Enchanting!

✨ Devlog: Enchanting

In Shadows of Dragonholde, your abilities are powerful—but they’re only the beginning.

The enchanting system lets you socket modifiers into your abilities, changing how they behave, interact, and scale.  Enchantments are build-defining and completely modular.

🧱 How Enchanting Works

• Every active ability has 5 enchantment slots that are unlocked as the ability levels up.

• Each enchant modifies the core behavior of an ability

• Enchantments are:

• 🧪 Dropped from enemies or bosses

• 🧵 Crafted using skill systems (e.g. Smithing, Gem Crafting) (Eventually)

• 📜 Rewarded from quests or dungeons

• Adding enchants to an ability does increase the resource cost of that ability.

You can mix and match enchants to stack effects, change targeting, add new layers (poison, burn, AoE), or completely flip how the ability functions.

🔮 Current Enchant Types

Here’s what’s currently implemented:

• Affliction – If the ability has a status effect, this enchant increases the chance and duration of it.

• Area of Effect – Expands radius or hit area

• Aura Enchant – Converts ability into a toggled passive aura

• Burning – Adds burn damage over time

• Chain – Allows abilities to trigger a chain reaction when they hit an enemy. Each ability has a different chain chance depending on the category

• Critical Strike – Increases crit chance/damage of the ability.

• Duration – Increases effect uptime (great for traps, zones, debuffs)

• Damage Type  – Adds the respective damage  type to the ability damage map

• Piercing – Projectiles pierce enemies

• Life Leech / Resource Leech – Sustain-focused scaling

• Multiple Projectiles – Fires more projectiles

• Echo – Cast the ability again automatically

• Many more to come!

Each one opens a new build avenue depending on your class, gear, and skills.

🌀 Aura Enchants – Passive Power at a Price

A special type of enchantment, Aura Enchants, let you convert abilities into passives.

• These act like toggled auras

• They cost a percentage of mana or health

• Useful for builds that favor automation or buff stacking

• Can turn a skill that was useless to your build into a handy tool that can change the way you play

Example:

Ice Shard Aura– Periodically create an ice shard that floats around you. Once max shards are reached they lie in wait. When you come into range of an enemy, the ice shards all shoot towards the enemy, but costs 7% of max resource to maintain. (It still regenerates resources per ice shard).

This will let you passively apply debuffs to enemies through the use of enchantments. For example if you have unlocked the burning enchant for all of your basic abilities, you can reserve 28% of your resource and turn them all into auras to just apply your burning to nearby enemies as you plow through your enemies.

📦 Where to Find Enchantments

Each enchantment drops for each specific ability. So the echo enchant on the fireball won't work for the spark. In the current demo all enchantments work for all spells for testing purposes.

All enemies in the game have a small chance to drop enchantments, but some really powerful enchants are locked behind tough bosses and content. I'll dive more into the loot of the game in the upcoming logs.

🧪 Final Thoughts

Enchanting is all about creating chaos, and making all abilities useful even if they're not typically part of your build.

I can't wait to see what you come up with!

Next up: Quests, Dungeons, and Loot!

Have an enchant idea you’d love to see? Drop it below! I’m always looking for creative chaos 👇