Game updates/2014-11-16

November 16th, 2014

This update focuses on crafting and loot quality, as those were big topics in recent feedback. There's also the first part of a new high-level dungeon, the Winter Nexus, which I'd love feedback on! It's accessible from Sun Vale, and should require about three level 50 players to do most things. There's a bunch of other stuff planned for that dungeon, including puzzles, bosses, and more NPCs, but there's enough there now that you can help me tune the balance and find any major issues.

There's a lot of changes to crafting and random item generation. All crafted equipment will have better chances for better powers now. In addition, item-enhancement recipes no longer have any chance of breaking an item, so there's no reason not to use them. Finally, there's a brand new augmenting system called Max-Enchanting. These require separate recipes (available from wherever you found the normal recipes), and gems that can only be made from items (and recipes) found in the Winter Nexus dungeon. So you're gonna need to be high level, or get help from a high-level person, to test that out. (I realize that it's annoying and awkward to have a major crafting feature locked in a dangerous dungeon... it's just how it happened to work out, and won't be the only way to get those recipes. In the short term, if you're high level, please help out people who want to test high end crafting!)

Random-Item Related

• Increased the likelihood that crafted or randomly-found loot will have percentage-boosting enhancements as one of its enhancements ( on items where this is appropriate)
• Added new treasure effects to skills that were lacking enough diversity to make crafted items of that type viable.
• A bunch of new treasure effects focus on defensive attributes instead of attacks. These are still usually attuned to specific skills, so for instance, you might find an item that says "+5 Crushing Mitigation while Shield skill active".
• Tweaked the possible level range of each treasure effect so that it can show up more often. This creates more diversity in loot at each level.
• A few treasure effects were nerfed, most notably the Power-regeneration abilities of Fire Magic. Fire Magic is supposed to be a very Power-intensive skill, and these made it too easy to build infinite-Power builds without sacrificing damage. (They still seem a little too powerful even after the nerf, but I don't wanna go overboard without more play testing.)
• This update introduces three new defensive stats. "Chance to Ignore Stuns" and "Chance to Ignore Knockbacks" are pretty self-explanatory. This is a dice-roll to see if you avoid a stun or knockback effect. It's rolled once for each such effect.
• "Chance to Avoid Death" is a little weirder. If an attack would kill you, this is the chance that you won't take any damage, and will stay alive. Once this works, your Chance to Avoid Death goes down by 100% for an hour. This stat can go over 100%, which lets you avoid death multiple times in an hour.

Crafting-Related

• Tweaked MANY food/alchemy/misc recipes and items to make the cash-value outcomes of recipes make more sense. (Still need to work on XP values...)
• The ingredients of a recipe should be worth less than the result of the recipe. So if you're making something worth, say, $100, the ingredients should cost less than $100. There are two kinds of exceptions: some recipes for newbie items lose money -- but they are always for items worth less than $50. And it's possible for some randomly-generated equipment to be worth less than the cost of ingredients, because they're randomly generated. But your everyday potions and snacks and such should not lose value during the crafting process.
• Added a bunch of new synergy bonuses, where you get free levels of a skill by raising another skill. This makes it possible access some recipes that were too high-level to be used before.
• (We'll eventually increase the regular level cap, but synergy bonuses will always be useful -- they're how you'll get past the eventual "soft cap" of level 100, just as right now they let you get past the soft cap at level 50.)
• The Wombat now sells carpentry recipes for creating Staff weapons. (Oops, those were supposed to be in earlier, but got left out of his data.)
• New Max-Enchanting: these new crafting recipes allow you to create better gear. They require an expensive ingredient that can only be obtained in the new dungeon (for now -- eventually there will be other, more tedious, less-terrifying ways to get them). The resulting items usually have one more enchantment item than the regular items of that type and rarity. Thus and Uncommon (green label) item will tend to have two powers instead of just one, for instance.
• As of right now, thanks to Max-Enchanting, it's theoretically possible to craft better gear than you can find in loot. I don't think that will always be the case, but it's fine for now. (My eventual goal is that crafted gear will be competitive, but randomly looted gear will occasionally be better. However, all gear, looted or crafted, can be improved by crafters, so there's always something for crafters to do.)
• Items can now be improved via rare recipes without any danger of the item being destroyed! Items can use a new "Craft Points" system, and each recipe costs Craft Points. If an item runs out of these points, it just can't be improved anymore -- it doesn't break.
• Loot items usually have 100 Craft Points to start, while crafted gear has 120 Craft Points. On a whim I have snail armor 150 Craft Points. After the first improvement, an item will show the number of Craft Points it has left in the description.

Combat-Skill Related

• Unarmed weaposn were bugged, allowing you to wield a shield in your off hand and still be considered empty-handed. This was unintentional, and is fixed. You can't use Barrage with a shield, in other words.
• There is now a new unarmed weapon type, Claw, which goes in the off hand slot. I didn't have time to really flesh them out too much yet, but they have some basic bonuses. Claws can be used either by themselves (to access Punch and similar powers) or dual-wielded with a Cestus or Katar.
• One of the NPCs from the upcoming desert region has been temporarily transplanted to the Winter Nexus to provide a few new Unarmed abilities related to the Claw weapon.
• Battle Chemsitry flasks can only be held in one hand or the other, not dual-wielded. The intent was to let you use Battle Chemistry with many other skill combinations, not to dual-wield them. Dual-wielding lets you stack too many damage bonuses at once.
• Archery's Poison Arrow and Fire Arrow have had their duration (and hence DoT) doubled
• Archery's Acid Arrow had its armor-damaging effect increased
• Fixed Stake the Heart so that it works
• Fixed issue that made i impossible to resurrect dead pets (untested... last-minute fix, but it probably fixed it!)

Other

• Reduced how much NPCs like specialized foods, because it was pretty ridiculous.
• Marna's help box doesn't keep popping up forever anymore
• Fixed underwater issues in Eltibule
• Fixed a couple of exploits that were only possible if you hacked the client, including an important money-duping bug and a bug that let you use basic attacks more often than once per second