Zombasite More Mod - An Overhaul Mod
Release Version 1.0

We did it! At long last, this mod is finally finished!

This mod is the result of probably somewhere between 100-150 hours of development and playtesting over the course of 2 months. A small project for me, but one with big results!

The changes in this release patch specifically are the culmination of my testing of the game over the past couple of weeks. I made it a goal to play every class until I felt confident in knowing its true power. And, I also made it a goal to use every skill in the game at least once.

The results of this were incredible. Skills that I thought were useless actually have really strong mechanics. Combined with the changes I had made while modding, some turned out to be nuts. For example, Death Rune is actually nuts. Huge AoE damage that goes through walls. It’s actually bonkers. Same goes for Stealth. It gives so much bonus physical damage per point invested... and its damage buff lingers. Really strong. These skills were just overlooked by me historically since I hate rouges and didn't think that that the Reaper sub-class was that good. But now that I've tried out a lot of these niche skills and combos on chars, I've managed to get a taste for the true power level of all classes.

All of the classes will now feel really good to play to the extent that almost every random hybrid combination should feel very solid and entirely playable. And, if you have a need that a skill can meet, then it will almost always feel really good to invest into that skill and acquire it. There are now hundreds of new builds to play that are competitive and hardcore-viable; which is an extremely big deal for hardcore enthusiasts as there is really only one competitive and hardcore-viable build in the vanilla game; Conjurer. Now, you can easily make a build with another class that is as good as or in some cases even better than a Conjurer, which is something that really can't even happen in the vanilla game. Again, the goal was to make it so that you could feel good about playing pretty much any random hybrid combination at the character creation screen, so the power levels between classes have been brought way closer together while letting their individual strengths shine.

So, I end my introductions with this. If you enjoy Zombasite or if you don't. If you have complaints with the base game or just want to try something different. Regardless of the reason, I highly recommend checking out this mod at least once and seeing how it plays. It's a brand-new experience, one that you likely won't regret.

Changes:

- Rebalanced the weapon skills to bring them in line with other changes.
- Fixed empower not scaling properly.
- Reduced defense loss for using Berserk.
- Blur rebalanced. Cripple rebalanced.
- Ice Storm mana cost fixed.
- Charges bonuses rebalanced.
- Rampage bonuses rebalanced.
- Shield spells buffed. Item proc for holy shield upgraded to 75.
- Set time limit guardian/fire elementals to 999999 (basically lazy way to make them permanent).
- Thorns down to 5/10/15%.
- Mana burn was nerfed too hard. Back up a bit at 3/4/5%.
- Reduced spawn rate of health/mana potions by 50%.
- Increased health potion scaling by 4x.
- Increased mana potion scaling by 50%.
- Increased spawn rate of my custom potion to 2.0.
- Concentration gives 5% mana regen a level now.
- Mana regeneration affix is 1.5x.
- Health regeneration affix is 5x.
- Fortress block stun is now .5 seconds long. (vs. old 1.0). Range
- Deadly aim up to 25% per point invested again.
- Stealth bonuses reduced quite a lot.
- Snipe damage bonus down to 15% per level.
- Precision has buffed (10,15).
- Removed concentration from thief.
- Thief's Concentration speed doesn't give crit/deep wounds anymore. (Butchered).
- Apply poison damage bonus is now flat 12%.
- Ice Storm is now costs 8.
- Frost ring costs 4.
- Mana leech costs 4. Doubled leech effect.
- Staff Mastery added to monk.
- Hell Storm starts at 8 points.
- Slaughter cast time is 1.0 seconds. Costs 6 points. No damage penalty and scales by 5% phys damage a level.
- Whirlwind costs 6 points. starts at 5% and scales by 5% phys damage a level.
- Death Rune's base damage nerfed by 25%. DoT has been rebalanced (mostly buffed).
- Rebalanced/Added Damage inflation to most of the large-scale AoE abilities. The value is 3% a level.
- Earthquake has had its damage buffed. Mana cost starts at 15.
- Wampir Blood scaling has been increased to x4 (6 per level). Also has 3% damage inflation.
- Aura of Poison up to 2.0 damage per tick.
- Inferno damage to 2.5 a tick. Also has larger range (75 to 200). Gives 1% fire resistance a level rather than 10% a level.
- Shield sweep to 1.0 second total time. Reuse time 10 seconds.
- Tripled expedition point charge rate.
- Blood Sacrifice down to 5% phys damage per point. Health cost is much higher per stack and has inflation of 3%.
- All Dark Templar Buffs cost more health now base, but have lower inflation (3% instead of 5%).
- Demonic Roar has no reuse time.
- Blood Rage has no reuse time. Cast time is halved.
- Regeneration Aura power doubled from 2.5 to 5 base and per level.
- Double power of better potions mod. I had nerfed potions and simultaneously made hp goals way higher to reach. So, I had overnerfed potion regen a bit. Now, you can get a few pieces of gear with the better potions affix and it will feel valuable. Status effect duration may not seem valuable because of its low values. But, it has to be noted that 100% status effect duration by itself is double duration, which is nuts. So, I decided to not change it.
- Monster taunt has been nerfed to 3% attack/defense/cast speed per stack.
- No stamina debuff has had its effect reduced by 1/2.
- Bonus chests are now extremely durable and require keys to open. Brute forcing them breaks the items contained inside.
- The magic chest now spawns with similar loot to the base bonus chest. I nerfed its spawn rate though.
- Some cost tweaks to go along with affix buffs/nerfs.
- Ner.. erm *cough* Rebalanced Caltrops scaling.
- True Aim critical hit bonus nerfed to 1% a level. Apparently, status effect critical hits scale as 'more'. So, I had to nerf that.
- Dark Templar Blade of Darkness critical hit bonus nerfed to 1% per level too.
- Rebuffed critical hit affix.
- Rebuffed Crushing blow affix. Apparently, the physical and magic crushing blow affixes scale differently... so... yeah.
- Vendor price adjustments for changes above.
- Cold Mastery gives 2.5% status effect duration per point. 7.5% skill damage.
- Life burn now has cast time of 1.0. Damage scaling x2.
- Immolation now does 6 damage base and +6 per level with .03 health inflation.
- Arcane Might scaling fixed to .08 as it should be.
- Staff Mastery now gives .06% spell damage per point invested. Costs 6 points base.
- Set fury affix spawn chance to 0.
- Holy Strike's passives have been toned down. Cast time is now .75 seconds. Damage way up! Mana cost up.

Just a final note on balance here. The lightning mage is a bit underpowered in terms of damage compared to other classes. But, I'm a bit hesitant to buff because of the Sorcerer in the late game. Besides... it has tornado which prevents movement and is probably totally overpowered. So, it could use a little bit of weakness.

And last, some bug alerts to be aware of. First, normal items will not always stack, may have '+' signs on them and maybe display double the bonus of what they would normally give (applies to potions/gems, etc.). This is likely to do with the fact that I added additional affixes to the different item rarities. Though, I can't pin down the exact cause, because even I take off the extra affixes on regular items, it doesn't fix anything. The impact of this is not too major, but it is pretty annoying that potions/keys, etc. don't stack and that you have to halve the values of bonuses on items. If you hover the item, you will see it compares it against jewelry... so yeah. No idea what's going on there. The other big one is that Orb of Fortune and Dust of Destiny do not work properly on relics. The mods rolled will be itemlevel 1. There is also a bugged interaction with fortune/destiny being able to be used on broken items, but not removing the broken item flag on the items, causing them to be both broken and not. Not really important, but figured I'd note.

----

Now I end these release notes with a few personal comments.

First, an update on my plan for this mod going forward. I will update this mod for the upcoming expansion and perhaps have a few small tweak mods in the future to cover anything I may have overlooked or to further fine tune balance. The chance that I missed a few balance issues is.. well.. very high. This game is pretty complex and there is a lot of small stuff that is very easy to overlook. But, my point here is that I have no intention of making new skills or performing any more sweeping changes. Because of this, you can expect characters to not need to be deleted in the future.

My only regrets with this mod are that I can't fine tune the balance of the game to the degree that I want. And, I can't do more in regards to effects/animations and art. But, art was always a big extra, never something that I felt was mandatory. And, effects/animations weren't happening no matter what. So, oh well.

In the end, I'm very satisfied with my work on this mod and I can't wait to try to beat the game with a level 100 character. Is this possible? Absolutely. Will it be easy? Probably not. I have yet to make it to level 50. But, both of my deaths at like lvl 35 and level 43 were extremely fair and I felt that they were totally justified. Getting past elite will be quite hard... and as for legendary and ultimate? Even I have no idea. :D (Though, they should theoretically be balanced anyway, since my formulas worked up to level 50, so they should be even more consistent on the path up to level 100 since changes are less drastic... scaling down from infinity ya kno)