Hello Survivors! :cozyroe:

Feel the Embrace of Chaos as our 13th major update lands with a new character! Not only that but it also comes with new Artifact Powers and huge performance improvements!

New Character - The Demon Hunter

• The Demon Hunter has arrived, a master of ranged combat and chaos itself. Armed with dual crossbows, they bring a new level of lethality to the Void Hunters. Their swift, critical strikes are as unpredictable as they are devastating, making them the ultimate predator of the void. You can now craft his new weapons and use the new unique skills, runes and of course try his powerful new Ascension!

New Artifact Powers

• You can now unlock the Artifact Powers for the Demon Hunter, Hound Master and Spellblade by upgrading their weapons to the Artifact rarity!

Major Performance reworks

While last update saw a few localized performance improvements, this time around we have a few major system refactors that were in the works for a long time making their way into the game. These should considerably improve the FPS of the game in most scenarios, especially very late game such as high Endless and Overlord. Heres a quick summary of those changes:

• Negative effects almost entirely refactored to use every last bit of performance possible. Should make a big difference for builds that rely heavily on them;
• New collision detection system for almost every skill in the game. Should provide major improvements in very hectic scenarios. Will have close to no affect for projectile heavy skills, like Storm of Arrows, but all others should be considerably faster;
• Considerably reduced the disc size of the game for faster download;
• Considerably reduced amount of memory used by the game, which not only should make it overall faster but more stable especially in late game scenarios;

General changes and fixes:

• Changed how Brittle is calculated under the hood. It no longer benefits from your stats and skill modifiers twice, being now more in line with all other damage increasing negative effects in the game;
• New intro animation for the existing hidden bosses;
• Fixed an issue that cased the negative effect Wound to not work (currently applied only by one of the Hound Masters dogs);
• Fixed Spinning Staff tooltip which was scaling incorrectly;
• Player target areas (blue circles) no longer show in Endless and Overlord cycles, to reduce the visual clutter;
• Added a counter of the number of summoned units to the Artifact Power interface;
• Fixed an issue where in a very specific scenario the Endless/Overlord completion percentage would not be saved properly in your player profile;
• Fixed a pathfinding issue for enemies in the Dungeon of Despair;
• Fixed an issue where Lord of the Void statues could be lying down;
• Fixed an issue where if your health went negative in the Unholy Cathedral with unique power ups, the display could bug and end up showing a very high number instead;
• Fixed an issue where the Assassin mission text was not being localized;
• Fixed an issue in the Unholy Cathedral where buffs from the previous cycle would not be reset when starting a new cycle;
• Fixed an issue where Chaos Golems would not be able to move in the second stage of the Unholy Cathedral;
• Fixed an issue where skills that had sub projectiles like Surprise Gift or Noxious Shot would count as more than 1 source of their respective negative effects;
• Fixed an issue were in very specific scenarios skills like Icy Veins would not work at all, leading to strange errors;
• Multiple small fixes and improvements in the UI;

We hope you will enjoy this update as we are already working hard on new content for the next one! Performance has been a big focus for us but there is still a bunch of stuff coming! We will update our roadmap shortly after this update, where we will discuss in more detail what is coming, what plans changed and the path forward, so if you would like to check it out keep an eye out for our announcements here!

Community Event: Big Damage

To celebrate the new update we will also be running an old favourite in our Discord community, the Big Damage event! Come up with the build that deals the most damage possible in 10 minutes, send your results and win gift cards and game keys! If you want to learn more head over to our Discord! Finally, if you would like to receive updates like this one via email, we would also like to invite you to our new mailing list! We are still to send our first email, but that will be a great way to get news about the game and overall studio if you are interested in what we might have store in the future! As always we wanted to thank you all very much for your support! Have a great day!
~Soulstone Team