Hello everyone!
This update is mostly about weapons, and it's the first piece of the hero-class work to reach the base game.
⚡ WEAPONS NOW HAVE ELEMENTS
Two new damage types have been added: Lightning and Shadow. They join Fire, Frost, and Holy, each with their own on-hit lines in both languages.
More importantly, affixes that promise an element now actually deliver one. A Glacial weapon deals Frost damage. Storm-forged deals Lightning. of the Void deals Shadow.
Ten affixes were naming an element while actually granting something unrelated. That's now fixed.
There was also a long-standing bug with of the Saint: it always granted a flat 2 Holy damage regardless of your level. It now scales properly like every other elemental damage source.
⚖️ ONE ELEMENT PER WEAPON
Dropped weapons now carry a single element instead of up to three.
If a weapon rolls more than one, the elemental damage is combined into the surviving element. The weapon isn't weaker—it simply has one clear elemental identity instead of several smaller ones.
Its name changes to match. If a weapon rolls both Glacial and Fiery, but Fire is the element that survives, the finished weapon is simply Fiery.
The word leaves because the element left.
Slayer-token forged weapons are the deliberate exception. They can still carry multiple elements. Tokens are slow to earn, and that reward should stay meaningful.
🔧 SOME HONEST BALANCE NOTES
Fewer weapons will carry an element than before. Elements now come only from affixes that actually name one, so what a weapon's name says is now the whole truth about the elemental damage it deals.
Ten affixes traded an existing stat for their element. Glacial gave up mana, of the Phoenix gave up spell power, and so on.
Whether that's better depends on your build. A fighter may prefer the elemental damage. A caster who wanted the mana or spell power may not.
There's also one small distribution change: when two elements are equally strong, which one survives is now random. Previously, ties always favored Fire, which meant Fire appeared roughly twice as often as elements represented by the same number of affixes.
🌀 PORTALS INSIDE PORTALS
Clearing an elite chaos portal could sometimes spawn another portal inside it. Entering that nested portal left you with no normal way back out.
Portals can no longer spawn inside portals.
Thank you to the player who reported this—it was a genuinely obscure case, and anyone who encountered it could end up stranded.
If you're currently stuck inside a nested portal, recall still works. Closing and reopening the game will also return you to Oakhaven.
🔍 SKILL DESCRIPTIONS
28 class skills now say which element they deal.
There is no mechanical change here—your skills work exactly as they did before. The game simply knows what they always were.
🔭 WHAT'S NEXT FOR ELEMENTS
Right now, elements are mostly flavour with a number attached. A Fire weapon deals Fire damage, and that's largely the end of the interaction.
The next step is elemental reactions.
Elements will begin interacting with each other. Hitting a chilled enemy with a physical attack, or striking a burning enemy with Lightning, will do something more than simply applying the two effects separately.
Six reactions are designed so far. One of the most important needs no spells at all: a Frost weapon can leave a chill behind, and a physical hit can shatter it.
That means a Warrior with the right sword can participate in the elemental system without casting a single spell.
Some of the planned reactions depend on combat features that don't exist yet. A couple only really make sense once you can regularly face several enemies at once, which the game currently supports only in specific encounters.
Reactions will also announce themselves when they happen. If something interesting occurs, you'll see a line telling you what happened and why.
A reaction you can't notice isn't much of a mechanic—it's just a hidden number.
After that, enemies will begin gaining elements of their own: first in what they deal, and eventually in what they resist.
The goal there is texture, not a chart you have to memorize. An enemy might shrug off some Fire damage; it shouldn't become an enemy you simply cannot beat because you didn't bring Frost.
This is groundwork you can use now, and the first visible piece of a much larger system.
— TheHand