Greetings, lost souls!
Heretical Steam Community Items are now available!
Players can start collecting a full set of trading cards, featuring characters like Aelar Thorne, Harald, Oswald, Ruvius, Sethian, Tizian, Venexis, and Wildheart.
Completing the set will let you craft badges and unlock exclusive profile rewards. Alongside the cards, you’ll also find unique profile backgrounds, as well as thematic emoticons
Whether you’re a collector or just want to customize your Steam profile, now’s the perfect time to dive in and showcase your Heretical spirit!
What's cooking behind the closed doors?
We've been working on our 9th playable class - the Alchemist. So let me share some insights on how he's going to work.
Unlike other classes, Alchemist has a unique ability that changes how their typical run looks. His ability is, well, "Alchemy", which causes enemies to drop ingredients occasionally. There are 20 unique ingredients that enemies can drop, and each enemy type can only drop a certain type of ingredient. For example, Beast Ear can only drop from hounds and rats, while Ghostweed can only drop from scholars in the academy.
Anyway, by killing enemies, you accumulate ingredients that you can later use to mix concoctions, and each such concoction requires 3 different ingredients. Once mixed, the concoction gives you the benefits of those ingredients for a limited duration. Each ingredient grants some passive stats while in a concoction, for example, increased attack damage, resistances, or hit points.
However, there are numerous unique combinations that, when mixed, grant you a unique ability for the duration of the concoction. For example, mixing Rotting Skin, Stake Ash, and Fermented Blood will result in an incendiary bomb mixture that not only gives you the benefits of the ingredients but also causes your attacks to launch bombs at a random enemy around your target.
Given that there are over a 1000 possible combinations and only a handful of these unique ones, it's unrealistic that you'd be able to test it all out on your own in a realistic amount of runs, so instead of just experimenting, there are also going to be "recipe books" points of interest in runs that will allow you to learn one recipe that you don't know already in exchange for gold.
This way, the Alchemist has both a learning and progression curve unlike any other class so far.
The second big thing that's coming with this update is the crossbows. They're going to be one-handed weapons that shoot slower than wands, but with a longer range. Besides the Alchemist, others will also be able to use them, while Wildheart and the Ranger will have increased proficiency with the crossbow.
Crossbows will also have two new uniques tied to their weapon class, with their own prophecies for unlocking them.
We're also working on some performance issues, some bug fixes, and lots of other little things.
Like before, you'll be able to test this all out on the beta branch in the upcoming days when we release the first version of it, and it should hit the production branch during September.