Season Two & Official Duos Release

Greetings Oaklings 🪵

Patch v0.5.4 - Season 2 begins and new Duos mode!

Official Duos release

I am happy to announce that Duos is now officially released. With future updates, you might see some new duos content as well, however, the main focus will be on Solo moving forward.

Duos Features

• Separate ranked leaderboard.

• 14 items unique to Duos.

• The Seer - A new Duos encounter with 23 unique options to buff you and your partner.

• Join up with your friends or match with a random partner.

• All the Emotes!

Expect bug fixes and tweaks over the coming weeks!

Season 2 begins!

End-of-Season rewards

For everyone who participated in Season 1, you will be awarded:

• The Birch Tower skin.

• Player Titles up to your end-of-season rank.

Reworked Rating System

The rating system in Oaken Tower has always been very forgiving. Actually so forgiving, that it ended up in massive rating-inflation. The current system ended up being a measure of time spent rather than skill, and for season 2, I am trying to go the other direction. The new rating system is inspired by the system in Down with the Ship and many other games.

Essentially, the high ranks become very demanding, and you should find the ranked ladder much more competitive. Grandmaster will now be a true achievement.

Better UI for "Random Packs"

You can now clearly see if you have equipped fully random packs, which provides +10% rating boost.

What's coming next during Season 2?

• More item collabs / crossovers with other games you love! 🤔🤐

• Player Stats so you can track all your crazy numbers 🔢📈🤯

• The Q3 Content Update including:

The Vampire Set

New unlockable Perks!

I plan on the perks for the Q3 update to be a mix of safe/reliable perks and some crazy high-roll ones.

and more...

Gameplay Changes

Leveling up early game tended to be very strong. In high-elo, the main strategy was to power-level early game and choose the Healing Touch option from the priest to gain large amounts of Max HP - essentially winning on HP diff,gaining access to legendary items AND gaining extra income to outscale anyone who didn't level up.

To make early game leveling more punishing I am introducing 2 new gameplay changes:

• Healing Touch (priest, d3): Gain +100% Max HP --> Gain +85% Max HP.

• Losing / Winning a combat grants: 4 / 8 XP --> 4 / 12 XP.

The last change makes tempo builds fall less behind, because they are rewarded with more XP.

I will be monitoring this gameplay change closely over the next weeks.

The intent is not to make scaling builds bad, but to make the game more dynamic and make buying items early game a more viable strategy in high ranks.

Duos changelog

• Added 3 new Want?/Need ping options.

• You can now emote during combat.

• Fixed connection issues. The game will now automatically reconnect in the background if you briefly lose connection.

• The Oak fight in duos now only fights with your board.

• Duos has been translated into all available languages. (Please report any bugs you find in the Discord)

• Added ranked mode and ranked leaderboard.

• The host chooses Casual/Ranked, but the joiner can ping to signal what they want to play.

• If you play with a random partner and they leave mid-game, only they will lose rating.

• Projectiles are now destroyed when a new tower swaps in.

Fixes

• Hovering your ranked flag in-game no longer shows 100 more rating than you actually have.

• Various Duos bugfixes.

Other

• The game now shows "Update available!" for players who are playing when a new update rolls out. This will also disable ranked and duos until you update the game.

Join the discord! http://discord.gg/yPXGp2NXcj

//Bocary