The melee reforged content update (version 0.9.12) markes another big and important step towards the upcoming 1.0 release of Striving for Light as this update brings major improvements to melee combat along some exciting new content.

New Features

New Cyclic Might Skill Redesign

Instead of attacking you turn into a whirlwind of blade. Dealing melee damage to an area around you. Increased attack speed increases damage tick rate. Damage area triggers on hit effects like your normal melee attacks.

The cyclic might melee attack replacer skill has been completely reworked. Cyclic might now creates a whirlwind area around you that frequently triggers all melee on attack and on hit effects. Attackspeed allows to increase the damage and ability tick rate. AoE size allows scaling the whirlwind effect size.

Colossal Strike - Charged Melee Attack Replacer

You can charge your melee attacks up to 3 seconds to unleash big AoE strike that triggers all your melee on attack and on hit effects. Charge duration increases melee damage up to 5 times and shatters additional boss shields for each charge.

Colossal strike is the very first charge based melee attack replacer skill that allows to dynamically decide on low charge time and quick attacks or longer charge times with huge AoE reach and massive damage. Colossal strike also allows to shatter additional boss shields based on your attack charges.

New Melee Weapon - Sanguine Blade

Each melee attack has a chance to create a sanguine circle. Defeating an enemy inside the circle will leech one life.

New Range Weapon - Sanguine Scepter

Projectiles apply 1 bleeding condition on enemy hit when you are below 70% life, 2 bleeding conditions below 50% life, and 3 bleeding conditions below 20% life.

New Legendary Weapon Abilities

• Cyclone Hammer Legendary Weapon Ability: Chance to create a cyclone hammer that triggers melee on hit and on attack effects.
• Sanguine Leech Legendary Melee Weapon Ability: Chance to create a sanguine circle that leeches 1 life if defeating an enemy within the circle.

Rebalanced Rifts

Rifts have been rebalanced. Elite enemies and bosses in rifts now do not gain elite map modifier abilities. The enemy HP scaling in rifts have been increased to make rifts challenging earlier. The rift time limit has been decreased to 8 minutes as no one seemed to ever get close to the previous 10 minute mark. Successfuly defeating a rift boss will now grant a random rift key that will speed up collecting keys for the next rift run. A bit more enemies now have to be defeated to complete a rift. Since these are bigger balancing changes the rift leaderboard got resetted.

Major Changes and Improvements:

• Added trails to hammerstorm and cyclone hammer skills.
• Constructs are now as well affected by player effect transparency setting
  
• New skilltree respec algorithm that allows respecing the most complex tree shapes and edge cases
• Performance improvements for condition damage.
• Added additional hints to endurance and energy skill nodes to communicate that each resource is mainly for melee/ range attacks.

Balancing

• Noctelle attack patterns rebalanced for melee combat
• Enemy attack patterns rebalancing for improving melee combat
• All condition types now have faster tick rates: burning 0.7s (was 1s), bleeding 1.2s (was 2s), poison 1.5s (was 3s). The condition damage decay is remaining on 50% per condition tick as calculation inconsitencies have been fixed, that have lead to higher condition damage calculation that intended.
• Hammerstorm - Goladir Specialisation Skill: Hammers now circle around you for 2 rotations and 6s in total (was 3s before, as there was a bug with the recent patch)
• Cyclone Hammers - Amberforge Weapon Ability: Hammers now circle around you for 2 rotations and 6s in total (was 3s before, as there was a bug with the recent patch)
• Darokin weapon size has been increased to grant Darokin bigger melee range to allign Darokin with other player characters.

Bugfixes

• Fixed ascended weapon effects not being displayed in the build viewer on the leaderboards.
• Fixed unlockable base skills that are already unlocked.
• Fixed condition damage calculation inconsistencies that lead to higher condition damage than intended.
• Fixed wrong condition damage tooltips.
• Fixed missing weapon unlock achievement images.
• Fixed skills not being able to be refunded on very complex tree shapes and edge cases.

Thank you, everyone, for your immense support. Without you, the game would not be what it is today.

If you have not yet shared your feedback, please consider throwing your feedback at us. This is immensly helpful in preparing Striving for Light for the upcoming 1.0 release.

We truly appreciate each and every one of you!