Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem Update #60

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Written by ValH on September 11th, 2017

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The latest Kickstarter update for the open world hack 'n' slash RPG Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem introduces the 0.5.0.2 Update that adds 7 Signature skills, several new types of spells and items, and revamps the way potions work. The update also rebalances the game's unique items and provides minor tweaks and improvements across the board. Have a look:

Hi everyone!

After being introduced in the last devblog, the first 7 Signature skills are now usable in the game. You can find an extended presentation of this new feature in our devblog: https://wolcengame.com/work-in-progress-signature-skills/

To go along with them, all the PST sections have been reworked and slightly rebalanced, which is why we had to clear your PST progression on existing characters. The update also include more than 30 new passive skills to help you personalize your Signatures and your playstyle.

A new type of spells has been added to the game : Charged spells (or spells with charges) have little stacks on their icons which indicate how many times you can use it without triggering the cooldown. Charges can fill up in many ways, whether it’s a simple timer or when killing enemies, blocking attacks or performing special actions. They also can be used one by one or rather all at a time, depending on the spell, and can increase its power or effects when more charges are used in one launch. The first Charged spells added by this update are Bladeslinger, Ironguard, Hunting Ground and the new Ammunition spells.

Another new spell category added by the update is the Semi-passive spells, or Sigils. When slotted in your bar, they will provide you passive effects that will work until you use the spell, triggering its active function. While the spell is on cooldown or its active effect is resolving, you won’t benefit from its passive bonus, but will gain it again as soon as the cooldown ends. The first two Sigils of the game are Spellbinder and Infiltration, but we’ll add more in the future.

Old Ammunitions spells have been removed, since they needed a lot of rework in order to be fun. We thus added the first version of the new Ammunition spells, the Elemental and Impairing ones, which are cycling skills that are always active when slotted in your bar and makes use of the Charges system. When using them, you switch to the next type of munition (ex: Fire, Frost and Lightning for Elemental), and all your shots are affected by the active one as long as you still have charges. Those two spells are Signature spells and already have a few variants in the PST, unlocked in the Hunter and the Trickster sections.

Skills using charges also gave us the opportunity to experiment with items that interact with skills. New unique items can now add modifiers to skills, allowing for even more customization beyond the possibilities of the Active Skills Tree. This is the very first iteration of this system, and new unique items will be added on a regular basis.

Finally, potions now provide permanent bonuses when equipped, depending on the potion type.

You can find the complete changelog for the update on the game's official website. A snippet:

GENERAL:

• The game’s lighting has been slightly reworked to deliver a better readability of the player and the enemies in the different environments.

VISUALS:

• Handforged Dagger magic effects are now correctly placed on the blade.
• Missing material in old civilization architecture
• Fixed rare occurrence of overlapping armors

UI:

• The way temporary effects icons are displayed above the ROS has been reworked and improved, and keep positive and negative effects separated while allowing to stack a higher number of different icons. The tooltips of those icons can now bear colors (green / red) to quickly tell positive and negative effects apart inside the same global effect.
• Improved multi-resolution/multi-aspect ratio support for item info UI solving multiple positioning issues
• Enlarged item & skill info UI
• On ground items text will now appear when hovering the item, removing the need to press alt
• Fixed flash rendering issue
• Optimized skills icons (size divided by 4)

QUESTS:

• Fixed a bug where you could exit right after killing the first Corrupted Heart and respawn with it being still there.
• Fixed a bug preventing you from achieving certains quests goals involving Nodes destruction depending on the weapons you were using.
• Fixed a few occurrences where Seren could run and roam around on loading.

NETWORK:

• Optimization of the network messages resulting in a 80% bandwidth usage reduction (in average) when sending messages to our cloud servers.

ENVIRONMENT:

• Various improvements in the Open world
• Overhaul of Dhur surroundings
• New rooms for house caves
• Most chests and containers now have a chance to appear when you load the world, they won’t necessarily be at the same spot every time (except for a few fixed chests).
• A new type of chest has been added : unique chests. You will recognize them from their red glowing effect, and they will likely contain Unique or Rare items, even Legendaries if you’re lucky enough, and will have a small chance to appear in unexpected places – thus rewarding the most attentive explorators.
• Interaction radius with the PST is now 50m instead of 25m.
• Fixed a bug where the player could walk on an invisible bridge leading to the Ravengarde Fortress.
• Fixed some Bounty generation issues.
• Improve randomness in deep level of Bounty.

CHARACTERS:

• New optimized models for all the orcs!

GAMEPLAY:

• A new value is now shown in the Character Sheet : the Presence level. Presence is assimilated to your current visibility level to enemies : at 100%, enemies target you in a regular way. Below, they start making more time to see you and lose targeting more quickly, whereas above 100% they are much quicker at spotting you. At 0% presence, you are invisible to them. This will allow us to create interesting interactions in the future and will be a complementary system to aggressivity. The only enemy that doesn’t handle Presence level for now is the Ghoul since it uses a different AI system, but we’ll fix this in the future. For now, let’s just say the Ghoul has very sensitive senses!
• Modified the scope of many of the game’s values. To sum up, player health, armor and enemy damage has been halved, while player damage (from spells and weapons) and enemy health has been doubled.
• All passive skills working on the Movement status of your character will now work as intended and be more forgiving, to be used easily.
• Increased default Stamina regeneration time from 3 to 4 seconds.
• Fixed a bug causing the player to get Cursed instead of inflicting Curse to enemies.
• Maximum Status ailments stacks number you can inflict or receive is now 15 per ailment instead of 10.

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