The Slormancer News

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!

Hello everyone!


It's been a chaotic release for us, due to various bugs, performance issues and balance problems.
We've already taken care of some of it and I do still have quite a list of bugs ahead but I can only fix them one at a time. That being said, we have one (hopefully) final patch regarding The Great Forge coming in the next few days. It will fix Performance issues for the most intensive builds such as Ray of Obliteration + Arcane Clones or any build using Vindictive Slam, along with the vast majority of bugs and issues regarding Runes.

On a positive note, we're pretty happy with The Great Forge. And from what we've seen from our Discord, players seem to be having fun building massive War Chests, which is nice.

Once the final Great Forge patch has been released, we will be able to move on to new horizons.


Now feels like a good time to release the new Roadmap. Nothing has been added or removed from the old one, this is basically us taking a fresh start in our Early Access.

With this new Roadmap also comes the intention of deploying Updates much more often, even if it means releasing less content at a time.

I have to say that working for 5 months on the last update has been pretty hard. Despite the amount of content that was added, we've made almost no progress on the roadmap itself and it feels bad.
So right now, we want to go for the exact opposite: Making smaller yet impactful updates, and ticking things off the Roadmap.

And after so much time working on the same thing, we're super excited to work on new content.

Now Behold!



This new Milestones / Features gives us a bit more freedom regarding what we add and when we add it. The Milestones row is what we plan to follow, meaning that the next update is "The Luxuriant Update I", while the Features row is what we plan to add at any given point in-between updates.

We are also done with adding new layers of customization or new mechanics for a while. Our goal is to focus on what we currently have and work on it. This means reworking what needs to be reworked and grow on existing layers such as adding Environments, Enemies, Slorm Reapers, Ancestral Skills and Legendary Items.

We actually plan on finishing all these layers before even considering adding something entirely new. As for the last 2 endgame modes mentioned in the Road Map, both are based on existing mechanics that simply needs to be polished and fleshed out.

In the near future, for the next 5 to 6 months, it should all be about building content for what we already have. This usually requires very little brainstorm or tests, which was the most time-consuming thing for our Slorm Temple and Great Forge updates.


Half our team (so 1 person) is already working full time on the new update, while I'm still here fixing bugs, writing devlogs and stuff. And while we have nothing absolutely new to offer, here are a few (fairly old) screenshots of what's coming: The Luxurious Gardens.




That's about it for now!
Cheers!

Hello everyone!

Here's the list of changes that were made over the yesterday's and today's patches.

We've been monitoring what was achievable in The Great Forge and we've decided to make a first round of changes as some interractions with Greater Rewards were out of control.

• The chance to get Greater Rewards inside The Great Forge diminishes every time you pick a Greater Reward. The Greater Reward from Well-Deserved Rest remains guaranteed.
  
• You can no longer get an Obelisk as a Challenge Choice if you already have that same Obelisk active, Allied or Hostile.
  
• The Chance to have Obelisks as Challenge Choices has been reduced by 30%.
  
• War Chest Quality and War Chest Quantity base rates have been halved.
  
• Rewards with a "Rest of the Run" duration have been increased by +100%.
  
• Rewards for "Attrition Battle" have been increased by 300%.
  
• The Greater Reward: "You immediately gain +15% Slorm Quantity to your War Chest for every Reapersmith Spirit inside your War Chest." now reads "You immediately add +10 Slorm to your War Chest for every Reapersmith Spirit inside your War Chest."
  
• The Greater Reward: "For the rest of the Expedition, you add +1 of a random type of Reapersmith Spirit to your War Chest everytime you kill an enemy." now reads "For the rest of the Expedition, you have 35% Chance to add +1 of a random type of Reapersmith Spirit to your War Chest everytime you kill an enemy." and is no longer affected by Wrath Rewards Multiplier since Wrath Level already increases the number of enemies per Wave.
  
• The Obelisk Reward that adds +4% War Chest Quality every Wave now adds 2% instead.
  
• The Obelisk Reward that adds +2% Equipment Quality every Wave now adds 4% instead.
  
• Curse based on your Goldus now reads "Enemies have +X% Max Life. Max Life is equal to your current Goldus Quantity."
  

• The War Chest now drops Loot much faster.
  
• Goldus and Fragments from Items looted by the War Chest that are being filtered and converted are now immediately added to your Inventory instead of being looted.
  
• The War Chest can no longer be opened while in Combat.
  
• Obelisks are no longer affected by Cataclysms.
  

• Reaper of Necromancy should now properly grant the correct amount of Life to your Squire.
  
• Enhancement Rune of Hagan and Enhancement Rune of Beigarth should now properly work.
  
• Reaper Effect should now properly be increased by your Slorm Reaper Affinity.
  
• The Greater Reward: "The total of every loot inside your War Chest is immediately increased by your current War Chest Quality." now properly only increases flat values, and not % Quality or Quantity.
  

• Multiplie Memory Leaks and FPS-related issues were found and fixed. This includes issues with Rain of Arrows and various Cataclysms such as Floor is Lava or Replicant. Various parts were changed along the way that should result in FPS improvements everywhere in the game.
  
• The "Low FX" setting hides new resource-heavy effects that were previously ignored.
  

About Performance:
Due to the high density of enemies inside The Great Forge, lag is currently to be expected in high Wrath Levels. Here are some changes in your Gameplay Settings that you can make to improve your experience:

- Hide Gathered Slorm: Disabled
- Display Enemy Life Bar: Never
- Disable Hero Damage: Never
- Display Combo Meter: Never
- Display Goldus/XP/Mana/Life/State Texts: Disabled
- Display Debuff Icons: Disabled
- In Settings: Low FX: Enabled

This should reduce the lag you may experience.



That's about it for today.
We'll have another round of fixes next week, focusing on non-gamebreaking and again, on performance.

May your War Chest be filled with shiny Legendaries!
Cheers!

Hello everyone!

This patch is mostly about fixing the biggest Performance issues occuring inside The Great Forge.
There are a couple of things that were fixed along the way such as Slorm Reaper Affinity and Enhancement Runes not working.

Once I've dealt with the most important issues, I'll upload anohter patch and write a proper Patch Notes listing all the changes.
Tomorrow most likely.

I hope you're all having a good time!
Cheers!