3.22.0b Patch Notes (restartless)

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Duran_Fauxe wrote:

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Kieren_GGG wrote:

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Duran_Fauxe wrote:

Performance Fixes when?

We're currently investigating and testing fixes for situations that some players are experiencing (tiles/assets sometimes not loading, long load times, cases of high CPU load) and hope to get them out soon.

Thank you for the response. :)
I love the update!

For the record, I do believe the performance issues seem to be affecting people with VRAM of 1 GB or less, at least in reference to the constant shader spikes. That is my current hypothesis.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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Savage_of wrote:

soooooooo let me get this straight. youre deleting a build that people like out of the game entirely for no reason because youre deciding that the way spell cascade has worked for *checks calendar* 6 mfing years is now a "bug"? what exactly did impending doom do you to guys?

This bug is not that old (it is 3 years old, which is still impressive).

Spell Cascade has always taken account of area modifiers when placing areas, to make them more spaced out and prevent areas from overlapping too much. That has been the case since it's introduction in 3.1.0, at which point it as far as I can tell, it did not have the bug, because no cascadable spells were using the +x to radius stat.

In 3.12.0, curses changed from having % area modifiers to having + radius modifiers as the gem levels up. Due to the way radii have traditionally been handled in PoE, unlike % area modifiers, which can all be combined into a single multiplier that gets applied in a standard function, adding to the radius can't be folded into that multiplier. This means that each skill which uses a + radius stat needs it's code changed to manually add the value of that stat before the aforementioned multiplier is applied.

Unbeknownst to us at the time, this introduced the bug (at least as it pertains to curses). The curses themselves were correctly updated to account for this modifier applying to them, but Spell Cascade was not - it was adjusting the spacing of areas to account for all area modifiers except "+ radius" ones, which is incorrect - it was calculating spacing based on the wrong area radius.

I only worked out this part today, but some other skills, such as Contagion, were actually handling radius in a different way which included the added radius in the base radius value that spell cascade saw, meaning they behaved correctly - so the bug was inconsistent from skill to skill.

3.22.0 includes a substantial internal rework of radius handling to allow radii for skills to mostly be determined by stats, which can then be described on the gem/skill popup (as is already done for the new Avenging Flame skill from Flamewood Support). This necessitated changes to how Spell Cascade calculates radius. We weren't expecting this to change anything, as in theory it was already accounting for all area modifiers and continued to do so in the new system, but due to the bug it was actually not correctly doing that previously for several skills, including all Hexes.
Because the new version of spell cascade calculation was done correctly (and no longer requires special code in each skill for +radius to be applied), this changed behaviour with the skills that had the bug, and we didn't find this difference in testing prior to the patch release, so it was not described in patch notes.

The correct, intended behaviour of spell cascade has always been that it calculates the spacing of the areas based on how big they actually are.
The previous behaviour was that for many, but not all skills, it calculated spacing based on the area they would have had if they had no "+x to radius" modifiers. This is clearly a bug and meant it was inconsistent between different skills, and different ways of changing area of effect.