Game updates/2018-06-08
June 8 Update
This is primarily a bug-fix update. It includes important server-side bug-fixes, plus other fixes and improvements that happened to be ready to go.
General Changes
- - Fixed more server-side performance bottlenecks, and installed a new tracking tool to find remaining bottlenecks.
- - The winners of the Steam Screenshot Contest will receive an in-game notification, along with a package of items, later today.
- - To make finding the 3rd-party-tools JSON a bit less mysterious, tools developers can now just visit http://client.projectgorgon.com. This page will automatically redirect you to the page for the most recent game data, along with available documentation.
UI Fixes and Improvements
- - The Skills window now remembers which parent skills you had opened/closed in the skill tree (between runs of the game).
- - Fixed a timing bug that caused chat messages to be lost if they arrived during a certain part of the loading-screen process.
- - Improved the Training UI so that it doesn't forget your scroll position when you train something.
- - The tooltip for ability scrolls now shows a warning message if you need to learn an earlier ability before you can learn this one. (Previously the error message only showed when you tried to use the scroll.)
- - Fixed a bug with the Last Seen time in the Friends list window. Part of the calculations were done in UTC time instead of your local time zone, so if a player had just logged off, instead of saying they were last seen a few minutes ago, it would say they were seen X hours ago, where X is how many hours you are behind UTC time. (If your timezone is ahead of UTC, it would say they were seen "< 1 Min ago".)
- - Due to a bug, if you had multiple informational message boxes waiting for you when you logged in, some of those messages could have been missed. Only certain types of messages were vulnerable to the bug, including messages about e.g. shop items that didn't sell. The item would still be returned, but you might not get a message about it. (If you are worried you may have missed a message, note that you can always use the "/messages" command (without quotes) in chat to see recent messages.)
Skill Changes
We're in the process of converting all damage-over-time (DoT) effects in the game to use a new system that stacks better and has more information in ability-tooltips. (We're about 2/3 finished with that conversion as of this update.)
While doing this technical conversion, we're also recalculating DoT treasure effects using new formulae and guidelines that should make DoTs more useful and understandable. (One of these guidelines is that a DoT that lasts more than about 12 seconds is too long.)
We're also trying to normalize DoT tick count to every 2 seconds. Some DoTs would "tick" (deal damage) every second, while others ticked every 2 seconds, or 3, 4, or 5 seconds. This was done to work within other existing balance ideas, but when all DoTs behave so differently, it's too hard for players to understand what's going on and how to make their DoTs better. So we're unifying most of these DoTs to deal damage every 2 seconds.
Most DoTs will deal increased damage under the new balance guidelines, although a handful of DoTs that had 1-second ticks may effectively be weaker (depending on what per-tick buffs you had).
Aside from DoT changes, there are some other bug-fixes and problem-adjustments that were easy to fix while doing the conversion.
Animal Handling:
- - Ability: "Call Living Stabled Pet" did not work at all.
Archery:
- - Treasure: Fire Arrow suddenly deals an additional 335 indirect Fire damage after a 15 second delay => 320 after 12 second delay
- - Ability: Poison Arrow 6 deals 240 damage over 20 seconds => 180 over 12 seconds
Battle Chemistry:
- - Treasure: All bomb attacks ignite the target, causing them to take 130 fire damage over 10 seconds => 140 over 10 seconds
Druid:
- - Treasure: Heart Thorn coats the target in stinging insects that deal 180 Nature damage over 15 seconds => 306 over 12 seconds
- - Treasure: Heart Thorn deals Poison damage (instead of Nature) and also deals 192 Poison damage over 12 seconds => 258 over 12 seconds
Fire Magic:
- - Ability: Ring of Fire Deals 63 additional damage over 35 seconds => 150 damage over 12 seconds
- - Ability: Fire Breath deals 80 damage over 40 seconds => 168 damage over 12 seconds
- - Treasure: Calefaction causes 213 additional damage after a 20 second delay => 213 damage after a 12 second delay
- - Ability: Flesh to Fuel: this ability was sharing an icon with a mentalism Psi Wave ability; it now has a unique icon.
Giant Bat:
- - Treasure: The damage portion of "Drink Blood deals 96 damage over 12 seconds, and 50% of the damage becomes health for you" => this damage was applied to the caster, not the victim.
Hammer:
- - Item: Flame Basher: All Hammer attacks have a 25% chance to ignite the target, causing 50 damage over 20 seconds => 33% to cause 30 damage over 12 seconds
- - Treasure: Rib Shatter deals +160 Trauma damage over 20 seconds => 220 over 10 seconds
Mentalism:
- - Treasure: Agonize deals +425 Psychic damage over 10 seconds => 576 over 12 seconds
- - Treasure: System Shock deals +48 Psychic damage and 100 more over 10 seconds => 186 over 12 seconds
- - Corrected icon coloration inconsistencies between the various Psi Wave abilities.
Necromancy:
- - Treasure: Death's Hold deals +175 Fire damage over 15 seconds => 228 over 12 seconds
- - Spark of Death deals 105 Psychic damage over 10 seconds => 168 over 12 seconds
Pig:
- - Ability: Pig Rend 4 deals 75 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 96 over 12 seconds
- - Treasure: Pig Rend deals +238 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => +240 over 12 seconds
- - Treasure: Squeal deals 266 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 260 over 10 seconds
Priest:
- - Treasure: "Exhilarate, Triage, and Invigorate restore +47 Health if you haven't been attacked in the past 15 seconds" only applied to Exhilarate, not Triage and Invigorate.
- - The tooltips for various Priest abilities reported 0 healing when there were treasure mods that could make the ability provide that healing, but the treasure mods weren't in use.
Shield:
- - Ability: Stunning Bash causes the target to take 145 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 210 over 12 seconds
- - Treasure: "Fire Shield causes melee attackers to ignite, dealing 42 Fire damage over 9 seconds" => 100 Fire damage over 10 seconds.
- - Also fixed a bug with the lowest-tier version of this effect (found on level 1-10 gear); it did not work correct, instead briefly boosting your Fire Mitigation.
Spider:
- - Ability: Spit Acid 5 Deals 400 acid damage over 9 seconds => 400 over 10 seconds
- - Treasure: Spit Acid deals 228 Acid damage to Health over 12 seconds => 270 damage over 12 seconds
Staff:
- - Ability: Pinning Slash 3 deals 60 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 180 damage over 12 seconds
- - Treasure: Double Hit ignites the target, dealing 135 Fire damage over 15 seconds => 198 over 12 seconds
Sword:
- - Ability: Hacking Blade: "Deals 210 Trauma damage over 15 seconds" => 252 Trauma damage over 12 seconds (but fewer Ticks)
- - Treasure: Hacking Blade deals 120 Trauma damage over 4 seconds => 192 Trauma over 12 seconds
- - Treasure: Hacking Blade and Debilitating Blow deal 126 Trauma damage over 12 seconds => 138 over 12 seconds
Unarmed:
Note: Slashing Strike's damage was calculated incorrectly; this affects the ability and all treasure effects related to it.
- - Treasure: Slashing Strike damage +51% => Slashing Strike damage +35%
- - Ability: Slashing Strike deals 120 damage over 15 seconds => 180 damage over 12 seconds (but fewer Ticks)
- - Treasure: Slashing Strike deals +26% damage plus 45 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => Slashing Strike deals 126 Trauma damage over 12 seconds (w/ no direct damage boost)
- - Treasure: Slashing Strike deals +23% damage and hastens the current reuse timer of Hip Throw by 2.5 seconds => Slashing Strike deals +15% damage and hastens the current reuse timer of Hip Throw by 2.5 seconds
- - Treasure: Infuriating Fist taunts +460 and deals 150 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => Infuriating Fist taunts +460 and deals 138 Trauma damage over 12 seconds
Additional skill and ability changes, including tweaks to how area-of-effect attacks work, will be in the next update (in a few weeks). The treasure-mod rebalancing discussed in the May 2018 Dev Blog will still happen, but we're delaying it for bit while we collect more up-to-date gameplay metrics.
Eltibule Changes
Bug-fixes and adjustments to Eltibule include:
- - Tweaked arrival spot from Serbule. (Just a gentle tweak - it didn't move across the zone this time!) As a side-effect, one of the meditation pillars in Eltibule has moved a short distance.
- - Adjusted map so that it covers the entire area. (Previously there were some edges that were "off the map".)
- - Fixed scenarios where bird-form druids would stop being birds if they flew too close to certain edges of the map (and then fall somewhat hilariously to their deaths).
- - Fixed scenarios where attempting to craft a map or survey could generate the error message "You must be near an Eltibule to do that."
Miscellaneous
- - Recipes for max-enchanted priest staves had incorrect (easier-than-intended) ingredients.
- - Arisetsu Medallions incorrectly allowed the Familiar's Recall ability to be used by long-term animal players (that had bonded to a master).
- - The item-description for the necklace 'Treatment of the Poor' was lost and has been restored.
- - Sidebar abilities that involve using knives (such as Poison Blade) now require the user to have hands.
- - Some musical performance abilities were grouped incorrectly in the skills UI listing.
- - The "Neurotoxin" movement-debuff from Biting Vines always succeeded regardless of movement-speed debuff protections.
- - Previously, tapped alcohol kegs showed a generic error if you were unable to drink for any reason: "Drink failed. You can only have 3 beer/wine and 1 hard liquor drink active at a time." Kegs now show more specific and accurate error messages if you are unable to drink for an unusual reason.
- - Fixed a bug introduced with the new UI that prevented many alcoholic beverages from bestowing their special effects when drunk from inventory.
- - If a chat message included items and had a spoiler-begins tag without a spoiler-ends tag, the chat line was displayed incorrectly.
- - For our volunteer guides: when -Guide- or -Moderator- chat flair is enabled, speech filters are ignored and spoken Words of Power are not activated.
- - Added internal tools to help us assist guilds whose guildmaster is gone.