Today we will launch Season 7 - The Clash of the Elements. It is fair to say that since the first time we launched Dwarven Realms for early access back in December of last year, this is the first season we completely don't know what is going to happen. There was just too many stuff to test. Which means we honestly have no idea how the game plays out. We could wait another week and deliver more predictable content but as you already know us, we much rather do it with you.
We think true balance is a very delicate art which even in simple games could take years and millions of data points. With that being said this season doesn't have any kind of data. The game could be way harder or way easier we can't even tell. This is why we decided this season will last for a duration of one week. After that we will try to stabilize all the new features and modifiers and start another 3 week season to work on more content.
Skills
The majority of the time has been taken to overhaul the skill tree. There is not much point in trying to explain it since its a completely new tree. The major difference from the previous seasons we hope to see is people will have different builds. Every skill will belong to 1 of 3 elements - Fire, Lightning, and Arcane, and will benefit from such bonuses accordingly, if you have any. We hope to have a lot more mechanics based on these elements in the future.
Stances
We added a basic playstyle for archery and magery.
The magery shoots AoE from Wands and has 2 unique abilities. One causes an explosion around you and the other will fire a volley of your normal attack.
The archer fire bows with 2 unique shots. The first will cause your arrow to explode and the second will fire an arrow to the sky, where it will split into a lot of arrows which cause the ground to rain with arrows.
The different skills for stances will no longer be on the skill tree and will now progress with time use. The way the progression feels will certainly change next season so don't get to worried if its too fast or too slow.
Items
Items have not changed much but there are a few new modifiers. Lower tier items will drop modifiers for lower tier skills.
As always. There was a lot of work and a lot of changes in a very short amount of time. This might have a lot of gameplay issues and bugs. If you prefer to enjoy a more stable experience, please wait and play the season next week after we had a chance to let the dust settle down. Some of changes and tweaks have been made to some of the current content.
If you have requests regarding the new systems, or want to report bugs feel free to do it in the correct discord forums. We would welcome these with open arms.
Some future plans regarding the new content
After careful thoughts and considerations we think that the experience we want to provide for each stance needs to be very unique. So the game stays as it was, each stance has a minor mechanic which makes it more special. To make a stance really play differently will require a full season of effort for each stance by it self. In the future we plan to do exactly that, spend a full season on one stance, and remake them 1 by 1. This includes making a crafting/tools stance with different mechanics making tools viable and interesting.
Items are still in the same place they were. They require a more sophisticated overhaul in order to be interesting. The potential for crafting in Dwarven Realms is huge, with survival elements, crafting lists, and different mechanics they have attached to them. Until we work on a better crafting system the items will keep being modified slowly.