The Iron Oath – Fire and Ice Update Detailed

Roughly a month after The Iron Oath launched into early access, we get this Steam announcement outlining the game’s first major content update that should be going live in June. The update will be introducing a new character class, an enchanting system, new in-game events, and more.

Here’s what you should expect:

Hello mercenaries!

It’s been just over a month since our release! Now that we’ve gotten the majority of bugfixes and QoL changes out of the way, we’re currently working on our first major update called Fire and Ice, which will be available in June. We’ll have an exact date for you as we get a little closer, but for now we wanted to share some extra details on what will be included in that update (and some more details beyond that).

New Class: Icebinder

Our 7th class, the Icebinder, is a frost mage that specializes in crowd control. He has a wide range of abilities that allow him to summon ice pillars, freeze enemies, and support his allies.

• Arctic Armor: Apply a Damage Shield on an ally for 2 Rounds which also grants Frost Resistance and Immunity to Freeze.
• Cold Feet: Place an ice trap on a vacant cell. Targets that step on it take damage and are Rooted in place for 1 Round. If the condition is not cleansed, they will become Frozen on their next turn for 2 Rounds.
• Frostburst: Target an ice wall or frozen unit and channel for 5 turns, shattering the ice and damaging all adjacent targets.
• Frozen Tomb: Target self, ally or enemy and Freeze them for 2 Rounds, cleansing negative conditions. Targets are Immune to damage, but the ice can be destroyed.
• Ice Wall: Summon a destructible wall of ice on any cell that partially blocks line of sight. If the cell is occupied, the target is pushed away. Lasts until destroyed.
• Impaling Ice: Target up to 2 cells within range and damage the occupants, Slowing them for 1 Round, and applying Ice Terrain.

We’ll be adding at least three more classes during Early Access that will expand the roster to 10. The ones currently planned are the Balladeer (healer), Executioner (tank), and Mystic (ranged support).

Improvements to the Scourge

The Scourge and the dragon’s arrival currently looks cool, but we want it to have more consequences and a larger impact on the world (and the player). In the Fire and Ice update, the dragon will attack a single city during the Scourge, spawning numerous void breaches in the county (as points of interest on the overworld). With the breaches active, the city will only have a short time before a demonic horde descends upon it – threatening to destroy it completely. Without spoiling too much, you can choose to lend a hand in various ways to potentially influence the outcome, or ignore the matter completely and leave the city to its fate.

In addition to the above, we’ll have new quests and events related to the Scourge, along with new visuals for cities that have been attacked by the dragon.

Enchanting Gear

Repairing gear was originally something we planned to introduce in our Fall Update (with the additions of Named and Legendary gear). But due to popular demand, we moved it up in our timetable. Enchanting is another feature related to that which we’ve decided to move up and include in our Spring Update, in an effort to provide more rewarding loot in dungeons (and progression for your characters).

With the update, you will be able to find magical scrolls within dungeons, which can then be applied to your gear to enchant it with various beneficial effects. Higher tier gear will have more slots for enchantments, allowing you to come up with unique combinations that best suit each of your characters.

Looking Ahead

Our second major update, A Matter of Time, will be primarily focused on dungeons: adding new Time Modifiers and new Incenses that will give you more options when camping to help counteract the negative effects of time. Along with this, we’ll be making improvements to dungeon exploration by adding new event types, and more events in general that will make dungeon crawls more interesting, varied, and rewarding.

Beyond that, we will be adding the final two tiers of the ability upgrade trees (and reworking a few of them in the process). Abilities themselves will be getting a balance pass to raise up some of the weaker and underutilized ones, giving you more viable choices when building your characters.

Suggestions and Feature Requests

If there’s anything you’d like to see in the game, you can suggest it on our FeatureBase page found here: https://theironoath.featurebase.app

We’ll be prioritizing suggestions based on upvotes, so be sure to have a look through the list and vote on a few things you’d like to see!

We’ll likely be pushing one more patch before the Fire and Ice update to fix some smaller issues, but beyond that we’ll be focused on the update itself for the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading, and for your continued support – it means a lot to us! If you haven’t yet, be sure to leave a Steam review, too!

-Curious Panda Games