The PTS is in the process of being updated with build 93. The copy of characters from live to the PTS is ongoing... and should be ready by 7:00pm CDT.

Changes:

PVP 1.5!
Let’s face it; our first PvP implementation was less than ideal. Yeah, we know that… and we’re not afraid to say it! We’ve taken a bunch of your feedback and our own expert play testing experiences and whipped up what we feel will be a much better time for everyone! Good times!

“Magical” Rebalancing
During PvP battles, everyone is “magically” rebalanced to make the battles much fairer. Each player will have their health and damage boosted to what it would be for a level 101 player of their build. There are a few things you should keep in mind when thinking about this system:

Matchmaking is MUCH Faster
Hey, now that everyone is “magically” rebalanced to level 101, you don’t have to wait for someone of your level to be on the PvP server to get a match. This means that you will immediately find a match if there’s anyone else waiting for one. Talk about lowering wait times…

Outnumbered? No Problem!
Our “magical” rebalancing system automatically adjusts your damage potential based on how many people are on each team. It’s a pretty simple system that keeps “unbalanced” fights fair. This damage adjustment is clearly explained during the PvP session and changes automatically if folks join or leave a battle. In the most basic terms, the side with more players gets a damage nerf appropriate for how many more players they have.

Skill Ranks and Equipment
We automatically adjust your damage and health based on how your character compares to an “average” character at the same level. So, having terrible equipment and skills that aren’t ranked appropriately for your level will make your level 101 adjustment less powerful. For example, a level 50 mage with rank 1 fire bolt will find that their fire bolt does terrible damage in PvP sessions. The lesson of all this is… keep your skills and equipment upgraded!

Balance Changes
Oh, we didn’t stop adjusting things just because we “magically” rebalanced your character in PvP. No… we also fixed some other annoying and broken things in PvP.

Slow Stacking Limited
We’ve limited the affect of slowing effects. So, you can no longer get slowed so much that you can’t move. Hey, it sounded like a good idea at the time! The most a player can be slowed is 50%!

Resistances Improved
The basis for all magical resistances has been increased in PvP. This means that your resistances will be more effective against opponent attacks during PvP battles. This includes stun resistance as well.

Scoring
Each kill in PvP is now worth 100 points.

Basic Rewards
We feel pretty confident in this pass of PvP… so confident, in fact, that we are now giving a King’s Coin to winners of scored PvP matches. Here’s how it works:

1. Losers don’t get a King’s Coin.

2. Winners may get a King’s Coin, depending on how long the match lasts.

3. If the match lasts the full 7 minutes, winners have a 75% chance to get a King’s Coin.

4. If the match is cut short by cowards then the chance for a King’s Coin is lowered proportionally to the amount of time spent in the match. For example, if the match lasts 3.5 minutes, the chance to get a King’s Coin is 35.5%.

5. The chance to get a King’s Coin is shown once the match is over.

New Skills
We’ve added two new skills this build…

Light in the Loafers
This is an active skill that is quite useful for fighters. When activated, it allows you to move at 100% normal movement speed regardless of any speed de-buffs that are affecting you. This includes “monster molasses” as well as armor speed penalties. This is a great closing skill for fighters in PvP as well as a useful travel and escape skill for anyone that’s being slowed.

Mad Melee Mastery
This passive skill significantly increases melee attack rating at the expense of 20% health. There are several ranks of this skill… each one increasing the attack rating multiplier.

Skill Adjustments
Several balance changes were made to skills this build…

Spirit of the Hare
The chance to lose the speed increase granted by Spirit of the Hare has been reduced to 25% (down from 50%).

Fear of Gosh
Fear of Gosh now required a successful melee attack roll to be effective. When an enemy is affected by Fear of Gosh, their movement rate will be reduced by 50%.

Holy Roller
Holy Roller now requires a successful melee attack roll to be effective. Sorry mages, but this was just too powerful for you in PvP! It has also been changed to a weapon-based cool down skill, making folks with faster attack speeds able to use this skill more often.

Acidic Blight
Acidic Blight has a new visual effect and icon… as well as being considered a “poison” attack for resistance purposes.

Unnerving Shout
Unnerving Shout has a new visual and sound effect… as well as being considered a “divine” attack for resistance purposes.

Ice Bolt
The attack speed de-buff granted by Ice Bolt has been reduced to 20% (down from 40%).

Critical Hits
We’ve added the ability for skill damage to get critical hits! Yes, this means monsters too… Each skill has the potential to get a critical hit based on the whims (and careful thought) of our designers. In general, damage over time skills and area-of-effect skills have a lesser chance to “crit” than single target skills. Having negative resistances to a particular damage type will increase the chance that skills of that damage type will get a critical hit.

More Resistance Changes!
When a skill is resisted now, all of the effects that come from the skill are also resisted. The most notable example of this is ice bolt. If you resist an ice bolt, you will not be slowed by it. This applies to all skills.

Monster Tweaks
We’ve been hard at work making the monsters more effective at killing you. Yeah, we know that’s a mean thing to do… but we’re mean like that!

Fear Effects Added
Some monsters have been given the ability to cause your character to run in fear for a time. Once feared, your character will receive the “Bravery” modifier… making you immune to further fear effects for six times the duration that you were feared. Which monsters do this? We’re not telling…

Resistance Tweaks
With this handy new critical hit system for skill damage, we’ve adjusted the resistances of all monsters in the game. Most monsters are weak to some damage type as well as more resistant to others. It’s not too severe, but you will have to change tactics depending on your opponents in some cases. We’ve also made certain monsters resistant to specific physical damage types, giving melee and ranged players some of the same fun that the magic users get!

Boss Fights Tweaked
We’ve been adjusting some of the boss fights to address some difficulty and coolness issues…

Rotgut
Rotgut has an awesome new bit of theme music!

Abaddon
The resurrection skill that was used against you in previous versions of this fight has been put back in!

Shadow Queen
The Shadow Queen fight has been totally reworked. It’s freaking awesome!

Ratsputin
A terrible exploit was fixed in the Ratsputin boss fight.

New Items
As always, we’ve added a boatload of new items to the game…

Armor
Four totally new armor sets have been added to this build: mythic crystal, bone splint, military splint and another ghost armor variant.

Weapons
A whole slew of two-handed picks and axes have been added to the game… dozens of them.

Amulets
A crazy number of new amulet graphics have been added to the game!

Mythic Items!
Oh my, the number of mythic items has been increased by a good amount. We’ve started adjusting how we make mythic items to help increase variety and power. We’ll continue to do this over the next few builds, but you’ll notice the increase that this change makes right away.

Quests
We’ve added a bunch of new quests to Ratsputin’s Gulag. How many? A bunch!

UI Changes
We’ve been adjusting and fixing issues with the UI…

Modifier List Revamped
We’ve changed how the list of modifiers works to let you see many more modifiers on your character at one time. For the uninitiated, a modifier is a buff or de-buff. Through the magic of code, this list can now display dozens of modifiers at one time.

Current Target Health Bar Moved
Because of the increased capacity of the modifier list, we’ve moved the health bar / name display for your current target to just under the zone name display on the mini map. This will take some getting used to, but it’s a good thing!

Quest Log, Part II
We’ve changed the quest log to ensure that quest text is more readable and that unsightly text clipping no longer occurs.

Scroll Bars Reworked
We’ve swapped out the nasty-looking scroll buttons with scroll bars on each UI screen that could scroll (excluding the chat window).

Bug Fixes
We’ve fixed a tremendous number of little bugs and annoyances with this build. Sure, we didn’t get to them all… but we did fix a bunch!

Memory Leak
A minor, but potentially annoying, memory leak on the client has been fixed this build.

FPS Improvements
We found and fixed a terrible flaw in our graphics engine that allowed particle effects that are not visible to be drawn. This caused up to a 50% frame-rate drop depending on your camera angle in some dungeons (Embercore, anyone?). This change vastly improves the FPS of the game in those areas.

Well, isn't this embarassing? We've just found a bug in the "magical" rebalancing that causes larger groups with nerfed damage to actually do 16 million damage per hit in some cases.

Be aware of this while you're on the PTS. Stick to solo PvP battles unless you like getting killed in one shot.

Build 94 is being cooked now, but won't make it to PTS until Monday... unless a miracle occurs.

steve

the framerate fix definitely helps on those high-particle dungeons, nice work

i can't say i'm happy about the target box being moved to the upper right corner of the mini-map.. top center just feels way more natural.. maybe allow a toggle for this in options?

How are you making the enemies able to kill more effeciently? Im kinda curious.

cant u get the patch for noraml servers really faster like by monday?because it looks great, iv seen no problem and almost no one is playing the pts, so you should get it to normal serverr by monday if u r able too.and whers the trade system?and yeallows for non members?oh by the way the pvp is awnsome, reakky a good job removing those slow efects that make mages like pvp gods

There are normally only a small number on the test servers. Those of us that play on there do so to try and find bugs, in the past a few major bugs have been found. I am sure they will get this build to the live server as soon as they feel that it is stable and ready for everyone to play.

As for your other questions ... werent they answered like an hour ago by Ripper in another post?

So these changes and I dont get crap that helps me. This is why I canceled my account I'm not getting what I want to see and the content is just plain old hat after a month. There is alot of people who get tired of doing the same thing in game and it would go a long way to keeping old players and getting new ones (paying members) if they added interesting content and stopped wasting time on usless crap like pvp

PvP is useless?

Well that is your opinion, you may dont like PvP, but a lot people do and obviously, the devs have to cover all the aspects. Besides that, PvP is, at least, even more with the new changes,where lv 100 char can test all the time they spent training their char,

2 Notices on Shadow's Pinnacle.

Me and someone else noticed that the platform where the Shadow Queen is on doesnt appear at the minimap, If I remember correct that doesnt happends in the old pinnacle.

And also the creatures there except the shadow queen seem to show no loot if you mouse-over them, they only get damage and health, and also the difficulty improves the creatures on that areas, and not the loot, I dont know if thats what it should be because it costs some effort to kill them.
And also, Imo, the amount of loot dropped by The Shadow Queen could be a bit more, as it costs quite some effort to get there and there doesnt drop loads of stuff, Like for example Abbadon.

One more notice, Better change the skill picture of Acidic blight at the main website in that one picture, it shows the old one hehe

I like what I've seen so far... particularly, the heavier riff at Rotty.

My obeservation has more to do with the "poisoned" auras.
Turning green when poisoned is/was a great inidicator, and after awhile you begin to figure out the color codes.

If it's mauve, it's been blighted, green poisoned, etc. Heck! even when there's multiple nasties you can still of tell what stacks have been thrown on him when he's dark from multiple curses/poison.

On PTS the acid blight and poison blight use the same, if not, very similar green gas effect at the mobs' feet. It's not so easy to tell anymore if a mob's been blighted or poisoned. Perhaps adding a little icon overhead, like when you've been hamstrung could help differentiate between the 2, or a different color of gaseous aura for blight.

Then again, if acid blight is considered poison, maybe it shouldn't have a different effect at all.

The other observation is that, on a fatty like Rotgut, the poisoned aura seems to get lost under his rather large butt.

"...for once his large butt prevented the release of toxic gas"
- Bart Simpson



Edited by Babblethrog (10/07/07 04:02 PM)

Goofed around on test for a few mintues tonight just to check out the new location for the Target Box. I must say that I love it! No more mixing up my health with that of the enemy and thinking "MAN! This guy is dropping way too fast!". That was my biggest complaint of the game. Well. My not paying close attention was the biggest complaint.

Good work so far boss. If you are ever in the Jacksonville, Fl area, coffee on me.

coffee?? you would have a better chance saying open bar for 2 hours

Hi all Dazzi-100 ranger enjoying the game still and plan to keep playing for awhile yet.

Should make one thing clear and well you can yell and scream all you like but my only concern is end game content. Nothing else means any thing to me at all so sorry to any one under lvl 100.

Well the patch..pvp changes seems good thou i don't bother to pvp much really maybe i will more later. Less waiting is always a good thing.

The PP nerf was not a good idea in fact i think any thing that reduces level 100's desire to keep playing as a bad thing. Should have not removed the % damage terrible idea, removing the END was enough to slow rangers down a bit especially seeing as abby got tougher.

Abby was a bit too easy so i won't complain that he was ubered up a little.

This is a fact for current level 100's -
Shadow queen is fun sure but level 100 groups will not be running it because for the time it takes the end reward is too poor. If bosses like SQ and Ratz gave much better return than you would see more level 100's doing it until then you will not see us bother.

Removing the glitch from ratz was pointless as all he is good for is kings coins. Thou it obviously had to be fixed.

The HP bar is already being fixed so good-o

In the end of the day the changes to abby made no difference to groups of level 100's only really made a difference to solo'ing him which was slower than grouping any way just gave us some thing to do while waiting on other 100's to log on.

So in short
pvp change = good
PP nerf = absolutely horrible idea and will probably cause a lot of long term level 100's to leave.
Abby buff = Annoying but what ever
Shadow Queen = 100's won't go near her unless bored out of our heads.
Ratsputin = Not fussed

Have to agree with Dazzi on the PP nerf. And not just because my alt is a ranger. Bogey loves his PP and yes I know that sounds wrong in so many ways:)

Only other thing I noticed on the move of the hp bar. To me it looks like it was moved a little to far right. It's kinda stuck under the mini-map or so it seems to me. May just be my resolution I'll check later to nite when I get home from work.

Gary

The change to the PP wasn't really a nerf although I know why every ranger feels it was. The PP had double the attribute points as any other level 100 weapon. Realize that the level 100 PP has +444 (or more depending on its tier) where every 2H melee weapon only had +222. This was one reason why a level 100 ranger in the past wouldn't be able to match to a level 100 fighter in PVP. It was to much of a boost for the ranger and was an unfair advantage due to a code error. All they did was bring it in align with every other level 100 weapon.

i have purps that absolutely own the pp in test now joe. PP is an instant sell RB as far as i'm concerned. It was overpowered for sure thou can't deny that.

Not quite sure if I agree with you, the PP should still have higher +attributes than a purple given that it is the same level. The rest depends on if it fits your build or if you are going to specific modifiers like most high levels do.

still waiting to see gear that is better than the best you can get currently. once you get the best of what you are looking for what else is there to do? Yes as everyone else does level another toon.

To be clear, this isn't Chunk #2...and now that we have pvp, it is important to fine tune it and make sure it is something all pvpers would enjoy playing.

Please, test it out, and give us your feedback. As you guys may have noticed, feedback goes a long way around here

Well i havn't tested it but i think that to make PvP more appeling you should add other types of play and not only the common deathmatch, maybe something like Monster Killing Contest to see who kills more monsters, or Capture XXXX (not the flag, flag is too common, something more fun according to the game) or a Survival, of course you have to add bigger dungeons for PvP but i think a bigger diversity would attract more players.

I think vanilla pvp should be left in, one with no mods or team making. Where one group fights the other group type thing.

How 'bout an "every man for himself, cage, death match"?

I do find it funny that you are asking for a handful or more formats when you are luck if there are 50 people on the server to begin with. Maybe more formats would bring more people over there but also a chance that it would just dilute the number of people you had to fight.

What about a trade system?? When are we going to be able to have private trade windows instead of dropping stuff on the ground???

Search is your friend

This link too

Trade wasn't promised in this content patch. Next chunk possibly.

I for one am a paying member because it is one of the few online game that is solo friendly and is fun to play. I like guild war but it's too cooperative play oriented and too many things like crafting etc. I doubt I'll ever play PVP so I would appreciate more effort and energy put into making the world bigger and better, more quests, items, dungeons, etc.
Thanks.

The one, well known exploit in Ratsputin was fixed, but I found another one today. I verified that it works on both live and test. After verification, I sent an email to JayJack explaining it. While it's not as egregious an exploit as the other one, I think it's an exploit, nonetheless...