v0.13.0 — Echidna, the Brood Matriarch

Echidna, the Brood Matriarch

A new endgame hunt. Once your bestiary is complete and you have bought Dark Citadel Resonance X, the Hunting Crew starts looking for signs of the Brood Matriarch.
Collect her four signs. Every mark you slay in one of the four farm regions has a 10% chance to leave that region’s sign: lightning in the Grasslands, poison in the Swamp, fire in the Foothills, cold in the Mountains. Found signs show up in the bounty window, and the crew panel tracks them as four pips.
Track her with all four signs: 500,000 gold and 6 hours. While her nest stands, the crew takes no other job.
The fight: Echidna is a level-200 four-headed hydra on a top Dark Citadel tile. She deals no physical damage. Each head attacks with its own element, so only your matching resistance helps, not armor or block. A head falls at 75%, 50% and 25% HP (lightning, poison, fire, then cold). Her HP bar refills for each head, and four life orbs next to her name show the heads that are left. She stands a head taller than other enemies.
The reward is a single unique ring, the Signet of the Matriarch: +1–2 to all skills, +15–30 to all attributes, +20–30% to all resistances, and a 10% on-hit chance each to trigger Venomous Steel, Thundering Strike, Fiery Blade and Freezing Veins. There is no gold and no other loot. If she kills you or you break off the fight, she escapes and the signs are gone.
Her bestiary card sits after the 30 marks and doesn’t count toward them.
Combat log: statuses enemies put on you now read ” stuns you”, ” poisons you” and so on. Before, they read as if you had stunned the enemy.

Affixes

New affixes: Reduced Stun Duration and Reduced Freeze Duration. They can roll on magic, rare and unique armor (including shields), amulets and rings, and cut an enemy’s 2 s stun or freeze on you to 1.5 s. A freeze still slows you. They don’t stack: the best item counts. The Witch can add them from the Resistances group.
Immune to Stun / Immune to Freeze exist as unique-only affixes and stop the status entirely.
Your character sheet shows Stun and Freeze Duration rows while your gear changes them.
Elemental Damage % and Enemy Resistance Reduction are now unique-only. They no longer roll on magic or rare drops, trader offers or Witch crafts. The Witch’s Elemental group now holds only the four flat elemental damages, so it only appears for weapons. If your magic or rare items carry these rolls, each one is replaced by a random other affix of the same tier when you update your save.

Crafting

Tempering a shield now raises its Shield Damage by the temper %, like a weapon’s damage (+20% at 10/10). Shield Strike, Smite, Aegis and the Bastion block counter hit harder. The item card and the Blacksmith preview show the new range.
A Witch enchant on a shield now also raises the shield’s own Enhanced Damage and Flat Damage in its Shield Damage. Before, only the affix lines showed the enchanted values.

Training

Armor training starts at 3 of 5 pieces. Each hit you take trains the material you wear 3 or more pieces of: full rate at 5/5, 75% at 4/5, 50% at 3/5. Training bonuses still need the same pieces as before.
Dual wield trains both weapons. Each hand trains its own weapon class at half rate, so the pair trains as fast as one weapon would. Training bonuses still come from the main hand only. The Training Grounds and the hand tooltips show the rates.

Endless Delve and hunts

Endless Delve wardens now pay Echo Shards (depth ÷ 20, rounded up) and guardians add Echo Cores (depth ÷ 40, rounded up). For example, depth 100 pays 5 shards and 3 cores. You see it on the kill line, in the run summary and in the offline report.
A completed bestiary page cuts that region’s scout from 8 h to 6 h. The dispatch form, the confirm and the bestiary Marks tab show it.

Uniques

New level-95 unique: Therons Riddle (Gilded Cuirass): +2 to all skills, +500–750 Defense, damage reduced by 15–30, Indestructible, +15 to Rush (usable by every class, learned or not) and +5–10% to all resistances.
Aridons Skin now drops from level-95 enemies and is rarer. Its two skill lines (Iron Resilience, Tempered Soul) now grant those skills to every class, learned or not.
New icons for Jakob, Stone of Absurdity and Trinity.