These patch notes are intended to highlight the most significant changes but don’t cover every modification to the game as part of this update.

Key New Features

• Tinker – an all new class that can drop traps, build walls, deploy a turret, and throw wrenches.

General

• The light towers have a new look, and now change color to indicate what team is currently in control of them.
• Added hit feedback sounds for when you hit somebody else, and when you get hit.
• Fixed the Shrine healing VFX to fires in SinglePlayer.
• Fixed casting VFX firing on AI in SinglePlayer.
• Fix for players who have invalid class level (should fix un-levelable classes).
• Upgraded Ranked game team balance logic.
• Fix to Ranked game not shuffling in spectators if someone leaves during warmup.
• Ravager Wars – the first mod for Forge.

UI

• Energy arc moved to be vertical on the HUD (right of the crosshair).
• Health arc added to the HUD to the left of the crosshair.
• The blocking UI has moved from the right to the left of the crosshair.
• Your health arc and health bar, as well as nameplate health bars now show white ‘lost’ health when damaged.
• Changed damage numbers so they are now consolidated per tick. This mostly effects dots and FlakShot.
• Fixed toggling the scoreboard breaking the tutorials.
• Fixed the chat font not loading in the groups menu.

Gameplay

• The light towers have reduced range (700 to 500), forcing you to go in closer to start occupation.
• Fixed projectiles giving mana when hitting dead bodies.
• Improved auto wall joining logic.
• Added config option to skip the simulated cast effect of abilities.
• The following abilities now never use simulation (effect only on hit/success): Stand Ground, Caltrops, Explosive Trap, Shield Storm, Shockwave, Chain Slap.

Warden

• Fixed the cast sound for charging leap so it now only plays when the Warden successfully leaps.
• Improved Shield Storm so it’s less likely to fall through the world.

We have changed the algorithm for the matchmaker to improve matching between newer players and veteran players. The algorithm looks at the number of players currently playing and decides if there are enough players to separate newer players from veteran players. If there are, then it begins to place them on separate game servers.

We are monitoring it closely and will probably be making tweaks as we gather information on the effectiveness of the matches.  Please let us know if you have any problems with matchmaking.

We’ve been very fortunate to have an active community that has taken a big role in helping guide us on development. We are still an indie developer and therefore must choose very carefully what features we work on with our limited resources. We’ve had numerous meetings where we put all of your features and requests up on a whiteboard and discussed which items we can feasibly do with our limited resources and which items would have the most return for the resource buck. We then shopped the list with our partners at DC and SuperGenius to come up with a final prioritized list.

We’ve heard over and over again how much you wanted more hit feedback so we all worked together with your input to come up with a good solution that we think you’ll be happy with. We are currently testing this in our Beta environment and it should be in the next patch.

As you may have guessed (and will hopefully be excited about), we’re close and are in final testing with the Tinker class. Not only will it be great to have a new class, but with this “Free DLC” we will hopefully bring a new influx of players into the game.

It’s kind of hard to imagine that DC has any extra time, but, in their extra time they have created a mod to Forge called “Ravager Wars.” We hope to put it on a couple servers on the next patch.

A little further down the road we have a plan for an overhaul of the progression system. We’ve had some fantastic player involvement in coming up with a new progression system that will de-serialize progression to support different player personalities. It will allow new players to quickly unlock mechanical unlocks to stop ‘imbalance’ claims, and allow new players more options more quickly. A new currency will be introduced for purchasing cosmetic items which will accrue similarly to the amount of XP currently required to unlock cosmetic items. We hope this will help in growing our player base by keeping new players engaged and by providing more content for our very important veteran players as well.

Another item we’re in the early stages of is Guilds. We hope to further encourage a sense of community from players and allow for more team play which should improve the experience of objective game play such as Capture the Relic. Forge is definitely a team based game and the introduction of guilds is the first step in our plan for organized teams. The guild progression system will provide players benefits such as an XP multiplier, exclusive Guild skins, titles, and more.

We realize this last item, providing some kind of free demo, freemium, or F2P service, may raise some eyebrows.  We hope you all know that we all want what’s best for Forge and the Forge community. We are not looking for a way to nickel and dime you but more of a way for Forge to survive in this big publisher world. As you know, being an indie, we don’t have huge marketing budgets (or any marketing budget) and rely mostly on you and steam for bringing in new players. Going F2P will increase our CCU’s which will be enjoyable for all of us to play. We made a promise early on that Forge would never be “Pay to Win” and we stand by that as we investigate moving to a F2P model. In the simplest model, we would reserve progression and guilds for those who bought the game. F2P players would still earn XP and the new currency, but couldn’t spend it or get any benefit until they upgraded. So, it’s more of a freemium model.

If you look at our forums, you’ll see that all of these ideas came from you all and we really appreciate everything you do to make Forge better. Please keep up the discussions as we really do read and listen to what you say.

These patch notes are intended to highlight the most significant changes but don’t cover every modification to the game as part of this update.

General

• Infrastructural changes to help us make ELO and XP more reliable and robust.
• Added Practice Arena to the Arena map rotation.
• If you disconnect or leave after a part of a round, your XP is saved.
• Fixed players getting a team if they join a Ranked Arena game while it’s running.
• Fixed Ranked Arena games starting with uneven teams when a player on a team leaves in the warmup.
• Score display period sped up for Ranked Arena games (from 18s to 10s).
• Fixed Founder armor set not working if you disconnected and then reconnected to a server.
• Fixes to improve the server counts in the Steam server browser.
• Stopped bots in large Co-op games from spamming the chat so much.
• Fixed casting effect bugs that can be caused by high ping.
• Now blocking Ranked Arena to new users until they’ve earned 30,000 XP.

UI

• New ranking icons.
• Improved the reliability of the Play menu unlocking.
• Fixed a couple of issues with cooldown sliders and cooldown flashes with some ability orders.
• Fixed the escape menu warning about leaver status when you’re a spectator in Ranked Arena.
• Forsaken message made clear in the main menu and clearer in-game.
• Fixed issue where hitting Escape in some frontend sub-menus could break the menu.
• Preceptor and Tournament Winner titles and scoreboard prefixes added.
• Changes to hopefully improve AMD Eyefinity users – not full support.

Gameplay

• Bot skill level in Co-op mode is now adjusted more often and doesn’t require a respawn.

Assassin

• Assassin’s Disorienting Strike focus B no long has the ‘miss next attack’ component.
• Removed Assassin’s Panteras Kiss (default only) initial damage.

Shaman

• Shaman’s Spiritual Burden cooldown to 12s from 10s.
• Shaman’s Spiritual Fervor focus A now has a 10s cooldown, no mana cost.
• Shaman’s Blessed Aura focus A AOE range reduced.

Warden

• Warden’s Shockwave range down to 650 from 700.
• Cooldown for Warden’s Shockwave up to 12s from 10s.
• Warden’s Charging Leap mana cost to 10 from 15.

Ravager

• Removed the pin from Ravager’s Grapple.
• Ravager’s Mangle cooldown to 2s from 0 (GCD).
• Ravager’s Mangle cost to 20 from 15.
• Ravager’s Grapple now only costs 1/2 energy if missed (1/2 on firing 1/2 on hit).
• The pull on Ravager’s Grapple now always happens on hits (damage can still be blocked).
• Fixed Ravager’s Hook and Grapple beam VFX in multiplayer.
• Fixed Ravager Sword mode acting like Chain mode when you don’t have a target.