V Rising is overhauling the magic system in May's free expansion

rockpapershotgun.com:

Vampiric survival game V Rising continues its early access with a free expansion coming in May. It's meaty, overhauling a few areas of the game including magic progression, spellcasting, and lair building in preparation for the endgame. But it’s also “giving you more of what you already love” with new weapons and spells, boss battles, areas, and factions. Quite a lot to sink your teeth into, then.

The team’s blog post details all the new changes, with spellcasting in general receiving several notable ones. The five schools of magic are becoming more cohesive, with debuffs that benefit from stacking. These debuffs suffer from diminishing returns, though, since the team wants to encourage players to mix and match spells from other specialisations. Every individual spell in V Rising is getting either a minor tweak or a complete rework, all in an attempt to encourage “more unique, focused and intentional builds.”

Also in spellcasting, are new item type called Jewels is coming. These can can be equipped onto individual spells to strengthen and modify them, with higher-tiered Jewels granting more buffs. Jewels will be dropped by certain enemy types, but they’ll most commonly be found in extravagant, glowing treasure chests.

The free expansion is also bringing in an experimental "Territory” feature, which will “allow Vampires to claim individual plots of land instead of placing a castle heart and expanding single tile by single tile.” The goal is to fit more players into the game world, reduce player friction, and prevent various technical issues. But they teased that Territories might allow them to introduce new mission types in the future “like infiltrations, invasions, and spy missions.”

In his early access review,