Portalborn — Things That Weren't Quite Telling the Truth — Portalborn News

Hello everyone!

A lot of this update is about things that were quietly saying one thing and doing another. Pets that promised a bonus and gave nothing. A map that looked complete when you'd barely started. A help command that told you a topic didn't exist. None of it crashed anything — it just wasn't being honest with you, and in a game where reading is the whole point, that matters.

Changes

Mana pets now restore a percentage of your pool each combat round instead of a flat amount — and they'll keep working for heroes.
The tutorial no longer makes you type score to continue.
Kenneth and the class guides now tell you where new skills come from.

Fixed:

Fourteen of the thirty-eight pets did nothing at all. They all work now.
The minimap's room counter showed the zone's total rather than how much you'd explored.
help skills, and several other obvious help words, either dead-ended or answered with something unrelated.
The Intellect help left out most of how mana regeneration actually works.
In Chinese, the class-advance message still showed the class name in English.

Pets, and why they changed

This started with hero classes. Heroes are going to have their own resource pools — not all of them run on mana — and I wanted pets to keep working for most of them, rather than turning into dead weight the moment you ascended. While reworking how pets apply their bonuses to make that possible, I found that fourteen of them had never been doing anything at all.

The pets that did nothing

Fourteen pets — the six that raise critical damage and the eight that grant attribute points — have never actually worked. Their bonus was being counted and then never applied to the numbers the game really uses. You could bring one out, see it listed, and your stats wouldn't move.

The critical-damage pets had a second problem on top of that: their values were written as tiny fractions against a stat measured in whole points, so even if they'd been applied they'd have added almost nothing.

Both are fixed. A critical-damage pet now adds 3, 5 or 8 points to your critical damage, and you'll see it rise the moment you bring one out. An attribute pet now adds its points to your actual stats — and through them to your health, defense, attack and everything else built on them.

If you've been carrying one of these around, it starts working immediately. I'm sorry they didn't before.

Mana pets, now resource pets

The same hero work is why the mana pets changed. A pet that adds a flat 2 mana only means something to a character that uses mana. A pet that restores a percentage of whatever resource you spend works for most heroes too, without needing a separate version for each one. Today every character's resource is mana, so that's what it reads as — but it'll follow you into hero play.

The flat values had a problem of their own, too: 1, 2 or 3 mana a round helped at level 1 and meant nothing by level 20. The pets now restore 0.5%, 0.75% or 1% of your pool each round, depending on the pet, so they stay worth having as you grow. A level-50 caster with a large mana pool gets around 28 mana a round from the best of them, where it used to give 3.

One thing to say plainly: for a very new character with a small mana pool, this is a little less than before. A level-1 mage with the best mana pet now gets about 1.4 mana a round instead of 3. The crossover is around 300 maximum mana, so it passes quickly — but it is a small reduction right at the start, and you should know that.

The minimap

The minimap used to say something like "Rooms: 45 known" the moment you stepped into a portal. That number was the total rooms in the zone, not how many you'd found. Beside a progress bar that was always full and a map full of question marks, it looked like the game had the whole map and was keeping it from you.

It now reads "Explored: 4 / 45", counts up as you go, and the bar fills with it. The Lost Labyrinth still jams your minimap on purpose — that one's deliberate, and it tells you so.

Finding your way to new skills

A few things were making it harder than it should be to work out how your character grows.

The tutorial's fourth chamber wouldn't let you continue until you typed score. Most of what score shows is already on the left of your screen, so the chamber now just mentions it — along with help and a class name, which lists every skill that class has and the level you get it.

Typing help skills used to tell you there was no such topic. It now takes you somewhere useful, and so do a handful of other obvious words. Two of them — help flee and help mail — were being answered with completely unrelated class skills, which was worse than no answer at all.

And Kenneth, along with every class guide, now says the one thing that was missing: you gain new skills by advancing a class. Several of you asked where to learn new skills, and the honest answer is that nothing was telling you.

Also

The Intellect help now explains that everyone regenerates a flat amount of mana before Intellect is counted — the part it was leaving out, and most of your mana regeneration early on.
In Chinese, the class-advance message now names your class in Chinese. The last update said the advance messages all used the same word, and for Chinese players this one still didn't — this finishes it.
A few words in the tutorial looked clickable and did nothing when you clicked them. They're plain text now.
The sacrifice altar said you needed "at least 20 HP" but refused you at exactly 20. It now says "more than 20".
A small correction to the last update: I gave the recovery times as around fifteen and five seconds. They're closer to eighteen and eight.

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.