After the LATAM server came back to life after being inaccessible for nearly two weeks following the August update, I started playing more often. I noticed that lava is almost harmless now—it drains very little HP, and you can stand on it for a few seconds or even run a long distance (longer if you jump/run) without dying. Before, just three steps were enough to kill us. Maybe this was done to balance volcano purges, but it feels a little odd now. Was this intended?
Another question: Was the noxious gas arrow nerfed? I noticed that some foes (purge defensive archers, for example) who used to die while standing in the noxious cloud now don’t even lose 10% of their HP. Enemies that used to die from a single arrow now require dozens, and sometimes they don’t die at all. Watching closely, I got the impression that they were losing HP and regenerating it at the same time, though not at the same rate.
Lava damage is affected by your damage resistance. This means walking on it naked will inflict full damage, which is 30% of your maximum health per tick, but walking on it with a full suit of heavy armor will do far less damage per tick. If your current character has more armor than you did in the past, you will take less damage than you remember, but the damage has not been changed.
Noxious gas has also not been changed. You say they appear to be healing at the same time. That would explain why you see a difference, but I do not know what would be healing them.
Is your information based on the values for these parameters out of the devkit? Because I noticed the exact same things on the official servers I play on. I run around in medium armour for ages and since the patch I don’t die anymore if I accidentally step on lava, I can cross smaller streams now without problem. And although I don’t run purges on a regular basis I can say that it is not possible anymore to clear the purge archer platforms with gas arrows. Online official both Xbox and PS5, I don’t play online on PC.
I noticed these changes when using the same armor set as always, the HP loss seems to be three times lower. I also noticed this with mobs: when they tried to cross the lava to reach us, they died quickly, but now they cover much greater distances. The archers don’t change much, I always thought they were too strong. When purge bases spawned right next to my base, even my best archers were killed by a single purge tower. The lava issue is a bit more disappointing, although the volcano purge has become more balanced, now I feel like the lava has lost its respect. Before, it was terrifying to fall into the lava far enough from the edge and know that death was certain, having to carefully time the jump, and always carry some material to make bridges, now I can even run freely in it lol.
I found this old statement on a forum: “Lava damage increased from 50/s to 250/s. Meaning: 3s on lava = death.” Recently, we had trouble logging into the LATAM servers, which were inaccessible for over a week. FC announced they would stop the decay timer until the issue was resolved. Could this freeze time be related to that? Similar to the freeze time option on the admin panel?
I was discussing this topic with Xevyr and he reminded me of a bug that was fixed this patch and is almost certainly the explanation for what you’ve experienced.
The bug caused damage not inflicted by a player to ignore armor mitigation. This bug was accidentally added during the Age of War when some dev accidentally “corrected” a value that was not incorrect (every coder has done this at some point).
Lava and gas damage are both supposed to be mitigated by armor, but the damage source does not come from a player, so they were ignoring it.
So between the introduction of the bug and it finally being fixed in the last patch, lava was ignoring armor and doing its full 30% max health damage every tick and noxious gas was doing its full 30 damage per tick to every enemy.
Lava is a thing that was never felt correctly balanced in this game.
When i started this game i didn’t knew the dragon mouth entrance and i lost a couple followers inside of it, unable to retrieve the loot , so i dedicated alone plenty of time in volcano to learn it’s secrets.
Then lava got nerfed a little bit and we had time in it, but still for some particular npcs lava was almost instant death. It was the “survival” points that was helping both players and followers to endure lava a bit more. Lesteret the unsung hero was a very good follower in volcano but it was very difficult to gain one.
I believe that it’s time for chilled god breaker boots to do the difference and for stygian alchemy. Both of these items should have immunity to lava.
Plus i believe that purge npcs should be total immune to lava, or plenty of them come with god breaker armor and god breaker hammers that destroy everything on their path. Volcano purge experience should be very difficult if not devastating, like it used to be. Golems on the other hand can easily have total immunity in lava and that’s an easy change.
yesterday i thought that the purge mobs was using their fallen comrades corpses to step and run fast over the lava, it would be brutal lol, like the insects climbing the base walls using corpses on starship troopers.