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.



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.




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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


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").

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%)

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.

• 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:

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.

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).



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!

Hello everyone!

Our next update is on tracks, its name: The Royal Wing Update, Part II.
No surprises there, it will include Act 5 (so new missions), new boss fights, new Ancestral Skills and an increased level cap. One important thing to mention is that it should be the last update containing a new Act / Missions. Once this one is out of the way, we will be introducing our last 2 endgame modes followed by various objectives and quests that should link the endgame altogether and lead to a glorious fight against the infamous Slormancer.

That being said, we've mostly been working on "side" stuff lately and things we've been delaying for a while because once we're done with the main content of an update we tend to publish it as soon as possible without taking the time to rework past content or work on "secondary" features. So this time, we're doing it the other way around.

This is something that we've always wanted to have in the game since we want to encourage players to change their builds and explore fun and interesting options on the go.

The way it works is that you can take a snapshot of your current build, switch to another build that you've been looking to try (eventually save it aswell), and load back your previous build once you're done. If you're familiar with the Diablo 3 system, I believe that it is exactly the same.



So there now is a large Wardrobe next to the storage area with 5 Loadout Slots per character.
It is important to note that it is not a storage space. Items are not being stored, so you can use them in multiple builds (of the same character).
The tooltips of Equipment pieces will now display whether or not these items are being used in a Loadout Set. In the screenshot above, my Ring is used in Set I and in Set II.

We've also been reworking the "Storage Area" so you access everything faster. The top left chest replaces the Storage NPC, so you no longer have to talk to her. The top right chest, is the legendary chest and the wardrobe opens up the Loadouts menu.



We have a few reworks coming with this update. I will not detail most of them right here mostly because we came up with solutions that are yet to be tested (so they are subject to change).

You can expect changes regarding: Legendary Equipment Scaling, Soul Eating Mantle, Runes: such as Thornbite Rune, and Activation Rune of Hagan, Silence in general.

However, we have a few changes coming that I'd like to talk about:

(I'll only talk about Armor here out of simplicity but the same changes will be applied to Elemental Resistance since they are identical).

Let's be real, Armor does not work or at least, it doesn't make much of a difference.
We've been looking at some numbers to figure out why Armor was not doing its job, and we actually found out that we didn't know what job Armor was supposed to do exactly and where it was supposed to shine, so we had to start from there.

Currently, Armor is really only useful when you take light hits, the lighter the hit is, the stronger your Armor is. For some reason, it felt like the appropriate behavior to us.

Here are few numbers of the current Armor formula:
Assuming 10 000 Armor, which is a decent yet easily obtainable number.

A Level 70 (Wrath 5) Archer deals 486 Damage.
Your Armor will prevent about 91% of the Damage, resulting in about 43 Damage.

A Level 70 (Wrath 10) Archer deals 4 212 Damage.
This time, the same Armor will prevent about 16% of the Damage.

It is already pretty bad at this point. But it gets worse.
Some enemies hit MUCH harder than an Archer, and some Cataclysms and Forge Challenges push this even further.

Assuming a Level 70 (Wrath 10) Colossus (an upcoming enemy based on Act II Boss, Grotagrom), with the Gargantuan Cataclysm, and a Critical Strike from the Assassins Cataclysm:
He will deal 148 044 Damage.

This time your Armor will prevent 0,45% (!!) of the Damage.

It was actually quite fun seeing how wrong we were when doing all these calculations.

This is also true for when the player deals damage to enemies. Even enemies with high Armor values would just not mitigate anything from 100 000+ Damage (which is pretty common).

As mentioned earlier, we first had to figure where Armor is supposed to be useful. And we found out that it was cristal clear that it was supposed to be the opposite of what we were doing.

Given the massive difference in light and heavy damage at a given Level / Wrath (going from 4 212 to up to 150 000) we have in the game, we needed to have viable options for both.

Max Life combined with Life Regeneration and / or Life Leech are great to sustain light hits. But there are currently no proper options to sustain the massive hits that can eventually occur. Regardless of your Equipment, there is no way to sustain a 1-hit 150 000 Damage, except by somehow "cheesing" the game, which is what players have been doing (using Thornbite Rune, Primordial Aïondee etc...), and it is perfectly understandable.

Our rework goes in the way of making Armor the absolute best option to mitigate these heavy hits.

Basically, we are changing the Armor formula: Instead of being based on Damage, it will be based on Level + Wrath. We have yet to find the correct multiplier / value, but what this means is that 10 000 Armor (like in the previous example) will result in the same % of Damage being mitigated whether you're dealt 500 or 500 000 Damage.

And instead of 0,45%, or even 16%, we want to be closer to 30-40% (for 10 000 Armor).
Given how bad Armor currently is, we don't mind overdoing it.
And we'd rather see players being unkillable because they have tons of Armor rather than having lots of shield from Thornbite Rune because they have lots of Armor. It just feels more natural. :)

This also means that enemies' Armor will now work the way it is supposed to and be much more efficient.

To be honest, The Great Forge was never meant to be so heavily farmed. We expected players to reach the 100th Wave but given how long it takes, we didn't expect it to be the default goal.

There are a couple of issues with The Great Forge (at least when you are properly geared / farming endgame content):

1. It's too easy.
   
2. It's too long.

The first issue is not related to The Great Forge so our goal is not to try and fix it here. We could scale everything up, but it would not make much of a difference. Instead, we should trust ourselves and the many balance passes that are yet to come that will eventually resolve the issue.

So our focus was to work on issue n°2: It's too long.
I personally do not get to Wave 100. At some point, I lack the time and motivation so I actually leave The Great Forge, not because I feel like I can no longer sustain the upcoming wave (the way it's supposed to work), but because I no longer have the time to get to the end.
We believe that even if The Great Forge was much harder or much longer, the goal would remain the same: complete Wave 100. Players simply don't want to leave.

So we decided to embrace that goal and not try to go against it, and went with something that feels like a very simple yet elegant solution (at least to us).

Some Challenges will now have a new bonus tied to them, called "Fast Forward".
It is pretty straightforward: when you pick up the Challenge with a Fast Forward option, you will ignore the next X Waves. This will allow to modulate the length of Great Forge runs: You can complete a quick Great Forge run (by picking up every Fast Forward, you should be able to complete a run in about 30-35 Waves) but you will skip rewards for a certain number of waves.



This solution adds up a new layer of choices to Challenges which is interesting.

But ultimately, it is almost just like before except it's not. If you only have time / motivation to do 30 Waves, instead of leaving after 30 Waves and feel bad about it, you actually get to the end of The Great Forge before leaving. And if you happen to find a Legendary Reward that scales nicely, then you may feel tempted (and not forced) to slow down on the "Fast Forward" challenges.

The objective does not change, but you now have some flexibility to how you want to reach it.

This one is an ongoing issue that we've been having. We want the game working in a certain way that prevents certain things during the early game.

For instance, we love looting Level 1 Slorm Reapers. It is important for the experience that we want to offer that you level it from the start. But we understand that this completely prevent players from immediately equipping a new Slorm Reaper and experience stuff with it when they loot it. This is even more true for the first 2-3 Slorm Reapers you loot, since the vast majority of your DPS comes from your Slorm Reaper you cannot afford to switch immediately change it during the Story.

We've previously added a few things to ease the leveling process (such as Slorm Reaper Affinity) but it actually does not help new players at all.

So we're introducing a new Item that you will be able to pick up when you unlock Pr. Geranium that will set the level of your current Slorm Reaper to the level of your Character (up to a certain point). This way, players will be able to quickly experiment their freshly found Slorm Reapers, until they no longer need to.

We also love the fact that there are no potions in the game. To us, this mechanic often ends up into a spam-fest that is not fun. But we understand that it is really important in the early game and at least until you get your first Equipment with Regen stats, at which point the game switches to something much more enjoyable. But we've noticed how BIG of a difference the experience is for a player that loots an item with Life Regeneration early on, and the ones that don't.

We've tried adding some base stats to sustain Life, but it actually didn't make much of a difference.

So same as Slorm Reapers, we came up with a simple solution: players will pick up an item that has an Active Skill that acts like a Potion in the very early game and use it until they no longer need to.

On top of that, we'd like to experiment with "Life Globes" (a small globe dropped by enemies that regenerates a small amount of life when you pick it up). We like the mechanic and how it could add fun to early game fights. Life Globes would be available during the Story and in early Wrath levels, and slowly dissapear once you get to higher Wrath Levels.


That's about it!

We currently have no release date to communicate for this update as it is too early in development. We'll probably be able to give a proper date for our next Slormite Chronicles on June 6.

Cheers!

Hello everyone!

Patch 0.6.01d




5 New Enemies have been added to the game.



The Royal Wing has been added to the game and can be accessed through Battlefield Expeditions.
This is NOT a new Act. It will come in a later update.



A New Storage Stash has been added to the game and allows you to store up to 1 of each Legendary item that can be found in The Slormancer.

Battlefield Expeditions:
You can now choose between:

• Battlefield Journey: Random and everchanging Environment. Boss Events.
  
• Careful Examination: Chosen Fixed Environment. No Boss Events.

Super Elites

• Super Elites have been removed from regular Battlefield Floors.
  
• Super Elites have been reworked and are now Bosses during Battlefield Journey Expeditions.

Various:

• "The Great Maze" mission has been changed and now have regular fights along the way.
  
• The Jetlag Cataclysm has been renamed to "Invulnerability" to match its current effect.
  
• The "Head of the Syndicate" mission no longer has the Jetlag Cataclysm.

The Mighty Knight:

• Whirlwind should now work properly with Reaper of Vindictive Slam.
  
• Voracious Swing should now work properly with the "To Each his own" Cataclysm and with the Obelisk of Revocation.

The Fierce Huntress:

• The Force Transmission + Elemental Sorcerer loop should now be fixed.
  
• Fountain of Malady now reads: "While Delighted, you can now Leech Life with Poison Damage and have an additional +3.5% Life Leech on Poison Damage." instead of "While Delighted, you have +3.5% Life Leech on Poison Damage."
  
• Fountain of Malady should now work properly with the "To Each his own" Cataclysm and with the Obelisk of Revocation.

The Mischievous Mage:

• Chrono-Burst should now properly deal its damage to the enemy that triggered it.
  
• Chrono-Burst should now trigger properly with the new Leech mechanic.
  
• Empowered Rift Nova should now work properly with Supreme Rift.

Legendaries:

• Ancestral Champions' Present should no longer display Ancestral Gifts that are currently not available in Early Access.
  
• Battlefield Mantle (The Mischievous Mage) should no longer trigger when inside Bryan's Seal of Protection.
  
• Spectral Sight should now grant you the proper Pierce Chance.

Various:

• Starting an Optional Mission to unlock a new Hero then immediately leaving the game should no longer your Material Tab and Shared Stash to disappear.
  
• You should now properly lose the Stun status when leaving a Boss Room while being Stunned for cinematic purposes.
  
• Elite Life Bars should no longer show negative values.
  
• Slorm Temple Shrine animation should now be played at the correct speed.
  
• NPC moving during cinematics should now walk at the correct speed.
  
• Fixed a few typos.

Slorm Reapers:

• Animations from Vindictive Slam's Holy Ground should now be played at the correct speed.

Enemies:

• Suffering Soul's visual FX should now be consistant with FPS.

Controller:

• Reaper Damage and Skill Damage should now properly display their Tooltip when hovering.
  
• Talking to an NPC should no longer prevent you to then navigate the Slorm Reapers menu (and a couple of other buttons).
  
• Changing Font Sizes with a Controller with Simplified Chinese displayed should no longer crash the game.

If you find a bug, please report it below or on our Discord.
Cheers!

Hello everyone!

The Royal Wing Update is almost ready, and it will be available next week! Today also marks the 2-year anniversary of The Slormancer's Early Access! Two years of Updates, Patches, and Chronicles!



We've been talking about upcoming content in our latest Chronicle, so I'll only briefly recap what has been said and move on: The Royal Wing Update, Part I comes with a new environment called "The Royal Wing" (duh) and 5 new enemies, tied to that environment.

Oh, and it will be availble on April 11th!




Now, we've been working on a couple of new exciting stuff that will be available with this update:


As you can see in the screenshot above, we've added a couple of choices to Battlefield Expeditions.

We wanted to fix different issues we've been having with Battlefield Expeditions:

• Playing in the same environment over and over gets boring, especially when you've been dealt with an environment you don't really like.
  
• Battlefield Expeditions lack special events / changes of pace.
  
• If you wish to play in a specific environment, you have to fish for the correct environment by entering/leaving Battlefield Expeditions until you get the one you want.
  
• For the same reason, once we introduce the Influence feature tied to Environments, players will want to farm in specific environments, so this has to be doable.

Now, you will get to "Choose your Adventure":

• You can either choose the Battlefield Journey which is the default option. "Random and Everchanging Environment. Boss Events."
  If you choose "Battlefield Journey", you will get to face a boss every few floors (with appropriate loot :o). We've been working on a nice staging, similar to the one we've made for Story Bosses: The entire floor is dedicated to the Boss fight, just you and him.
  
  
  
  Once you've dealt with the boss, the Expedition will then continue on a different environment so it never gets boring.
  
  
• Or you can choose the Careful Examination option. This alternative allows you to choose the Environment you want to venture in. However, you will face no bosses and the environment will, obviously, never change.

This comes with a change: Super Elites that you could sometimes find in Battlefield Expeditions can no longer be found in a regular Expedition floor. We felt that they didn't have the set-up they deserved and were not noticeable enough to cause the change of pace we wanted them to cause.

So we've actually been working from what we had with these Super Elites and turned them into the Battlefield Journey Bosses mentioned above. The changes we've made should hopefully create more epic/memorable fights.

This is step 1 of the "Loadouts & Smart Stashes" line from our Early Access Road Map. We're introducing a new Storage Chest where you will be able to store one of each Legendary item available in The Slormancer.



We really like collectible stuff so it felt like the most natural option for The Slormancer. And since we plan to have about 200 Legendary items for the 1.0 release, it was almost mandatory to add more storage options. And depending on how much it is needed, we will eventually increase the number of basic stashes later on.

This is a particular milestone because we originally planned to get from Early Access to the 1.0 within two years. Well... We were wrong. Very very wrong.

For the purpose of the Steam Q&A about Early Access that you can read on our Steam Page, we had to give an estimate of how much time we expected our Early Access to last. In which we said "About 2 years".

I believe that we were expecting to have no issues whatsoever, no bugs or setbacks, and less sales (so less feedback to manage). Let's call it optimistic ignorance.

If you've been eagerly waiting for the 1.0 release of the game, then sorry for being optimistic ignorants. We'll do better.

As of right now, we will soon update the Q&A with an honest (yet desappointing) release date answer: We don't know. We have a release date in mind, but we don't trust our own prediction anymore. We would love to get to 1.0 before that date, but we've been reminded many times that developing a game takes time. So we will keep that date to ourselves. I think it's too optimistic anyway :).

On the bright side, we're making good and tangible progress and our to-do list never felt so small and manageable. We still have lots of things to work on, but we can see the end. It's far. But we can see it.

The goal always was to get the best possible game. We know that The Slormancer has the potential to be much more than it currently is. So we'll try our best not to waste it.


That's about it!
Thanks for reading! See you on April 11 for the release of The Royal Wing Update!

Hello everyone!

As discussed in our latest Slormite Chronicles, I've been working on various aspects of how the Controller behaves, both in menus and in game. Both were causing some frustration and a rework was much needed.

This update introduces major changes to our controller support but I also took the chance to work on other technical and / or quality of life features so everyone has something to look for in this update.
So here goes!

Controller Aim Assist:
Reworked the Auto-Aim system to be much more efficient.
The Auto-Aim should now accurately follow the direction of the ground cursor.
The Auto-Aim should no longer aim for enemies behind walls.
As a result, switching between targets should be much MUCH easier.

When moving with the Left Stick, the system should aim for pretty much any relevant target nearby in front of you. When using the Right Stick, you will be able to more accurately pick a direction FROM the enemy currently being targetted. If you don't like that behavior, I've also added two other options for you to choose from:

"Aim Assist" Setting:
Added an Aim Assist Setting with 3 options:

• Auto Aim: (Default option) Use the Right Stick to navigate between targets.
  
• Semi-Free: Use the Right Stick to Aim. Your aim will adjust to a relevant target in the direction you're aiming.
  
• Free: Use the Right Stick to Aim. No Help.

Toggle "Aim Assist":
Added a Bindable Option called "Toggle Aim Assist" that I encourage you to set to R3 (R3 used to be Toggle Enemy Life Bars by default): Toggle Aim Assist will switch from your chosen Aim Assist setting to "Free" and back to your previous choice when you press R3 again.

Visual Feedback

• A Locked Target will now glow with a more distinct stroke and the back of its lifebar will change.
  
• When a Target is locked, the ground cursor will change color.

User Interface:
The Left stick can now be used to move a newly added cursor around menus and select any button or hover over any kind of tooltip. This should make the navigation much MUCH smoother.

I've also fixed a couple of weird behaviors:

• Ancestral Tree Menu: Moving the Tree now takes stick sensitivity into account.
  
• Ancestral Tree Menu: You can now properly refund Ancestral Legacy choices with a controller.
  
• Inventory: Enabled Stick/Pad Navigation to Slorm Reapers, Thumbs and pretty much any button.
  
• Inventory: You can now add/remove Traits 10 by 10 by holding RB.
  
• Inventory: You should now be able to navigate through the Slorm Reapers menu without issues.
  
• Inventory: You should now be able to properly close Reaper Runes / Ultimatums notifications with the A button.
  
• The Great Forge: You can now hover over Challenges Effects and Rewards.
  
• Expeditions: Now that everything is clickable, the default button to start Expeditions is now Y instead of A (used to click on things).

Bonus:
Button Faces can now be customized between Xbox / PlayStation or Nintendo Switch.

Font Sizes:
Added new Font Sizes called "Biggerer" and "Biggest" which are bigger than the "Bigger" font size.

Search Bars:
Added a Search Function to Skills, Attributes and Slorm Reapers.
The Search Bar in the Ancestral Legacy menu has been moved to the top right out of consistency.

Mouse / Keyboard
You can now bind Side Mouse Buttons (up to 2).

Added a "Target FPS" setting with 4 options: 30, 60 (default), 120 and Uncapped.

This was heavily requested, so here goes.
I haven't been able to test those options on proper hardware, so please let me know if everything is working properly. When playing above 60 FPS, you may notice elements going slower or faster than usual. If you do, please let met know.

Added 21:9 support to The Slormancer.
The following resolutions are now available:

• 2560 x 1080
  
• 3440 x 1440

Same as FPS, I haven't been able to test those options on proper hardware, so please let me know if everything is working properly. You may find some UI elements in the wrong places, or unable to click on some buttons.

Added a Zoom setting that allows you to zoom in by 25% and zoom out by 25% (via mouse wheel or via the Settings Menu). It should feel better for people unconfortable with our current level of zoom without breaking the experience.

And here are a couple of bug fixes that I've managed to squeeze in before today.

Act 4:
- Minimap sizes should fit better.
- Arnaldow, The Scarecrow, should no longer stop targetting you when you move too far.
- Chaining missions should no longer cause an inappropriate "Time Played" to be displayed on the Victory screen.

Various:
- Influence should now be properly displayed on the Victory screen (there was a small difference due to Influence Gain stats).
- Victory Screen should now properly display Flasks and Books destroyed in The Mage Academy (major bug!).
- When using Bryan's Portal, "Next Floor" should be displayed, instead of "Next Mission", when applicable.
- The number of possible Reforges displayed at the Blacksmith for Masteries, Reaper Affinity and Attributes should now be the correct values.

Crashes:
- Fixed a Crash when clicking on Flawless Defense occuring in Chinese.


That's about it!
Let us know what you think.

Hello everyone!

In our previous Slormite Chronicles, we've said that the Controller Update was expected to be done in February. I later posted a comment regarding the delay that most of you probably missed:
I had personal things that came up so we had to delay the release a bit. But we can now announce that
The Controller Update will go live on March 7.

Things also got out of control as I felt the need to add more and more features to this update! :D
So the "Controller Update" became a larger beast, now known as "The Technical Update".

I don't want this to turn into a patch notes (that we will publish on March 7 as well) but I'm glad you ask!

Controller Aim Assist:
I've reworked the Auto-Aim system to be much more accurate and efficient.
I've also added an Aim Assist Setting with different control schemes:

• Auto Aim: (Default option) Use the Right Stick to navigate between targets.
  
• Semi-Free: Use the Right Stick to Aim. Your aim will adjust to a relevant target in the direction you're aiming.
  
• Free: Use the Right Stick to Aim. No Help.

On top of that, we've added a new bindable option called "Toggle Aim Assist" that is used to quickly switch between your default Aim Assist option and the "Free" control scheme.


We've been working on visual feedback aswell.

User Interface:
Navigating through menus with a controller used to be really painful. But fear not! Things got much MUCH smoother as you can now use the Left stick to move freely inside menus.

And as mentioned in our previous Chronicle, you will be able to change button faces and choose between Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo Switch.


We've also been working on various Quality of Life features and technical stuff that should improve the overall experience.

• I've added new Font Sizes called "Biggerer" and "Biggest", bigger than the "Bigger" font size.
  
• You can now bind Side Mouse Buttons (up to 2).
  
• I've added Search Bars (similar to the one in the Ancestral Legacy menu) to Skills, Attributes and Slorm Reapers.
  
• The Slormancer now supports UltraWide and the 2560 x 1080 and 3440 x 1440 resolutions are now available.
  
• The Slormancer now supports 120+ FPS and a "Target FPS" setting has been added by 4 options: 30, 60 (default), 120 and Uncapped.
  
• Last but not least, I've added a Zoom setting allowing you to Zoom Out by up to 25%. It should feel better for people unconfortable with our current level of zoom without breaking the experience.

Everything listed above will be available with the "Technical Update" on March 7.

While working on the technical aspect of the game, we've also made progress on The Royal Update that will add a New Environment and 5 New Enemies to The Slormancer.

Here's a preview of our upcoming enemies!



From left to right:

• The Loot Thief
  
• The Decaying Domestic
  
• The Spectrum of Justice
  
• The Ominous Jester
  
• The Undead Paladin

It is actually the very first environment we've built for the game. It has been through a lot and is now ready to come to The Slormancer.






As I've said, the Royal Wing was the very first environment we've built for The Slormancer. Behold its first iteration. You can also enjoy the very first designs for The Mighty Knight and Skeleton Soldiers.
Back then, we were super proud of the result. :o




That's about it for now!
Have a nice day everyone and see you tomorrow for the update!