Lightning Rain has been added to the game. It is the first weapon of the Spell archetype. Spells have long cooldowns and thus aren’t as reliable in terms of DPS, but are otherwise quite powerful and have easier access to powerful status effects.

To unlock it, travel east after upgrading the Twin Blades to at least Level 8 in a prior run.

Lightning Rain applies Shock with every hit. Shock is a soft-stun, enemies hit by shock can neither accelerate nor deal contact damage. Shock duration stacks, so hitting the same enemy with multiple shocks will keep it shocked for longer.

Lightning Rain also has a legendary upgrade that can be used as either screen clear or burst damage against tanks/bosses.

However this update also introduces a “decaying CC resistance” mechanic, every time an enemy is hit by a crowd control effect it’s CC resistance is slightly increased, this resistance is then lost again over the course of a few seconds. This gives me more breathing room for adding crowd control effects to weapons without “breaking the game”.

The Heartseeker Bow received a powerful legendary upgrade that turns all of it’s damage into Frost Damage. Frost damage slows down the enemy proportionally their maximum health, up to 50%. The slow caused by Frost damage is permanent.

Since Frost scales with damage rather than being a duration based effect, it is not affected by CC resistance.

The flames from Dragon Soul now deal a significant amount of burn damage. Burn damage can be seen as a simple Damage over Time effect, but it can also jump over to nearby enemies. At high levels the Dragon Soul shield can incinerate whole waves of enemies at once.

Bleed was already added last patch with the legendary upgrade for the Executioners Axe. However there was a bug that was making it tick much slower than intended, stretching it’s duration from 3s to over 7s.

The balance of that wasn’t bad though, so with that bug fixed the upgrade has been re-balanced at 15% max HP over 5s. (Versus 20% max HP over 7s before, DPS and total damage should be roughly the same because stacking multiple bleeds has diminishing returns and with 7s duration this would happen frequently.)

General

• Fixed a bug that would soft reset a part of the skill tree when one specific Constitution node was picked.
• Rarity now applies to equip too, as it was intended.
• The chance to find Rare upgrades has been increased.
• The chance to find Legendary upgrades has been increased.
• The massive amount of weapon upgrades made upgrading your trinkets rather cumbersome. The third and fourth slot now give equal opportunity to all items regardless of number of upgrades.
• The higher the max level of your equip the less Armory Extension Pressure is now applied. (Armory Extension Pressure = Chance a upgrade gets replaced by new equipment.)
• The Brutal difficulty Demonic Strength modifier has been reverted to 75%, due to how many very strong options the player now has access to.
• Increased Elite Grunt Base Damage from 17 to 19.
• Increased Horned Grunt Base Damage from 7 to 10.
• Increased Shade Base Damage from 7 to 10.
• Increased Runner Base Damage from 8 to 12.
• Player base health increased from 50 to 80.

Weapons

• Heartseeker now uses the same Spread mechanics as the Arbalest and Returning Blades.
• Heartseeker rarity has been changed from Common to Rare.
• Returning Blade +Range upgrade now gives +200px/s speed instead of +100px/s.
• Returning Blade +Damage upgrade now also gives a 5% Increased Damage modifier.
• Golden Disc rarity has been changed from Common to Rare.

Trinkets

• Dragon Soul Shield rarity has been changed from Rare to Epic due to it’s massive increase in power.
• Dragon Soul Shield now gives an additional 5% armor increase per level.
• Eldritch Mass Essence Gain increased from 20% + 20% per level to 40% + 40% per level.
• Eldritch Mass rarity has been changed from Rare to Epic, just because.
• Ember Flask Health per level increased from 10 to 20.

I wanted to extend the skill tree with this update, however ended up running out of time. These will probably added with next weeks minor update.

The most criticized feature of Hell Slayer is the lack of animations. As Hell Slayer is quite a bit more hardcore than other Survivor-likes I don’t think just any standard animations gonna do the game justice. But I have an idea, a concept, which might just work and make this game feel extremely dynamic. This is all a big gamble and I don’t know when I will be finished, could be in a few weeks or in a few months, I don’t know. I write every line of code, every shader, make every game design decision, draw every icon and every new sprite in this game so I end up lacking the time to really practice animation to the needed level.

My philosophy is Gameplay first, if the Gameplay is good everything else can be overlooked. It might not grab quite as much attention as having amazing art with high production value, might not bring in as much sales but it creates a solid foundation, a game that people want to play. A game that will truly be timeless and can still be enjoyed in 10-20 years of time.

With this update the first Spell-type weapon has been added to the game. I plan to add more spells and the respective upgrades in the skill tree in the week 5 update, after which I will focus entirely on making Stage 2 a reality, so stay tuned!

Week 01: Early Access Launch
Week 02: Minor Update
Week 03: Status Effects Week 04: Minor Update
Week 05: Divine Arts
Week 06: Minor Update
Week 07: Minor Update
Week 08: Minor Update
Week 09: Plains of Hell
Week 10: Nightmare Difficulty
???: We will see