The Slormancer News

Hello everyone!

The Ancestral Update (v.0.7) is now available!


Part I and II of the Adam Nostrus' Trials have been added to The Slormancer.

As mentioned in our previous Slormite Chronicles, they are an introduction to the endgame content of The Slormancer.



The Slormancer is now tracking the following data:

• The number of Bosses defeated during Expeditions.
  
• The highest Reinforcement among your Items.
  
• The highest Great Forge at Wrath 3+
  

This means that somes objectives of the Trials will be validated retroactively, while others (listed above) will not.


Have been added to the game:

• The 7th Ancestral Stone.
  
• The Primal Ancestral Stone.
  
• The last 5 remaining Ancestral Skill.
  

With this update, the Ancestral Legacy is now feature complete.


Adam Nostrus, King of Fashion, our first Endgame boss has been added to the game.

He has fixed stats and will not scale to your Character Level or Wrath Level.
He will be fairly easy to defeat for seasoned players but should be quite challenging for players running Wrath 5 to 7 Expeditions.

This is a first for us, and its first iteration, so feel free to let us know how you are doing against Adam Nostrus and if a mechanic is difficult to overcome.

• The Necromancer and The Dreadful Colossus, enemies you've defeated as Story Bosses, can now appear as regular enemies during Expeditions.
  
• Bosses will trigger more often during Battlefield Expeditions.
  
• Loadouts are now saving Character Traits.
  
• Story Missions from Act 1 to Act 3 can now be chained without returning to the Village when possible.
  

• Fate-Crusher, Reaper of the Seven & The Great Forge:
  
  • Fate-Crusher no longer grants an unknown and unusable Reapersmith Spirit.
    
  • Fate-Crusher now has a bonus Reapersmith Spirit reward with every Reapersmith Spirit.
    
  • As such, a defeat in The Great Forge equipped with Fate-Crusher will result in you keeping every Reapersmith Spirit in your War Chest.
    

The Might Knight:

• Grappling Hook should now behave and animate properly.
  
• Grappling Hook should no longer teleport you around.
  

The Great Forge:

• Light Beam and Ice Bomb should no longer stop as soon as the "Next Wave" Button is enabled.
  

(Bugs were definitely not a priority lately)

That's about it for now!
Cheers!

Hello everyone!

Today is Chronicles day! So let's jump into it!
We've mentioned this in our previous Chronicle but we have a short term plan in mind for the rest of 2023. Ideally, we would like to release 3 Updates:

• The Ancestral Update
  It's the one we are currently working and I'll detail all about its content right down below.
  
• The Slorm Reapers Update
  Is the one where we want to release all the Slorm Reapers that are left to be introduced. That's a whopping 68 new Slorm Reapers!
  
• The Warlords Update
  Is the update that will introduce the big Endgame content that we have in mind for The Slormancer.
  

Best case scenario is that we manage to release all of that content before the end of the year. But depending on how things may turn out when developping Slorm Reapers or The Warlords endgame mode, it may take longer than that.

Once we're done with these 3 Updates, the vast majority of the content will be in The Slormancer so we would like to move on to balancing the game.


Now let's talk about the upcoming Ancestral Update.
The idea here is to tie the end of the Story to the beginning of the Endgame via a few objectives to complete that will give the players a good idea of what's left to be done when reaching this point.

On top of that, we will introduce the last 2 Ancestral Stones for the Ancestral Legacy tree, along with our very first non-scaled Endgame Boss.

[h2]Adam Nostrus' Trials[/h2]


Once you reach the end of the Story and defeat the Boss in Act 5, Adam Nostrus will give you a few tasks to complete to make sure that you are indeed ready to fight The Slormancer itself.

His Trials are divided in 3 Parts. You will have to complete each part to unlock the next one, and everytime you complete a part, you will unlock a reward.

The first part grants the seventh Ancestral Stone, while the second part grants The Primal Ancestral Stone which is a unique Ancestral Stone that can be enshrined into any slot of your Ancestral Legacy.
As for the third part, as you can see, it is currently waiting for "The Warlords" content to be available but it will reward you with a unique Slorm Reaper (only available through the Trials).



Adam Nostrus' Trials are designed to encourage new players reaching Endgame for the first time to explore all their options.

For seasoned players looking for harder goals, we will instead use Achievements to create interesting challenges.

Regarding the tracking of all these Objectives, the game is already tracking most of them, and this is also true for Achievements. However, some of them are currently not being tracked, such as Defeating Expeditions Bosses, so you will start from scratch once the Update comes out.


[h2]Ancestral Legacy[/h2]


One of the most important goals of this update is to unlock the full potential of the Ancestral Legacy.
So for those of you that have been playing The Slormancer since Day 1, where you only had 2 Ancestral Stones at your disposal, this is the end of a very long journey.

With this update, we introduce the seventh Ancestral Stone that will allow you to reach the very last Skills that were not reachable yet. And with the new Primal Ancestral Stone, we hope to provide an interesting option to enhance previously impossible combinations, and hopefully break the linearity of the Ancestral Legacy a bit.

[h2]Adam Nostrus, King of Fashion[/h2]
We do not consider this to be a spoiler since this is a friendly challenge (some sort of a final test) and not a major plot twist making Adam Nostrus the big villain. And since you've been giving this poor old fella a bunch of the most powerful artifacts known to man, it is now time to face him.

Adam Nostrus is our first Boss with fixed stats which means he will not adapt to your level or your current Wrath Level. He will represent the same challenge for everyone and a good way for us to have a non-scaled way to measure the strength of the various classes and builds.

We've yet to determine his actual strength but he is meant to give players a reachable goal and a first taste of an Endgame fight so he will probably land around something similar to Level 100 + Wrath 7. So if you're alreay crushing Wrath 10, besides understanding his mechanics, he will not be particularly challenging. For that, we will have The Slormancer itself.


That's about it for today!
We have no release date for this update but it should be around September.

Cheers everyone!

Hello everyone!


Act 5 has been added to The Slormancer. It is the final story act and is composed of 6 Missions leading to an (hopefully) Epic boss fight.


A new Ancestral Stone will be available once Act 5 is completed, granting access to more than 20+ new Ancestral Skills.


Level Cap has been increased to 80.


Loadouts have been added into The Slormancer and should be immediately accessible through the
big dresser next to the Storage area.

The Storage area has also been changed to be easier to navigate and look nicer.


The Royal Wing Update Part II also comes with a hefty list of changes.

[h2]Changes to The Great Forge[/h2]

1. You no longer have to wait for every enemy of a Wave to die before triggering the next one.
   Instead, you now only have to wait for the Wave to spawn before triggering the next one.
   Limitations:
   
   • Up to 5 Waves can be active at once.
     
   • You won't be able to trigger a new Wave if 300 or more enemies are currently alive.
     
2. At the start of The Great Forge, you will now be offered with a new choice that will impact the spawn rate of the rest of the Expedition. You will now be able to open up to 6 Spawn Locations (instead of 2), thus increasing the spawn rate by up to 200%.
   Increasing the spawn rate has an Elder Slorm cost tied to it.

[h2]Changes to Armor & Elemental Resistance[/h2]
Armor & Elemental Resistance have been completely reworked and should now be much more effective, and be equally useful against heavy or light hits.

Since Armor is now pretty straightforward, the % value displayed below your Armor value under your Stats recap represents exactly what your Armor does at a given Wrath Level against ANY attack.

This rework also affects enemies. So be prepared to face enemies with actual Armor & Elemental Resistances.

For this reason, we've changed Wrath Modifiers to match this new efficiency.
At Wrath 10, Armor & Elemental Resistance Multipliers are now 1000% instead of 2000%.

We've also reduced the base Armor, Elemental Resistance and / or Life values of some enemies to better reflect the contrast we want for each of them.

We will adjust these values based on the feedback we get.

[h2]Changes to Silence[/h2]
Spellcasters:
Enemies are now split into various categories. One of them being “Spellcasters”.

Silence now only affects Spellcasters enemies.
List of Spellcasters can be found inside Silence’s tooltip but it's supposed to be obvious (Enemies casting spells).

The Mischievous Mage:
Shutdown now reads: Your Ancestral Strikes (instead of Critical Strikes) Silence enemies hit for the next 1 second.

Ancestral Legacy:
Gliterring Silence now silences for 0.5 (+0.1 per level) seconds, instead of 2 (+0.3 per level) seconds.

Exaltation of Silence has been renamed to Exaltation of Bliss and does the following:
Enemies within a 3 yard radius are Blinded, Rooted and Silenced.

[h2]Changes to Legendaries[/h2]

Legendary Reinforcement:
Legendary Effects can no longer benefit from Reinforcement Levels above 15.

It leaves a decent room to upgrade Equipment without allowing players to completely bypass any form of challenge or difficulty by upgrading some Legendary Effects to infinity and beyond.

Soul Eating Mantle now reads: Damage over Time effects and Channeled Skills deal Additional Damage equal to 1% (+0.2% per Level) of the enemy's Max Life per second (instead of "per tick").

[h2]Changes to Runes[/h2]
Activation Rune of Hagan:
Activation Rune of Hagan now triggers after 20 Ancestral Strikes instead of 12.
Activation Rune of Hagan now reads:
After you've dealt Ancestral Strike Damage 20 times (and up to 1 Ancestral Strike per second), you trigger your Effect Rune.

Thornbite Rune now reads:
You gain Thornbite Protection that shields you from the next X Incoming Damage.
Thornbite Protection is equal to 15% of the sum of your Armor, Elemental Resistance and Evasion.
Thornbite Protection cannot excess X. The limit is equal to 150% of the sum of your Armor, Elemental Resistance and Evasion.

Rune of the Nimble Warrior now grants (at max rank):

• 45% Critical Strike Damage (instead of 75%)
  
• 150% Ancestral Strike Damage (instead of 225%)
  
• 45% Primary Skill Damage (instead of 75%)
  

Enhancement Rune of Hagan now grants (at max rank):

• 180% Increased Effects (instead of 300%).
  
• 150% Constraint (instead of 225%)
  

[h2]Changes to New Player Experience[/h2]

A new dialogue is now available with Pr. Geranium when you loot your first Slorm Reaper, granting a new Legendary Item called "Pr. Geranium's Amulet of Stimulation".
This Legendary Item has been designed to quickly use freshly looted Slorm Reapers.


A new dialogue is now available with Pedro, The Gravedigger when you complete the third mission, granting a new Legendary Item called "Signet Ring of the McRippeds".
This Item grants you a Skill that acts like a Potion.

These Items can also be looted like any other Legendary Item.

[h2]Changes to Cataclysms[/h2]

• The Reconstruction Effect will stop its Cooldown when an Invulnerability shield from the "Invulnerability" Cataclysm is active.
  
• Regeneration as a Battlefield Boss modifier now heals the boss every 10 seconds instead of granting Life Leech.
  

The Mischievous Mage:

• Additional Projectiles should no longer reduce Projectile Damage from Arcane Missile while Arcane Sovereign is active.
  

Legendary Items:

• Ancient Blacklight Talisman should now work properly.
  

Controller:

• You can now properly rebind Menus keybinds.
  
• Not setting a keybind for your Inventory should no longer result in a crash.
  

Various:

• Joane should no longer spawn with Chests when unlocking her for the first time.
  
• Leaving an Expedition while Frozen should properly remove the Frozen debuff.
  
• Click-to-Move should no longer crash the game when playing "The Storage" Mission in Act II.
  

That's about it for now!
Cheers!

Hello everyone!



First and foremost, The Royal Wing Update, Part II will be available on Monday, July 10. This update comes with new content and quite a bit of reworks.

New Content includes:

• Act 5: New Missions.
  
• An Epic Boss Fight.
  
• The 6th Ancestral Stone and new Ancestral Skills.
  
• Increased Level Cap to 80.
  
• Loadouts.
  

Reworks include:

• Armor and Elemental Resistance.
  
• Changes to Silence.
  
• Changes to Legendary Scaling.
  
• Rune Balance.
  
• Changes to New Player Experience.
  
• New Legendary with early game sustain.
  
• New Legendary with early game leveling help.
  
• The Great Forge:
  
  • Multi-Waves.
    
  • Increased number of Paths (up to 6).
    

You can read more about most of the upcoming changes in Slormite Chronicles #25 and Slormite Chronicles #26.


With this Update, we are done with most of the heavy / mandatory stuff and the future will allow us more flexibility. We still have quite a bunch of very important features coming up, but they are a very different aspect of the game than what we've been working on this past year (Enemies / Environment / Story / Missions) so we're pretty excited by this.



Our plan for the rest for the year 2023 is as follow:

• Release The Ancestral Update and tie the Story to the Endgame.
  
• Release 68 New Slorm Reapers to reach our target number of 120.
  
• Release The Warlords Update: Our 4th Endgame mode.
  

Let me say this right now, Slorm Reapers can be REALLY hard to design so it is quite hard to determine how much time it will take. Above is what we have in mind, but if taking the time to create fun and interesting Slorm Reapers delays the release of the Warlord Update for a month, then so be it.

Then 2024 will be about adding final features such as adding a Codex, Achievements etc... We also want to rework classes and skills with the help of the community while balancing the whole content. And hopefully move on to 1.0.



The Ancestral Update is next on the line.

The goal of this Update is to link the end of the Story that you will get to discover on Monday's update (The Royal Wing Update, Part II) to the Endgame. And altough everything I'm about to say is subject to change, this is roughly what is planned for this update:

• Adam Nostrus will give the players that just completed the story a good introduction to what can be done in the endgame. We currently call this "Adam Nostrus' Trials", and it will consist of a series of various milestones for the player to complete.
  
• Adam Nostrus' Trials are divided in three parts. Completing a part will grant you much needed rewards to complete your build.
  
  • Completing Part I will grant you the 7th Ancestral Stone.
    
  • Completing Part II will grant you the Primal Ancestral Stone.
    
  • Completing Part III will grant you the last Slorm Reaper in the game.
    

The Primal Ancestral Stone?!
It is a very special Ancestral Stone we've talked about a few times that you will be able to enshrine in any Ancestral Slot without restriction.



This Update, rightfully called The Ancestral Update, will grant the player the final pieces to use the Ancestral Legacy, open up its possibilities and unlock the last Ancestral Skills.

More on that in the next Slormite Chronicles!


That's about it!
Cheers everyone!

Hello everyone!


We are making good and steady progress on Act 5, and although we are not working on particularly new mechanics, we are putting extra care on that last boss and dialogues.

It won't be the final boss, and we still have quite a bit of story elements to drop here and there but these put an end to the "Story" portion of the game, so we're trying to close that chapter with extra love.

This Update is turning out to be larger than our previous ones because we are introducing new missions and Ancestral Skills, Loadouts, on top of substantial reworks of some mechanics and game modes.



If you've read the previous Slormite Chronicle, you've read about upcoming changes regarding The Great Forge, New Player Experience, Armor & Elemental Resistances and a few other things here and there.

In today's Chronicle, I'd like to talk about other changes that are coming up: The first one is actually another change to The Great Forge (reworking our rework basically) and the other one is about Legendary Items and scaling.



After reading all of the comments we've had regarding our intention to add a "Fast Forward" mechanic to Challenges, it was clear that it was not going to do what we wanted it to do.

It's a fun mechanic that we might eventually add at some point, but we now tend to think that it won't actually fix the issues raised in our last Chronicle (being that The Great Forge is both too long and/or too boring).

We came up with two solutions that have both been implemented. They both feel much more natural because they make The Great Forge work smoother without adding additional features.

Here's our take: If you manage to 1 or 2 shot packs inside The Great Forge, then the vast majority of your time is spent waiting. You wait for the wave to spawn, then you wait for packs to get inside the combat area. You eventually also wait for enemies to walk toward you or you move back and forth between active Forge Paths. And it's not fun either way.

What we did is that we tried to remove the wait time to 0. This would make The Great Forge both faster to clear but also more exciting which is the initial goal.
Obviously, we want The Great Forge to remain a fair Challenge for new players so we couldn't just increase the speed of everything. So here's what we did:

[h3]Opening More Paths[/h3]
At the very beginning of The Great Forge, you will now have the choice to open up more than 2 Forge Paths (these options are unlocked at higher Wrath Levels, a new player will only open up 2 Forge Paths up to a certain point).

Above Wrath 4, you will get to open up to 6 Forge Paths.
It basically make enemies spawn 3x times faster, and they come up from every direction so your best option is to stand in the center instead of running around Forge Paths, which was neither fun nor intented.

And I've felt that it creates much more epic fights.

Placeholder icons, but you get the idea.

As you may notice in the screenshot above, choosing to open up Forge Paths has an Elder Slorm cost. And although you can't see it in the screenshot above, it will be equal to the Elder Slorm cost you paid to get there.

Here in Wrath 4: I paid 250 Elder Slorm to get into The Great Forge. I have to pay an extra 250 to open up 4 Paths, and an extra 500 to open 6.

[h3]Multi-Waving[/h3]
In The Great Forge, you previously had to completely clear a wave before triggering the next one.
You now only have to wait for a wave to spawn before being able to trigger the next one.

This adds a very nice "greed" layer to The Great Forge on top of Challenges and allows players to increase the intensity if they feel like it, and eventually slow it back down after a though fight.

It also feels very natural and tower defense-esque to spawn waves when you feel that you're up for the next wave.

There are a couple of limits to this: First, you can't have more than 5 active waves, and you can't trigger a new wave if there are more than 300 active enemies (to prevent performance issues).



[h3]Balance[/h3]
With these new mechanics, we believe that The Great Forge will be fun again for everyone, including players easily going for Wave 100.

That being said, we know that The Great Forge is way too efficient compared to other game modes. And we don't want anyone to think that we are increasing the efficiency of The Great Forge without measuring its effects regarding the rest of the game.

Our goal here is to make it fun for everyone, even for intense farming sessions.
Once every game mode is out and once the game is feature-complete, then we will look at ways to balance game modes, currencies (Goldus, Elder Slorm etc...), and farming options. It's just not our top priority right now.



We've been having a general issue regarding Legendary Effects since the beginning of Early Access, and we've had numerous reports talking about how this or that Legendary Effect was unbalanced.

And we believe that it mostly comes down to the fact that Legendary Effects scale with the Reinforcement Level of your item, with no cap whatsoever.

This means that the Legendary Item "Winds of Harmony", which has the perfectly fine effect of granting "All Skills have -10% Cooldown" would eventually turn into something broken once you get to Reinforcement Level 50+ (or 90+ for a 100% Cooldown Reduction).

We've mentioned this before when we made a first change to regular Items Reinforcement scaling, but we never intended for players to reach these levels of Reinforcement "so easily".

It was made possible with a few oversights on our side regarding the crafting system that made it possible to completely bypass the "Potential" mechanic.

From now on, Legendary Effects will only benefit from Reinforcement Level up to Level 15.

Reinforcement Level 15 has always been the soft cap we wanted for items.
Slormites only go up to 15 after which Reinforcing gets unstable. And as you may know, the scaling of regular Stats on items decreases with every Reinforcement Level, down to its minimum value when you reach Reinforcement Level 15.
So stopping the progression of a Legendary Effect at Reinforcement Level 15 is what seems the most natural.

We could change the crafting system to prevent this or we could add a soft cap instead, but both options would only delay the issue. That's why the more radical option felt appropriate here.

We understand that this is a hard nerf for our most dedicated players that may not be welcome.
But we truly believe that this is a step in the right direction of slowly balancing the game to something healthier.


That's about it!
Cheers everyone!