Ironmace has released Early Access Hotfix #130 for Dark and Darker, and the biggest news is in the Arena. Arena Season #4 begins on October 30, and it brings a new structure, friendlier item retention and a round of balance changes aimed at abilities the developer considers too strong.
Arena splits into Individual and Party modes
From this season on, the Arena is divided in two. Individual Arena can only be entered solo, while Party Arena requires a pre-formed team of three. Ironmace says the goal is to give players separate competitive spaces depending on whether they want to test personal combat skill or team coordination.
Item retention after a loss is also getting more generous. Self-found and self-crafted gear is now tracked per account rather than per character, so anything found or crafted by any of your characters will be kept when you lose, no matter which character you bring in. To make this easier to see, the “Found by” or “Crafted by” line in item tooltips now shows in green when the name belongs to one of your characters, including deleted ones.
Players flagged for team killing will also wait longer in matchmaking. The restriction times have gone up considerably:
- 1st offense: 7 to 15 minutes
- 2nd offense: 10 to 35 minutes
- 3rd offense: 19 to 95 minutes
- 4th offense: 34 to 195 minutes
Bosses, balance and quality of life
Parties fighting bosses should notice more predictable behavior. Bosses now switch targets less often when several players attack together, thanks to a higher maximum aggro and less aggro gained from simply being nearby. A bug that could make a boss suddenly turn on a distant player has also been fixed. The Cave Troll’s high and low charging instant-kill attacks now have more clearly distinct wind-up poses, and the Banshee’s orb pattern should no longer instantly kill adventurers who never touched the orbs.
On the class side, the changes are:
- Rogue: Dual Wield bonus damage scaling drops from 1.0 to 0.5, and the bonus now applies only once across both hands.
- Sorcerer: Lightning Bolt damage scaling is cut from 1.0 to 0.5.
- Bard: Din of Darkness and Piercing Shrill range goes from 5m to 6m, but damage now falls off from half range down to 25% at maximum range, and targets behind obstacles take only 50% damage.
- Cleric: can now equip the Solaris Cuirass.
Arcane Essence now drops two at a time instead of one, and some monster and corpse drop tables have been adjusted. Hiding in a Wood Barrel now shows the inside of the barrel with left-right camera movement only, the Party Finder loses its “Any Party Size” filter in favor of a region setting, and friend requests now trigger a notification indicator.
The hotfix also includes a long list of bug fixes, most notably two issues where equipped gear could be lost when reconnecting after a disconnect while loading into a dungeon or right after leaving the Tavern. Players also can no longer grab rope exits before they open. The full list is available in the official patch notes.
Source: Dark and Darker official news.
