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!