Hey everyone!
I am happy to announce the newest Soulstone Survivors update, Omen of Spring! It has been a long time coming, but it's finally here, with new skills, weapons, secrets, and a ton of quality of life improvements and features that were in our list for a long time! Here is the highlight of what you can find inside!
The focus of this update is not only adding new content to the game, but start acting on the topics we mentioned previously. First, we continue adding new weapons and skills that offer new playstyles, along with major balance changes and even the redesign of a negative effect. Second, we are starting to build the diversity of enemies per map we have promised for a while, starting with the Whispering Grove but soon expanding to all maps. And then finally, adding new challenges and continuously improving the existing content, interfaces and visuals of the game.
There is still a lot coming and a lot of hard work ahead of us, and we will talk a little bit about next steps at the end of this post, but first... here is the full list of changes!
New content and features:
- Ritual of Love Event: 13 Feb - 26 Feb
Find new secrets in the heart of the woods and unlock unique skills, if you can! Secret will be permanently available in-game.
- 7 New craftable weapons:
Barbarian: Tempest Battle Axes
Pyromancer: Shard of Chaos
Hound Master: Heartseeking Rifle
Spellblade: Icelord's Blade
Arcane Weaver: Benedictio, Staff of Dawn
Sentinel: Misery's End
Paladin: Arcane Scepter of Light
- 17 new active skills:
Barbarian: Thundering Slash, Overcharged Strike
Pyromancer: Chaotic Inferno, Chaos Eruption
Hound Master: Precise Shot, Threshing Blast
Spellblade: Arctic Assault, Frozen Blade
Arcane Weaver: Sacred Orb, Celestial Retribution
Sentinel: Obscure Arrow, Void Trap
Paladin: Radiant Light, Arcane Mace
All characters: Secret 1, Secret 2, Secret 3
- New enemies:
The Whispering Grove now has unique regular and elite enemies, together with a new spawning system that should help bring more variety to each run. Over the next few updates, all other maps will also be reworked until all enemies are unique per map.
- New feature - Lock Power:
You can now purchase from the Skill Tree the ability to Lock power-ups a few times per run, so if you get more than one amazing choice in a single level up, you can lock one, pick the other, and then on your next level up, learn the power-up you locked before;
- Exposed and Vulnerable redesigned:
Increases direct damage taken by up to 8% for 6 seconds. Bonus is proportional to the damage caused by each attack. Vulnerable also multiplies that bonus by 2 on critical strikes.
Developer's note: The intention with these effects was always to focus on heavy hitting, slower attacks, but with the current mechanics they are too unpredictable and hard to use. We believe this implementation will provide a good synergy that can make heavy hitting skills such as Glacier, Savage Strike and others perform much better, while offering virtually no improvement for fast hitting skills such as Beams, Flurry, etc;
Rune changes:
- Mastery runes can no longer grant you skills from weapons you have not unlocked yet;
- Made it so Critical Mastery rune now also considers bonuses from Dazed and Disoriented into its extra critical damage calculation;
Skill changes:
- Made it so you can now cause a multi-critical attack if your critical chance is high enough, applying the critical damage modifier multiple times;
- Fixed an issue where Brittle would not apply to negative effects such as Burn, Poison, etc;
- Brittle is no longer over-influenced by skills that scale with different attributes, such as Shield Bash, and now provides the intended damage bonus;
- Smoke Bomb is no longer affected by Damage and Critical modifiers, since the skill does not cause damage;
- Fire Orb, Ground Slam and Heavy Strike are no longer available and might return officially at a later date;
- Arcane Beam damage per tick reduced from 50 to 30;
- Arcane Beam now applies Exposed with every tick;
- Arcane Blade damage per stack reduced from 50 to 30;
- Arcane Missiles now applies Exposed;
- Meteor damage increased from 400 to 500;
- Meteor Burn damage increased from 200 to 250;
- Meteor cooldown reduced from 7 to 6 seconds;
- Meteor Shower damage increased from 100 to 300;
- Meteor Shower Burn damage reduced from 200 to 180;
- Meteor Shower cooldown reduced from 10 to 8 seconds;
- Fire Wall Burn damage increased from 480 to 680;
- Fire Wall cooldow reduced from 11 to 10 seconds;
- Fire Bolt damage increased from 200 to 250;
- Fire Bolt Burn damage increased from 300 to 360;
- Flame Wave damage increased from 150 to 300;
Enemy changes:
- Made it so the reach of Gammuth's Flamethrower damage area is aligned with its visual area;
- Fixed an issue where the Elite Snake's poison spit might not hit the player when it should;
- Fixed an issue where enemy Void Hunters could become unresponsive if they were stunned by certain skills;
General changes and fixes:
- New additional soundtrack for The Whispering Grove;
- New toggle added to Level Up screen so you can automatically skip Active Skills once you have created your perfect build;
- Added option to disable New Objective Warning messages such as "Eliminate a Lord";
- The game will now let you know how many hidden achievements you still have to complete in the Achievements screen (but not how to complete them);
- Achievements Screen controller navigation now properly implemented, together with other improvements such as filtering for only incomplete achievements;
- You can now purchase skills from the skill tree by double clicking with the mouse;
- Fixed an issue where multiple player skills were not affected by effect visibility settings properly;
- Fixed an issue where Beam and a few other skills in extreme scenarios could become framerate limited, dealing less damage than they should;
- Fixed an issue where the Corrupted Death Knight's Poison Bomb would not show on the ground if you had your visual effects set to the minimum;
- Fixed issue where Bumble's Frost Aura would not appear if you had your visual effects set to the minimum;
- Fixed Scroll area in Crafting panel which was going over the designated area;
- Fixed a few instances where Tooltips could remaing on-screen indefinitely;
- Fixed an issue where if conditions were right, you could pull scenery objects from the Dungeon of Despair that shouldn't be movable;
- Fixed an issue where the Winter Holiday Defeat sound effec would play outside of the event window;
- Multiple UI improvements across the game;
Community Events in Discord:
We are back to running community events in our Discord (https://discord.gg/5RcXb8attT)! These include feedback events where players send in suggestions about a theme for the game, such as new skills, new runes, new characters... and vote on the suggestions they would like to see in the game, and the top rated suggestion gets implemented in the game! We are also planning a Developer Q&A and of course, we are always hanging out, so come and have a chat with us if you got any questions or would like to know more!
Developer notes
As usual, we aim to include a brief section discussing the update's details, so without further ado, let's delve into a few topics!
Growing Team
This update is landing a little bit later than what we had initially planned, but for a good reason! As we have mentioned in our previous update, we are working very hard on expanding our team a little bit more to allow us not only to deliver bigger and better updates, but to start thinking about more ambitious features we might have ruled out at first. Since last update we received over 500 job applicants (which is mindblowing!) and spoke to so many awesome people already, that its hard NOT to get excited about the future of the game! However what that means right now is that we are investing quite a lot of time into finding the right people, but truly believe this time will pay for itself very quickly in the months to come!
Still on this subject, we are happy to welcome our first new team member, Juan Paixao, a brillian programmer that started with us for a little over a couple of weeks and is already responsible for a lot of the improvements in this update! It's great to have you on the team man!
Map Diversity
This update brings the first step towards improving the gameplay diversity between the maps with new common and elite enemies in the Whispering Grove, but our goal is that every map will have a completely unique set of enemies. As we have mentioned before, this is an ongoing work that will be done little by little with every update to the game, so rest assured that these enemies are just the beginning!
What about our excess resouces?
We know that some of you are out there hoarding thousands, even millions of soulstones and materials and thinking... but what do I do with all this stuff? And... we might have something for you, soon! We have a completely new system in the works that will give you a good use for those materials, and... ah you know what, we will talk about it in more details on a post of its own =P but rest assured that we are working on it!
Next steps
As mentioned above, our next big priority for systems is a way for you to spend your excess resources that does not feel grindy, but instead gives you something cool to try and experiment with. We are hoping to officially introduce this system in the next update which we are aiming for some time in March, along with new skills, weapons and enemies as we continue to move towards the completion of our roadmap and more!
There is still a lot we want to add to the game, so many ways we can continue exploring, and you can rest assured that we are still super excited about all that is coming. I know that sometimes we are a bit quiet, and that some people will get nervous about when the next update is going to be... but we are at it! We are growing the team and taking the steps so that we can continuously support Soulstone Survivors for as long as we can, and we are always around, here, on Discord, should you get any questions!
Finally, I just wanted to thank you all for the amazing support once again, developing Soulstone Survivors has been an amazing journey so far, with a lot of hard work and late nights, but just getting all the amazing messages, emails, telling us stories about things you like (or dont like!) about the game... make all the effort worth it a thousand times!
Best wishes,
- The dev team