Game updates/2015-05-03

May 3 Update

Tons of changes in this update! There's new content and also lots of adjustments to combat. As always, remember this is alpha! In case of disastrous bugs or terrible design flaws, please stay calm, report problems, tell me what's good and what's bad!

New Dungeon Content

- There is a new addition to the Wolf Cave dungeon. This extension is designed for a duo of level 50s, or one level 50 with really high quality gear and items. There's a couple of empty areas that will have new werewolf-specific content soon. (Not quite ready today, sorry wolves!)

- There is a new addition to the Kur Tower dungeon. This dungeon kinda went off the rails, to be honest. I had lots of big plans, but they didn't end up being that fun and I ran out of time to experiment. So I'm gonna put it on the back burner for a while and try again in a few months. In the mean time, there's enough of it working that I've opened up a large new area for exploration. There's no lore, and nothing makes any sense, so just roll with whatever you find.

In its current state, I'm not actually sure what the best group size is. Maybe a trio of level 40s, or a duo of 50s... something like that.

New Skill

- Ice Magic is now learnable. Ice Magic has some decent damage potential, but it's far more impressive as a crowd control or self-defense skill. This is just a first draft of the skill, though, so we need your feedback! Report bugs, of course, but also let us know what is fun, what isn't fun, and how you'd change the skill in an ideal world.

You will need level 25 in Fire Magic to learn Ice Magic, and you will need to be able to survive a difficult dungeon encounter, so realistically speaking you won't be able to learn the skill before reaching level 40 in some other skills. :(The upcoming Fairy playable race will be able to learn it as a newbie skill, though.)

Get the necessary quest by reading a signpost in the entrance to Kur Tower, then go visit Landri the Cold in the Kur inn. Then complete her errand to gain access to the skill. You will need a couple of allies to complete the quest -- it's not soloable.

The gem for Ice Magic crafting is Tsavorite. Ukorga in Kur Mountains sells some loot belts for Ice Magic.

Power Costs Revision

Most player abilities have reduced Power costs. Some examples from Sword skill (but all skills are affected):

 -  Sword Slash 4 - Old: 9  New: 7
 -  Flashing Strike 3 - Old: 17   New: 11
 -  Riposte 4 - Old: 17  New: 11
 -  Many Cuts 4 - Old: 22  New: 20
 -  Wind Strike 4 - Old: 25  New: 25 (unchanged)
 -  Decapitate 3 - Old: 50  New: 67 (higher!)

As you can see by the examples, not every ability's cost went down. And a few abilities with insane power-to-effect ratios actually cost more power now.

- Raising your combat skills now raises your Max Power a bit more noticeably. By level 50, most skills will give +25 more Power than before. (So you'll have 2x25=50 additional Max Power.)

- The "Dig Deep" abilities restore more Power

Ability Damage Revision

The high-level versions of nearly every ability now deals more damage. Some examples (the same ones used in the power cost examples above):

 - Sword Slash 4 - Old: 19  New: 38
 - Flashing Strike 3 - Old: 18  New: 44
 - Riposte 4 - Old: 13  New: 32
 - Many Cuts 4 - Old: 35  New: 46
 - Wind Strike 4 -  Old: 40  New: 77
 - Decapitate 3 - Old: 150  New: 182

On a related note, high level pet damage was raised a bit.

This is an overall buff to player deadliness, although it's not quite as dramatic as it may look because monsters got a bit more armor in this update (see below).

=== Sun Vale Changes ===

- Sun Vale was causing severe sub-server lag due to the sheer number of monsters spawning in a tiny space. It turns out that Sun Vale's terrain was designed to be much larger originally (but we didn't have content for it) -- so we've scaled it up. There's still not a lot of content for it, but this was necessary to avoid server problems. Sun Vale is now twice as wide and deep as before, meaning it has 4x as much land mass.

- There are also fewer Ranalan Warriors, because even at 4x larger, having literally 50 frog dudes running at a single target caused the client to freeze up and die

- Also, fixed the 10-second respawn rate on the winter court fey near the Thorn's spawn -- that was a bug. They now respawn at a rate of 8 every 5 minutes, similar to other encounter areas like the ranalan ruin.

- Flowers and trees now spawn across the entire super-sized area, making it a more appropriate challenge to collect tons of them

- Replaced about 1/3 of the randomly-spawning fruit trees with Ferocious Boars, with an occasional Charged Boar or Poison Slug for variety

- Lots of empty space... more content for Sun Vale coming soon!

- NOTE: if you were in Sun Vale when you logged out, you will log in to nothingness, because Sun Vale physically moved. You will fall for a while and then die, horribly. Don't worry if you are Hardcore; your items will not break from this death.

Item Level Requirement Change

tl,dr: items now have higher level requirements. Existing items are unchanged.

When I designed the level requirements for randomly-generated gear, I gave them requirements 10 levels below the intended target. So level 50 items had level 40 requirements, level 20 items had level 10 requirements, etc. The goal was to make it easy to find usable equipment.

This turned out to be very confusing. Players assume that the level requirement is the intended level, so everybody thinks their equipment is crappier than it really is. It also makes looting seem psychologically less impressive because monsters your level drop gear for people 10 levels below you.

New items now have requirements that match the intended level of the abilities on the item. So in general a level 50 item will have level 50 requirements now. The handful of level 55 and 60 items in the game have artificially lowered requirements of 51 or 52.

Existing items are unchanged.

NOTE TO VETERAN PLAYERS: this change may make it hard for newbies to find usable gear. I fudged things a bit at the low levels, but even so, it may be frustrating. (I just don't know yet.) If newbies are having a hard time finding usable gear, please help them out if you can.

Treasure Tier Tweaks

A perfect storm of bug fixes, tweaks, and additions make this a very confusing update for treasure tiers.

tl,dr: your existing items are unchanged, but your Epic and Legendary items will now have a differently colored name when you examine them.</b>

Let's go through the details one by one:

1: Fixed a bug that caused higher-tier loot to be generated too often. Items that were supposed to be a mid-tier like Rare could get unintentionally upgraded to higher tiers like Legendary. This happened when looting elite and boss monsters, as well as special loot chests. Crafted items were not affected by the bug. The ramifications really depend on the exact configuration of each monster. For most monsters the change is so small that it won't be noticeable. For a few bosses, the change will be noticeable: they will drop more blues and greens and less purples and yellows. The good news is that this was a really hard-to-find bug that had to be fixed before we can increase the level cap beyond 50. So we're one step closer to higher level content!

2: We've standardized the exact number of powers each treasure tier had. Previously each tier had a random number of powers, and now it's always the average number. For instance, the tier that had 3-5 powers now always has 4 powers. This was done by player request, because it was very disappointing to get a high-rarity item that had fewer powers than an item of a lower tier. Now every tier has exactly 1 more power than the tier below it. (There are other benefits to higher rarity tiers besides the number of powers, but that's the most obvious thing.)

3: Added a new extremely-rare treasure tier at the top of the rarity list. This one is supposed to only show up once in a while. There are currently no buffs or items that give you a better chance of finding this rarity, and there are no monsters that have a bonus chance -- it's as likely to come from a boss as a from a random skeleton or a crafting recipe. Unfortunately, we already had a rarity level named "Legendary", and it seemed stupid to have a rarity level above "legendary." So I added a new name in the middle, so that the highest tier is still called Legendary. This is just a naming (and coloring) change.

The old rarity names were:

Uncommon (green), Rare (blue), Epic (maroon), Legendary (yellow)

The NEW rarity names are:

Uncommon (green), Rare (blue), Exceptional (purple), Epic (maroon), Legendary (yellow)

Existing items that were Epic or Legendary have become Exceptional and Epic, respectively. This ONLY affects the color of their name when you examine the item. The items' stats are unchanged.

GUI Tweaks

- The vendor window now has a checkbox to hide equipment that you don't meet the skill requirements for

- To avoid disasters, you can no longer drop items on the ground while the storage window is on-screen

- magical items have their correct colored name when viewed in the Sell window

Dungeon Tweaks

- Chests in dungeons can no longer be opened while you're in combat. (This is to help dissuade people from "drive-by looting")

- Fixed many dungeon areas where you could get "outside the dungeon" when knocked back by monsters. There are still a few places where it can happen, but most areas are fixed now. The dungeon that needed the most work was the Serbule Crypt. (It's only 75% fixed because it's the hardest to fix.) Pay attention in the crypt for weirdness that didn't used to be there, like cracks in the seams of the walls!

- reduced the number of monsters wandering in the deep parts of the Dark Chapel dungeon (the shadowed halls and the annexes, not the initial cave section). However, the density is still quite high compared to any other dungeon in the game. The dungeon is still intended for a group of 5 level 50s.

- In the same dungeon: now each section of hallway has a cap on the number of Elite monsters that can spawn there. Quite a few elites can still spawn, but this change prevents ridiculously unwinnable random spawn scenarios.

Monster Changes

- Revised the formula for monster health and armor. This resulted in small changes to every monster's stats. The health change is negligible (just a few percent difference); the armor change lowers the armor of newbie monsters and raises the armor of high level monsters. A typical level 50 animal monster has something like +50 more armor, while monsters that are supposed to be "heavily armored" can have as much as 200 more armor

- Monster's Rage can now go higher than their maximum (up to 50% higher). This fixes various scenarios where monsters couldn't get their Rage attacks off, and makes rage-reduction stats more meaningful

- Fixed a bug in yeti's encase-in-ice ability. They were not actually getting most of their intended resistances, making their ice-cube ability basically suicidal

- Old Fangsworth can now spawn in various different places in the tiger fields, to deter camping

- Khyrulek (in the Serbule Crypt) had become an Elite but did not have shared treasure. She does now. However, I nerfed the chance of dropping The Galvanizer to reduce camping (Khyrulek has to be on a fast respawn because her death activates a portal, but that made her easily campable.) The first time you loot Khyrulek each day you will find a Galvanizer; repeated looting after that has a 25% chance to have a Galvanizer.

- Fixed Elites and Bosses that did not have loot for every player. This includes: The Flower Child, Venenae, Mother Snail, Spiderlord, and a few others.

- Bleddyn the werewolf was supposedly downgraded from "elite" to a "very tough solo" monster a while back, but he had not been informed.

- Fluffy the worm has bulked up to "very tough solo" level as intended

- Lamias are fixed in the deep-cave bits of Dark Chapel (they were not visible at all)

- acid traps and explosion traps can no longer call for help

Misc. Bug Fixes

- shields are now considered weapons for purposes of vendors (meaning that people like Joeh will buy them)

- Bluebell seeds work again

- Malgath did not actually like shields as indicated. (He liked fire staves.) He likes shields now.

- a mix up with the "Apply Hammer Oil" and "Apply Katar Oil" recipes has been fixed

- Stalwart Claws were not correctly marked as claws

- reduced the research requirements of low-level fire magic recipes (e.g. level 5 spells require 1 Fire Dust, not 2)

- skulls were not correctly flagged as body parts for purposes of vending. More vendors will buy them now

- Fixed a scenario where consigned items could be duped after a server shutdown

- Fixed some abilities that did not share reset timers with their own earlier versions

- Fixed more treasure effects