The Cove is Now Live!

• The Cove dungeon region, featuring 7 new monsters, 2 new bosses, new curios, all new environment art, and new music!
• The Cove features monsters that are in general both fast and bleed resistant, and also have many bleed-causing attacks.
• The Cove monsters also include some key mechanics previously unused by monsters, such as healing and guarding! These mechanics may begin to work their way into other dungeon regions in the future…beware!
• You do not need to begin a new campaign to play The Cove. Cove quests will spawn alongside quests from other regions.

• Idle heroes in town will recover a small amount of stress between quests even if not placed in active treatment at the Tavern or Abbey
• By popular demand: unused dungeon supplies now sell back at the end of a quest (for a smallish percentage of their value)
• Increased roster size a bit so players with full rosters can recruit some new heroes and go Cove spelunking even at low level quests
• Streamlined combat flow to keep the pace brisk and reduce many of the small waits that occur between chained events
• Revised the core combat damage calculation so trinkets and other buffs apply in a more even way to AOE attacks. This will preserve intended damage balance of AOE vs single target attacks and help keep both approaches situationally useful. Previously, trinket and other buffs were amplifying AOE damage unfairly with respect to single target attacks. The revised calculation applies the base skill modifier directly to the weapon damage, and then totals all other buffs before applying them to this base result.
• Trinkets have received a much-needed balance pass. The goal was to ensure that rarer trinkets are more reliably valuable than less rare trinkets, and also to make many previously uninteresting trinkets (both general and class-specific) more interesting. While some trinkets will obviously be better than others for some classes, dungeons, or situations, we have improved many of the trinkets that were particularly weak or problematic. A few trinkets have been nerfed (in cases where the value was just too high compared to other trinkets). Some trinkets have had their rarity adjusted, and we will likely do more of this once we measure the results of these changes. Additional trinket adjustments may also be required in the future.
• Trinket drops are a bit more constrained–you won’t see as many rare drops in lower level dungeons.
• Resolve level 0 and 1 heroes now have more disease resistance! After all, they are fresh off the stagecoach and are the healthiest they’ll ever be!
• Some more small mobs don’t leave corpses (e.g. dogs, spiders, gargoyles)
• Adjustments to the surprise mechanic: surprised monsters now act last in the first round but no longer lose an entire turn.
• Players cannot retreat during the first combat round if they were surprised.
• Retreating from combat adds stress
• Some skills effects that didn’t show % chance now show % chance in the associated skill tooltips (e.g. Jester stress heals)
• Riposting heroes won’t riposte against 0-damage causing attacks
• Heroes and monsters generally shouldn’t be able to crit on a 0 damage attack
• Torchlight properly drops to 0 during camping ambushes
• Corpses don’t give critting stress relief
• Fixed bug where both +herosurprise and +monstersurprise was occuring in dim light. (Should just be +heroes surprised)
• Camping ambushes always surprise the party
• Many misc bug fixes

• Heroes’ armor icons now visually upgrade with each new rank
• All quest objects (ex. Reliquary) now have unique art
• Foreground layer added to every dungeon
• New pop-text icons for greater ‘at-a-glance’ clarity on skill effects.
• Tray icons/character panel icons restyled to match pop-text icons
• Updated Corpse art
• Rebalanced several enemy color tints
• New pose for Plague Doctor’s ‘Incision’ skill

• Click to advance through plot quest (boss) narration on loading screens
• Full music and sound design on the Cove!
• – all new music by Stuart Chatwood
• – ambiences
• – wet footstep recordings
• – all new props! Ever wondered what sifting a through a whale carcass sounds like? wonder no more!
• – all enemies and bosses fully designed with unique attacks, impacts and voices
• – live recorded voice of the Siren singing along to the battle track
• nearly 100 new lines for the Narrator including more coverage for already existing events
• Narration lines no longer limited to playing only 99 times in a given campaign
• new music arrangements for hallway battles in all regions
• redid all traps, trap disarms, trap dodges
• redesigned impacts on some existing enemy attacks
• retimed battle-end stinger and sound triggers
• Brigand Pounder, Gibbering Prophet and Formless Flesh bosses now all have dungeon intro/outro narration

Final notes: the large amount of new content and features means that some bugs will likely have slipped through. Report what you find in the Steam forums / on twitter @darkestdungeon / via email support@redhookgames.com. Rest assured we’ll be monitoring and working on fixes as fast as we are able!

Delve deep and remember: avoid all pacts with undead sailors!

–the Darkest Dungeon team