The Slormancer News

Hello everyone! It's Chronicle Time!

If you've been following The Slormancer, you know that our last update was "The Luxuriant Update Part I" so naturally, our next update will be "The Luxuriant Update Part II".

As mentioned on the Road Map, "The Luxuriant Update Part II" will include:

• A New Act: New Missions and a new Boss fight.
  
• A New Ancestral Legacy Tree Tier.
  
• An Increased Level Cap.
  

Act IV is in progress. 8 new missions are being added to the game, followed by a glorious boss fight!

When we create new missions, our goal is to build something that cannot be found in regular procedurally generated Expeditions, so we try to toy with the possibilites of the environment. So you can expect gardens filled of fountains or ponds or anything we could think of.

In the Luxuriant Gardess, we tried to build a few missions around the maze and the possibilities that it offers without, hopefully, creating tedious missions.

We are adding a new Quality of Life -sort of- mechanic: When you complete a mission, you will now be able to move on to the next mission without having to come back to the village everytime.

Unless an event has to trigger in the village to forward the story, in which case, this won't be an option.
We will add this mechanic for Act IV missions for now, and add it to previous acts at some point as well.








Once you clear Act IV, you will get your usual Ancestral Stone from Adam Nostrus which leads me to our next part.


This new Ancestral Stone will give you access to 32 new Ancestral Skills.

Here are a few examples of the new Skills you will have access to:





And finally, the Level Cap will go up to 70.
After that, there will be another increase going up to Level 80 during The Royal Update Part II and a final increase to Level 100 for The Final Update and the end of Early Access.




We are also working on various reworks.
These may or may not make it to the next Update depending on how much time we have left, but they are on top of our to-do list:

• Controller Rework: We want to improve the overall experience in gameplay by allowing players to have control over the auto-targetting system and improve the feeling as much as possible.
  We also want to almost entirely rework how menus are being handled with a controller. We don't want to make a separate interface for controller users but I have quite a bit of room for improvement. And probably switch to cursor-based menus.
  
• Armor / Elemental Resistance / Evasion: We want to rework the system so that these stats become a bit more central to most builds and try to make them as useful as Life, or even more depending on your playstyle. Basically we want them to be stronger. :)
  Armor and Elemental Resistance Penetration should be impacted by the changes we intend to make as well and will most likely become much more useful stats.
  
• Balance: We are currently looking at balancing game-breaking effects and effects that allow you to completely bypass the intended difficulty, and these should be adressed in the next Update.
  

I believe this is the shortest Slormite Chronicles to this day. Our previous update is 3 weeks old, and since we are currently focusing on short and frequent updates, there's nothing super big or fancy coming up that we can share.


That's about it.
Have a nice day everyone!

Hello everyone!

Don't mind me, I'm just fixing a few things I broke in yesterday's update.

[h2]Bugs:[/h2]

• Super Elite Enemies should no longer appear without a proper name (Colossus and Necromancer)
  
• Unstable Imps AoE's should now properly follow them when being pulled.
  
• The Alternate Recipe of Slormelines should no longer mess with the Craft of Slormandrites.
  
• The List of Epic Rolls should no longer be offsetted while reforging an Epic Item.
  
• Primordial Aiondee should now properly work again.
  
• Bryan's "In The Circle" protection should now properly disappear.
  

[h2]Performance:[/h2]
Fixed a memory leak causing the FPS to slow down in The Great Forge (eventually leading to crashes).

That's about it!

Hello everyone!



To be clear (before anyone asks): This Update does introduce a new Environment: "The Luxuriant Gardens", but does not introduce a new Act or new Missions.

Now onto the Patch Notes:

[h2]New Enemies[/h2]
5 new foes will strengthen the armies of The Slormancer:

• The Pudding Hermit.
  
• The Zombie Peasant.
  
• The Shepherd.
  
• The Unstable Imp.
  
• The Plague Doctor.
  

[h2]New Environment[/h2]
A new environment: The Luxuriant Gardens will be available in Battlefield Expeditions.

[h2]Superior Elites[/h2]

• Superior Elites have been added into the game. These Elites will have a chance to spawn in Battlefield Expeditions. They have a superior Life pool and come with up to 4 Elite Affixes.
  
• 20 Elite Affixes have been added.
  

[h2]New Cataclysms[/h2]
5 new Cataclysms have been added into the game:

• Fire Strike: Granting Fire Damage to attacks and a Chance to Burn.
  
• Ice Strike: Granting Ice Damage to attacks and a Chance to Chill.
  
• Lightning Strike: Granting Lightning Damage to attacks and a Chance to Shock.
  
• Light Strike: Granting Light Damage to attacks and a Chance to apply Daze, Broken Armor, Broken Elemental Resistance or Slow.
  
• Shadow Strike: Granting Shadow Damage to attacks and a Chance to apply Shadow Confusion.
  

[h2]Cataclysm Changes[/h2]

• Assimilation: The wording of "Assimilation" has been changed to "Enemies receive X% Decreased Damage for each yard between you and them." (instead of the "damage's source").
  
• Assimilation: Regardless of the distance, enemies affected by "Assimilation" will now always receive at least 10% of the Damage dealt.
  
• Reincarnation: In Battlefield Expeditions, enemies now have 25% Chance to be revived (instead of 100%).
  
• Shadow Curse: After receiving Shadow Curse Damage, you become immune to Shadow Curses for 1 seconds.
  
• Replicant: Enemies now have 30% Chance to summon a copy of themselves (instead of 100%).
  
• Jetlag: Has been reworked and now reads: Every second, enemies have 10% Chance to become Invulnerable for 0.5 to 2 seconds.
  
• Explosive: Enemies now explode after 3 seconds, instead of 1.5 seconds. And the explosion now deals damage based on Base Max Life instead of actual Max Life.
  We talked about a 5 second delay in The Slormite Chronicles but changed it back to something a little more challenging after further testing.

[h2]Life / Mana Leech Reworks[/h2]

• Life & Mana are now Leeched over a 5 second duration.
  
• Life & Mana stored over time cannot exceed your missing Life. The excess is not stored.
  
• There is also a Leech cap of 1% of your Max Life per second per Leech instance (excepted for Primordial Aiondee) but no instance limit.
  

[h2]Craft Reworks[/h2]
Life/Mana On Hit/Kill

• Life Regeneration rolls (on a Level 60 Epic Item) have been increased from 11-23 to 23-46.
  
• Life on Hit / Mana on Hit rolls (on a Level 60 Epic Item) have been increased from 2-4 to 11-23.
  
• Life on Kill / Mana on Kill rolls (on a Level 60 Epic Item) have been increased from 15-30 to 30-61.
  

Alternate Slormeline Recipes
We've added alternate Recipes for Magic, Rare, Epic and Legendary Slormelines: Slormelines can now be crafted using 10 Slormelines of the previous tier.

Epic Stats

• Epic Stats are now chosen from a pool of 38 Stats instead of 78.
  
• These Stats differ depending on the current Equipment you're trying to craft.
  

[h2]Slorm Reaper Changes[/h2]

• Primordial Reaper of Vindictive Slam: Holy Ground can no longer stack above each other.
  If a Holy Ground area was supposed to stack on top of another, it refreshes the duration of the other instead and increases its damage.
  

This change was done to drastically reduce the noise onscreen and improve performance.

[h2]The Great Forge[/h2]

• Obelisk of Transmutation now reads: "While Obelisk of Transmutation is active, everytime an enemy dies, it restores Life equal to its Max Life to another random enemy." instead of "to all other enemies within a 5 yard radius."
  

[h2]The Slorm Temple[/h2]

• The Temple Keeper and his Traps should be slower overall on Floor 100 and Floor 150.
  
• Bridges from The Slorm Temple should rise faster.
  
• The size of each floor has been reduced by about 30 to 40%.
  
• Pure Slorm rewards for each floor remain about the same, so Pure Slorm should be 30 to 40% faster to acquire.
  
• The value of random Pure Slorm drops have been multiplied by 6 and now properly scale with the Floor Level.
  
• The Pure Slorm rewards of Floor 50, 100 and 150 are now properly displayed.
  
• The Pure Slorm rewards from Floor 50, 100 and 150 have been reduced by 40%.
  

[h2]Bugs Fixed[/h2]
The Mighty Knight:
- Critical Retribution should now properly increase Critical Strike Chance.
- Porcupine should now properly increase Critical Strike Chance.
- Effects affecting your "next Skill" such as Exposed Armor will now properly end when Whirlwind ends.

The Fierce Huntress:
- Fairy Dust should now properly avoid Shadow Seal Damage from the Shadow Curse Cataclysm.
- Wandering Arrow should now trigger properly after changing rooms.

Slorm Reapers:
- Reaper of the Untouchable: Untouchable Dash should no longer allow you to move outside the map.
- Reaper of Retaliating Foresight should no longer trigger on friendlies.
- Primordial Reaper of the Trainee should now properly scale with Affinity.
- Fixed a crash with Reaper of Alpha and Omega.
- Reaper of Necromancy / Reaper of the Temple Keeper: Summons will now spawn properly after changing rooms.

Legendaries:
- Young Phoenix Feather should now properly work with Primordial Aiondee.

Runes:
- Thornbite Rune should now display the proper Shield value.
We are aware that some runes are currently overpowered. We were short on time to fix them in this Update but a fix is coming.

Various:
- Storing then retrieving Spirits in your Stash should no longer cause them to stack in the Fragments slots.
- Player's Area of Effects are now slightly more discrete and create less noise on screen.
- Great Forge Challenges should no longer appear blurry.
- Codex Menu should no longer move out of window.
- Fixed a couple of crashes.

Synergy Loops:
- Added a global system to help prevent Loops.

- Armor of Illusion (Armor -> Evasion)
+ Indomitable Mountain (Evasion -> Armor):
Armor of Illusion doesn't benefit from Armor gained with Indomitable Mountain.

- Evasive Magic (Evasion -> Max Mana)
+ Elemental Lock (Mana Lock (so Max Mana) -> Elemental Damage)
+ Primordial Reaper of the Untouchable One (Elemental Damage -> Evasion):
Evasive Magic doesn't benefit from Evasion gained with the SYNERGY of Primordial Reaper of the Untouchable One IF Elemental Lock is equipped.

- Toughness 15 (Armor -> Elemental Resistance)
+ Elemental Sorcerer (Elemental Resistance -> Elemental Damage)
+ Primordial Reaper of the Untouchable One (Elemental Damage -> Evasion)
+ Indomitable Mountain (Evasion -> Armor):
Toughness 15 doesn't benefit from Armor gained with Indomitable Mountain IF Elemental Sorcerer and Primordial Untouchable One are equipped

- Good Crop (Deals Damage based on Reaper Damage + Increase Raw Damage based on Damage dealt)
+ Savagery 60 (Raw Damage -> Reaper Damage basically)
Savagery 60 doesn't benefit from Raw Damage gained through Good Crop.

Performance:
- Improved performance when Area of Effects are hitting lots of enemies at once.
- Improved performance when lots of Goldus coins are being displayed on screen.
- Also improved performance everywhere else. :o

As always, if you find a bug, post it on our Steam Forums or on Discord.
Cheers!

Hello everyone! It's Chronicle Time!


First and foremost: The Luxuriant Update, Part I will be available on November 14.

Quick reminder if you're not following the road map closely (shame on you!): The Luxuriant Update is the next update on the line. It will introduce a new environment called The Luxuriant Gardens and 5 new Enemies.

Given how long it took us to release The Great Forge, we wanted to try to work on smaller yet impactful updates released at a regular pace. We successfully managed to keep the development time under 6 weeks for this update, and it feels great!





5 new foes will strengthen the armies of The Slormancer. From left to right:

• The Pudding Hermit is a basic enemy dealing Melee damage with its stick.
  
• The Zombie Peasant adds a "Scratch" stack when dealing damage, increasing the damage dealt by Zombie Peasants. Be warned, Zombie Peasants are inoffensive until they are not.
  
• The Shepherd casts large and slow Projectiles with random patterns.
  
• The Unstable Imp explodes when he gets close to you.
  
• The Plague Doctor casts a Poisonous Area when he gets in range then teleports away.
  

A new environment will be available in Battlefield Expeditions.
This update does not introduce a new Act to the Story, it simply adds The Luxuriant Gardens as a possible choice during Battlefield Expeditions.





We've also been working on the "Elites Rework" part of the Road Map. Here's how it works: Upon spawning, regular Elites will have a chance to become Superior Elites. They will have a slightly larger Life pool and up to 3 Affixes, and a unique name (based on the names of our Patreons and our most active community members!).

We've been working on various Elite Affixes and we will launch this update with 20 different Affixes for our Elites. Each Affix is based on a Cataclysm that has already been added in the game but has been redesigned to fit the Active Bonus/Skill we were looking for rather than a passive effect.

So for instance, an Elite with the "Ice Bomb" affix will cast multiple Ice Bombs in a line toward you every few seconds. An Elite with the "Replicant" affix will summon a non-elite copy every few seconds while the "Multiplication" affix (Additional Projectiles) will grant +5 Additional Projectiles every few casts.

In the screenshot above, you can see an Elite enemy with 3 Affixes. You can follow their cooldown and prepare accordingly. We still have to add a few polishing touches on this, so the enemy is missing its name and does not have the proper Superior Elite glow.


[h2]New Cataclysms[/h2]
We're introducing new Cataclysms granting Imbued attacks to enemies. So that's a total of 5 new Cataclysms added to the game, one for each element.

Example: Fire Strike adds Fire Damage to enemies and a Chance to apply Burn aswell.
As for the Elite Affix version of Fire Strike, it will trigger an AoE around the enemy dealing Fire Damage every few seconds.

[h2]Cataclysm Changes[/h2]
Speaking about Cataclysms, we've made modifications to the most tedious ones. Here are the biggest changes:

• Reincarnation: In Battlefield Expeditions, enemies now have 25% Chance to be revived (instead of 100%).
  
• Shadow Curse: After receiving Shadow Curse Damage, you become immune to Shadow Curses for 1 seconds.
  
• Replicant: Enemies now have 30% Chance to summon a copy of themselves (instead of 100%).
  
• Jetlag: Has been reworked and now reads: Every second, enemies have 10% Chance to become Invulnerable for 0.5 to 2 seconds.
  
• Explosive: Enemies now explode after 5 seconds, instead of 1.5 seconds. And the explosion now deals damage based on Base Max Life instead of actual Max Life.
  We're basically changing the formula so that a Wrath 10 Explosion benefits from the % Increased Damage (2 500%) instead of the % Max Life (20 000%).
  We're also increasing the cooldown by quite a bit so that players can no longer be accidentally (or not) one shoted.
  

[h2]Life / Mana Leech Reworks[/h2]
Since the difference between Damage dealt and actual Max Life is so big, we're seeing builds with less than 1% Life Leech heal their whole Life in a single attack. Which is not what we're looking for.
We're also looking at making them mechanically different than the regular Life on Hit/Life on Kill.
Same goes for Mana.

This is why we're making the following changes:

• Life & Mana are now Leeched over a 5 second duration.
  
• Life & Mana stored over time cannot exceed your missing Life. The excess is not stored.
  
• There is also a Leech cap of 1% of your Max Life per second per Leech instance (except for Primordial Aiondee) but no instance limit.
  So you might not benefit from your whole Life Leech stat if the difference between your Max Life and the Damage Leeched is too high.
  

[h2]Craft Reworks[/h2]
Life/Mana On Hit/Kill
Based on the changes made on Life/Mana Leech, we've increased the score result of a few Stats on Equipment. For readability purposes, I'll list the result of these changes for a Level 60 Equipment on an Epic Slot (although, these changes will affect all slots any level):

• Life Regeneration roll (on a Level 60 Epic Item) has been increased from 11-23 to 23-46.
  
• Life on Hit / Mana on Hit rolls (on a Level 60 Epic Item) have been increased from 2-4 to 11-23.
  
• Life on Kill / Mana on Kill rolls (on a Level 60 Epic Item) have been increased from 15-30 to 30-61.
  

Alternate Slormeline Recipes
We've added alternate Recipes for Magic, Rare, Epic and Legendary Slormelines: Slormelines can now be crafted using 10 Slormelines of the previous tier.
A Magic Slormeline can be crafted with 10 Normal Slormelines, a Rare Slormeline can be crafted with 10 Magic Slormelines and so on.

Epic Stats
This is quite a big change.
In order to reduce the cost of crafting Epic gear, we're reducing the number of possible Rolls by quite a bit. Currently, everytime you reroll an Epic stat, it is rolled from a pool of 78 stats which result in massive crafting costs.

With this Update, we've reduced the number of possible rolls to 38. Just like Normal, Magic or Rare stats, possible rolls will depend on the piece of Equipment you're currently crafting.
So for instance, you will no longer be able to roll "Fire Resistance" on your Belt, Bracers, Gloves, Shoulders and Boots. "Melee Knockback" will only be a possible roll on Belts, Bracers and Gloves etc...

We've tried various approaches to reduce the cost of crafting Epic gear, not only regarding Goldus but also because the crafting itself was long and frustrating. And this solution felt like the most natural thing: It naturally halves the average cost of Crafting the stat you want but also halves your need of actually rerolling the stat since Epic gear found will be 50% more likely to get the correct roll.

The bad side of this is that it potentially reduces the freedom of crafting since you can no longer stack absolutely any stat you may want on all your pieces. That's why we really tried to cut stats that felt the most useless and tried to make sure that no build would suffer from this. We also feel that it will encourage players to look at a wider variety of stats.

[h2]The Slorm Temple[/h2]
Bridges inside The Slorm Temple will now rise much faster!

We're also looking at improving the experience in The Slorm Temple so that's not it: We've reduced the size of every floor by about 30 to 40% all while maintaining the same Pure Slorm Rewards.

So a floor should be about 30% faster to complete and Pure Slorm should be equally faster to acquire.
We've made these changes because starting from Floor 70+ (or even less, depending on your own taste), floors got longer but not necessarily more challenging which needed to be changed.

[h2]Performance & Bugs[/h2]
I've also fixed numerous bugs. Including the infamous Infinite Loop bug.
And I've made quite relatively big performance Improvements when it comes to AoEs dealing damage to large packs of enemies or when large amounts of Goldus are displayed on screen.

That's about it.
See you next week for the release! Cheers!

Hello everyone!

This is hopefully the last patch regarding performance and bugs for The Great Forge. That does not mean I don't have lots of bugs to fix and improvements to make, but at some point we have to move on to new content before coming back to bugs.


Thanks to The Great Forge and from your feedback, I've managed to find a number of effects that were severely impacting performance. If you've been using the following skills or effects, you probably had performance issues inside The Great Forge (and in high-density areas in the rest of the game) that should now be gone:
- Neriya's Shield and any effect applying Chill to enemies.
- Arcane Clones casting Ray of Obliteration
- Vindictive Slam.

As for Vindictive Slam and Ray of Obliteration, we've had to make a couple of mechanical changes to improve performance aswell, which are listed below.


Today is not about balance, but only about fixing bugs and improving performance. But on top of making performance improvements on the following skills, it was also necessary to tone them down to limit the huge number of collisions they may have at higher Wrath Levels with some Builds.

Ray of Obliteration
- The range of Ray of Obliteration cast by Arcane Clones has been reduced by about 25%.

Vindictive Slam
- Vindictive Slam can no longer be triggered on enemies already being targetted by a Vindictive Slam Hammer.
- There is now a small delay between Vindictive Slams so that multiple Vindictive Slams do not fall at the same time.
The main issue with Vindictive Slam is the amount of Hammers landing which is clearly too high, despite the change listed above. We will figure out a way to balance it, but later.
However, the main issue performance-wise was that when multiple Vindictive Slams were triggered during the same frame, they would all land and deal AoE damage at the exact same frame as well, freezing the game for a short time. Which should no longer occur.
That being said, and until we've made proper balance changes, low-end configurations will probably still struggle to run the build.

The Great Forge
- War Chest Quantity is now properly additive with Goldus and Slorm Quantity instead of being multiplicative. The correct values were displayed on the War Chest UI but incorrectly calculated at the moment of looting, resulting in large differences between both values.
- You now need to unlock The Slorm Temple to unlock The Great Forge.
- A Single Obelisk should no longer prevent you from opening your War Chest.
- Cataclysm Tooltips should no longer display wrong Breach informations.
- The Curse based on Reapersmith Spirit should now properly work.
- The Cataclysm "Gravity" should now be be properly working in The Great Forge.
- The Cataclysm "To Each His Own" should now be properly working in The Great Forge.
- The Cataclysm "Tenacious" should no longer always grant 100% Tenacity regardless of its rarity.

Reaper Runes
- There were rounding issues with Activation Runes and they should now display their proper Activation Condition.

The Mighty Knight
- Fast Rebound can no longer be upgraded above its Max Upgrade rank.
- Deflect and other visual FXs should now remain centered when Whirlwind is active.

The Fierce Huntress
- Traps + Gravity Belt should no longer stop heavier enemies from moving inside The Great Forge.
- Fist of the Wild + Volatile Hurricane should now spread properly on enemies out of the screen.

The Mischievous Mage
- Time-Lock should no longer interrupt Bosses.
- Arcane Clones will now properly stop casting when the player dies.
- Ray of Obliteration should now properly gain Mastery over time when cast by Clones.

Slorm Reapers
- Reaper of Vindictive Slam now displays the proper Per Level upgrades.
- Damages from Vindictive Slam is now properly affected by Slorm Reaper Affinity (they were in the tooltip, not ingame).
- Reaper of the Temple Keeper: The Mini-Keeper should now properly follow your orders, including inside The Slorm Temple.
- Reaper of Necromancy / Reaper of Temple Keeper: you should no longer have to resummon minions everytime you start a new floor.
- Fate-Crusher no longer benefit from Affinity on your Equipment.
- Fate-Crusher: Fulgurorn's Dedication now increases the Affinity Level instead of Reaper Level.
- Fate-Crusher: Primordial Malediction should now be properly working.

Story
- Act 3 - Mission 9: Alarin - School Seals on the ground should no longer be randomly destroyed.
- Act 3 - Mission 4: School Emblem should now be properly dropping everytime you complete the Mission.

Various
- Fixed a couple of crashes.

That's about it!