Frozen Canvas Brings Big Changes!

Torchlight Infinite's 8th Season Frozen Canvas (SS6) is releasing on October 24, 2024 at 7 PM PDT and brings some big changes! The new Season means a new mechanic, Selena the Tide Whisperer, exclusive Supports, monetization changes, and a complete rework of progression

Frozen Canvas Overview

Here are a few of the things you can look forward to in the upcoming Frozen Canvas Season!

Seasonal Mechanic: Frozen Canvas

Gather Snowpaper Fragments in the Netherrealm to unfold a mystical painting. Once your painting is complete, step into The Frozen Canvas, where your applied colors become a living landscape. Battle enemies within this world and earn Splendor Eggs of various colors. The higher the paint’s level, the better your rewards. Think of this as building your own custom map then going through, killing enemies, and collecting loot.

Supreme Showdown and Aureate Calamity Ordrak

The Supreme Showdown introduces 20 high difficulty boss challenges with brand new map mechanics. To succeed, master the balance between damage output and survival. Conquer all the challenges to earn a past Legendary Season Pactspirit of your choice, including Heart-Binding Rose, Monument Knight, Shepherd, or Mistville Orphan.

In addition, you can face the daily boss challenge, Ordrak the Aureate Calamity. The more damage you do the better your rewards and the more dangerous the fight gets. You have 3 minutes and 3 revives to claim as many rewards as possible. This resets every day so if you don't like your score you can always farm up a bit of gear and then return tomorrow.

New Hero Trait - Tide Whisperer Selena

"Oh, surging tide, sing with me!"  

Selena is a versatile new hero, shifting between two powerful forms to adapt to any battle:  

• Bard Mode: In this mode, Selena wraps her skills in foam, which bursts upon contact with enemies, automatically triggering the skill. She can also summon tides, increasing damage and allowing her to ignore enemy collisions.  

• Loud Song Mode: In this form, Selena sacrifices movement, attack, and cast speed to gain a significant damage boost, perfect for unleashing devastating offenses.

Introducing New Support Skills

The new Season introduces a range of exclusive support skills designed for the majority of active skills. Hunters can now equip these exclusive support skills in slots 3 and 5 of the skill support slots. These enhancements not only boost skill damage but also alter skill forms, creating unexpected and extraordinary effects that significantly enrich the combat experience.

Exclusive support skills aren't acquired through traditional means or combat experience. Instead, they require the consumption of the rare material Inspiration Essence and leveling up with skills of the same name. Hunters can obtain exclusive support skills and Inspiration Essence through The Frozen Canvas gameplay, enabling the construction of more robust, diverse, and imaginative builds.

Netherrealm Adjustments

The Timemark system has been streamlined by removing Timemarks 8-3 and 8-4, and introducing Profound Timemark 8 and Deep Space. These new levels offer challenging encounters and rich rewards, elevating the endgame experience for Hunters.

In addition, Confusion Cards now apply to all Stages in the sequence rather than just the end. There have also been numerous changes to monster difficulty throughout the Netherrealm. The focus here is to make melee foes more dangerous and remove affixes that cause excessive screen clutter. Keep moving to avoid the new on-death effects and stay out of melee or start stacking those defenses!

Full Crafting Rework

With the Frozen Canvas Season, Legendary Gear crafting has been removed, Prototype crafting has been removed and the process for crafting non-Legendary gear has been significantly revamped. Priceless gear now drops with random base affixes that highly affect the value of the gear. You use Embers to craft similar to the way the system worked early on in the game's history. Each item can have up to 6 affixes, 3 Prefixes, and Pre Suffixes. These can be Basic, Advanced, or Ultimate. With both Advanced and Ultimate affixes being restricted to 2 per item. Most powerful modifiers are now Ultimate affixes, and restricted to Priceless items.

There have been several quality of life features to streamline the crafting process. This includes Holy Fossils, which can upgrade affixes from T1 to T0, non-Legendary gear can be corroded, and the addition of an auto-craft feature!

Simplified Hero Traits

Hero Traits have all been completely redesigned to make them more straightforward and easier to understand. Now, each hero has a base trait and three additional traits that unlock as you level up. This change significantly reduces complexity, allowing you to focus on gameplay and strategy.

There is also a new Hero Memory system. You use Hero Memories to activate Hero Traits and raise their levels. The new Hero Memories provide more consistent power with most of the complex or hero-specific stats being removed.

Path of Progression Overhaul

The all-new Path of Progression plays a vital role in a Hunter's growth, offering detailed and comprehensive goals along with extremely generous rewards that reset every Season. This revamped system ensures a more rewarding and structured journey as you advance through the game, making each step of your progression more impactful and satisfying.

Free Hero Usage

This Season, the Hero Gathering event allows the use of all Heroes for free except for the newest addition Selena which requires the Battle Pass. Now is your chance to dive in and explore the full roster without limitations!

Balance Adjustments

Here are a few important changes coming in the Frozen Canvas Season from the patch notes overview XD posted:

• Legendary gear crafting is no longer a part of Torchlight Infinite, as part of the Season changes many Legendary items got adjustments to their affixes.
• Several Skills are no longer in the game as of the Frozen Canvas Season.

• There are new Sweet Dream and Nightmare Affixes available during Dream Interpretation.
  • Removed Deep Dream Talking.
  • Shallow Dream Talking does not consume readability.
• Dark Surge bosses now appear even if the stage boss hasn't been defeated, and now benefit from Netherrealm talent-related bonuses!
• Clockwork Ballet now offers more strategic choices, has higher base rewards, and summons more waves of monsters but includes fewer monsters per wave, and the reward bonuses for the ratings have been adjusted accordingly.
• Removed the Enchanting feature.

Combat Mechanic Adjustments

• For attack skills, "X% of skill damage gained as Ailment base damage" will no longer include weapon damage in its calculations.
• The additional attack speed bonus for attack mobility skills has been reduced by 20%. This change affects skills such as Leap Attack, Rocket Jump, Centralized Loading, Blink Bow, Swift Shadow Raid, and Spiral Strike.
• Mark Status: We've aligned the description and effect, so it now grants an additional +10% critical strike damage taken by the target, instead of the previous +40%.
• Skill levels have been adjusted for high-level skills: After reaching level 20, each additional level grants an extra 12% damage. Beyond level 30, each level increase provides an additional 10% damage.
• Affixes that offer "additional damage to enemies in the center of the area" now stack multiplicatively, allowing for more strategic damage output.
• Rare monsters in the main story no longer have random affixes.
• Optimized early story difficulty to deal with damage anomalies.
• Elites in the Netherrealm are now immune to control effects.
• The new Calamity Warlord rarely appears in Netherrealm stages but offers increased rewards when killed.
• Aeterna now gains 10 levels per city cleared, the upper limit is 2000 floors and the Psalms have been adjusted.

Hero Trait Winners and Losers

With all the changes, you're probably wondering what to level. We've gone over everything and here are our thoughts so far (keep in mind we won't know 100% for sure until the Season goes live, so consider this to be a well-educated guess).

• Youga Spacetime Illusion and Spacetime Elapse made it through the changes with a lot of their power intact. The clones on Illusion are better than ever, so you can walk through the game while they kill enemies for you using spells like Icy Ring or Ice Lances. Similarly, Spacetime Elapse with Mind Control is a great choice for leveling quickly and efficiently.
• Gemma - Flame of Pleasure got significant buffs. Her hero trait was previously ineffective and overly complicated. Now it's simple and provides tons of damage, giving her tons of power in the early game despite using attack skills.
• Selena, the new hero continually unleashes your skills while moving, similar to an Activation Medium. This is an incredibly potent effect meaning she is likely one of the strongest choices for both leveling and endgame in the new Season.
• Erika lost a lot of power across both hero traits. Many of her bonuses that were previously multiplicative are now additive and Lightning Shadow has been hit particularly hard by the Shock changes. Therefore, we do not advise Season starting on Erika.
• Attack Skills lost their flat damage. This is going to make leveling downright painful on most of the Hero Traits who start with Attacks. If you're planning to play Rehan, Thea - Incarnation of the Gods, Rosa, or Erika be prepared to suffer until you get your endgame build online.

Overall, Heroes and their Traits require more investment to reach their full potential. This means leveling the Traits up via Memories or looking for key stats on gear such as Cooldown Recovery Speed or Double Damage.

Developer Interview

Recently, Maxroll members Tenkiei, Palsteron, and Milkybk_ sat down with XD's community manager Andre to talk about the upcoming Season, player concerns, and the overarching design philosophy.

Stay Tuned for More

With so many changes coming with Frozen Canvas our Maxroll Torchlight Infinite team has been hard at work to deliver guide updates for the new Season, but they're taking a bit longer than usual. If you haven't already, head over to our Discord and select the Torchlight Infinite role in #roles to stay up to date with our content development. Keep up the fight, Hunters!

Written by: Tenkiei

Reviewed by: Milkybk_