The Black Pool patch 1.2 introduces an entirely new game mode: Arena Survivors— a fast and intense battle arena featuring rapid progression and randomized waves of increasingly more difficult enemies. It delivers a fun and highly replayable “survivors-like” spin on The Black Pool gameplay, and also provides a quick way to experiment with abilities and builds without the time commitment of a full playthrough. A successful Arena Survivors attempt will take around 30 minutes, compared to 90 minutes for the full game mode (now called The Journey Home).

Four unique arenas have been developed for Arena Survivors, each presenting varied and evolving layouts, hazards, and challenges.

• Endless Mode: Upon clearing level 30 in Arena Survivors, players can choose to keep playing endlessly. Attempt to set new records, go crazy with augments, and push the game beyond its design constraints. Caps on the number of upgrades are increased. Things can get nuts. You have been warned!
  
• New dynamic music track: Making Contact. The musical score now consists of 7 dynamic tracks which seamlessly progress with the playthrough sequence, and 10 Temple tracks.
  
• Players can now reallocate their geodes in The Device, enabling more experimentation and strategy.
  
• Improved Widescreen Support: Dynamic FOV is now applied based on resolution aspect ratio, providing better support for ultra widescreen formats.
  
• When a player reconnects, the player will now respawn using a friend’s location rather than the level start.

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• Added Rank 7 Enemies: Introduced an additional level of difficulty with a new top rank, Rank 7 (red). Rank 6 enemies, which were previously red, are now orange. Rank 7 enemies can appear in challenge modes, endless mode, and when playing in large parties.
  
• Detonating enemies now take 4 seconds to arm after spawning. If they are destroyed prior to arming, they will not explode for AOE damage. This greatly improves the experience of kamikazes and seamines spawning in close proximity to players.
  
• Stomper: Reduced the rate that player damage is applied when touching a Stomper laser plane.
  
• Infected Enemies: The orange area attack from flux infected enemies now fires less frequently.
  
• Ice effect on Bosses: Frozen status duration on bosses reduced to 50% compared to regular enemies (previously was 33%), but the boss now gains a half second immunity to freezing afterwards.
  
• Lightning effect on Bosses: Stun duration reduced to 50% on bosses compared to regular enemies.
  
• Ice Mine: Increased base damage by 20%.

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• Improved AI: Enemies now have improved pathing when there are obstacles between them and players.
  
• Performance: Fixed a few memory leaks which caused longer levels to degrade in performance over time.
  
• Multiplayer: More robust channeled ability management, improving situations where ability duration is shorter than ping, which previously could leave a cast stuck channeling or prematurely end it.
  
• Fixed an issue that could cause event bars to stop being displayed.
  
• Seeker: Fixed multiplayer bug that could result in client players gaining infinite instant cooldown quick void attacks.
  
• Boulder Toss: Fixed issue where the boulder was not always colliding with enemies once redirected by an ability.
  
• Focused Light: Fixed "way too bright" visual bug.
  
• Fixed auto targeting point on wall turrets (for stone turrets and auto targeting spells).
  
• Fixed an issue when defeating the final boss which failed to trigger the end music queue and halt passive enemy spawns.
  
• Heals applied to shielded players will no longer trigger an “armor blocked” sound, causing players to wonder if the heal was reduced.

Plus many more smaller tweaks and bug fixes.

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Shoutout to Volcris, ThatPlatypus, RedSpekkio, Skelly, Wrusty, DoomSayer, Sh4ft, and Morris230 for their help in testing this patch.

Creating a full new game mode was a huge undertaking. Let us know your thoughts and experiences on Arena Survivors!

Endless mode was one of the top requested new features in our latest Discord player survey. If you would like to be part of the community and share your opinion on what should be developed next, join The Black Pool Discord[discord.gg]!

• Fix for Dynamic FOV.