The Slormancer - Ashmore[The Slormancer]
Hello everyone!

The Slorm Reapers Update (v.0.7.5) is now available!

New Slorm Reapers

68 Slorm Reapers have been added into The Slormancer!
That's pretty much it.

Of the 68 Slorm Reapers, there are 40 Unique Slorm Reapers and 28 Evolutions.

This means that the Slorm Reapers Collection is now complete.
However, 2 of the new Slorm Reapers are currently locked behing unavailable content right now:
  • Vengeance will be acquired once you defeat Ohm Agad.
  • Altior will be acquired once you complete Adam Nostrus' Trials.

Some Advices to hunt Slorm Reapers:
  1. Slorm Reapers are looted on Breaches (not enemies) so clearing Breaches is the way to go.
  2. Rooms in The Slorm Temple count as Breaches.
  3. Breaches from Story Missions can loot Slorm Reapers.
  4. There are no Breaches in The Great Forge so you won't find Slorm Reapers there.
  5. There is a hidden pity timer that guarantees a Slorm Reaper every 150 Breaches.

Various Additions
We've added a couple of things that felt mandatory when working on this Update:
  • Whenever a Skill resets its Cooldown Time due to a triggered effect, an animation will be played on its icon to clearly deliver the information.
  • Legendary Items and Slorm Reapers tooltips can now be scrolled up / down.

Bugs & Performance
Performance:
  • Crafting lots of Slormites / Slormelines will compute instantaneously and will no longer cause the game to crash / freeze.
  • Opening FAT War Chests should no longer cause the game to crash / freeze.
    • Goldus can now drop in stacks of 100 000.
    • Slormite, Slormelines and Slormandrites will be packed based on their Tier / Rarity.
    • In the absence of a Loot Filter, Items will be gradually filtered out to prevent 100s+ of Items displayed on screen (granting Goldus instead). This will literally only activate if more than 100 Items of a specific rarity are about to spawn, and will never filter out Epic or Legendary Items.
    • Item Names will be shown once the War Chest has done distributing all its content to prevent unnecessary performance constraints.
    • Looting all the content of a FAT War Chest should be much faster overall.
Bugs Fixed:
  • Having the Primal Ancestral Stone in a Tier 1 Ancestral Legacy Slot should no longer cause a crash.
  • Duplicating a currency should no longer be possible in the Material Tabs.
That's about it for now!
Cheers!
The Slormancer - Ashmore[The Slormancer]
Happy New Year everyone!

Same as last year, this Chronicle will be a recap of the year 2023 for The Slormancer and we will take a look back at what's been done.

But first and foremost, let's talk about the Slorm Reaper Update that was supposed to be done (damn you, devs!). It turns out that verifying and debugging a hefty amount of 68 Slorm Reapers took us longer than anticipated. We also took some time off during the holidays, and were busy eating raclette for a few days.

There's still a degree of uncertainty regarding the release date. We have a few things to polish here and there, a few sound FX to add and still some Slorm Reapers that do not work the way we want. We're almost there but not quite. We're almost always regretting giving a release date too soon so I'm not giving any right now. Coming Soon is the best I can say.

Now onto the Recap.

A Year of Chronicles: 2023 Edition
Fun fact: You may not know this but we publish the Slormite Chronicles devlog every 6th of the month, which is the day The Slormancer was released (on April 6, 2021). Everytime we publish a Slormite Chronicles, the game gets one month older, and it is currently 2 years and 9 months old.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3648510249383787904
We started the year with Slormite Chronicles #21. A Chronicle similar to this one, with a roadmap for 2023, and it turns out that we did everything that we had planned. Yay! Moving to Slorm Reapers by the end of year was not planned but it is one of the most challenging part of the roadmap for us so we're happy to be (almost) done with it.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3677786821873442436
We then went on with Update #1: The Luxuriant Update Part II on January 30.
This Update introduced :
  • 8 New Missions (Act 4)
  • A New Ancestral Legacy Tier, adding 32 Ancestral Skills.
  • An Increased Level cap to 70.
  • Quality of Life for The Slorm Temple.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3645136358946943138
In Slormite Chronicles #22, we talked about the (mixed) feedback we got for Act 4 and our plan to fix things, and then talked about the upcoming rework on Controller Support.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3655271993680980796
Slormite Chronicles #23 was again about Controller Support and the numerous technical changes that were coming to the game in The Technical Update. We also talked about the new Environment and Enemies that we were working on.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3645137816263933584
Update #2, called The Technical Update, introduced a complete rework of the Controller. We had a growing playerbase on Steam Deck, and an unexpected amount of players using a controller so it was most needed. We also added numerous technical changes:
  • A new Aim-Assist for Controller users.
  • A Toggle Option along with various Visual Feedbacks for the Aim-Assist.
  • Many Interface and Menu Navigation changes for the Controller.
  • New Font Sizes
  • Search Bars for Skills, Attributes and Slorm Reapers.
  • New Bindable Buttons
  • Uncapped FPS.
  • UltraWide Support
  • An ingame Zoom.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3696933459132056109
Slormite Chronicles #24 covered our upcoming Royal Wing environment along with 5 New Enemies.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/6754877058971340034
This led to Update #3: The Royal Wing Update Part I on April 11 that introduced:
  • 5 New Enemies
  • A New Environment (The Royal Wing)
  • A New Legendary Chest to store Legendary Items.
  • Changes to Battlefield Expeditions: Now separated in two slightly different modes.
    • Battlefield Journey. With Bosses on dedicated Floors.
    • Careful Examination. With the ability to farm in a chosen Environment.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3719453992477321493
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3721708329664648030
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3644023772659391558

Slormite Chronicles #25, #26 and #27 were all about our biggest update of the year: The Royal Wing Update, Part II that would not only introduce new missions, story content but also loadouts and a rework of The Great Forge. The first iteration that we talked about in the Chronicles (#25) turned out to be something players didn't want so we went on with something simpler and funnier (#26) that seems to have pleased players.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/6027549530047881897
This led to Update #4: The Royal Wing Update Part II on July 10 introducing:
  • Act 5: 6 New Missions and 1 Boss fight.
  • A new Ancestral Legacy Tier adding 20 new Ancestral Skills.
  • Increased Level Cap to 80.
  • Loadouts
  • Reworks to:
    • Armor and Elemental Resistances, making them more efficient.
    • The Great Forge, making it faster, greedier and with a better density by introducing "Multi-Waving" along with opening more Spawn Locations at once (from 2, up to 6).
    • Silence, toning it down and making it only affect spellcasters.
    • Legendary Reinforcement, by limiting it to 15.
  • And various changes to Runes or new player experience.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3685685238927988976
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3690191375767913128

Slormite Chronicles #28 and #29 were about the upcoming Ancestral Update that would introduce Adam Nostrus Trials, a series of endgame goals that would guide the player to the right direction along with setting nice objectives, along with our first endgame boss: Adam Nostrus.
On top of that, we would introduce the Primal Ancestral Stone, a unique stone that you can enshrine anywhere on your Ancestral Legacy that would increase build possibilities a lot.

In one of the Slormite Chronicles, we also talked about our ideal goal for the end of the year, which was to release: The Ancestral Update, The Slorm Reaper Update (the one we're currently working on) and The Warlords Update. It was very optimistic to say the least. I would have loved to release The Slorm Reapers Update before the end of the year, just to get 2 out of 3, but there was no way that we could have done this one faster.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/6819068581450405188
Update #5: The Ancestral Update was then released on September, 19th.
It introduced:
  • Adam Nostrus' Trials.
  • An endgame Boss: Adam Nostrus, King of Fashion.
  • The last Tier of the Ancestral Legacy Tree adding 5 new Ancestral Skills.
  • The Primal Ancestral Stone.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3749867242861566445
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3774639576536488352
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3860210510760624428
Since then, we've been working on Slorm Reapers! So we pretty much only talked about Slorm Reapers in Slormite Chronicles #30, #31 and #32.

In 2023, we have released 5 Updates. A 6th before the end of the year would have been great but we had to settle for 5. It was a great year for us overall, we checked a lot of important boxes and made good progress.

Once The Slorm Reapers Update is out, we will post our plan for 2024 in an upcoming Slormite Chronicles. along with an updated Road Map. We have high hopes for the year to come, so please stick with us for the final push!

That's about it for now!
And again, Happy New Year! May you all loot fat War Chests.

Cheers!
The Slormancer - Ashmore[The Slormancer]
Hello everyone!

It's Chronicle time!

Slorm Reapers, again!
I feel like I'm only talking about Slorm Reapers lately in these Slormite Chronicles, but that's pretty much what this is what our daily lives are like. Slorm Reapers everyday, and night.

For those of you that have missed our latest Slormites Chronicles, we are currently working on finishing the whole Slorm Reapers Collection. As of now, there are currently 52 Slorm Reapers available in The Slormancer for a total of 120 wanted. This means 68 new Slorm Reapers to deliver.

The good news is that everything is coming along. We are slightly late on schedule but not by a big margin. This could have taken much more time than previously anticipated, so we're happy with how things are going. As for our current progress, at the time of writing this Chronicle, we are at:
- Pre-production and Brainstorm : 100% Complete
- Production (Actual Code) : 80% Complete
- Assets (Icons and Visual FX): 70% Complete
- Tests: Debug & Balance: 0% Complete

This means that we should be done relatively soon but I'm still reluctant to give a release window right now, mostly because Christmas holidays are coming up. And we want to make sure that we are fully available to fix bugs for at least a week once the update releases. We also don't want to release an update that may introduce gamebreaking bugs while the holiday sales is going on, since this would be a pretty bad experience for new players.

Basically, this means that we will probably aim for a release of this update slightly after Christmas, and possibly even slightly after the holidays, depending on how comfortable we are with our update.

That being said, we're close to finish quite a big milestone for The Slormancer, and for us. And we're pretty happy with how things are going. We're not sure about the impact of adding so many Slorm Reapers for our Early Access players, since most of you already have totally broken very viable builds with the weapons that already are in the game. But we're pretty confident that having so many different and unique weapons to choose from, level up, and discover will eventually pay off and hopefully be an important salespoint for the game.

Slorm Reapers, again!
Since we now have quite a bit of Slorm Reapers ready, I can finally show a bunch of screenshots of actual gameplay. It's not as efficient as videos but it's much faster to make, and it means that I will be able to return to coding Slorm Reapers soon enough.


The first screenshot is based on the notorious Vegetable Reaper. Tyler, the rabbit is there with you, eating vegetables.


This is the Slorm Reaper of the Desecrated Unholy Sepulcher: When killing enemies, they will drop a small sepulcher. You will then be able to either cast Tomb Explosion or Tomb Profanation on them.


Slorm Reaper of the Spider Nest, turning you into ... a spider knight.
On top of that, this Slorm Reaper makes your projectiles bounce off the edges of the camera instead of physical walls!

That's about it for today!
If you've missed the last Slormite Chronicles about Slorm Reapers, you can find them here, and there!

Cheers everyone!
The Slormancer - Ashmore[The Slormancer]
Hello everyone!

It's Chronicle time!

As mentioned in our previous Slormite Chronicles, we are currently working on building the last Slorm Reapers for The Slormancer. This is a long and quite difficult process but we're making good progress.

We've now moved to production and I believe this part should take about a month. There are a lot of original (and hopefully fun) new concepts that require quite a bit of assets and resources, but we believe it's for the best.

We don't have much gameplay to show yet, or at least nothing visually interesting, so we will instead continue to reveal upcoming Slorm Reapers. (As always, everything is subject to change).



The Slormancer being The Slormancer, we have a couple of circumvoluted and absurd concepts that we want to share with you, such as a Vegetable as a Slorm Reaper.

Go Tyler, Go!

The Primordial Version has an effect called "Miscalculation" that reduces Critical Strike Chance or Ancestral Strike Chance to 0% before Probability occurs. It gets fun.

We also came up with a bunch of asymmetrical Slorm Reapers.
Here's Legion, Reaper of Unity!



This Slorm Reaper gets stronger based on the number of Slorm Reapers you own called Legion.
It has a total of 5 Evolutions, plus its base form, so adding up the Primordial Versions, it adds up to a total of 36 Slorm Reapers.

On top of that, each evolution starts at level 1 and can be leveled up to 100.

Complete Collection
And here's a small preview of what a Slorm Reapers Collection looks like when complete!






If you want to read more about how we came up with Slorm Reapers and how the concept evolved, you can read our previous Slormite Chronicles.

That's about it for today!
Cheers everyone!
The Slormancer - Ashmore[The Slormancer]
Hello everyone!

It's Chronicle time!

We're currently working on the upcoming Slorm Reapers, and since we're still on preproduction, we don't have that much to share with you guys, so I figured I might tell you a bit more about Slorm Reapers and how we came up with the concept.

The Origins
At first, Slorm Reapers were supposed to be much more basic than what they are now.
The core was the same: Collectible Weapons that would always at least slightly alter the way you would play. But the result was very different back then. We came up with about 40 Slorm Reapers, with various effects. Most of them worked in a similar way: You get a nice bonus that could enable a build, but you get a malus that you have to play around.

And we also liked that it was a collectible, instead of a basic piece of Equipment. We wanted a "Weapon-o-Dex" that you could complete and that would also allow players to quickly change their builds on the go.

Here's an example of a very early prototype:



Slorm Reapers had rarities back then, and as you can see, one very simple bonus, and one very simple malus.

Slorm Reaper Hunting
As you can see on the screenshot above, we had a mechanic in place called "Focused Thoughts Elixir" that would allow players to try to loot a very specific Slorm Reaper he wanted.
Basically, you would loot Scrolls that would give you informations on a random Slorm Reaper, including where you could find it, then you could decide to use Focused Thoughts Elixir on that Reaper, greatly increasing the chances to find it.

We called this "The Hunt".

Slorm Reapers were much harder to drop without these Elixirs and the process felt tedious and not so fun. So instead of having to loot a Scroll, then spend a few Elixirs, then farm in the correct Environment, we removed these steps, increased the droprate and went full random.

From 40 to 120
At this point, we've only had one playtester beside us two (which is the composer), and when he played the first prototypes, he told us that he loved collecting Slorm Reapers, and that he thought we should go for more, and that 40 was not a big enough number.

So we went with 120.
This would lead to a LOT more work than anticipated, especially given the numerous reworks we've had to make.

Reworking Slorm Reapers
We then went on and built 120 Slorm Reapers. Then moved on to other mechanics of the game, eventually reworking Class Skills, The Ancestral Legacy, addind Character Traits etc... And even though Slorm Reapers were "good to go", The Slormancer got much bigger and much more complex than we anticipated, and all of a sudden Slorm Reapers were very underwhelming for what they were supposed to accomplish.

So we decided to rework them all. This would lead to a very important change:

We felt that granting a bonus and a malus was a very nice idea but that most players would be so annoyed by the malus that they would not give the Slorm Reaper a try.

So we first decided to split things up. Let's offer a regular version of the Slorm Reaper, with a fun and interesting concept, and then, if players show great commitment to it, they would unlock an even stronger version, but with a Malediction they would have to overcome.

This would lead to the Primordial Version that it's in the game.

So it meant that we could discard almost all the work we've done on the first iteration of our 120 Slorm Reapers. And coming up with new effects turned out to be both long and challenging, so we decided that instead of having 120 Slorm Reapers from the beginning of Early Access, we would start with 32, and add more along the way.

At this point, we also removed Rarities, because we knew players would often disregard Non-Legendary Reapers simply because... they are not Legendaries.

Here's a Before / After of Aïondee :



This new version is a LOT more work. Now instead of having a simple Bonus / Malus, we also have to come up with an interesting base, with a few scalable stats and exciting things to build around. Usually, our goal when designing a Slorm Reaper is to create something that is good on its own, but that can also trigger the theorycraft part of a player. Basically, when you loot a Slorm Reaper, you should always think: "Oh, I want to build something around this."

Early Access
During Early Access, as Pepperidge Farm remembers, we added a first batch of about 20 Slorm Reapers pretty early on, but it felt too early for most players, since the game was still lacking most of its content, so we decided to postpone the rest of the Slorm Reapers until further notice.

Early Access also saw the apparition of Slorm Reaper Affinity, a mechanic that would enhance the effects of your Slorm Reaper, reduce the difficulty to unlock Primordial Slorm Reapers and the addition of Cory Ironbender, an NPC that can craft Slorm Reapers you've unlocked with another class.

Now
And this leads us to now.
With 68 Slorm Reapers left to go.

Since the last Slormite Chronicles, we've made good progress and are almost done with preproduction. We have all the 68 Slorm Reapers ready to go, and are currently validating every single one of them one last time so we won't regret anything during or after production.

Here are a couple of new concepts that we can share:
At this stage of development, things are heavily subject to change.

Reaper of the Conniving Warlock
Whenever you spend Life, you trigger Life Drain, dealing that same Percent of damage as Skill Damage to enemies within a 3 yard radius and apply a Life Link stack to enemies hit, up to (Reaper Level).

Life Drain deals 1% x Reaper Level Increased Damage.
Life Drain deals 8% Increased Damage for each stack of Life Link.

You gain the following Active Skill:
Life Bargain - Cost: 10% Life.
For the next 7 seconds, Mana costs spend Life instead of Mana.
Evolution:
Life Drain can leech Life.
You have 1% x Reaper Level Life Leech on Life Drain.
Primordial Benediction:
The Cooldown Time of Skills costing Life to cast is reduced by 70%.
Primordial Malediction:
Life Costs are doubled.

Aurelon's Reaper of Light
'+1% x Reaper Level Aura Increased Effect
+0.5% x Reaper Level Aura Increased Multiplier

The Judge of Light is equipped and at Max Rank.

Whenever you kill an enemy while The Judge of Light is active, you have a 0,3% x Reaper Level Chance to create a Blorm of Light, for every Negative Effect on the enemy.

A Blorm of Light lasts 10 seconds and relentlessly attacks nearby enemies, dealing 100% Skill Damage per attack.

Blorms of Light deal Increased Damage equal to your Percent of Missing Mana.
Primordial Benediction:
Whenever you receive Damage, if you have Shield, Damage is reduced to 1.

Shield stops decreasing while The Judge of Light is active.
Primordial Malediction:
Value of Shields is 1.

Energy Overflowing Reaper
'+1 x Reaper Level Mana On Hit Multiplier
+1% x Reaper Level Mana On Kill Multiplier
+1% x Reaper Level Mana Leech Multiplier
+1% x Reaper Level Mana Regeneration Multiplier

Mana you Restore over your Max Mana is stored as Overflowing Mana.
Every 2 seconds, Overflowing Mana is evenly distributed as Elemental Damage to up to 5 random enemies within a 7 yard radius.

Overflowing Mana has X% Critical Strike Chance.
Critical Strike Chance is equal to yours.
Primordial Benediction:
Max Mana Modifiers are added to your Life instead of your Mana.
Primordial Malediction:
Your Max Mana is 1.

That's about it for today!
Cheers everyone!
The Slormancer - Ashmore[The Slormancer]
Hello everyone!

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

Adam Nostrus' Trials
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.

Ancestral Stones and Ancestral Skills
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
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.

Various Changes and Additions
  • 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.

Bug Fixes
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!
The Slormancer - Ashmore[The Slormancer]
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.

The Ancestral Update
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.

Adam Nostrus' Trials


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.


Ancestral Legacy


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.

Adam Nostrus, King of Fashion
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!
The Slormancer - Ashmore[The Slormancer]
Hello everyone!

Act 5
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.

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

Increased Level Cap
Level Cap has been increased to 80.

Loadouts
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.

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

Changes to The Great Forge
  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.

Changes to Armor & Elemental Resistance
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.

Changes to Silence
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.

Changes to Legendaries

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").

Changes to Runes
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%)

Changes to New Player Experience

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.

Changes to Cataclysms
  • 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.

Bugs Fixes
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!
The Slormancer - Ashmore[The Slormancer]
Hello everyone!


The Royal Wing Update, Part II
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.

The Roadmap
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
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!
The Slormancer - Ashmore[The Slormancer]
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.


The Great Forge v.2
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:

Opening More Paths
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.

Multi-Waving
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).



Balance
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.


Legendary Item Scaling
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!
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