Hi Gyldhunters! Welcome to our eighth Developer Update. Looking back at July 30th—the day Mistfall Hunter officially launched—the entire team still vividly remembers that moment. After a long development process and multiple rounds of testing, seeing the game finally go live was a moment filled with both nervous anticipation and excitement, as we wondered how the world of Weavereach would be received. Based on our recent data tracking, over 1.5 million Gyldhunters have already arrived in Windrest to begin their hunts and adventures! This milestone is a massive encouragement for everyone on the development team. It brings great meaning to all the time we spent iterating gameplay, optimizing visuals, and polishing combat for each individual class.
As more and more Gyldhunters join our ranks, our team has also run into some major challenges. We are steadily fixing the various bugs that cropped up during the initial launch phase through multiple rounds of verification and hotfixes. When it comes to class balance adjustments, we still need to observe a vast amount of match data before deciding how to further tweak and optimize specific classes. For the server latency and hitching issues that many of you have reported, we previously completed a full server-wide optimization targeting cloud server CPU hyper-threading issues, which has successfully reduced the frequency of these stutters.At the same time, we have set up dedicated server frame rate monitoring, which helped us discover that actions like refreshing chimes and treasure chests can sometimes trigger excessive computation loads, leading to performance hiccups. These specific issues will be systematically resolved in upcoming updates to drastically improve your overall combat experience.
Following the update on August 12th, the flagship mechanic of the S1 "Soul Hunt" season—Soul Harvest—is now live. The core intent behind this feature is to give you more dynamic choices in every match.
We wanted to create a high-reward, advanced layer of content that introduces more variables to each match. Teams that excel at direct, front-line combat can proactively rush to ritual sites to contest rich rewards. Gyldhunters who prefer flanking and ambushing can hunt down targets outside the hot zones, waiting for the perfect moment to snatch critical items. Meanwhile, casual Gyldhunters looking for a safer, more standard match experience can simply take their Soul Cocoons to Richie, the in-match merchant, to cash in on guaranteed earnings without being forced into the chaos. Gyldhunters of all playstyles can find a strategy that suits them. This ensures that matches no longer revolve around a single objective, greatly enriching your mid-to-late-game experience.
Additionally, to smooth out the progression curve for all Gyldhunters alongside the launch of Soul Harvest, we've introduced the new Mistchaser Shop, where Gyldhunters can reliably exchange items for a substantial amount of Moonlight Nectar and Soul Coins. Our goal is to provide a sustainable path for acquiring resources and expand your progression channels, thereby balancing the overall upgrading experience and offering everyone more rewarding content.
While optimizing resource acquisition and balancing the progression pace for all Gyldhunters, we also gathered a massive amount of feedback regarding class balance and gameplay mechanics. Below, we'd like to share the design philosophies and considerations behind these upcoming changes:
The technical limits of our class archetypes have been thoroughly tested by your high-level mechanics and execution. We're incredibly grateful for the deep thought and strategy Gyldhunters have poured into combat. This has helped us lock in a vital goal for our balancing efforts: to ensure that practicing your favorite class feels deeply rewarding and impactful, allowing you to fully enjoy the thrill of tactical outplay. Currently, certain classes and playstyles—such as the Sword and Shield Mercenary's Shield build, Blackarrow, and Sorcerer—possess a very high skill ceiling. Moving forward, we'll implement balance adjustments and design optimizations to bridge the gap between these high skill caps, while ensuring the mastery curve feels smoother and more engaging.
Our balancing approach simultaneously considers the peak execution of veteran Gyldhunters and the progression experience of newcomers. We want to ensure that the skill ceiling for high-level players isn't overly suppressed, while avoiding forcing new players through grueling practice loops just to enjoy these playstyles. We also want to prevent balance changes from making certain builds too niche.
First, let's address the unmatched "hatchet-running" capabilities of the Shadowstrix. In an extraction game, avoiding combat to focus purely on high-speed looting is a viable strategy with its own unique charm. We intend to preserve this evasive playstyle for the Shadowstrix. However, we plan to tweak skill and talent selections in the future to prevent scenarios where a Shadowstrix can dominate map mobility while simultaneously maintaining overly dominant front-line combat strength. Regarding the Shadowstrix's combat identity, their core traits should center on agility, sneak attacks, and cunning. Currently, several talents and skills grant Super Armor, giving the Shadowstrix an overt ability to break enemy standard attacks head-on. This doesn't quite fit the class's tactical identity, and we're highly likely to consider removing these Super Armor capabilities in the future.
Both Sword and Shield Mercenary builds are currently overperforming. In particular, the Red Shield build's follow-up Deflect mechanics leave opponents feeling entirely helpless once Perfect Parry is mastered, completely discouraging offensive plays. We're already looking into adjustments targeting Deflect costs, precision windows, and the risks of missing a parry. Meanwhile, the Burst/Chase capabilities of the Sword build are also exceptionally strong, and we've already implemented moderate adjustments to its skill behavior and overall damage output.
The Hammer Mercenary is currently performing in line with our expectations in both solo and trio modes. In certain scenarios and team compositions, it even leans slightly overtuned, so we may introduce minor tweaks based on upcoming data tracking.
For the Polearm & Shield Withered Knight, the Quick Shield Bash build is currently performing as expected. However, the alternative Enhanced Shield Bash build is underperforming, and we'll likely deploy significant adjustments for it in Season 2. For the Greatsword Withered Knight, we recently buffed its basic attack patterns. This was primarily done to address situations where its animation recovery and high execution costs left it at a disadvantage during close-quarters combat. We've also moderately enhanced the effectiveness of several associated skills and talents.
We're also keeping a close eye on ranged classes. We've already begun implementing moderate nerfs to their burst damage output. Recently, we've been evaluating the mobility performance of ranged classes and tracking how specific map terrain amplifies their effectiveness. In particular, Blackarrow and Sorcerer currently possess exceptional initiation tools and damage output while retaining safe kiting and survival capabilities. We'll continue to leverage data and match observation to bring ranged classes back down to a healthy, balanced state.
Next, let's talk about the seasonal resets, which are a topic we know many of you are deeply curious about. As a game built around the core extraction loop, if we were to fully carry over all assets into every new season, we would be forced to drastically tighten economic drop rates and significantly slow down resource acquisition mid-to-late game just to maintain server-wide economic stability. That is simply not the type of experience we want to deliver to you. Instead, we want players to enjoy a fresh start each season, experience the thrill of fast-paced progression, and enjoy relatively high-impact drop rates. At the same time, balancing the playing field between returning veterans and fresh newcomers in a new season is a vital design consideration for us. Therefore, drawing from the seasonal operational data of successful titles in this genre, we locked in a partial seasonal reset framework early in our development phase:
What Gets Reset: At the start of a new season, character levels, warehouse supplies, and select camp buildings will be reset.
Seasonal Compensation: We'll adequately return a portion of your seasonal assets as compensation. These can be used to freely exchange for critical resources (such as Pip's Rare Pouch, Unbound Holy Collectibles, Holy Soulcatch Nets, Exclusive Cosmetics, and various tiers of Combat Bags). This ensures that players who accumulated vast wealth in the previous season maintain a reasonable head start.
What Carries Over: Long-term progression systems (such as the Collection Pedestal) will not be reset. The supplies you worked so hard to collect will not completely vanish into thin air.
Bonus Rewards: Based on your net asset worth from the previous season, exclusive honorary rewards will be distributed at the start of the new season.
This core framework will not be altered in the short term. However, the exact compensation items, trade-in ratios, and the specific reset categories will be continuously iterated and optimized using our global live-server data tracking and your direct player feedback. As we approach the tail end of Season 1, we'll publish a comprehensive, detailed breakdown covering the exact seasonal wipe specifications.
Our ultimate goal is to provide all Gyldhunters with an exhilarating progression curve and satisfying drop rates, rather than forcing you to blindly grind through old content all over again. Every rule we design is driven by a single purpose: making the game more fun to play. We welcome any and all feedback you have to help us continue refining our gameplay systems.
Finally, let's talk about the recently launched Season Tasks, which have been the focus of most of your recent feedback. Seeing that it takes a grand total of 152 tasks to unlock all end-game rewards has understandably left many Gyldhunters feeling overwhelmed and burnt out, with some even stepping away from seasonal progression altogether. For this, we want to offer our sincerest apologies.
During the design phase of these Season Tasks, our team wanted to flesh out the world's lore, so we wrapped a large amount of story dialogue directly into the task system. At the same time, we included quite a few non-essential side tasks. When combined, this heavily inflated the total task count. We completely understand that seeing such a massive number upfront creates severe psychological pressure, and this was an oversight on our part.
To clear up how this works, we want to share some actual progression data: Unlocking Pip's Rare Pouch—which you can use for the entirety of this season—only requires completing 50 core tasks. Meanwhile, obtaining the Legendary Nether Ferry skin actually requires completing 93 tasks. To address the current issues, we'll restructure our task design philosophy for future seasons. We'll drastically streamline the total task count, optimize the overall progression pacing, and entirely eliminate mandatory three-player team requirements so that everyone can enjoy a much smoother Season Task experience.
If you encounter tedious task steps, unbalanced difficulty spikes, or any other frustrating designs while playing through the Season Tasks, please don't hesitate to drop a message and let us know in the community hubs. As this is our very first official season, our initial predictions regarding actual player behavior were bound to have some misjudgments. We'll continue compiling suggestions from all Gyldhunters. Following a unified team review, we'll be rolling out targeted balance optimizations in the near future for tasks that feel overly difficult or frustrating to play. Moving forward, we'll remain completely flexible in iterating season-related content based on your ongoing feedback.
That's everything for this Developer Update. Since our launch, every piece of feedback from our Gyldhunters and every data point gathered from your matches have served as the core driving force behind our game optimizations and content polishing. Moving forward, our team will remain fiercely focused on bug fixes, server optimization, class balance, gameplay iterations, and progression experience tuning. We'll carefully listen to the voice of every single Gyldhunter as we continuously improve the world of Weavereach to deliver a higher-quality, smoother, and more thrilling hunting adventure.
Thank you all so much for your ongoing understanding, patience, and passion for the game! To close things out, we have a quick sneak peek for you—the highly anticipated second weapon type for Blackarrow, the Javelin, is currently in full production! Without further ado, here's a first look at the concept art. Stay tuned for more updates on our development progress!