Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem Update #88 – Beta Revamps and New Roadmap

The latest Kickstarter update for Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem brings us a new roadmap that can be used to follow the game’s development throughout the beta phase. On top of that, the update discusses some recent changes to how this hack ‘n’ slash action-RPG handles its potions, defenses, and attributes. Here are a few sample paragraphs:

New roadmap

We’ve made another roadmap that will be used for the Beta and for the game progression. Our teams are going back to working on two versions and we need a centralized way to communicate our progression on this, whether it’s on future Beta patches, or on the global game progression.

This new roadmap will offer both options. All sections will be about patches except for one, dedicated to weekly meetings of progression. In this section I will share the latest information I have about the current progression of the team.

[…]

Potions revamp

Along with the other revamp plans for the Beta/final game, we have come with another system for potions to fit with our difficulty objective and the choice requirements we want in Wolcen’s gameplay.

We wish to avoid the “piano effect” due to the absence of common cooldown between potions of the same type, and mostly we want players to make choices for their potions instead of being able to have everything they need in 5 slots.

Finally, it will also be more easy for game control management to have fewer potion slots.

Therefore, potion slots will be reduced from 5 to 2 and will work with charges.

Using a potion consumes charges, and you will be able to refill them by killing foes. Each enemy type will grant you a certain amount of charges based on the creature difficulty.

Potions won’t have any cooldown anymore. There will be three types of potions: Health, Willpower, and Rage.

Potions will also have levels of rarity that will improve their efficiency, duration, or the number of charges, and eventually grant other bonuses.

[…]

Attributes revamp

We want attributes to be useful for more builds and avoid a “one attribute per play style” system. We want to reinforce the class-free direction, and give players a real possibility to choose, while still offering the possibility to build straight-forward archetypes.

In this attribute revamp, we remove the gauge mentioning the attribute efficiency (“weak” “average” “excellent” etc.). This tends to be frustrating for players and remove the call for choices.

There are still 4 attributes in Wolcen: Ferocity, Agility, Wisdom, and Toughness. But with the Beta transition, each will have interesting bonuses for different kinds of builds.

Here is the list of attributes and their respective 2 bonuses:
Ferocity: Critical chances & Health Points regeneration
Agility: Global speed & Dodge
Wisdom: Ailment chances & Ailment Resistance
Toughness: Health Points & All resistance

Your three higher attributes (no matter what they are) will also grant you damage bonuses for all types of damage distributed this way (values still subject to change):
Main: 0.25%/point
Second: 0.10%/point
Third: 0.05%/point

This will allow Toughness to be a valuable attribute as well.

Finally, we will revamp the Character Sheet to improve readability for everyone, especially for theorycrafting use.