Hello everyone! It’s Chronicle Time!
The Luxuriant Update, Part I Release Date
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!
New Enemies
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.
New Environment
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.
Elites Rework
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.
Other Additions and Reworks
New Cataclysms
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.
Cataclysm Changes
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.
Life / Mana Leech Reworks
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.
Craft Reworks
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.
The Slorm Temple
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.
Performance & Bugs
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!