Good Day Adventurer!

It has been a long journey, but weve finally arrived at our destination. The path to the last hall will be revealed and its demons, monsters, and the magic will break loose. Never-ending torrents of fiends will overwhelm even the most cunning adventurers and new challenges will make even the bravest champion shiver. Are you ready to take on the quest for unreachable treasures, endless power, and the most rare artifacts out there? Welcome to Halls of Torment 1.0! The past 17 months have been quite an adventure for us. Weve tried out many things that will vanish from the books of history forever, but probably not from the guide section. But now were here, thanks to you all. Weve extended the originally planned 6 month Early Access and now we are (almost) satisfied with what came out of it. We dont know exactly how to proceed next with the Halls, but we know that we want to keep new and smaller updates coming and maybe even add some additional features. Well keep our communication channels open and we want to continue adjusting and improving the game based on your feedback. To add transparency to our communication we decided to have an open version of our management tool available for everyone to take a look into. It's been cleaned and reports and feedback after 1.0 launch will be added there: https://open.codecks.io/hot Reports can be given as usual through the Steam Forums and our Discord server.

Changelog 1.0

THE VAULT

• The Vault is the final stage of Halls of Torment and can be unlocked by purchasing 30 items from the Wellkeeper.
• To enter the vault youll need to spend some coins. The price is (mostly) up to you.
• The more you pay the more modifiers are added to the Vault. They may be positive, negative, or ambiguous.
• Every 4th modifier adds a Torment Shard to the final drop.
• The Vault lord does not spawn automatically after 30 minutes but requires you to activate him.
• A Vault run lasts for as long as the lord is alive.
• After the 30 minute mark the monsters' strength continuously rises.
• Beating the Vault unlocks the post game. This currently includes making uncommon items recoverable and being able to find additional artifacts.
• The Vault has a medium sized quest board to complete.

THE SHRINE OF TORMENT

• Unlocks by defeating the first boss in the Chambers of Dissonance.
• Agony mode will be moved to the Shrine of Torment entirely.
• Defeating lords in Agony now grants Artifact drops.
• Artifacts can be used to customize the game mode, but they also increase stats of monsters.
• There are a total of 30 artifacts (for now) of which you can use as many as you want.
• Using more artifacts improves drop chances, rarity of loot, and amount of champions.
• Additional artifacts unlock when you defeat the Lord in the Vault.
• If someone manages to defeat the Shrine with all artifacts well simply keep adding.
• An artifact quest board has been added to test the mastery of each and single one of them.
• Additional quests that require the usage of artifacts have been added across all boards.

THE SCRIPTOR

• He must be rescued from the Frozen Depths. (bring some fire )
• The Scriptor kindly informs you about all recoverable items available in Halls of Torment.
• Also, you may have already collected some Torment Shards.
• The Scriptor can permanently improve characters with shards. (fully refundable!)
• In the future the Scriptor may hold additional information.
• The scriptor has something to say about the other NPCs in the camp (and vice versa).

CHARACTERS

• Trait V quests can now be unlocked!
• Each character has 5 rank V traits available. 2 Weapon Proficiencies, 2 Stances and 1 Dedication
• The Weapon Proficiency is exclusive to each character.
• Stances are trade-offs for major play styles of each character. (Available via Marks)
• Dedications are improvements of the play styles of each character. (Available via Marks)
• Only one of the V-Rank traits can be taken from each character per run. (unless you do some potion witchery )
• Traits are available at level 60 when the previous traits have been taken.
• Each type Weapon Proficiency/Stance/Dedication for each character has an unlock quest.
• Sage has seen some changes regarding his balancing.
• Minor character balancing for all other characters, but no more drastic changes.

ITEMS

• All items now have 2 uncommon versions.
• Items can now be recovered in the post game. (Beat the Vault!)
• When using enough Artifacts, items of a new rarity can be found that are further improved variants.
• Its now more likely to find new items from Boss Chests.
• Champions will now drop buckets without you having to send any item through the well first.
• Up to two additional buckets can be found per run.
• The well will teleport close to the player after defeating the lord of a stage.
• There have been no new items added in this patch, but new ones will arrive in the future!
• Some items saw changes in functionality, fixes, and improvements.
• Jade Amulet now converts collected gold to XP.
• Collar of Confidence is no longer capped but has diminishing returns.
• Duelists Spark now increases damage for the number of defeated champions, bosses, and elites. This count does not reset between runs.
• Gatherers Amulet variants can refill potions during a run.
• Berserker Boots are now uncapped and have diminishing returns.
• Elven Boots are now uncapped and have diminishing returns.
• Hunters Garb is now uncapped and has diminishing returns.
• Blood Soaked Shirt is now uncapped and has diminishing returns.

QUESTS

• Weve added so many quests, we reached a total count of 500!
• There are a lot of new additional milestone quests. They are now spanning two boards.
• Existing saves will see that new levels of existing quest types will be automatically set to the level of the previous quest.
• Almost all quests are now trackable with the quest tracker instead of just showing 0/1 completed.
• Quests that are time based may scale with run time shortening artifacts.
• Certain quests have reduced requirements, specialist quests in particular.
• The Main Quests suggestions have been expanded to cover the whole game until beating the game.
• Additional information about quest tracking has been added to the game.
• All currently available quest boards have been filled up, and they all have been added as achievements.
• There might be more quests in the future, but quests after 1.0 will not be added as Steam achievements.
• Unfortunately not all final quest icons will be available, they will be added in the near future.

STAGES

• Weve added distance information to collectables on the screen edge markers.
• All stages got one or more additional ability drops, either by champions or placed directly in the stage.
• Additional drops must be unlocked via quests.
• On some maps the well has been visually adjusted.
• All stages got unique traps and enemies activated by new major Artifacts.
• For the base stages we expanded the amount of different champions and also added new abilities to them.
• Champion drops have been adjusted to improve when playing with artifacts.
• Changed how champions scale. It should happen less often now that they have dramatic damage spikes.

ABILITIES

• New unlocks for stages to enable a fixed drop of 11 abilities scrolls/tomes for each stage.
• All abilities have gotten an adjustment regarding Crit Chances, Crit Damage, Base Damage and traits that affect those values to line up more with base traits.
• Blessings focus now on relative increase rather than absolute ones.
• Spectral Fists adaptation traits have been altered to be better understandable, converting Attack Speed and Multistrike to Damage bonus.
• Increased the normal attack damage of Spirit Warriors, but changed that the projectile upgrades scale less drastically.
• Arcane Rift explosions can now actually apply damage effects.
• Reduced effect apply chance of Elemental Rifts when enemies are standing on them.
• Changed Arcane Rift spawning to be more regular.
• Kugelblitz now spawns more regularly and scales more evenly.
• Kugelblitz speed now scales with Movement Speed instead of Range.
• Meteor Strike now hits more regularly but with less foreseeable pattern. Increasing Base Area instead.
• Fixed an issue on Meteor Strike were triggers would be skipped when certain attack speeds were reached.
• Golem Upgrades no longer affect Roll duration or Roll Cooldowns
• Golem has a higher base Speed and more lax movement restriction to attack more often.
• Golem (and all other Summons) now scale their movement speed with the player!
• Golems Base Roll Cooldown and Duration have been increased, reducing the time wasted on transition states.
• If the Golem has a lower cooldown than Roll Duration, the Golem will no longer stop rolling.
• Golem Traits have been adjusted to reflect base balance change. It is also possible to get the Golem to no longer roll.
• Dragons Breath has now a higher Base Damage, also reflecting this in its traits.
• Fixed an issue where the flame turned invisible and kept moving.
• Base Attack Speed of Ring Blades has been doubled. In turn they have a 20% lower duration.
• Cyclone upgrade has been changed into a pattern to cover more area closer to the player.
• Frost Avalanche will not travel for as long as before and will also visually disappear gradually.
• Lightning Strikes now deal significantly more damage and have bigger areas and the base spawn is higher.
• Lightning Strikes scaling has been reduced a bit, but some negative modifiers have been removed from traits.
• Astronomers Orbs have been increased to 5, but deal less damage each.
• Astronomers Orbs had almost all traits rebalanced to reflect the base balance change.
• Many traits are losing some or all negative modifiers.
• Arcane Splinter now spawn more bullets that have a significantly higher base damage.
• Arcane Splinters have a lower duration.

QOL

• Abilities have now markers to let you know if they can be upgraded.
• When leveling up, its now more likely to get traits that are related to traits youve memorized via Potion of Memories.
• Endscreen now shows the active artifacts in a run.
• The quest menu now features a row of pips that indicate where you are currently in the quest board navigation.
• You can now view character and ability stats from the ability/trait selection.
• 16:10 and Widescreen support. When in widescreen mode: We are aware that you will see monsters popping in the middle of the screen. We do not change the gameplay/balancing to accommodate various screen ratios.

OTHER

• Halls of Torment is now running on Godot 4.3 including all available bug fixes! (Huge thanks to all the Godot contributors and maintainers!)
• Tons of stability and performance improvements, the game should run much smoother now. It will still tend to lag in late games or when too many things happen at once, but we are on it to push the limits.
• Game statistic tracking in the game profile starting from 1.0, to have the possibility to add statistics views in the future.
• Some abilities have been touched to bring them more in line with others, especially some traits related to them.
• Five new blessings have been added, three of them related to critical strikes.

For this update, we wont be able to provide a full extensive change log, since most changes happened before we started full documentation. Well provide detailed change logs for future updates. Also, early testing will happen in the future again. Want to help us? Please spread the news! Youre an awesome community! So as always:

Stay Fresh - Chasing Carrots