Build 90 is coming to PTS shortly. It fixes several issues with 88 and 89. This one looks like the one that's going to go live early next week! Come help us test it out!

Changes:

The duration of all fear effects have been reduced by 30% in PvP.

A new fear resistance passive skill has been added to the game. It's called "Banner of Foolish Bravery" and can be purchased from Lothar in Townston.

The Bravery modifier that players get after being feared has been adjusted. It now begins as soon as the player is feared, providing immunity from other fear effects earlier than before. This stops the insidious and unbalanced strategy of chaining fear indefinitely. Because of it's earlier start, Bravery's duration has been increased to 600% of the duration of the fear effect, up from 500%.

Fear Shot is no longer a weapon-based cooldown skill. It's cooldown is now 7 seconds, regardless of the weapon used.

The basis of all magic damage resistances in PvP have been increased to 30%, up from 20%.

Players can no longer stun each other with normal damage or critical hits in PvP.

The respawn dialog has been modified to auto-accept respawning after a player has been dead for 30 seconds. This stops a cheezy technique in PvP that allows a player to avoid fighting and stall game progress.

Group vs. Group Deathmatch now gives remaining time updates every minute of the battle. The 15 second reminders for the last minute have been removed.

Some bugs with the Tomb of Sickness have been fixed. These bugs would allow the player to potentially become invisible and uncontrollable in some situations.

A bug was fixed with the PvP matchmaking system that allowed woefully imbalanced matches to be created. Also, the maximum power difference between groups is now 10%, down from 15%.

Righetous Stomp now does magical damage and, as such, it now benefits from divine damage modifiers.

A bug with point & click movement has been fixed. This bug caused the player's character to convulse terribly in some situations.

A bug with knockback and knockdown effects has been fixed. This bug caused the player's character to show the improper animation state in some cases.

A bug with chests sometimes not generating loot has been resolved.

Merchants, skill trainers and the bankers now always show their available quests after the options to use their special functions. This will stop players from having to scroll down to access the bank, merchant or trainer if there are a ton of quests on them.

A sync error that could occur at the end of a PvP session has been fixed.

A bug that allowed for permanent Bravery and / or Fear has been fixed.

We've enabled all self-buff skills (except Teleport) to be used in Townston.

well, it appears that with divine stomp, divine ascendancy still doent affect it, but mental prowess does.

Stephen was on the PVP test world Friday evening and was pretty optimistic that this build (.90) would go to the live servers on Tuesday of this coming week. As usual that date is not official...at all.

If more people would play on the test servers....

PVE is outstanding, LOTS of new stuff. +75 dungeon is going to be a nice new place for exp gain. I've played through the whole thing plus the boss encounter but I won't give away any spoilers.

PVP will probably need some adjusting but for an initial pass it's pretty good.

The stuff on PTS seems fine to me. In fact, Since I run Vista, I've sort of been banished to the PTS area, since the production client doesn't run stably on my system. The PTS stuff, though, runs great. Admittedly, though, I'm not the least bit interested in the PvP stuff.

I hope it goes to production soon, since all the stuff I've worked on in PTS won't make it to production.