We have hinted at the rehauling of several Combat Skills recently, and we are happy to announce that these improvements made their way into the next build of Vagrus. Moreover, we ended up with many more skills that now work much better or are completely new than we had initially thought. Here are a few of these with some commentary:

One of the most requested additions by our Early Access players has been Companion progression for a while now, and it's no surprise. Being a party-based RPG at its heart, Vagrus has a roster of unique Companions that are your most trusty lieutenants with their own backstories, skills, and personalities. It is only natural that they can become stronger with time and effort - and we have naturally designed this progression system in the beginning, but we held off on adding it because there were a lot of specifics to work out and the EA experience functioned fairly well without it.

Fellow vagri! In this video, we touch upon one of the (many) improvements we have added to Companion combat: diminishing returns. In essence, Block and Evade will receive stacking penalties with each successful use. This will prevent some enemies to endlessly avoid damage (as well as players to abuse buffs, heh), drawing out some fights too drastically.

This time, we bring you a little teaser about the next area we are about to add to Vagrus, namely the twin salt basins north of the Crimson Gate and the Hills of Plenty. It includes - among other things - the town of Salum, where the Dragonlands is in control of a faltering salt mining operation and seems to be oblivious to certain issues surrounding it. Is someone hiding something? You'll have to dig deeper to find out. Or just harvest salt and try to get rich in the process.

Just a quick update: in line with our efforts to have more frequent content updates for Vagrus, we are getting close to releasing one that involves the salt flats of northeastern Jagged Waste. Expect endless expanses of white lake beds, a cruel 'work camp' with corrupt leadership, Dragon riders, faction politics, miners, clandestine conspiracies, spying, secrets, and salt. Lots of salt.

As seen in this short video, the option to flee from crew combat encounters has been added to Vagrus' latest build. No need to die against a horde of Jhakrae or a throng of Undead (or to load your game...). Run away and live to fight another day!

Fellow vagri! This is just a short video to demonstrate the recently updated Leader Status UI pane, which lists all the enduring status effects that belong to your character, the vagrus.

The Lost Pilgrims

Lately, we have been working on Crew Combat to further enhance its mechanics and the latest improvement is the 'Flee' feature. Let's check it out!

Flee!

Fleeing will now be added to a selection of Crew Combat encounters with the following considerations:

With the previous large update (Codename: Bandage), we have introduced some changes to Scouting on the campaign map and we thought that we should give you a more detailed change log of what exactly happened. These alterations all appear on the Scouting Result UI.

• A set of colored chevrons now indicate the success or failure state of your scouting in each direction instead of text saying how things went.
• For each successful scouting, a set of icons appear that indicate what to expect there with chances for each of these outcomes next to the icons. The scroll icon indicates an Event, the axe icon means a crew combat encounter, the compass shows an exploration Task destination (but we'll implement this feature in the future), and the crossed-out circle indicates that nothing happens.
• For each critical success, you will now get more precise percentages and more detailed information in the case of Events. The blue scroll indicates a priority Event (story-related or fixed local Event), while the golden scroll means a random Event (general or region-specific).
• Scouting now also provides information about the viability of hunting and foraging on the scouted nodes. Percentages represent the expected chances of such activities on the nodes. The less successful the scouting, the less  accurate the percentages are (with critical success being perfectly accurate).

As you can see, we have been working on making Scouting more desirable for players, as we feel that in its current form it is rather under-used. This is but a first step - we have many more ideas and will hopefully be able to implement them as we go along. Thank you for all the amazing feedback and improvement suggestions you all gave us!

With the relatively recent arrival of Factions to Vagrus, you guys finally got your hands on a new way to specialize your comitatus. Up until now, this meant some obscure (albeit very welcome - I'm looking at you, road tax) boons and perks but now, with the addition of claimable rewards, Factions are going to become your best friends.