Game updates/2015-07-28

July 28 Update

Tutorial Cave Tweaks

The tutorial cave wasn't really set up to deal with this many newbies at once! (That's a good problem, to have, though!) With this many newbies, the skeletons in the cave are often dead when players run by. That means they don't get important starting gear or XP.

Eventually we'll need a more robust newbie experience, but for now, here's a quick fix. New players will find a sack of equipment next to Yurra the hag. It's in the chamber right at the exit of the cave. This sack has some random newbie gear. It's pretty crappy gear, but it will at least let you survive a fight against common livestock! There's also a note to guide newbies as to what to do next.

It's still a good idea to kill a dozen or so skeletons before leaving the newbie cave, but if it's too crowded, or if you're just unlucky in getting equipment, the sack should help. (If you've already left the newbie cave, don't worry, you can go back! The sack will be there.)

New Level 40s Solo Dungeon

There is a new dungeon in Kur Mountains. You can find the entrance in the big crevice full of yetis. This is a dungeon for solo play: the first parts of the dungeon should be soloable by players in their low 40s, and the entire dungeon should (theoretically) be soloable by players in their mid-to-high 40s, after they've found some 40s-level gear in the dungeon.

High-Level Armor Changes

Many higher-level players report that their armor isn't useful to them anymore -- it depletes too quickly during the fight. The problem seems to come from gear -- way too much high-level gear restored Health and very little restored Armor. It should really be the other way around.

So we've changed many treasure effects of the form "<some attack> restores X health" to now restore armor instead. Not all such effects were changed, but more than half of them were.

This will definitely screw up some players' builds (because they will now run out of Health before they run out of Armor, and will thus die faster). This is especially true if you've treated Armor as a "dump stat". But there are several benefits to this change. Since your Armor bar will stay full longer, you will have more mitigation throughout the fight. So if you have high Max Armor, you'll take significantly less total damage during the fight!

This change also makes healing skills (and the "healer" role in groups) more useful, and it makes food more useful too.

Just to clarify: this change is not intended to "balance" any particular skill -- some equipment is definitely overpowered, but that's not what we're trying to fix here. This was a "bulk" change -- a somewhat ham-fisted change -- whose only goal was to make Armor more important in combat. We'll have to see if it does the job or if other changes are needed. In any case, bear with us, we'll refine things as we go forward!

(There were some unrelated buffs/nerfs/tweaks to skills, though -- see the full list below.)

Other Skill Changes

- Modestly reduced the Max Power earned by most combat skills after level 35 (they now give +1/level instead of +2/level). Skills with specialized advancement curves (like lycanthropy and fire magic) are unaffected

- Necromancy Orbs no longer reduce the Power costs of Necromancy abilities. (They have other buffs instead, such as small damage boosts.)

- Improved effectiveness of Patch Armor abilities, and put them all on the same reset timer as intended

- Tweaked the stock attributes of some equipment. Most notably, Elven and Orcish equipment got better

- Added two new lucky belts for Ice Magic (as random loot on high-level monsters), plus a new toolcrafting recipe for a solo-skill Ice Magic belt

- Fixed a bug with Life Steal equipment. The equipment mods were being enhanced by Necromancy base-damage-boosting gear. (Only the ability's base damage should be enhanced by base-damage-boost gear.)

- Life Steal now has a 3 second reset instead of a 2 second reset

- There were too many Psychology treasure effects that slowed movement speed, making it way too easy to stack them up and immobilize foes. Some of these effects have been replaced with entirely new effects that do entirely new things.

- Fixed the Aimed Shot Oil, which applied a low-level version of the effect instead of a high-level version

- Added 20 new Fire Magic treasure effects

- Boosted the damage of various miscellaneous attacks: Spore Bomb, Explosion Sigil, Fish Gut, Poison Blade, Organ Displacement, Stake the Heart

- Several equipment effects were supposed to heal the player but actually healed the enemy. These have been fixed

Other Changes

- You can now sit in chairs!

- A few of the beds in Serbule can now be correctly laid down in. (The rest haven't been converted yet, and still use the old "you have to sit on them" method.)

- Fixed bad specular maps that caused "white dots" in Eltibule (I may have missed some; if you see any, please screen shot them for me!)

- Since some players thought the "white dots" were fireflies, I added "real" fireflies that show up in the early evening in Eltibule. Just for fun

- Worked around Unity bugs causing "black screen of death" where nothing rendered unless you lowered the graphics settings. Most common location would have been Eltibule region

- Adjusted lighting at night

- Day/night cycle is now 120 minutes long (instead of 90 minutes). Just another experimental data point, feedback desired!

- Added lamps and torches to cities. These aren't automatic -- players have to maintain them. But a few NPCs in Serbule will tend to a few of the lights. (For instance, Sir Coth will light the lamps at the front gate of Serbule.)

- Improved the loot drops for Preserved Corpses in the Kur Tower dungeon. (They now drop level 40 loot.)

- Cacti now give foraging XP (note: they are temporarily sharing spawn spots with dragon wyrms, so if you can't find any, it's because you need to kill more wyrms.)

- Improved framerate a bit when Tundra Spikes is used

- The slash key now puts you into chat mode and types "/" for you. (You can remap this, or un-map it, in the configuration, if you want to use / for something else.)

- In groups with round-robin loot permission, players that are far away from the corpse are skipped in the loot rotation

- Fixed bugs where players who went AFK playing instruments (or dancing) would look like they were standing around idly to new players that logged in