Realm of the Mad God Exalt News

Realmers!

Imagine you are in the desert...how will you deal with all the sand? Why not prepare yourselves with an event?

[h3]Below the Sands [/h3]

The event will be running for 2 weeks, until May 16th, 9AM UTC, and will include the following dungeons:

The Ancient Ruins features the Found Treasure Mod + 1.5x Loot and EXP.
The Undead Lair features the Stat Pod Mod + 1.5x Loot and EXP.
The Tomb of the Ancients features the Stat Mod Pod + an Chest Event
The Lair of Draconis features the Loot Boost Mod + an Chest Event

Find out more on our blog.

Realmers!

Last week you were able to get a first look at our upcoming Realm Rework. Thank you, everyone, who provided feedback and had a look at the blog post. This weekend we are going to have a first look at one of our new upcoming features “Enchantments” and the new one-room dungeon “The Tavern”. Keep in mind that especially Enchantments are in a very early stage and we mainly test the functionality of the feature. You will find portals in the Nexus to the new dungeon.

As always feel free to provide any kind of feedback on our social channels and the dedicated testing channel in the discord. But now time for the Designers to tell you more about the features. You can find all the details on our blog.

Realmers!
Easter and its events are coming to an end. We had a full month of Events and a community campaign and it's now time to move forward with the next update. You already tested some of the changes coming up to Realm of the Mad God, like the O3 changes and Moonlight Villages adjustments. Additionally, our newest STs for the Priest and Ninja now drop from specific dungeons. To celebrate this we are hosting events in them. The April Fool Skins will be removed with this update.

For a full overview of the changes, have a look at our blog post.

Realmers,

For years many of you have been requesting and anticipating a major reconstruction to the realms and we are glad to officially announce that 2023 is finally the year of the Realm Rework! Today will be the first time we share information about it as well as having our first PT to get some early feedback on some of the new systems that will be involved. Not everything mentioned within this post will be available for the first playtest but we would still like to hear your thoughts as they will be part of future sessions.

Tl;DR:

1. New mechanics such as Realm Score, Beacons, Combat Power, and Dungeon difficulties.
   
2. Improved sprite art for older enemies.
   
3. New maps with brand-new biomes, enemies, and rewards.
   
4. Only Realm Score, Beacons, and some of the upgraded enemy sprites will be available to players on this first playtest, the map that exists is just a prototype for this testing session.
   
5. Leave as much feedback as you can! We want to make sure we get this right.
   
6. Things are still very early (especially for this initial PT) so as always, things may still be subject to change.
   

This rework intends to correct several issues with the current realm:

1. The current maps are 90% wasted space to most players.
   
2. The current realm lacks variety within biome thematics
   
3. The current maps cannot be edited and new maps cannot be added to the pool.
   
4. Some of our easiest content is found in the same location as our hardest content both without any way for us or the player to differentiate.
   
5. Low-population realms are a painful experience for traveling around the map.
   
6. Lack of progression past the Godlands
   
7. Outdated and disconnected art style from most of the new aspects of the game.
   

With these core issues identified, we came up with the following goals for us to achieve so that the realm rework can be the best that it can be.

1. Create a more linear gameplay experience.
   
2. Allow space for expansion.
   
3. Create better theming and variety through game balance and biome placement.
   
4. More reasons to play in the realm!
   

Now with that out of the way, on to the new stuff. As part of the Realm Rework, we will be introducing brand new realm maps for the first time in 13 years. Additionally, we will be introducing new mechanics to streamline the realm experience.

[h3]The Realm[/h3]



Prototype and Map Key of New Realm #1

As you can see in the above example, we have removed the old structure of the map in order to make better use of the 2048x2048 space. Rather than the highest level area (godlands) being centralized on the map, we have created a new map with a more linearized progression scale. The 3 core regions of the new realm are the Rookie, Adept, and Veteran regions. Within each of these regions have their own unique biomes and milestones for the player to reach

Rookie Region: This area is basically what our current realm is condensed to about 1/4th of the size, primary goals for this area are to achieve level 20 and get a small introduction to stat potions

Adept Region: This area can be thought of as a revamped 'godlands', but rather than just have one biome it is made up of multiple with their own unique enemies, rewards, and encounters. Goals here are for maxing 4-6/8 of your stats

Veteran Region: This area is where players will commonly find things of epic dungeon difficulties and above. Additionally in this region is where players will find exaltation encounters and increased power level adept region dungeons. Essentially, this is a high level area meant for farming harder content.

[h3]Beacons[/h3]



As you traverse through the many biomes, players may come across a “biome beacon” . Activating these beacons serves as permanent progression for everyone that joins that Realm and will allow players to freely teleport to different areas of the realm without requiring another player to be in the location.

[h3]Equipment Power levels[/h3]



I'm sure many long time players have seen a newer player finally reaching level 20 just to get an Avatar of the Forgotten king quest and immediately die due to being undergeared. To assist with guiding players towards content that is more appropriate to their level we are introducing a new feature called “Combat Power”. Combat Power is a numerical value derived from both your stats as well as your gear. Based on your combat level you will be assigned quests that are most appropriate to your level, as well as other future use cases that we are not ready to share.
Dungeon Difficulties

Dungeon difficulties are a new feature we will be introducing to stretch the life time of dungeons in a player's journey. For example, you may find the Undead Lair you are used to in the Haunted Hallows biome, but additionally you may find an even higher level Undead Lair in the Sanguine Forest. These increased versions of dungeons can have high damage, defense, xp gain, loot %, as well as new and exclusive loot to dungeons depending on their difficulty levels.


Realm Score



The final major shift from the old realm to the new realm is a change in how players progress and close the realm. For this we are introducing a mechanic known as realm score. Everything you do in the realm will grant Realm Score and contribute to closing the realm. Killing encounters and heroes will still grant the most Realm Score overall but if someone just feels like vibing out in the Shipwreck Cove hunting for a new biome UT, they can do so while still contributing to the overall goals of the realm.

Conclusion

This is all we are able to share at this point, but we hope it starts giving you an idea of what we aim for the Realm Rework to be. This weekend we will be running a PT on just the Realm Score and Beacons (as well as some tests on the backend), and we would appreciate it if you could hop in the realm and try it out! Although only these two parts will be part of the first pt, please make sure to leave feedback on everything you’ve read here as well on the #testing-feedback channel of the Official RotMG discord so we can make sure this Realm Rework is as successful as can be.

Realm Community

Depending on where you live in the world Easter is right in front of you. That's the perfect time to have a look at upcoming O3 changes on our testing environment, right? Right!

In order to test these changes, you will be able to jump into Oryx Sanctuary via portals in the Nexus. New ones spawn every 90 seconds.

The Testing Servers will open its gates on the 7th of April. We announce it once it opens on discord.

Let's have a look at some Designer notes and the changes to O3:

[h3]Oryx 3 Adjustments[/h3]

The Oryx 3 fight has shown a lot of issues as time progressed, generally, as time goes on we expect bosses to get more optimized. Oryx 3 however has in some cases been optimized to the point where the boss is incapable of attacking for the majority of the fight. The primary culprit of this is the counter/stagger system, as it currently exists dealing enough damage quick enough will instantly cancel any attack Oryx is doing and force him into a reset. Coupled with many instances where O3 is vulnerable to damage while not doing anything and you can blow away most of the fight with Oryx barely shooting a single bullet. The following changes should keep the majority of the fight intact while still rewarding good gameplay and patching up a lot of the above issues.

The O3 counter/stagger system has been fully retooled, now instead of getting the counter or stagger at the end of an attack, O3 will fully complete all of the attacks in a combo chain. When you hit a certain threshold of damage in each phase, o3 will go invulnerable for the remainder of the attack and add to a tally of times the threshold was reached in the combo, at the end of the combo O3 will enter a stagger state with a duration depending on how many of these thresholds were reached over the course of the combo.

The thresholds have been normalized to 2.5% for all O3 attacks, this is not a final value but was chosen to hopefully allow well-played solos to still hit these thresholds on occasion. Additionally, if a stagger happens near the end of one of the O3 phases (roughly every 20% hp) it will allow you to cut into the next phase by up to 5% of O3 max health, thereby speeding up the subsequent phase and not wasting a stagger that happens too close to that hp threshold.

O3 also no longer can roll combos with only 2 attacks, the new chances are 50% 4 attacks 25% 3 attacks 25% 5 attacks. Additionally, the chances for further Celestial phases in the fight have been changed, previously the phase had a 4% chance to trigger instead of any attack except the first one in a combo, if this continued into the new system it would interrupt a currently going on combo and reset the stagger counter. Instead, it now has a 15% chance to occur when Oryx is picking a new combo, but it cannot trigger twice in a row, or as the first combo after heavens.

Counters have been entirely removed from the fight.

Invulnerability has been added to the windows at the start of attacks and between combos as O3 is resetting to the center. This should cut down on the “free” damage windows present in the fight as they had previously been contributing to the fight being steamrolled in higher dps groups.
As always, feel free to leave feedback on our social channels.