Changes

== May 23 Update ==

:- You can't easily unselect things, only change the selection

:- The new healing sound effect is super loud and can be heard from anywhere

:<b>Reminder: if you see weird black blobs instead of trees:</b> this is a bug with a recent NVIDIA driver update; we're still unsure which specific cards are affected. We've heard that you can fix it by switching from full-screen to windowed mode or vice versa (it's an option in the Config window), then restarting the game. Once it's fixed, you can switch back to the mode you prefer.

:The in-game camera has been rewritten to fix some persistent bugs and issues. The camera should no longer clip through walls, and it should no longer jump around when other players bump into it. It also behaves slightly differently in different scenarios -- it's entirely new code, after all -- so please play with it for a while, give yourself a little while to get used to it, and then let us know what you think.

:Two things to be aware of:

:- The "Mouse Avatar Turn Speed" variable (also in Mouse and Movement Parameters) has also been reset.

:There is a new signboard near the entrance to the enclosed keep in Serbule (near the vendor stalls). You can post a request at this sign asking other players to provide you with certain items and set a price you will pay them for those items. For instance, you could place an order for 50 pieces of Oak Wood at a price of 1000 coins. Your 1000 coins will be deducted immediately.

:Any player can visit the sign and look through the orders. If they complete an order, they immediately receive the payment, and the items are mailed to you. If nobody completes your work order within a week, the order is canceled and your money is refunded (minus a small fee, of course).

:There's a bit more to the system, but hopefully the game explains everything else that you need to know ... so please try it out and see if you have problems. Note that at this time, you don't earn XP for completing these work orders, unlike NPC-provided work orders. (I couldn't think of any way to give out XP that wouldn't be trivially exploitable by someone with a few alt accounts. But if you have ideas please post them on the forums for discussion!)

:We've been trying for a while to resolve a nasty bug: monsters were able to "see through walls" in many situations. This was not intentional, and proved hard to fix, so the entire monster-visibility system has been rewritten to correct it. Monsters should not see you through walls anymore.

:However: I should explain about monster "hearing". Monsters can only see your character if there's a clear line of sight between you and the monster. BUT monsters can HEAR through walls, and that part is intentional. When you see an "!" icon over a monster's head, it means it has shouted for help and one or more monsters heard it. So it's not a bug if monsters run to help during a fight. But it IS a bug if you aren't in combat and monster just rushes out of some room and attacks you.

:(Speaking of exploits: there are still a couple of visibility bugs that were reported before and haven't been fixed yet, such as one that involves shape-changing "into the middle of a wall". Using these older bugs is also considered abusing an exploit. We know about them and they will be fixed when we can, but in the mean time we need you to test for things we don’t know about. In short: please don't be a dick.)

:Guilds can now undertake quests -- communal tasks where everybody in the guild can chip in. The guild can only undertake one guild quest at a time, and no more than 3 guild quests per week. An NPC who starts a guild quest will have a Guild Quests option on the left-hand side of the NPC window. If you decide the quest is too hard, you can cancel it from the guild sign in Serbule or Rahu, under "Misc Settings."

:Note that you will need to have the right permissions to accept guild quests on behalf of the guild. You will also need the right permissions to cancel guild quests. Both of these permissions default to guild ranks 9 and 10 but can be changed (assuming you have the right permissions to change permissions, of course).

:Note that Guild Credits are tied to the guild, so if you leave your guild you lose any unspent credits.

:There are three versions of each guild quest: a 10-person version, a 25-person version, and a 50-person version. Those numbers are just a guide ... the idea is that if you have 50 guild mates helping out on the 50-person quest, it'll be a piece of cake. But if you have only twenty people helping, it'd take a long time. Similarly, a 10-person quest will be very easy for 10 people, and a slow slog for only one person.

:You're free to choose whichever version you want, regardless of the number of people in your guild. But a few pointers:

:- Nelson Ballard: This guild quest does not yet have any follow-up quest.

:Guilds can now enforce two "membership requirements" on all guild members: Hardcore Death Penalty and Permanent Animal Form. These settings can be "Allowed", "Disallowed", or "Required". Requiring either of these grants a bonus to earned Guild Credits from guild quests, but the bonus really doesn't really make up for the hardship … unless you wanted to play that way anyway.

:New guild members cannot be recruited into the guild unless they meet the requirements. And if guild members STOP meeting the requirements, there are penalties to the entire guild until the situation is corrected:

:A key purpose of this feature is to help players find like-minded guild mates. When we eventually have guild-advertising in game, players will be able to filter by these types of requirements.

:There are some new additions to the minotaur lair under the Ilmari desert. These additions are very bare-bones, like the rest of the dungeon, and there are some unused rooms and lots of little things I intend to add later. But :I hope that it's already an entertaining place for the highest-geared players.

:The first part of the new area is for level 60s and should be comparable to the rest of the dungeon in difficulty, but with more hegemonic storage chests than the first part has. (Oh and the old area has one new chest.)

:- The lowest-level monsters and chests can occasionally drop a gem called "Vervadium". This is akin to Winterprize, but for level 70 crafting recipes - which are not in game yet. You can of course save it for later, or you can use it as fluorite in existing crafting recipes. Or, if you are Like Family with the Sand Seer, you can trade your Vervadium to her in exchange for two pieces of Winterprize.

:- The Winter Nexus dungeon has been revised a bit. This level 50 group dungeon now has actual group monsters in it! There are a reduced number of weaker monsters and the respawn rate has been slowed. In addition, mining :Winterprize now requires the blood of the fae creatures that live in this dungeon, which is a relatively common item drop, especially from the elite ones. The intention of this change is to prevent players from running past monsters to loot the chests. You're supposed to kill the monsters!

:- A new named elite monster has been added to the back end of the Winter Nexus; it can drop a quest item needed by one of the new guild quests

:- The Necromancy altar in the Serbule crypt has been removed. You now receive the skill after killing Khyrulek's True Form.

:- The "foul air" debuff found in some dungeons now increases ability cost by +3 instead of +4, and it cannot stack with itself (which was only possible in weird situations anyway).

:Boss monsters (and many named elite monsters) now have one set of loot when you kill them the first time and a different set of loot if you kill them again within 3 hours. (This is very similar to how Asterion already worked, but with different code internally.) The first loot profile is generally beefed up from before, while the second one is reduced from before. The point of this change is to make bosses more rewarding without having to "camp" them :-- and to discourage camping in general because it causes flow bottlenecks and unnecessary group contention.

:See the forum version of the patch notes for a full list of changed bosses.

Some of the oldest treasure effects had stopped being compelling and become nuisances; they've been revised as follows:

:- "Power Regeneration (Out of Combat) +12" => "Power from Combat Refresh Abilities +12"

:Also related: The chances of these "generic" effects showing up on Epic and Legendary treasure items has been reduced. (The chances were too high due to how it was being calculated.)

:The sort button is a bit more nuanced and (hopefully) more useful. Equipment comes first -- for each equipment slot, gear is sorted by rarity, then cash value, with worn items always listed first and broken items always last. :Non-equipment comes after and is organized into over 60 different categories (such as "barbed arrows" or "armor patch kits" or "crystals" or "skulls"). In each category, items are sorted by base value, with identical types of items always placed next to each other. Larger stacks should come before smaller stacks of the same item.

:The code has been completely rewritten so that I can rapidly adjust the sort order based on your feedback about how things should be ordered. So if you have opinions, please send them in! And of course, this is all new code, so if you see it working differently than described above, then it's buggy and you should report it.

:(PS: The ability to sort storage containers is on the to-do list! I just haven't finished it yet.)

:This update re-fixes the "negative regeneration" bug that was fixed in March 8 update and then partially UN-fixed in the April 13 update. The bug caused monsters and pets to take double damage from indirect damage sources (such as damage-over-time effects, delayed-damage explosions, etc.). This time, players were not taking double damage from DoTs, but monsters and pets were.

:One notable side-effect of this bug was that bears could insta-kill pets. Bears' rage attack is "crush half to death", which reduces your current health by 50%. When you double that ... the pet probably dies.

:This bug made players' DoT abilities twice as effective as intended, and many high-level players use DoTs. This meant that our data-metrics on combat for the past six weeks were tainted by the bug and not useful. Without good data, I decided to postpone changes to monster/skill/ability/treasure balancing (except for what had already been implemented -- e.g. the druid changes noted below). We'll gather new data over the next few weeks before making more changes to combat.

:Pig was one of the earliest animal forms and it has undergone many experiments as we tried to figure out how animal forms were supposed to work. At different points it's been a tank, a "scavenger" skill with low-combat capabilities, and a crowd-controller. None of the experiments were very successful, and none of them were fully cleaned up, so the pig's skills and equipment were a chaotic mix of random stuff, making it very hard to create fun :Pig builds. This update attempts to refocus the pig and clean up all of the old experiments.

:Pig is now a support skill that shines in groups. In many ways the pig feels like an "animal bard", filling in whatever is missing from the group (except tank). In small groups the pig can be a healer/damager with emergency crowd control; in larger groups the pig's unique buffs become quite potent. The pig has only mediocre damage capabilities - enough to solo, but nothing to brag about - but it is pretty sturdy and can be hard to kill, especially given its penchant for deflecting aggro onto the group's tank.

:- Norbert in Animal Town can raise your Pig skill cap to 60.

:These changes came about as part of some bug fixes. Testing the fixes led to other stuff that hadn't been properly cleaned up, which led to some loot tweaking. This is not a balance pass per se, although a few particularly unexciting treasure effects were rewritten because they bothered me. (I've grown dissatisfied with most treasure effects that have a "chance to apply" a buff on a 30-second cooldown ability -- it's too hard to plan around that sort of thing, and feels too unpredictable. So expect to see most of those phased out over time.)

:Here’s the fixed and changes:

:- Fixed a bunch of Druid treasure effects that only buffed the druid instead of buffing the actual target(s).

This skill is right in the middle of a lot of changes - a.ka. experiments - right now. For the moment, there is a new ability called Lock Target. This is a basic attack that is automatically learned at level 3 and automatically upgraded at 14, 24, 35, and 44. It does a little bit of damage and also "taunts" your pet onto the target of your choice. (In other words, the pet will switch targets and attack what you told it to attack until something else damages it enough or taunts it away.) This overrides the pet's combat mode, so even if they are in passive mode, this will cause them to attack the target. (It doesn't change the combat mode, though - it just sort of ignores it. :Like I said, it's an experiment!) There are also a few small tweaks to pet AI, but nothing super exciting yet.

:- GUI improvement: when you examine an item, its built-in properties are white and any enchantments or augments are green. This should help newbies understand how gear works a little easier and help experienced players compare two pieces of gear more efficiently.

:- Fixed a bug with training dummies that could keep you from regenerating health if you stood near them.

:- Treasure that claimed to boost "Healing from Misc. Player Abilities" did not work for any abilities and was confusing and dumb. This effect has been rewritten to be "Healing Received from Major Healing Abilities".

:- Worked around Unity 5.3 bug with path-mapping (which caused right-click-move to sometimes only move you a few inches forward and then stop).

:- Mr. Squeaky now drops his tiara, rather than it spawning near him. (It only drops when you have the quest to retrieve it.)

:- Mr. Squeaky's defenses have been nerfed. (But he's still Evasive, and his psi blasts are as dangerous as ever.)