The Slormancer News

Hello everyone!


If you've been following the Road Map, you know that we're one endgame mode away from finishing the second part and move on to another update cycle.

The endgame mode we're talking about is called The Great Forge (the name may or may not change before it gets released) and we have the ambition to make something Great out of it, otherwise it would be called The Average Forge, or The Meh Forge.
With each endgame mode we try to build, we try our best to offer a different experience, new features and new mechanics that keep the game fresh and exciting for a bit longer.

That being said, we know we've rushed the very first version of The Slorm Temple so we had to rework most of it later on to get to something we're proud of.

And this is something we do not want to reproduce, so we're taking our time to brainstorm and test multiple versions of our vision for The Great Forge until we get something that clicks well.

Building a new endgame mode is much trickier than say designing new Slorm Reapers or new Enemies because we can basically go in any direction: The Great Forge could be about you being a cook and gathering vegetables to create meals that can boost your stats, or be about you hunting monsters that you can later on use as pets or mounts, or something entirely different.
We want to make sure we go with something that is relevant, fun and also not totally out of scope for a 2-man team.

We currently have the concept down (though we believe it is too early to talk about it) and are itterating through various ideas and features that may or may not be in the final cut. Once we have everything planned, we'll be able to let you know what it is all about.
Also, if we plan everything correctly, then the coding/building part should not take too long.


That leads me to my next point: While brainstorming and designing stuff is fun, I also really like to just code tangible things so I've been hard at work fixing bugs (or almost fixing them) and implementing some highly anticipated Quality of Life Improvements.

So behold...

The Ancestral Legacy Tree! BUT IT HAS A SEARCH BAR!!!1!!

Looking for Fire-related Skills?


Or Auras?


You can type all sorts of stuff.


...
Also! The Ancestral Legacy Tree can be Zoomed in!
Which is not super useful.


But it can be Zoomed OUT!
Plus, you can combine it with the Search! How great?!


We plan to deploy these changes on Monday the 16th (so in about 10 days from now). That will leave us a bit of room to fix another round of bugs and add a couple more small Quality of Life upgrades.
After that, we'll move on to actually building The Great Forge.

Also, The Ancestral Legacy Tree Zoom + Search function have been requested (multiple times) on our Discord where we have a Suggestions section that we use a lot to get a feel of how bad players want this change or that change into the game.

So if you have an idea of an improvement or a Quality of Life upgrade you'd like to see, feel free to join the Discord and we'll see what can be done. You can also post your idea here as a reply of this post or as a new thread on our forums.

That's about it for now!
See you in a few days for the next Patch!

Hello everyone!

This update is mostly about fixing bugs.
Some are new, some are really old.

Progression:
- Doing one of the optional missions in The Graveyard should no longer unlock Mission 12 "Undeads only live Twice".
- Missions requiring the player to find an Emblem can now be properly redone.

Act III Boss:
- The seal in front of Alarin while he casts should be more easy to see.
- The seal that needs to be activated should more easy to spot as well.

- The Victory OST should no longer loop indefinitely.
- You can no longer hide in the corners of the room to avoid the Multi-Projectile attack.

Critical Strikes Triggers:
Some Critical Strikes Triggers were not properly triggered by "Indirect" Damage (Any source of Damage that was not from your Primary/Secondary/Support Skill).
The following Effects are now properly triggered by ANY Critical Strike Damage dealt by you (this does not include Minions under your control).
- The Mighty Knight: Building a Wall (Gain a Block Stack)
- The Fierce Huntress : Free Membership (Reduces Finesse's Cooldown)
- The Fierce Huntress : Golden Strikes (Chance to loot Goldus)
- The Mischievous Mage : Shut Down (Silence Enemies)
- Attributes: Fury 45 (Increases Primary Skill Attack Speed)
- Attributes: Determination 15 (Increases Life on Hit)
- Attributes: Bravery 30 (Removes Strider Stacks)
- Reapers: Ancient Ancestral Legacy Reaper (Grants Ancient Legacy stacks)
- Legendary: Gazloka's Conquest (Grants Conquest Stacks)

Ancestral Legacy:
- Burning Rage now properly displays a visual effect on enemies.
- Enemies hit by Burning Rage now properly engage the player.
- Walking Bomb's Damage is now properly affected by Area Increased Effect.
- Lightning Arks should now properly target an enemy nearby and not the same enemy.
- Lightning Rod's tooltip should now display the correct value.
- Twitching Warp should no longer let you move out of bounds.
- Icy Veins is now tagged as an Area of Effect and the Radius of Effect has been added to the tooltip.
- Agent of Shield should now properly attract all Shield Globes to you.

Slorm Reapers:
- Primordial Reaper of the Goldfish now properly denies Greater Traits only.
- Primordial Reaper of the Sleepy Butterfly should no longer increase the Cooldown of your Ancestral Legacy Skills.
- The wording of Reaper of Retaliating Foresight has been changed to better reflect the effect. :)

Legendaries:
- Soul Eating Mantle should now be properly triggered with Burn Damage.

The Fierce Huntress:
- Delightful Rain stacks should now be properly removed when unequipping the Skill or the Upgrade.
- Using Tumble right before a Boss cinematic should no longer move you out the room.
- Multiple Ravenous Daggers from the same trigger now properly deal damage to the same enemy

The Mischievous Mage:
- Speed Gate now grants the proper amount of Movement Speed.
- Arcane Clones casting Arcane Barrier should now only cast it once and not cost Mana over time.

Cataclysms:
- Projectiles from Fury of the Storm are now properly categorized as Projectiles instead of AoE.
- The Wrath Multiplier is now properly calculated in the tooltips of Fury of the Storm and Shadow Curse.

Extras:
- Steam Screenshots should be working again.
- Sound from The Slorm Temple should now properly stop when you exit the Expedition.
- Level and Reinforcement Level of Items are now properly displayed in Inventory on smaller/larger resolutions.
- Mana on Hit and Mana on Kill should now be working properly even when the player has Mana Leech.

- Additional Informational Tooltips (such as Fireballs, Frostbolts, Arcane Clones or Inner Fire) are now always displayed after being idle for a few frames on your Skills or Ancestral Legacy menu instead of having to hover.
- Missing Informational Tooltips should now be properly displayed.

Performance:
- The script preventing enemies from staking up has been reworked.
This means performance should be better (although maybe not noticeable unless you used to pack dozens of enemies) when large amounts of enemies are on screen and packed or being packed with Skills.


- Elite Strict Tutors: Reflected Projectiles from Elite Tutors have been drastically slown down.
- Elite Stric Tutors: There is now a 1 second delay between the activation of the dome and the moment the dome can actually reflect Projectiles.


That's about it for now.
I'll be working on another bug-fixing patch that will also include a couple of very requested Quality of Life upgrades. Once it's done, we will move on to the next update.

Hello everyone!

The Mage Academy Update, Part 2 is now available!
Here's the complete list of changes:


- 9 new Missions have been added to the game including a new Boss fight.


- The diversity of enemies in Act 1 has been greatly increased (from 5 enemies to 12).
- Fight composition, diversity and density has been reworked to get more interesting yet approachable fights.
- Larger maps have been sized down.
- Exalted Breaches and Named Elites have been added in Act 1.
- The Great Escape and Nocturnal Escapade (in which you unlock remaining classes) are now optional and can be accessed much sooner so you can actually unlock new characters if/when you want to.
- The Cataclysm from "The Laws of Gravity" has been changed from Gravity to Explosive (the mission has been renamed accordingly).
- To improve new player's experience and pacing, Adam Nostrus' Slorm Reaper now evolves much sooner (Level 5).
- For the same reason, one of the Breaches in Act 1 now has a 100% Chance to drop a Slorm Reaper the first time you close it. The Slorm Reaper you find is based on the class you play.

- (A couple of changes were made to Act 2 missions as well).


- A new Ancestral Stone can be unlocked throughout the story.
- This unlocks 30 new Ancestral Skills in the 4th tier of the Ancestral Skill Tree. Including Imbue Skills.


- The Level cap has been increased to 60.


7 New Cataclysms have been added to the game:
- Replicant
- Gargantuan
- Assassins
- Assimilation
- Reconstruction
- Fury of the Storm
- Shadow Curse

By introducing Shadow Curse (Shadow-based Cataclysm) and Fury of the Storm (Lightning-based Cataclysm), there is now have a Cataclysm for each type of Elemental Damage.
We've made a couple of changes on these Cataclysms, here's how they work now:

- Fire Damage has a chance to apply Burn.
- Ice Damage has a chance to Chill.
- Lightning Damage has a chance to Shock (and stop all Cooldowns for 0.3 seconds).
- Light Damage has a chance to apply Armor Broken, Elemental Resistance Broken, Daze or Slow for a few seconds.
- Shadow Damage has a chance to apply Shadow Confusion preventing ANY form of Mana or Life gain for a few seconds.

For Cataclysms, the chance to apply their debuff is 100%.
This Chance can be reduced by using Resistance Stats such as Fire Resistance (70% Fire Resistance will result in a 30% Chance to get the debuff when hit).

We also plan to add Imbued Attacks to enemies (such as Elites or Bosses or in specific cases):
Enemies' Imbued Attacks are yet to be added to the game but their chance to apply the debuff will be around 5-15%.

Fire Damage / Floor is Lava:
- Burn base damage has been reduced from 121 to 14.
- Burn can now stack up to 10 times.

Light Beam:
- The Light Beam Cataclysm has been reworked to be more oppressive and will now target you with greater accuracy.


- Exaltation of Precision.
- Exaltation of Silence.


- Chaos Wave Event: We've added a new way for Breaches to spawn enemies (so this is INSTEAD of getting 1, 2 or 3 waves of enemies) called the Chaos Wave.
When triggered, the Breach will spawn hundreds of enemies, at an accelerating pace and with random compositions.
Completing a Chaos Wave adds +5 stacks to your Breach Bonus Reward.


- "Boss Loot" from Bosses can only occur ONCE the first time you kill them with each class. Bosses will then loot with a greatly reduced multiplier on subsequent kills.
- Wrath Levels now also apply a scaling on Armor and Elemental Resistance to enemies, like in The Slorm Temple.

Adam Nostrus' Reaper:
- Base Damage is now 22/27 and +6/+9 per level instead of 17/21 +4/6
- Bonus Damage has been increased to 3 (from 2).
- Now grants +15% Attack Speed.
- Now evolves at Level 5 and 12.
- Effects from Adam Nostrus' Mighty Reaper have been swapped with effects from Adam Nostrus' Perfect Reaper (basically we switched the effects of its evolutions).

Reaper of the Untouchable One:
- Evasion bonus is now equal to your Min. Raw Damage instead of your Average Raw Damage (to prevent an infinite synergy that could occur with Evasive Magic)

Cataclysms:
- Burn applied by Floor is Lava is no longer considered a self debuff (and should no longer apply irrelevant buffs or debuffs)

Reapers:
- You no longer have to release the key pressed to recast an Aura or a Skill
- Reaper of Alpha and Omega should now deal damage more consistently.

Various:
- You can no longer be hit or be targetted while a dialogue is running.
- Ondeath Particles should now have the proper size.
- Added an Alert preventing from merging Slormites or crafting Slormelines while your inventory is full that would result in nothing being created.

The Mischievous Mage:
- Arcane Clones casting Rift Nova will now properly cast Rift Nova when enemies are in their range.

"Infinite Synergies":
- Known infinite synergy loops should no longer occur (They have been edited "manually" to what felt the most natural, and if more are found, I'll have to create exceptions to handle them.)
- Armor of Illusion (Fierce Huntress Passive) + Indomitable Mountain Legendary : Armor given by Indomitable Mountain is no longer granted BACK as Evasion by Armor of Illusion.
- Mana Harvesting Reaper + Savagery 60 Trait : Raw Damage from Good Crop is now ignored from Savagery's 60 calculation.
- Reaper of the Untouchable One + Savagery 45 Trait + Evasive Magic (Fierce Huntress Passive) : has been taken cared of with a minor balance change listed above.

Enemies:
- Strict Tutor's Dome should now properly destroy Ballista's Light Arrows
- Strict Tutor's Dome should no longer destroy Forked Projectiles created within the Dome.


- Damage Script should be roughly x5 faster than before (from to 2,5ms to 0,45ms on average). This should drastically reduce the amount of lag when casting AoEs (do let me know).
- Changes made to various scripts should also result in improved performance at all time even when out of combat.

- The Fierce Huntress' Legacy of Pain should have improved performance.
- Improved performance on Projectiles piercing multiple target.
- Improved performance when multiple Buffs are being displayed on Hero's UI.
- Improved performance of the Combo Meter.


- Due to the nature of some changes, I might have broken a few things that were perfectly working until then. :x
- I'm sorry about this.
- If you find a bug, then please report it here, on our Steam forums, or on Discord. We try to fix crashes and critical bugs within a day, so please be patient.

We didn't manage to get some of the reworks we talked about in some of the latest Slormite Chronicles, but we felt that it was time to release this update. Rest assured that these changes are still planned and will be added to the game in the near future.


Have a nice day everyone!
Thanks!

Hello everyone!

First and foremost, the Mage Academy Update Part.2 will be released on April 18, 2022.
We're pretty much done with what we wanted to add for this update. We'll try to sneak in a couple more changes and reworks during the remaining days of this week and use one additional week to polish things out and remove as many bugs as possible.
Since we've been reworking the early part of the game, we want to be extra cautious with what we offer to brand new players and make sure there are absolutely no bugs or unintended behaviours.



Now that all dialogues and missions have been written, we can talk about the details of The Mage Academy, without revealing too much of course.



The next part of the story will take place in the Mage Academy, where you will have to find the Destroyer of Indestructible and Unbreakable Seals that Olorin, the Archmage, uses as a paperweight.

To get to it, you will have to face students, teachers and other weird creatures now under the control of Ohm Agad.

Students in the Mage Academy are divided into 4 Houses: Arcaiman, Temppopotamus, Oblitelican and Necromanchovy (you might be familiar with the idea).



We tried to add diversity by recoloring clothes and other parts of enemies (even from older ones) depending on where you are in the Academy.
If you are in a common room such as the Great Hall, then you will meet students from all houses, but if you are in say, the Arcaiman dormitory, then you will only encounter Arcaiman students.
We've also tried to work on a different ambiant lighting for every house so you can feel different ambiances.

The Great Hall

Arcaiman's Dormitory

The Mage Academy includes a boss fight against Alarin, Olorin's Evil Twin!





You can also read our previous Slormite Chronicle to get more information about The Mage Academy.


The Slormancer slowly reveals its features and richness over the course of the first dozen of hours. Unfortunately, a significant number of players simply does not get to this point and simply stops in the middle of Act 1. To most, Act 1 is boring and repetitive, which is a big issue for us.

So we've been taking the time to rework most missions and the overall pace of the early game:
We've greatly increased the diversity of enemies that you can find in Act 1 (from 4 to 12), we've reduced the size of the larger maps while increasing the density of enemies when possible. We also tried to create more interesting yet approachable fights and compositions.
We've also added Named Elites and Exalted Breaches throughout Act 1.

Regarding pacing, we've reduced the evolution level of Adam Nostrus' Reaper (the base reaper), from level 36 to level 8, so players are introduced to the evolution mechanic much sooner.
We've also forced the loot of specific Slorm Reapers at key points during the history. These are different based on the class you are playing. Again, we want to make sure the "Slorm Reaper loot" mechanic is properly introduced to new players, in an exciting fashion.

We've also changed the 2 missions in Act 1 that let you unlock new classes: These can now be accessed much sooner (after the second mission), and are no longer mandatory, so you can unlock missing classes whenever you feel like it.

All these changes should make Act 1 more dense and interesting.

We also plan to keep improving new player experience and pacing of new mechanics over the duration of Early Access.

That's about it for now!


Oh, and in case you didn't read the very first line and jumped to the end of the article: The Mage Academy Update Part.2 will be released on April 18, 2022.

Cheers!

Hello everyone!

We've pretty much revealed everything that is planned for the upcoming update in the previous Slormite Chronicle. There are a few things that we've implemented and that we haven't (or barely) mentionned so I'll try to cover that instead today, starting with a couple of informations about The Mage Academy itself.


The next part of the story will take place in the Mage Academy, where you will have to find the Destroyer of Indestructible and Unbreakable Seals that Olorin, the Archmage, uses as a paperweight.

There, you will have to fight dead yet deadly students of the four houses of the Mage Academy which is now under the control of no other than Olorin's evil twin... Alarin.

Witches from the 4 houses.

The Mage Academy can now be visited.

Alarin, signing out.


We're introducing a new NPC called Cory Ironbender, the last living Reapersmith, that you will be able to unlock throughout Act III. Unfortunately, he is retired.

He will probably have a role to play in The Great Forge, The Slormancer's upcoming endgame mode.
Who knows?

Cory Ironbender, retired Reapersmith.


We're introducing 7 new Cataclysms and 2 new Exaltations.
The complete list will be revealed later. For now, here are a couple of examples:
- "Replicant": Enemies summon a copy of themselves when they reach 50% Life.
- "Gargantuan": Enemies are bigger and deal 200% Increased Damage until they receive damage.
- "Assimilation": Enemies receive 15% Decreased Damage for each yard between them and the damage's source.

Gargantuan effect (I died taking that screenshot).


We've added a new way for Breaches to spawn enemies (so this is INSTEAD of getting 1, 2 or 3 waves of enemies) called the Chaos Wave.
When triggered, the Chaos Wave spawns a few dozens of enemies, at an accelerating pace and with random compositions.
The description doesn't do justice to this event, it's quite fun if I do say so myself. :)




We still have quite a bit of stuff we want to get done for this update (a skill to rework, a couple of mechanics to improve, Act I to rework and a few more things), and each element could take longer than anticipated so we feel like it's still too soon to give a precise timeframe. On top of that, adding elements to the story and new missions require a bit more testing that the usual.
I'm pretty sure we unfortunately won't make it in time for march, so we'll rather try to get it out before the 1 year anniversary of the game (on April 6), but again, easier said than done.
At the very least, you'll have a new Chronicle on that day with a release date. :x

That's about it for this Chronicle.
Have a nice sunday everyone!