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Halls of Torment News

Hot Potatoes Bundle & Patch Update 2023-09-13

[h2]Hello Adventurers![/h2]
Before we proceed to the most recent patch notes we would like to spotlight a little collaboration we’ve struck up with Blobfish, the makers of Brotato. We’ve put both our games together in a delightful bundle called “Hot Potatoes”. So if you recommend Halls of Torment to your pals, or in case you’re reading this without having bought the game, yet, consider the “Hot Potatoes” bundle!

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/34876/HoT_Potatoes/

[h2]The Patch[/h2]
In this patch we’re introducing two major changes to Halls of Torment: The first is a buff to the Spirit Warrior ability. The second is an information display in the campfire character selection that shows all major stats of each playable character. We hope to reduce a little bit of initial friction for players who start playing a character they are unfamiliar with.

We are aware of other areas where stats and values still aren’t clearly communicated and we are working on those. We’re planning to add more transparency as we continue with the development, and we hope that we can introduce those improvements very soon.

Additionally, there have been plenty of smaller fixes and adjustments across different areas of the game. For a detailed list of changes, as always, have a look below:

[h2]Change Log | 2023-09-13[/h2]
  • Spirit Warrior
    • Buffed melee attack
    • Buffed dash attack
    • Added stun effect to dash
  • UI
    • Added a character description panel at the campfire
    • Added ability description in "Traits and Abilities" screen
    • Increased size of right panel HUD tooltip
    • Increased size of inventory item tooltips
  • Difficulty
    • Agony champion projectiles are slower now and shouldn't off-screen the player so often
    • Shadow Cloak: uncommon version got buffed
    • Frost Avalanche: Increased direct damage from 25 to 50
    • Reduced the Agony score cap in Frozen Depths. It hasn’t been adjusted after rebalancing monsters.
    • First champions do now spawn after 90 seconds to avoid clashing with regular 2nd monster wave elites.
  • Bugfixes & Typos
    • Fixed missing ingredient indicators on Gatherer's Charm (e.g. Dragon Nettle)
    • In some trait descriptions regeneration modifiers weren't described properly
    • Shadow Cloak: block strength in description now fits the actually applied block strength
    • Fixed typos in quest descriptions
    • Spirit Warrior: it is now possible to select a second ability upgrade after picking up trait VI
    • OnHit chance stats of abilities are now displayed as chance percentages instead of flat values
    • Flame Strike: typo in ability tags
    • Ring of Thunder & Ring of Frost: fixed typos in descriptions
    • "Purification" traits of Cleric have been fixed: areas and ranges were too low
    • "Voltage IV" trait fixed, now only triggers electrify on critical hit
    • "Summon Golem" - Magma Fists was missing "fire" and "burn" tags
    • Beast Huntress level 60 quest now yields a gold reward
    • Cleric’s movement speed was slightly to low, it’s now corrected to 4.5m/s
    • Beast Huntress had the physical tag instead of the elemental tag on her spear
    • Maiden’s Tear would make you invincible on unequip when it was fully charged.
    • There was falsely a Wraith Guard champion in the Frozen Depths, it’s now a Snow Effigy.

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]
As previously mentioned, we’re working on more quality of life improvements and fixes for various issues. We also have some engine updates in our backlog that could potentially fix a lot of crashes on some people’s machines. But before we can safely release those, they need to be tested properly, so stay tuned.

Have fun! 🥕
Chasing Carrots

HoT Patch Update 2023-09-07

[h2]Hello Adventurers![/h2]
This is the second smaller patch in the series of patches after the Frozen Depths update. While addressing further issues that have been pointed out to us, we’ve followed the discourse in the forums closely and of course played the game a lot ourselves. It was to be expected that for some players the difficulty reduction would render the game too easy. Others welcomed the change and of course we understand that we won’t be able to satisfy every single one of you just by tweaking the difficulty back and forth.

However, we have to point out that we always need to balance the progression as a whole. If you have everything unlocked (particularly the new class marks) naturally the game will be much easier for you even in the currently final stage. Keep in mind at which point Frozen Depths get unlocked. You can enter the stage after defeating the second boss of the Forgotten Viaduct. Each time we add a new stage, we move the goalpost in a way that doesn’t feel challenging for players who already have 100% of the content unlocked. But we need to make sure that players who follow a natural progression (i.e. when the game leaves Early Access) don’t hit a brick wall.

Frozen Depths is not the final stage. We have more content planned, and we also have a concept for the late game, which should allow challenge-driven players to ramp up the difficulty to their liking, while it doesn’t make other players feel like they have to take on those challenges. But this is an entire feature for a later bigger update. For now we will stick to improving the game where it still feels rough until we’re ready to add new content.

That being said, here is the list of changes for this patch. It’s focussed on improving the game feel of the Beast Huntress and her hound. There also have been some other minor tweaks, like small balancing adjustments in the Frozen Depths based on our own playthroughs and improvements in visibility.

[h2]Change Log | 2023-09-07[/h2]
  • Summons in general
    • fixed floaty movement behaviour by adjusting mass/movement speed ratio
  • Beast Huntress
    • improved game feel
      increased attack speed
      proportionately lowered damage and frost chance
      improved projectile visuals
    • Hound
      • increased attack speed
      • reduced damage proportionately
      • Hound will choose targets that are closest to the Beast Huntress instead of its own position
      • increased aggro range and movement speed
      • changed attack to a circular emitter in front of the Hound
      • added a better visual effect and sounds for the attack

  • Norseman
    • added missing description of Frost Nova ability
  • Visibility
    • Player's Frost Avalanche ability effects have been moved below characters sprites and enemy projectiles.
    • Enemies' frost avalanche effects have a higher contrast and stand out more against the frozen depth background.
    • Ability opacity setting now also affects Shadow Cloak, Arcane Rift areas, Arcane Rift Splinters, and Ringblades.
  • Ember Grounds tweaks
    • minor adjustments in XP distribution during early waves
    • slightly increased pickups in stage
    • slightly increased health values of some enemies
  • Bugfixes
    • Spirit Warrior falsely reacted to "+Spawn" modifiers, which was unintended.

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]
Don’t worry, we’ll get back to the Spirit Warrior ability soon. The list of planned changes is the same as it was in the previous announcement. We’ll keep you posted.

Godspeed! 🥕
- Chasing Carrots

HoT Update 2023-09-05

[h2]Hello Adventurers![/h2]
After last week’s update many players expressed their discontent with the changes we’ve introduced and with some of the new content we’ve added. We’ve gone through many forum posts, collected your feedback, and took a closer look at the current state of the game. We realize there are many other players who enjoy the new update, but it is clear to us that we need to readjust a lot of things in order to make the game fun again for those who aren’t happy with the changes.

To achieve this we want to take a more careful approach. Our plan is to release several patches in smaller increments and keep in touch with the community to make sure that our direction aligns with your expectations. We will try to keep the time between the next couple of smaller updates short and react to your feedback in between.

The most common complaint was the increased difficulty, especially in the new stage, Frozen Depths. In order to relieve some of the frustration, we’ve reduced enemy health and damage values for a less punishing experience. The difficulty in the other stages hasn’t changed much since the previous (non-beta) update, but we noticed a couple of outlier values that needed some tweaking, so there have been minor changes as well (specifically too high projectile damage values e.g. in Ember Grounds).

We’ve also added two new QoL features. You can rebind keyboard keys for movement and aim actions in the settings menu. If you struggle with visibility due to too many ability effects on the screen, you can now set the opacity of ability effects as well.

[h2]Change Log | 2023-09-05[/h2]
  • Settings
    • added configurable keyboard bindings
    • added opacity setting for player ability effects
  • Difficulties of Ember Grounds and Forgotten Viaduct
    • reduced damage dealt by enemies with special movement patterns or high movement speed
    • reduced damage from enemy projectiles
  • Frozen Depths Difficulty
    • reduced damage dealt by regular enemies
    • reduced health of regular enemies
    • increased enemy spawn count for regular enemies
    • reduced agony decrease rate on each enemy, since monsters take longer to reach the player's screen edge on Frozen Depths
  • Frozen Depth Bosses
    • reduced trigger distance for ranged attacks to avoid player getting off-screened
    • made projectile based attack patterns of bosses less frustrating
      • slower movement
      • less dense patterns
      • smaller damage areas
    • increased size of hit areas (the ones that receive damage, not the ones that deal damage)
    • Bugfixes
    • fixed a bug that caused frost effects to trigger every frame forever once their timer has run out

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]
This is just the first of several small updates. We are aware that there’s still a lack of transparency for instance regarding character stats. We also know that in some areas the visibility should be improved and some content still needs some balancing. This is a preview list of things we want to address in the upcoming updates:
  • adjust Beast Huntress and Hound AI
  • improve information on character stats
  • adjust Spirit Warrior ability
  • address various bugs, typos, and missing assets
  • improve enemy projectile visibility in Frozen Depths
  • fix bugs in agony champions


Keep in mind that this list is incomplete and there are many other things in our backlog we want to improve. We hope we can restore the game to a state that all of you will find enjoyable within the coming days and weeks.

Take Care! 🥕
Chasing Carrots



Halls of Torment adds new characters, new stage, 'Agony Mode' and much more

Well, there goes basically all of my free time. Halls of Torment blends together retro Diablo with Vampire Survivors and it was already horribly addictive and now I fear I'm going to be sucked in again.

Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/08/halls-of-torment-adds-new-characters-a-new-stage-agony-mode-and-much-more

HoT Update 2023-08-31

Hello Adventurers!


It’s time for an update! Those of you who have played on the beta branch will have seen most of the changes already. But there are a couple of new things in this update that didn’t debut on the beta branch. And of course we’ve also fixed some bugs that popped up during beta testing.

Highlights of this update are the two new characters: the Norseman and the Beast Huntress. Both feature ice based attacks, each in a different and unique way. In addition to this we have a couple of new abilities for you to try out. Two of them, the Ice Avalanche and the Flame Strike were playable in the beta version. But we’ve added two more: the Arcane Rift and the Spirit Warrior. We’re sure you’ll find something new in here that fits your combat preferences.

Without further ado, here’s a list of all the bigger changes. Please keep in mind that there might be some overlap between this list and the ones from previous beta updates.

[h2]Change Log | 2023-08-31[/h2]
[h3]FEATURES[/h3]
  • New feature: Class Marks
    • Class Marks allow you to pick traits from a different class
    • To unlock a class mark you will need to finish the class master quests.
    • Those quests require you to reach agony IV on the character's stage of origin.
    • These quests superseed the character quests to reach level 100.
    • If you have already completed the level 100 quests those quests will be set as completed.
  • New feature: Agony Mode
    • Agony Mode can be unlocked by defeating the Lord of a stage.
    • Monster count, monster health, and XP drops are dynamically scaled based on your performance
    • Each killed enemy increases agony, while monsters that are alive reduce agony over time.
    • Aside from monsters, only reviving reduces agony.
    • You may find ‘Uncommon Items’: stronger variations of items that you’ve retrieved previously
    • Additional champion monsters are spawning
    • Champions are randomized monsters with extra modifiers and abilities.
    • Champions can drop various rewards from ability scrolls, to uncommon items, gold, flasks, or an extra bucket for the well.
  • New stage: Frozen Depths
    • Can be unlocked by defeating the frost knight on the Forgotten Viaduct.
    • New unknown enemies await with 3 unique bosses and a new lord.
    • The stage layout limits your movement and requires you to navigate carefully through the caves while avoiding getting encircled by foes.
  • New elemental effect: Frost
    • Frost explodes and deals damage in an area when the affected monster dies or 20 stacks have been accumulated.
    • If the frost effect runs out it triggers with only half of its damage.
    • Frost deals damage based on the number of stacks.
    • The strongest hit that applied frost determines the area of the effect.
  • New characters
    • Norseman
      • Dual wielding axe fighter boosting your physical abilities.
      • When he hits a certain number of enemies he unleashes a devastating Frost Nova.
    • Beast Huntress
      • Throws her spear with great force, piercing through the enemy lines and applying frost effect.
      • Has a hound that protects her from close enemies.
  • New abilities
    • Ice Avalanche: an ice based attack with a diagonal pattern.
    • Flame Strike: close quarter defense or boss killer.
    • Arcane Rift: magic mines that deal devastating damage.
    • Spirit Warrior: summoned warrior that dashes through enemies.
    • Potion of Renewal: allows you to reroll abilities
    • Hallucinogenic Elixir: allows you to reroll items in a chest


[h3]POLISH & QOL[/h3]
  • All final stage bosses have lower health but they increase in difficulty over time.
  • Potion of Oblivion now allows you to banish a trait without closing the trait selection.
  • Discarding all items in a chest gives you XP worth 50% of your current total XP bar.
  • You can now discard all abilities from a Scroll of Mastery which will also give you 50% XP of your current total XP bar.
  • Some fixes regarding item and monster positioning in level geometry
  • Picking up quest items or ingredients will show a short text telling you what you’ve picked up
  • Potion quantities have been adjusted (max amount and bottles)
  • Many more tweaks, adjustments, and bug fixes that would either go beyond the scope of this post or we didn’t track properly.
  • Retrieving potion bottles doesn’t use up the well any longer. Also, when you survive a run, all bottles in your bag will be automatically added to your potions (no purchase necessary).

If you want to see a more detailed listing of changes that happened while we were preparing this update, you can have a look at this forum thread:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2218750/discussions/3/3801652762283956029/

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]
After this update we’ll have to monitor the game for a couple of days and make sure that there are no major problems. At the same time we are going to look at some of the QoL and accessibility issues many of you have pointed out and see if we can find fitting solutions for them. It may take a couple of iterations until we can address all of them. Of course we will also continue to work on more content, but our main focus for the next update will be more towards getting rid of some of the rough edges in the game.

We hope you’ll enjoy this update as much as we did!

Cheers! 🥕
Chasing Carrots