Hello Adventurers!

Here is a small summary of the past week's progress. Weve taken slightly longer than anticipated, but wed still like to start the beta for that patch within July. The release of the update is to be expected in August. The beta will not start with the full content, but with everything thats been finished at that time. So what were the biggest changes weve been working on in the past weeks? Note: Details in screenshots and information might change, everything is WIP

Frozen Depths

The Frozen Depths are the 4th stage that will be available. Following the previous stages, this stage will become harder and more complex. As the name suggests, the stage is going to be freezing cold, as will be the included new mechanics and enemies.
We had to make monster AI a bit smarter in order for it to navigate through a cave-like system. The cave structure will not only limit your movement, it will also enable you to plan ahead on how and where to engage enemies. Its our first approach to more complex level layouts. To not make things more interesting, we are also going to add a few new behaviours and patterns to enemies!
Besides some new cold hearted enemies, well also introduce the ice element with new abilities and characters. But those are not ready for the beta test, yet. Just this much: Ice will not slow down enemies :)

Agony

Agony is the first step of many to add new challenges and difficulties to the game. We had to rework some systems internally to make the monsters and spawning more flexible. This limited the amount of work we could get done on this front. For now Agony will be a simple toggle in the Register of Halls that can be enabled if you have defeated the Lord of the Hall.
With raising agony, champion enemies with some additional mobs will appear. The champions are randomized encounters that appear more frequent and grow stronger the better you play. Champions have special modifiers, making them shoot fireballs or use abilities, sometimes being simply stronger or faster. Those champions will reward you with additional drops of items, abilities and gold. But champions are not the only new challenge. All enemies will grow more resilient and in numbers with a higher agony rating. To raise the agony, one simply needs to slay many monsters as quickly as possible!

Balancing

Player characters are undergoing some changes right now. Especially early characters will be refitted with new traits so they follow the trait patterns of later characters. They will receive more general usage traits that dont focus on the main attack only. In the future, every character and ability will have a crit bonus value above 0, which means that they can all crit and critical hits can be more universally used. Also in the works are boni on level ups depending on the player character, like for example 5 max health per level, or a heal effect on each level up. In the future we want to expand on this, so it can go beyond simple passive stat boosts.
Furthermore, hit effects will get a couple of changes. Debuff effects will be toned down from 10% to 5% while all elemental effects will be capped to stacks of 20. Burn was already limited, but Electrify will now be limited as well. In exchange for this, when applying another elemental effect stack, the stack will deal direct damage and reset all timers which allows for better damage upscaling. The last thing regarding elemental damage is that buffs that were increasing elemental damage will now affect the damage effects instead of the direct damage. For example, Fire Blessing will from now on increase the strength of the burn effect instead of the direct fire damage dealt.
The bonus XP from completed quests is being rebalanced as well. The XP boost was rather strong and we will be adding more and more quests, so over time well have to reduce the bonus you gain from quests. With this update we are doing the first step with a reduction to 0.33% per quest.

Other Changes

There are many other changes, smaller and bigger ones, that will have an impact on how the game plays. Force will be introduced as a new stat value, replacing pierce and duration, combining them into a single stat. Force will also be used to increase knockback from melee attacks and to mitigate damage reduction of projectiles when piercing enemies. It may also apply to some more exotic stats in the future, but those will be denoted in respective descriptions. Duration buffs will all be changed to force buffs, the trait Piercing Wind has been changed to add a base crit bonus to all characters and abilities. Wordings for effects are going to be unified. When releasing into early access, we had no unified system for how to describe how values affect character stats and it wasnt always clear whether modifiers were multiplicative or additive. In the future additive bonuses will always include the keyword base and be non-% values, while all %-values will be added up and used as a multiplier on the base values. There are 2 new potions coming up: one to reroll items and one to reroll abilities. Those are still WIP in terms of unlocking, but they are functional in the game. The Lords of Ember Grounds and the Viaduct will be changed to have less health and scale in difficulty as time passes, just as the Lord of Pain in the first level. The additional projectiles and indestructible guards will no longer be valid targets for abilities and auto-aim. Weve upgraded the Godot Engine to version 4.1. This includes many potential fixes for various engine level issues. It will not fix everything and we are expecting more work to be done. But the engine upgrade will also enable us to further optimize the game in the future. A big Thank You to all the Godot Collaborators developing and maintaining the engine! Please note that all the above is work in progress and we continue to add more content. Its just a short overview of what weve done during the past few weeks. Once we can ensure a stable beta, were going to make it available for everyone who wants to give us feedback while the work on the next proper update continues. Have a nice week! Chasing Carrots