Game updates/2019-09-20

Update Notes: September 20, 2019

This update brings a smorgasbord of new mechanics, new content, tweaks and fixes. The Fae Realm gets some more polish, there are new recipes and new treasure effects to check out, armor sets are a thing (sort of), and lots more. So let's get to it!

- NOTE: Late addition to Patch Notes: You can now raise the level cap of Industry to 70 by paying Sheyna in Rahu.

Combat Refresh Boost

In this update we focused on providing players with more survivability options, and one part of the game that wasn't pulling its weight (in terms of importance to players) is the Combat Refresh.

Every 15 seconds, your Basic Attack triggers a "Combat Refresh" that restores extra health, armor, and/or power. The amount you recover is partially based on the level of your Basic Attack, but the biggest increases come from your armor: every piece of armor increases the health, armor, and/or power recovered from a Combat Refresh. The amounts are based on the material the armor's made of: cloth, leather, metal, or organic. In this update, we've boosted these numbers quite a lot.

For purposes of comparing old to new values, we'll imagine a hypothetical set of level 80 armor of each material. First we list how much this hypothetical set added to your Combat Refresh before this update, then we list the new amounts for this update.

• Cloth:

Old: 96 health, 144 power

New: 320 health, 280 power

• Leather:

Old: 160 health, 48 power

New: 240 health, 240 armor, 96 power

• Plate:

Old: 60 armor

New: 320 armor

• Organic:

Old: 36 health, 36 armor, 36 power

New: 96 health, 96 armor, 96 power

Just to make sure it's clear: your armor doesn't need to all be made of the same material to get Combat Refresh bonuses! We're just using the "full suit" numbers to make it easier to understand what's changed. Each individual piece of armor adds a portion of the above numbers to your Combat Refresh, so if you're wearing a mixture of different materials, your total Combat Refresh bonus will be a mixture of the numbers shown above.

But what if you ARE wearing a full suit made of the same material? In that case, see below...

Armor-Material Set Bonuses

In this update, we're experimenting with bonuses for players who wear all (or mostly all) of the same type of armor. There are five main armor slots: head, chest, legs, feet, and hands. If at least three of these are made of the same material (cloth, leather, metal, or organic), your Basic Attack has a special bonus:

• 3+ Cloth Items: If your Power is below 20% of max, your Basic Attack restores Power equal to 20% of your Max Power. (Max once per minute.)
• 3+ Leather Items: If your Health is below 33% of max, your Basic Attack restores Health equal to 33% of your Max Health, plus your Combat Refresh Healing amount. (Max once per minute.)
• 3+ Plate Items: If you are out of Armor (below 10% of max), your Basic Attack restores Armor equal to Combat Refresh Armor amount. (Max once per minute.)
• 3+ Organic Items: Your Combat Refresh happens every 12 seconds (instead of every 15 seconds).

The game doesn't tell you about these set bonuses anywhere at the moment -- so it's a good thing you read these patch notes! Once you have enough pieces for the bonus, the bonus shows up on the ability description for your Basic Attack like normal, but nothing in the game tells you that wearing 3 pieces of same-material gear will give you that bonus. This reflects the fact that this system is extremely experimental and may be removed or dramatically altered. Keep that in mind as you try it out, and tell us what you think about it!

New Skill-Agnostic Treasure Effects

In this update we worked to improve skill-agnostic (a/k/a "generic") treasure effects. We've added new treasure effects, mostly focusing on defensive and support options that can be easily worked into existing skill builds.

It may be worthwhile to check the ability tags on the skills you use, because sometimes the categorization can be surprising. For instance, the Deer skill's Minor Heal is also an attack; Battle Chemistry's Major Heal is an area-effect group heal; the sidebar ability First Aid is a Major Heal; almost all combat skills have a Signature Debuff, even if they're not particularly debuffy; etc. Due to the diverse nature of these abilities, in a few cases the treasure won't be useful to a particular skill -- for instance, Mentalism's Signature Debuff deals no direct damage, so the treasure that boosts Signature Debuff damage by +25% isn't helpful. (But the armor-damage still applies.)

The numbers shown below are for the level 80 version of each effect:

• Main-Hand: "Core Attacks deal +32 damage and hasten your current Combat Refresh delay by 1 second"
• Main-Hand: "Basic Attacks restore 12 Power"
• Off-Hand: " Nice Attacks deal +64 damage and hasten your current Combat Refresh delay by 1 second"
• Head: "Nice Attacks deal +40 damage and cause the target's next Rage Attack to deal -25% damage (debuff cannot stack with itself)"
• Head: "Major Healing abilities also restore 112 Armor"
• Hands: "Signature Support abilities restore 80 Armor to all allies within 20 meters"
• Chest: "Major Healing abilities restore +78 Health"
• Chest, Waist: " Signature Debuffs deal +80 damage and restore 96 Armor to you after a 10-second delay"
• Legs, Off-Hand: "Minor Heals restore 71 Armor"
• Legs, Feet: "Major Healing abilities have a 65% chance to restore an additional 152 Health"
• Feet: "Core Attacks deal +41 damage and reduce the Power cost of your next Minor Heal ability by -22"
• Necklace: "Signature Debuffs deal +25% damage and also deal 108 Armor damage"
• Ring: "Minor Heals restore +33 Health and reduce the damage of the next attack that hits the target by 20%"
• Ring: "Signature Support abilities restore 32 Power to all allies within 20 meters"

In addition, we tweaked the potency of some existing generic treasure effects and added level 80 versions of some effects that didn't have any. Notable changes include: - "Patch Armor restores +77 Armor" => +110 Armor - "First Aid restores +55 Health" => +74 Health

Mentalism Changes

Mentalism didn't receive the full "revamp" treatment in this update: we experimented with some new ideas, but they haven't panned out so far. But there were a number of buffs and revisions.

Abilities:

• Electrify is no longer taught by Mu. Instead, mentalists automatically learn the first two tiers (at levels 22 and 36), and the next tiers are trained by Rohina in Sun Vale, with the highest tier (Electrify 5) trained by Raina in the Fae Realm.
• Armor Wave now restores armor every 3 seconds (instead of every 4 seconds), effectively boosting armor restoration by 25%.
• Power Wave now restores power every 8 seconds (instead of every 10 seconds), effectively boosting power restoration by 20%.
• "Psi Armor Wave 6" now restores 18 armor/tick instead of 15 armor/tick. (This effect was bugged and used the value for Armor Wave 5.)

Treasure effects:

• "Psi Armor Wave and Psi Adrenaline Wave restore 90 armor to all targets after a 25 second delay" => 158 armor
• "Psi Health Wave and Psi Armor Wave instantly restore 76 armor to you" => 84 armor
• "Psi Power Wave and Psi Adrenaline Wave restore 34 power to all targets after a 25 second delay" => 54 power
• "Psi Power Wave and Psi Armor Wave cause all targets' melee attacks to cost -6 Power for 20 seconds" => -8 power. (This effect was bugged and the level 60 variant was used for levels 70 and 80 as well.)
• "Psi Health Wave, Armor Wave, and Power Wave grant all targets +6 Psychic Damage for 60 seconds" => +42 psychic damage
• "Psi Power Wave instantly restores 28 power to all targets" => 31 power
• "Psi Power Wave and Psi Adrenaline Wave instantly restore 26 power to you" => 32 power
• "Revitalize restores +20 Health and removes ongoing Trauma effects (up to 22 dmg/sec)" => (up to 26 dmg/sec)

One thing that the in-game text doesn't do a good job of explaining is that most of Mentalism's heals, including the health/armor/power waves, are subject to phrenological "critical heals". This works similarly to phrenological "critical hits" for damage: if you're healing an elven player and your Elf Phrenology skill is 50, you have an 8% chance to "critically heal" that player. (Note that this applies to Psychology's heals as well!)

By default a critical heal increases the healing by 25%, but treasure effects can boost this number very dramatically. Since every "tick" has a separate chance to critically-heal, high-level Mentalists who use stacked Healing Waves (for instance) will see a big improvement to their total group healing by using gear with "Psychology/Mentalism Critical Hit Damage +X% when skill Mentalism active". (And, of course, by raising their phrenology skills to 50.)

We're considering replacing this system with something that's more intuitive... and a little easier to balance. The current system doesn't do anything at low level, when you probably haven't even discovered Phrenology, and yet by very high level, it starts to become too powerful. (In fact, this is one of the reasons we've held off on raising Phrenology skills above level 50.) So it's possible this entire system will change, but that's how it works right now!

Fae Realm

We've fixed a bunch of bugs and made some tweaks to content in the Fae Realm. We have more content in the works for the area in future updates, and we're still actively evaluating and tweaking the combat and training details, so please keep sending in the feedback and bug reports!

• Lethargy Puck's warning screen was not reliably activating.
• Fixed recipes for "Dinobites" and "Rustic Meatsterpiece" to use the type of dinosaur meat found in the Fae Realm.
• Changed pear and peach trees to drop higher-tier wood; this also increases the level requirements to chop the wood.
• Increased the number of special lootable items that spawn only during the day or only during the night (such as certain butterflies, flowers, and mushrooms). There are now 300% to 400% as many of these items in existence at any given moment. This is largely a "bulk" change, and more individual tweaking is likely needed. Play with it for a while and if something seems excessively common or extremely rare, please let us know!
• Dramatically increased the chance to find rare level 80 recipe scrolls. (They're still pretty rare, but this fixes a bug that made them INSANELY rare.)
• Trolls' auto-healing has been nerfed a bit. (This applies to trolls in all areas.)

In addition, there is a new work order board near Solgribue's work station. The NPC who accepts completed orders is not in town, however -- he appears during nighttime at the second mushroom circle.

Other Changes & Fixes

• Carpentry:
  • Solgribue now trains Carpentry levels 71-80, along with recipes for various carpentry items.
  • Jara in Serbule no longer trains recipes for chairs. (They were already also trained by Paul Vaughn in Serbule Hills.)
  • A couple of high-level Carpentry recipes that were taught by Jara and Paul Vaughn are now taught by Amutasa in Rahu.

• Mining:
  • Urzab now raises the level cap for Surveying and Mining to 70, and has new recipes for motherlodes in Gazluk.
  • The new resource "Semi-Real Hassium" can be found as a rarely-occurring resource all throughout Gazluk, and can also be bartered for with Fluffikins.
  • Fluffikins now has identical barters for both glowy yellow crystals AND safety-coated glowy yellow crystals.
  • Awesome Metal Slabs are now called Superb Metal Slabs. (We are renaming "Awesome" items to "Superb" because we have too many other descriptors that start with "A"!)
  • Superb Metal Slabs can now be located outdoors in Gazluk or in various Gazluk caves (albeit quite rarely).
  • Removed physics from motherlodes so that you cannot get stuck inside them when they spawn.
  • "Expert Metal Nodes" can no longer be found randomly spawning in Gazluk or associated caves. (They are junk metal at that level, and there's already enough junk spawning.)

• Other:
  • More recipe-book cash values have been normalized (in this case, generally making rare recipe books more valuable).
  • Added right-click shortcuts to turn animal skins into leather rolls (assuming you know the appropriate Tanning recipe).
  • A new rare-drop recipe allows you to combine gold nuggets into gold ore.
  • Solgribue has a new blacksmithing recipe to melt golden acorns.
  • Solgribue has a new ring-crafting recipe available.
  • Solgribue has new blacksmithing recipes to add pockets to metal and organic armor.
  • Added new code to prevent items that enable Necromancy from randomly having Priest treasure effects, or vice versa.
  • UI: When you right-click the sidebar and choose "Choose Special Abilities", the ability list previously only showed abilities that can ONLY be on the sidebar (such as, say, Dig Deep). But there are other abilities that can OPTIONALLY be on the sidebar, such as Raise Skeletal Archer or Hunter's Stride. Now when you right-click the sidebar and choose "Choose Special Abilities", these abilities are now listed, too. (These abilities are also listed under their specific skill, as before.)
  • Nightshade now trains a new recipe to augment wands. This recipe can augment the only two wands in the game, "The Galvanizer" and the Fairy Wand of Cold. (We're still in the process of figuring out how wands will work and how they differ from the staves; these wands are prototypes.) Previously neither of them could be augmented.
  • Added "acidic shield-wax" recipes to Armor Patching trainers: Tyler Green, Arlan, and Pegast. These were intended to be added last update, but weren't, so now they are.

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