Hotfix 120 for Dark and Darker’s early access build is mostly a cleanup pass, but it carries two changes that alter how fights actually read: melee defence has been reworked around parries and ripostes, and hitscan spells no longer care where they land on a body. Add a guaranteed boss lineup in The Firedeep and a handful of class tweaks, and this is a patch worth reading properly rather than skimming.
Defence gets a real overhaul
The melee section is where IRONMACE spent most of the effort:
- The parry area is wider, so parry-into-riposte behaves consistently across every weapon that supports it.
- Parry weapons can now convert a normal block into a riposte when the incoming hit lands outside the parry area — but without the bonus damage a true parry grants.
- Defence recovery times on weapons and shields were shortened, making block-into-riposte more reliable.
- Cases where an attacker’s weapon clipped through a defending weapon and still connected have been reduced.
- A Parry Riposte Attack line was added to the Character Stats window, showing the riposte damage bonus with your current weapon; a separate entry covers the bonus for a riposte after a standard block. Both multipliers also show up in the Player Detail window.
Classes, bosses and one missing audio cue
Class balance is narrow. Rogue’s Veil of Shadows keeps its stealth for the first two seconds even if you move. Barbarian’s Whirlwind loses value, with all weapon damage multipliers dropping from 100% to 90%. Wizard changes were still being listed where the announcement text cuts off.
The Firedeep now always spawns both the Fire Colossus and the Magma Wyvern, and artifact drop rates from Firedeep bosses went up. The Wyvern itself got a long list of fixes: it no longer wanders out of its arena during certain attacks, no longer stands still instead of chasing, takes damage on its lower body properly, and its flame attack visuals are back in sync with the damage window. Its attack patterns are also slightly harder now. A separate fix removes the trap where players could not leave Firedeep after killing the Colossus.
Two entries change what information a fight gives you. Hitscan spells such as Zap and curses no longer apply hit-location damage, so headshots with them are gone. And the sound effect that fired when a player dropped to very low health has been removed entirely.
What this means for players using software
A hotfix is still a fresh client binary, and fresh binaries mean shifted offsets. Nothing in the patch notes tells you whether your ESP, loot overlay or aim helper survived — the only sane move is to check the software update statuses before queueing and wait for the rebuilt version instead of loading a stale one into a raid. Injecting into a build the software was never compiled against is the classic way to eat a crash mid-dungeon, which in an extraction game costs you the whole kit.
The hitscan change quietly kills a common caster setup. If your configuration prioritised head hitboxes for Zap or curse casting, that priority now buys you nothing and only makes tracking harder at range — centre-mass targeting is simply better maths after this patch. Similarly, any block or parry timing you had dialled in is invalid: a wider parry area plus faster defence recovery moves every window, and old numbers will feel either early or lazy until you retune them by hand.
Removing the low-health audio cue works in our favour. The game now leaks less information about how close an opponent is to dying, which makes a reliable health readout through software more valuable than it was yesterday. Guaranteed Firedeep bosses plus better artifact rates push the same way: routes are predictable now, so planning your entry and knowing what is already looted matters more than raw reaction.
Finally, expect the usual post-patch cleanup wave. Keep your HWID spoofer current, dial visuals back for the first day or two, and pick a build that actually matches the new client on the Dark and Darker page.
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