Project Ebonhold is a Rogue-Lite and Vampire Survivors inspired take on Wrath of the Lich King. You can find more details about the project on:

• The Website: https://project-ebonhold.com
• The Discord: https://discord.com/invite/MXbH5XEDDy

We’ve spent the last three months reworking and expanding the realm based on community feedback. In this post, we share:

• A short presentation of the project for the people that are not familiar with it
• Status and timeline for current and next progression patch
• Overview of the core changes we have implemented since launch

Short Presentation

The game loop revolves around "runs". Each run starts at level 1. As you level up, you choose powerful abilities called Echoes that define your play style. During a run, you earn Soul Ashes, which are spendable in an account-wide Skill Tree to permanently increase damage, survivability, and mobility. Death ends the run, but your progression carries over.

The features are presented in detailed on a dedicated page on our website: https://www.project-ebonhold.com/features/rogue-lite-wotlk

Patch Progression

Currently, Ulduar is the active content patch. The release of Trial of the Crusader is scheduled for the 20th of May and will focus on:

• Opening access to ToC raid and dungeons
• Opening access to Onyxia raid
• New echoes
• Extensions of the Skill Tree

Core Changes since Launch

Gear and Weapon Affixes

Gear now drops with random affixes drawn randomly from a pool of relevant affixes for the piece at hand. These affixes can be extracted using gold so as to be applicable (also with gold) on the pieces of your choice. Similarly, spell effects existing on weapons can now be extracted and be applied onto other weapons.

With these mechanics, the gear is now relevant and you no longer hunt pieces only for themselves, but also for their affixes. While they drop randomly, once you extracted the affix, you can forever apply it to other pieces, so it's not an endless RNG quest.

In addition to this, the impact of gear on your character's power is now much more important, and needed for the new Hardcore difficulty levels we introduced (see below).

Gear/Weapon Affixes Extraction

Hardcore Difficulty Modes

For those who want to crank up the difficulty like in any roguelite, you can now opt into Hardcore Difficulties I, II, or III, each offering massive rewards.

• Stronger gear affixes
• More gold
• Extra soul ashes
• More high-quality echo luck and extra loot

However, be careful! The game is much more dangerous in Hardcore! It's not recommended to play in Hardcore difficulty on your early time on the server.

Hardcore Difficulty Selection Panel

New Content: Ulduar Patch

Along with the opening of the Ulduar raid, we also:

Extended the Skill Tree: Expanded from 10M to 90M Soul Ashes with many new nodes.

• New Echoes: We have added numerous brand new echoes.
• Echoes Rework: Some echoes have been reworked to create class-specific variants.

More Control and Less RNG over your Echoes Selections

In the early days of the realm, the echoes selections were fully random with very few possible control possible beyond the option to Reroll a selection. To maintain some RNG and impact of luck but still provide more control, in the meantime we implemented:

• Banish: exclude one echo from your future echoes selections
• Freeze: keep an echo in your future selections, until you actually pick it
• Families: each echo is assigned a set of families (e.g. melee DPS, heal, tank, ...). Choosing echoes within a family reinforces the odds of drawing more echoes from the families at hand

Updated Echo Selection Panel

Class Rework

In the early version of the game, the experience was vastly different depending upon the class / spec you chose. For some classes/specs, it was super easy to progress, while it was much more difficult for others. Some classes were truly not performing well compared to others.

While our goal is not to reach perfect balance, we strive to reduce the gap among the classes / specs so that everyone can enjoy a vampire survivors-like experience with the class / spec they like.

Towards this goal and with the help of the community, we made a number of changes to classes / talents. We are not yet done with the changes, we are making incremental improvements on a regular basis.

We also have a number of talent reworks being currently tested on our public test realm, scheduled to be released soon.

Stability & Management Improvements

Early on we had quite some issues related to lag and crashes. Since then, we've been able to identify and resolve the major stability issues on the realm. Crashes are now very rare, and we implemented a soft layering system to guarantee smooth performance even under higher player load.

In addition to this, in the past we had some troubles with some members of the support staff, and we've had challenges to communicate effectively with the community and to make it a warm and welcoming place. In the meantime, we hired some new people in the support team, we hired a community moderator, and we also took several actions to improve communication with the community. Finally, we also improved our development processes and now offer players who want to help the opportunity to test new features and changes along with the team on the PTR. Overall, while we acknowledge that there is still progress to be done in these areas, we are moving in the right direction.

Updated Policies

Due to the difficulties we have experienced with people actively trying to harm the server (bug abuse, exploits, insults, cheating, botting, griefing, ...) we updated our rules and their enforcement.

While we may understand that some people felt it was harsh, we asked our support team to be very strict with these rules. The ultimate goal is to ensure the server remains a welcoming, constructive and fun environment. We would have preferred not to have to do this, but the remaining community now feels refreshing and much more agreeable than is used to be. It's now more focus on respectful and fun gaming than on drama and griefing.

Come Check it Out!

If you are curious about the project and want to learn more about these changes, you can look at the updated features description on the website: https://www.project-ebonhold.com/features/rogue-lite-wotlk

The Ebonhold Team