Torchlight Infinite Season 4 The City of Aeterna is set to release on September 7th, 5 PM PDT (12 AM UTC)!
XD's own Sean and Ian hosted and revealed Torchlight's very near future to the world in a livestream. In this event, we learned about the new Seasonal Mechanic, the new Soul Candle system, a new Hero and a new alternative Trait, a new Endgame Boss, long awaited Crafting changes, and much more.
XD is hosting a Developer Q&A with Maxroll's own Tenkiei, Milkybk_, Palsteron, and Crouching_Tuna in the coming days. If you've got questions to ask the developers, you can submit them to these creators.
Watch the Reveal
Season 4 Information
Seasonal Mechanic: The City of Aeterna
In Season 4, maps will contain the Monument of Aeterna, letting players enter the Ruins of Aeterna map. Complete challenges and slay monsters within to earn rewards and Marks of the Ruins.
Marks of the Ruins are randomized Tiles used to assemble a complete City of Aeterna map, try to cover as many Reward locations as possible with Tiles to get the most out of this puzzle based mechanic.
Complete challenges within the rebuilt City of Aeterna to earn rewards while empowering the Final boss, who further gains power from each Reward location covered by a placed Tile.
Psalms of Aeterna
Collect Pages of Aeterna from within the City to create Psalms of Aeterna, allowing you to customize your monster-slaying experience and potential rewards of the newest Seasonal Mechanic.
This Talent-Tree-Like System allows players to unlock more of the City's map while granting potent buffs and increased rewards.
Players can eventually unlock the Infinite City of Aeterna through Psalms of Aeterna, an alternative mode of endlessly increasing difficulty and rewards that has no limit.
This system is similar to the Cube of Rapacity's Avarice Code, which has had its progression reset for Season 4.
New Endgame Boss: The Lone King of Aeterna
Torchlight Infinite's 4th Season also introduces its 4th Seasonal Endgame boss, The Lone King of Aeterna.
The City of Aeterna may reward you with a new item called a Queen's Wick, these are used to challenge the Seasonal Endgame boss.
Similar to Blacksail's Lord of the Void Sea, The Lone King has 3 different tiered difficulties, the lattermost is assuredly capable of obliterating most overambitious Hunters!
Soul Candles
Soul Candles are Torchlight Infinite's newest form of itemized power, equipped in the Skills Panel to improve your Skills' effects!
Skills can socket Soul Candles to grant your character global buffs and enhancements to Skill Mechanics.
This new system grants players a ton of newfound power, and its heavily customizable nature is assured to bring about a new age of Build Making.
Soul Candle Itemization
- Soul Candles can drop with up to 3 affixes of random tiers and can be upgraded via a process called fusing, using the new Tears of Aeterna currency, which drops throughout the Seasonal Mechanic.
- Fusing two Soul Candles together creates a new one. The new Soul Candle is generated with affixes present on the two originals, and affixes may be randomly discarded. When both Candles have the same affix at the same tier, that affix is retained and elevated to a higher tier.
- When Fusing Soul Candles with two identical T1 affixes, that affix evolves into a powerful T0 affix that comes with a negative modifier. Rarely, the creation of a T0 affix results in a mutation which instead yields an affix of extreme power and extreme consequence.
New Heroes
Season 4 of Torchlight Infinite features the brand new Hero: The Forsaken Iris, and an alternative Hero Trait for Frostfire Gemma.
- For a brand new Hero's first season, they can only be obtained from the paid track of the Season Pass, at level 1.
- For a brand new Hero's second season, they can only be obtained from the Hero Shop for 980 Primocrysts.
- Alternative Hero Traits can be purchased from the Hero Shop for 980 Primocrysts OR for 100 of the free Hero Emblem currency.
- The Forsaken Iris: Growing Breeze can be obtained from the paid track of Season 4's Season Pass, and is projected to enter the Hero Emblem exchange in Season 6.
- Frostfire Gemma: Flames of Pleasure can be purchased at the Hero Shop for 980 Primocrysts OR for 100 of the free Hero Emblem Currency.
- Escapist Bing: Blast Nova can be purchased at the Hero Shop for 980 Primocrysts and will enter the Hero Emblem exchange in Season 5.
- Cateye Erika: Windstalker enters the Hero Emblem exchange, she can be purchased for 980 Primocrysts OR for 100 of the free Hero Emblem Currency.
The Forsaken Iris: Growing Breeze
- The Forsaken Iris: Growing Breeze has the passive ability to place Spirit Magus Skills in Active Skill slots, and using the Skill triggers her own Growing Breeze Skill which has a cooldown.
- Growing Breeze grants stacks of Nourishment to Spirit Magi, granting them massively increased damage and reducing the damage they take. When a Spirit Magus gains Nourishment and enemies are not nearby, they gain massively increased movement speed.
Unlocked Hero Trait Passives can enhance the Nourishment buff, enhance Spirit Magus Growth while unlocking their ultimate evolution, and massively increase the power of Spirit Magi.
Frostfire Gemma: Flames of Pleasure
- Frostfire Gemma: Flames of Pleasure's Trait Skill is Purgatory, which creates an area around the targeted location that can debuff and damage enemies.
- Purgatories can Brand a finite number of enemies, Branded enemies take increased Fire damage, and a percentage of the Fire damage they take is recorded. When Branded enemies die, a new enemy within the Purgatory will be Branded.
- Purgatory periodically triggers Death by Fire which removes Life from enemies in an area, the amount removed is equivalent to the amount of damage Brands within the Purgatory have recorded. Damage recording is cleared afterwards.
- Gemma can have up to 2 active Purgatories at a time at base. Purgatories can brand 1 enemy at a time at base.
Unlocked Hero Trait Passives enable automatic Purgatory casting, Brand transference, and enhancements to Death by Fire.
New Skills and Skill Mechanics
Spirit Magus Overhaul
Historically, Spirit Magus Skills like Summon Flame Spirit, Summon Frost Spirit, and Summon Thunder Spirit have only been used for their Aura-like buffs. XD plans to change this with the new Spirit Magus Overhaul and dedicated Spirit Magus Hero Trait coming in Season 4.
Growth
This brand new mechanic is an attribute possessed by Spirit Magi, allowing them to evolve over time within your map, it's like if Command never decayed. Some Equipment, Talents, and Skills can grant your Spirit Magus minions Growth.
Spirit Magi now have 5 evolutionary Ranks, starting at Rank 1 and needing Growth to evolve into each of the following Ranks. Each successive Rank boosts the performance of your Spirit Magi in a myriad of ways, such as: increasing their stats, letting them use their Enhanced Skills more often, and improving their Empower Skills. Rank 5 - the final Rank - grants the most power.
New Active Skills
Archery Bond
Tagged with Tagged with Empower, Sentry, Projectile.
This Empowering Sentry Skill grants nearby allies additional projectile damage, projectile speed, attack or cast speed, and a penalty of reduced projectile quantity. Projectile-centric builds will enjoy using this new Skill to efficiently dispatch bosses.
Speed Phantom
Tagged with Mobility, Spell.
This Mobility Skill displaces players, letting them teleport / dash forwards while leaving behind a Remnant that Taunts foes. Remnants explode after a few seconds, dealing damage and inflicting Slow. Players get a buff to spell damage and cast speed for a duration based on how many enemies the exploding Remnant hit.
Nourishment of Life
Tagged with Summon, Spell, Empower, Spirit Magus, Area.
This Empower Skill was designed to complement the Spirit Magus overhaul. Casting Nourishment of Life causes your character to emit a field around them, granting Growth to Spirit Magi within the field. Additionally, this Skill grants increased Area and Projectile Quantity to Spirit Magi at Rank 4 or 5.
Dazzling Bloom
Tagged with Spell, Summon, Spirit Magus.
This Skill was designed to complement the Spirit Magus overhaul. Casting Dazzling Bloom teleports your Spirit Magi to the targeted location, and causes them to prioritize attacking the highest rarity enemy nearby.
New Support Skills
Rhythm
Tagged with Support, Empower, Defensive, Restoration.
Supported Active Skills are automatically triggered, this has a cooldown.
Bountiful Harvest
Tagged with Support, Spirit Magus, Summon.
Supported Spirit Magi at Rank 2 or higher have a percentage higher chance to use Enhanced Skills. Spirit Magi at Rank 3 or higher have increased Empower Skill duration, and gain Additional damage while affected by their own Empower Skill.
Savage Growth
Tagged with Support, Spirit Magus, Summon.
Supported Spirit Magi gain a small amount of Additional damage per point of Growth, and gain a buff after using Skills 8 times which provides a sum of Initial Growth that diminishes over the buff's duration.
Crafting & Divinity Slate Improvements
Torchlight Infinite fully reworked their old Crafting System in Season 3, adding more depth and variability to the once-beloved system. Unfortunately, that initial rework didn't meet the community's expectations of power and ease of use, and has been heavily contested since.
XD's latest Crafting System tuning pass aims to fix the following problems they recognize with Season 3's system:
- Crafted Gear is underpowered compared to Legendary Gear.
- Viable Item Bases to be used with Crafting are too scarce, while the Plasticity system further increases the need of viable Item Bases.
- Targeted Processing's randomized affix generation overcomplicates things while making costs unreasonable.
Prototype Crafting Rework
- Randomizing an Item's affixes with 1 locked affix no longer costs Plasticity, the end result has 4 total affixes.
- Randomizing an Item's affixes with 2 locked affixes continues to cost Plasticity, the end result has 5 total affixes.
- Affix Upgrading has been added to Prototype Crafting, allowing you to spend Flame Elementium and Plasticity to upgrade the tier of an affix of your choice.
- With Affix Upgrading, you can spend Ultimate Embers to elevate a T1 affix to T0, but doing so removes another affix randomly and sets your Plasticity to 0.
Targeted Processing Rework
- Targeted Processing no longer sets the item's Plasticity to 0. This adds significantly more depth and power to the Crafting System.
- Adding affixes to items with Targeted Processing is no longer randomized, players can now directly select specific affixes to add onto their items.
- The affix's tier is still randomized, as low as T6 and as high as T0.
- Using Targeted Processing to add certain formerly rare high-powered affixes to an item has a chance of failing, resulting in nothing but loss of currency.
Note: In Season 4, it will no longer be possible to Corrode non-Legendary gear.
Divinity Slates: Improved Branding
Divinity Slates are going to be far less common in Season 4, as the Cube of Rapacity is now a randomly appearing mechanic similar to the Blacksail and Darksurge mechanics before it.
Because of this, and to address some community concerns over Divinity Slates from Season 3, XD plans to buff the Divinity Slate Branding System. They hope these changes make Divinity Slate creation more exciting and surprising, while making it easier for players to get their desired Talent Nodes.
- While Branding, Medium Talent Nodes have a chance to be upgraded to rarer and more valuable Medium Talent Nodes.
- While Branding at any point, any Talent Node has a chance to be upgraded into a New God Talent Node.
- When Branding Fails, a random Talent Node on the Divinity Slate will be converted into another Talent Node of equal rarity.
- Players are still able to revert their Divinity Slate to its immediate prior state after Branding, so the above changes are strictly positive.
Chaos Invasion Rework & Netherrealm Expansion
Permanent Trait Deck
- All 10 Trait Cards in your Trait Deck are now active at all times, they no longer need to be activated by clearing specific maps.
- All Trait Cards are being rebalanced with this in mind.
- The amount of strategy and depth added to Netherrealm experience by this change cannot be overstated.
Chaos Card & Invasion Revamp
- Chaos Cards now need to be progressed in order to activate their primary effect. Complete Maps to progress them.
- Chaos Cards grant Maps +100% Additional Drop Quantity while progressing them or while progression is complete.
- All Chaos Cards are being redesigned with these changes in mind.
- Chaos Invasion Rounds now end after completing a Map with a fully progressed Chaos Card, instead of the usual 5 Maps.
Timemarks 7, 8, & Deep Space
One of the most common pain-points with Torchlight Infinite's endgame Netherrealm system is it's extremely bumpy scaling, making it awkward for inexperienced players to feel any meaningful progression.
XD is finally addressing this long-standing issue with what is effectively a massive expansion to Netherrealm progression.
- New selectable difficulty levels have been added to Timemark 7. They are Timemark 7-1 and 7-2, these are more difficult and more rewarding than original TM 7.
- The former Spacetime Turbulence mode more commonly known as Timemark 8 is now actually Timemark 8 and uses the same beacons you'd use for Timemark 7.
Its also getting selectable difficulty levels, offering increased danger and rewards with Timemarks 8-1, 8-2, 8-3, and 8-4.
- In place of Spacetime Turbulence is the new Deep Space mode, being the most dangerous and offering the most rewards. The community will most certainly refer to it as Timemark 9.
Compass Removal
The majority of compasses are being removed from the game, only the ones relating to past and present Seasonal Mechanics are staying. There's less need for Compasses now, since XD has added 7 entire new difficulty levels between the former Timemarks 7 and 8+.
Additionally, these Seasonal Mechanic compasses will now be sold in Town for a set amount of Flame Elementium. This is to reduce Farming strategies' reliance on the Trade House.
Legendaries: New, Reworked, & Blueprints
Legendary Blueprints
When it comes to build-defining Legendary Equipment, the common community frustration has been inaccessibility. Many of these items lacked a targeted farming method, and are so rare, players felt compelled to seek them out in the trade house.
XD's response to these complaints is the new Legendary Blueprints system, a new way to acquire Legendary Equipment.
- Blueprints are a new type of item that will drop in Season 4, each one corresponds to a specific piece of Legendary Equipment. Collecting enough of a specific Blueprint will allow you to craft its corresponding Legendary.
- XD plans to release a Legendary Wishlist Event during Season 4, which will allow players to select a Legendary of their choice, improving the drop rates of its blueprint and the item itself.
New & Reworked Legendaries
Season 4 introduces 13 brand new pieces Legendary Equipment, while reworking a number of existing pieces of Legendary Equipment to fit in the more modern Torchlight sandbox.
Hero Trait Balancing, QoL, & System Improvements
The livestream revealed a pleasant list of notable QoL updates and system upgrades that will release alongside Season 4: The City of Aerterna.
Armor & Evasion Buffs
Armor's Damage mitigation now works against Elemental and Erosion damage, but with reduced effectiveness. Evasion's chance to avoid damage now works against Spell damage by default, but with reduced effectiveness. These much needed buffs are likely to put these two defense layers back on the table!
Training Dummy DPS Cap Reintroduction
XD does not believe that DPS is the only important indicator for a build's strength, and the community's hyperfixation on "Dummy DPS" with Season 3's uncapped Training Dummy has been unhealthy. The compromise to this is a new Dummy DPS cap of 99.9 Billion, far more than that of Season 2. XD promises that this is more than enough damage output to clear everything in the game.
Carino: Ranger of Glory is no longer really really really really really bad.
The days of telling people to reroll into another character because they picked the cool-lookin-dude-with-guns are soon to be over, as XD promised substantial buffs to his Special Ammo mechanic.
Value Calculation Changes
In an attempt to avoid further inflated numbers, XD is changing how some affixes are calculated. Bonuses provided by the same affix are now added together, whilst bonuses from differing affixes will continue to multiply. Basically, this means that doing things like stacking tons of Eve of the Kingslaying to use with Desperate Measure will no longer result in infinite damage.
Tons of Trade House QoL Upgrades
A Price Checking feature, the addition of a Global Search, accidental deletion protection for Items received from the Trade House. These are just some of the things coming to make buying and selling on the Trade House easier than ever before, and frankly there's just too many to list!
- Youga(s) buffs, changes to Lethal Flash and Wisdom of the Gods - Spacetime Illusion and Twisted Spacetime are now affected by bonuses to Skill Level. Not sure how that works. We've also gotten word that Carino: Lethal Flash, and Thea: Wisdom of the Gods are getting some changes, and that we'll learn about those from the Patch Notes.
- Six Gods' Trials Rewards Improvements - The frequently awful randomized rewards of the Trials from the Six Gods are being replaced by fixed universal rewards. Hopefully, they're good.
- Performance Improvements - XD has improved the game's optimization to further reduce lag and the likelihood of crashing. They're targeting how the game handles damage calculations, special effects, and loot drops.
- Swimsuits and Minion Skins - Erika is getting not one, but two entire swimsuit outfits, and we're happy for all of the people who like buying those. Moto and the newly introduced Iris are getting advanced outfits that change the appearances of their Mechanical and Spiritual summons.
Only More From Us, at Maxroll
Torchlight Infinite's 4th Season, The City of Aeterna is set to release on September 7th, 5 PM PDT (12 AM UTC). Maxroll's coverage of Torchlight Infinite will continue, with more content from us on the way. 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!
Related Topics
Interested in the upcoming Torchlight Infinite Season City of Aeterna? Find out more about what's to come with these other articles.
Season 4 Teaser
CC Recap S3 8-9
CC Recap S3 10-12
Written by: Xtra37
Reviewed by: Tenkiei, Facefoot