was nothing to turn. Now there's a dial, which matters when hero content starts making real demands on how fast you can get back on your feet.

In-combat healing is unchanged. Potions, gear regen and healing skills all work exactly as they did. This is only the recovery you get for standing still.

Hazardous rooms

Some rooms hurt you while you're in them — toxic sinkholes, fiery wards. Two things were wrong with them.

First, they were stopping you from healing. Recovery pauses for five seconds after you take damage, which is correct after a fight. But a hazard tick counted as damage and reset that timer every time it fired — so standing in a hazardous room meant recovery never started at all. Your only option was to leave. That's fixed: hazard damage no longer blocks out-of-combat recovery.

Second, the damage was a fixed trickle. Two to five points, whether you were level 1 or level 100. A real threat to a new character and completely invisible to anyone else. Hazard damage now scales with your level.

That second one is the groundwork piece. A hazard that does five damage forever cannot be part of a hero-tier encounter, and I'd rather fix the foundation than add a second parallel system for hero hazards later.

Those two changes point in opposite directions on purpose. Out of combat you can heal through a hazard now, so it's an inconvenience. In combat, recovery is paused anyway — so the same damage is genuinely dangerous mid-fight. The hazard didn't change; what changed is whether you can absorb it.

One thing worth saying plainly: because hazard damage is a flat amount rather than a percentage, it costs a small health pool proportionally more. A character built entirely for damage will feel it; a character with Constitution barely will. That's intentional — fighting in a hazardous room is now a decision rather than scenery.

Boss chambers

Every boss chamber in every procedurally generated realm used to share one description. The same four sentences, with the boss's name and the zone's name swapped in. Clear five realms and you read it five times.

It also didn't know where it was. An ancient grove guarded by a sylvan keeper told you its exits were "shrouded in dark boss energy."

There are now six, chosen by realm — overgrown, sepulchral, volcanic, astral, built, and one reserved for the top of the Ascended Doom Spire. Twenty of twenty realms get one that fits.

Also

Shrine blessings were a flat bonus — a large fraction of a new character's stats, and a rounding error at level 100. They now scale with your level, which also means a hero-tier shrine is now something that can exist.
The advance vocabulary. The button said "Spend Level Point," the score line said something else, and the command is advance. Everything now says advance, since that's what you type. The button reads ADVANCE A CLASS.

Thank you all, as always.

This announcement was written and published by the developers/publisher of Portalborn on Steam; it is mirrored here unedited for readability, with full credit and a link to the original above. © the respective rights holders. Rights holder and want it removed? Email us — we take it down promptly.