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Update Notes: June 20, 2018

Catalog Golems


You can now find Catalog Golems in the hall of player-run shops in Serbule Keep! These adorable little constructs will be happy to search the player vendors for specific items on your behalf, and let you know which shops have what you need.

The golems can't tell you how much the price is, and they don't deliver the goods, but they also don't demand tips. So stop by and take advantage of this free service today!


Augment-Installation Services


Some NPCs can now install Augments for you! By using one of these NPCs, you do not need to have learned the various Augment Installation recipes from Nightshade. Learning Nightshade's recipes will eventually be a cost-savings for max-level players who do a lot of augment-installing, but at the current max level of 70, most players will find it cheaper to just use these NPCs.

The following NPCs can install Augments for you:
  • Joeh in Serbule can install level 0-20 Augments for 50 Councils.
  • Kalaba in Eltibule can install level 21-40 Augments for 250 Councils.
  • Urzab in Amulna can install level 41-60 Augments for 650 Councils.
  • Rick Snapley in Gazluk can install level 61-80 Augments for 1000 Councils.
  • Torgan in Gazluk can install level 61-80 Augments for 900 Councils. You must know Orcish.
  • Preta in Sun Vale can install level 0-50 Augments for 350 Councils. You must be Close Friends or better.
  • Tyler Green in Serbule Hills can install level 0-25 Augments for free. You must be Friends or better.
  • Amutasa in Rahu can install level 0-70 Augments for 650 Councils. You must be Friends or better.
  • Nightshade in Kur can install level 0-100 Augments for 2000 Councils.


Skill Changes


These changes are a continuation of our DoT (Damage-over-Time) ability revamps. We are now mostly finished with the conversion, except for a few DoTs with special behavior that can't be converted. Those handful of unique DoTs will use the older system for the foreseeable future. (And of course we may have missed some or made mistakes!)

Archery
  • Treasure: Mangling Shot deals 330 Trauma damage over 10 seconds => 462 Trauma damage over 12 seconds
  • Ability: Fire Arrow deals damage over 15 seconds => same damage but over 10 seconds
Crossbow
  • Ability: Fiery Bolt 6: Deals 468 damage, plus 230 damage over 20 seconds => 418 damage, plus 288 damage over 12 seconds
Druid
  • Treasure: Cloud Sight covers the target in insects that deal 170 Nature damage over 15 seconds => 252 Nature damage over 12 seconds
  • Fixed bug that caused Heart Thorn and Poisoned Thorns DOTs to deal 5 more damage per tick than listed.
  • Treasure: Rotskin deals 190 Trauma damage to health over 15 seconds => 282 damage over 12 seconds
  • Treasure: Toxinball deals 114 Poison damage over 12 seconds => 186 over 12 seconds. Also note: this treasure effect was bugged and previously didn't work at all. Now it works.
Giant Bat
  • Treasure: Virulent Bite deals 115 trauma damage over 10 seconds => 222 Trauma over 12 seconds
  • Treasure: Virulent Bite has a 50% chance to deal +76% damage plus 120 trauma damage over 10 seconds => This effect has been overhauled. It is now: "Virulent Bite deals 192 Trauma damage over 12 seconds and also has a 25% chance to deal +76% direct Piercing damage"
Hammer
  • Treasure: Latent Charge deals +200 Electricity damage after an 8 second delay => 240 after an 8 second delay. Also note: this treasure effect was bugged and actually took 15 seconds to activate, not 8 as intended. This is fixed.
Lycanthropy
  • Ability: Sanguine Fangs 6: Deals 120 damage over 8 seconds => 140 over 8 seconds
  • Treasure: Sanguine Fangs deals +144 Trauma damage over 8 seconds => 224 over 8 seconds
  • Treasure: All Werewolf attacks have a 31% chance to deal 48 Trauma damage over 8 seconds => 64 damage over 8 seconds
  • Treasure: Sanguine Fangs suddenly deals 240 damage after a 15 second delay => 280 damage after a 12-second delay
Spider
  • Treasure: Grappling Web deals 224 Poison damage over 12 seconds => 300 over 12 seconds
Misc
  • Various meditation combos that dealt DoT (damage-over-time) damage have been adjusted to new DoT balance.
  • Various monsters with DoT (damage-over-time) attacks have been adjusted to new DoT balance.


Other Changes and Fixes
  • Fixed bugs with Skill tree UI not retaining state.
  • The item-tooltip for Augments now lists the skill level requirement of the augment.
  • Augment-Installation recipes no longer have an extra-ingredient cost (e.g. fish scales, fire dust, etc.).
  • When extracting an Augment from an item, you can now extract generic (non-skill-specific) powers by using any of the "desert gems": Turquoise, Sapphire, Emerald, Morganite, Sunstone, Tiger's Eye, Opal, Goshenite, Danburite, and Ruby. Previously these gems did nothing when used with extraction, so for now they are all assigned to generic-augment extraction. Eventually some of these gems will be needed for other things, though. So just to make it official, Sunstones and Goshenites are the permanent generic-augment-extraction gems. Some of the others may be reassigned to do other things in the relatively-distant future -- 3+ months from now.
  • Adding augments to items no longer affects how much phlogiston or other resources are obtained when decomposing or distilling the item.
  • Using Shamanic Infusion on an item now adds a Shamanic Infusion requirement equal to the level of the recipe. (Previously all infusions accidentally installed a requirement of Shamanic Infusion level 1, even for max-level infusions.) This fix does not affect existing items... UNTIL those items are used in transmutation. Transmutation (and a few other crafting processes) automatically recalculate the item's wield-requirements, and this can cause the correct Shamanic Infusion requirement to appear.
  • Fixed Fire Shield Potions and Acid Shield Potions so that their reflection does not stack if you drink multiple potions.
  • Fixed ingredient errors in crafted Priest Staff recipes.
  • Fixed rounding and calculation problems that caused a number of converted DOT effects (from the last update) to deal 1 or 2 more damage per tick than intended (and more than the tooltip said it would deal).
  • Enchantments that boosted movement-speed attributes by a fractional amount were displayed as adding a whole number. For instance, items that add +0.5 to Sprint Speed would say they added "Sprint Speed +0". (This was only a display bug.)
  • Fixed invalid locations where monsters could spawn, notably under Marna's shop in Serbule.
  • Additional texture memory optimizations.
  • Removed yellowish hue to the specular layer of Elvish Armor. (This will affect how the armor looks when dyed. It should look closer to the dye color, and less yellow. Unless you dyed it yellow, in which case... who knows.)
  • Fixed texture error with female dwarf NPCs that made their faces look extra wrinkled and weird.
  • The 3rd-party tools JSON for treasure mods now includes the minimum level-requirement for each tier of each treasure mod.
  • Added a bit more documentation for the 3rd-party tools files.

Dev Blog: June 18, 2018

Hi guys! The next update is coming in just a few days. I've been focusing pretty heavily on the update, but I had some time today, so I wanted to give you a status update.

Remember, this is a dev-blog. It's not an official announcement about future changes, it's just me talking about what I'm doing and thinking. I like to share my current plans, but these plans change often. Speaking of which...


About That Treasure Rebalancing


The last dev blog talked about some major revisions to treasure balance. And then the next two updates came out, and there were no revisions to treasure balance. The revisions aren't going to be in the next update either. What's going on?

Well, after I implemented some of the changes, I wanted to sanity-check them... and realized my gameplay data metrics were out of date. The game server normally collects anonymized combat metrics that let me answer questions like "How long does it take a player using skills X and Y at level Z to kill a level-appropriate monster?" or "If a player is using skill X in area A, how often do they die?" These insights are very helpful in making sure my changes aren't insane. But I don't have that data right now, because metrics-logging was turned off.

After we launched on Steam we had unexpected server stability problems, and the very first thing I did was to turn off all non-essential functions to rule them out as the cause. So metrics logging has been turned off for months, which means the data I have is pretty old and doesn't reflect recent changes to the game or the player-base.

I realized this problem late last month, but at that time we were STILL having occasional server problems, and it seemed dumb to turn the metrics back on while I was still hunting for problems. The server has been extremely stable after the last batch of server fixes (on the 8th), though, so I'm going to turn the logging back on in this week's update. Then it will take about a month to collect new data.

I don't always use metrics data when making changes, because it takes a very long time to analyze that data. For situations like the AoE nerfs (see below), it's pretty easy for me to test what will happen when I make the change: I can create some AoE characters and try them on my local server. But this upcoming rebalance will impact a LOT of skills and treasure effects, and I can't predict all the side-effects. There will inevitably be some weird issues stemming from this change, and that's fine, we'll fix them... but I guess I want more reassurance that this change is moving the game in the right direction. And I need more data for that!

So long story short: there's been some delays. In the meantime, I've focused on more client optimizations and new game features.


Client Optimizations


The next update doesn't have any of the large-scale Serbule optimizations that I talked about in the last dev blog, such as replacing the sky/weather system, but it does have a lot of more traditional optimizations: the game's texture-memory footprint is reduced by over 100mb in most areas, which will help users with integrated video cards (or any video card with less than 2gb of RAM). We've also done a bunch more LOD optimizations in Serbule and Serbule Hills, which will help framerate on mid-tier video cards.

The impact of these particular optimizations will depend entirely on your computer's hardware, so they might make a big difference for you, or they might not. We'll watch your feedback to see what you think. And there are many more optimizations in the works, of course!


Vendor-Stall Searching


The next update will add a way to search player-run-shops. There will be little Catalog Golems in the shop hall, and you can ask them to list all the shops that are selling a particular item.

I'm walking a fine line here, and I wanted to mention the reasoning behind it. The golems' results are intentionally pretty simple: they tell you who sells it, but don't tell you the price they're charging. Why not? For one thing, it can be very difficult to show a price because player shops can sell the same item for lots of different prices at different quantities. But the main reason is that I don't want to make shops compete on price alone. That would drive costs down extremely quickly, instead of the slower market adjustments that I want to see, and it's basically not any fun for player shop-keepers. And it would ruin my long-term plans to let shopkeepers compete in innovative ways.

For instance, in the future shopkeepers might be able to offer frequent-buyer discounts that reward repeat customers. Shopkeepers might also be able to set up raffles contingent on purchase: "Buy any _____ and automatically be entered for a chance to win _________!" The shop system was designed to have little features like this added in pretty easily, and they'll eventually let shopkeepers be really creative. But if catalog golems showed the cheapest price, most players would just go for the cheapest stall regardless of anything else that other shops had.

This is also why we don't have an auction house: it's super convenient for consumers, but it drains every drop of fun out of being a pretend fantasy merchant. For a game with this much crafting in it, I need to protect shopkeepers and make sure they're having fun, even if it means there's a little more hassle involved in buying something.

However, the current shopping process, which I guess can be summed up as "if you want to buy something right away, first you have to browse 100 player shops" is FAR too difficult and irritating. I'm okay with there being a little friction when shopping, but not anywhere near that much. So this vendor-stall-search feature is a step in that direction, and we'll evolve the game as needed, until we find a good balance of buyer convenience and shopkeeper control.

(If you're interested in this topic from a game-design point of view, I wanted to direct you to some of the old blog posts I wrote about Project: Gorgon's economic plans... but unfortunately our old pre-alpha dev blog is offline right now. So instead let me point interested readers at a great old blog-post by Raph Koster, of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies design fame. Just to be clear, not everything he talks about is applicable to us! Star Wars Galaxies was a very different game from ours, with permanent item loss and a bigger focus on crafting than we have. But he explains some underlying design ideas that will help you understand where I'm coming from. His post is called "Do Auction Houses Suck?" )


AoE Nerfs


Some players felt blindsided by the changes to area-of-effect abilities in the May 25 update. Which is understandable since it was definitely an abrupt change: I decided that it shouldn't wait any longer, I needed to drastically reduce the power of AoEs. Not in a subtle "maybe we'll reduce this one a little bit" kind of way, either -- they were so overpowered that they were creating new farming playstyles that shouldn't exist at all, with players able to safely kill eight or ten monsters at once.

This isn't new -- for a long time a small number of players have been using "AoE Death Builds" to kill dozens of monsters at a time. And that was obviously a problem, but it hadn't really been at the top of my to-do list. To be frank, there's a lot of overpowered stuff in the game right now, and I intentionally try to avoid making knee-jerk adjustments just because somebody found a way to abuse something. Since the game's balance is still changing pretty dramatically, an overpowered ability may suddenly stop being overpowered a bit later. So I try to focus on the big picture.

I do try to tackle balance problems if they're getting out of hand, though, and I should probably have jumped on this one earlier. These AoE builds had started to become really popular, and more and more players were using them. Listening to players talk in global, it's clear that most of these people realized they were overpowered, and were rushing to exploit AoEs before they got nerfed. So I nerfed them.

Let's talk about AoE balance a little bit. Most AoEs are balanced around the idea that they hit 1.5 people on average. That means we expect that half the time they'd hit a single target, and the other half of the time they'd hit two targets. If they hit three or more targets, that's "free" damage, but of course there's a lot more risk when fighting so many monsters.

And that's the underlying balance problem: players were using AoEs to hit more targets than I originally intended, and with less risk of dying than I expected. I'm not just talking about the really crazy builds that could kill dozens of monsters at once. If you talked to any player using an "AoE build", it's clear they didn't plan on hitting a mere 1.5 monsters on average!

The obvious fix would be to nerf their damage, Power costs, and other effects, rebalancing AoE abilities around the idea that they'd be hitting more enemies on average. But I'm resistant to that idea because it turns AoEs into very specialized, very boring abilities. Instead, AoEs were changed so that if you hit more than three targets, the damage is lowered dramatically. If you hit six or seven monsters, the AoE does almost no damage. But if you take care to only hit three monsters at a time, the damage is unchanged, and it's still FAR more efficient than single-target attacks.

I prototyped some other ideas before using this one. One idea was to increase the reset timer based on the number of enemies hit, so if you hit six targets, the ability would be on cooldown for 3 extra seconds. In practice this doesn't work -- the AoEs still do too much burst damage, and if they don't manage to kill the enemy, you have no recourse except to flee because your abilities are on cooldown. I also experimented with increasing the total Power cost based on the number of targets you hit, with similarly crappy results. I eventually settled on the current solution.

And I like the current solution -- it's not perfect, but it's the best I've come up with so far. It means AoE builds are still extremely powerful in the right hands, but they're not the mindless death-buttons that they were before. You need to be a bit more situationally aware, and that takes a little bit of skill. That's nice!

I think the most serious problem with this solution is that having a bigger radius isn't as big a win anymore. There are a handful of abilities with 10 meter burst radii (or even bigger!), and these abilities are much harder to use now. They hit so large an area that you can't always predict how many monsters will get hit. I may end up just reducing their radius, but first I'm trying some experiments to see if I can find a better approach for these abilities.

Anyway, I'm letting the current solution stand for another update or two while I ponder the issue, gather feedback, and prototype some more ideas.

Oh, and one more thing: monsters currently use the same AoE code as players do. If you're in a large group and fighting AoE-spamming monsters, keep that in mind.


NPC Augment Installation


I think the game is a bit unfair at higher level. There's an intentional power jump around level 50, then another one at 60 and 70, where the game starts to expect you to have decent gear and know how to use your abilities. The problem is that the game doesn't give players a lot of feedback on what's going on. Players often report feeling "stuck", unsure of why they seem unable to tackle higher-level areas. The game isn't giving them enough information to figure out how to advance.

So I've been slowly working on making this power transition smoother. NOT easier... just smoother. I think it's fine for the game to demand that you "get good" at high level, but the game has to give you lots of context to understand what's wrong and how to evolve your character. And ideally, it should do that well before you reach the point where you're saying "Huh? I can't kill these monsters in the desert. Why not?!"

One transition hurdle is that by level 60, the game is balanced around you knowing Transmutation and having access to basic Augments. Most players discover Transmutation on their own eventually (although I'll be making it easier to find soon, because it's really important! I expect every player to know and use Transmutation). But Augmentation is made up of several difficult crafting skills that I really don't expect every player to learn. Creating Augments is a pain, but USING Augments should be easy: you should be able to go to a player crafter and buy the Augment you want, then plug it into your gear.

This update moves us closer to that idea by letting NPC vendors install Augments into any piece of equipment for a small fee. This service is available even at low level: Joeh will happily install low-level Augments into your newbie gear if you want. I don't really anticipate that newbies will buy a lot of Augments (although who knows?), but I want low-level vendors to offer this service so players can discover that Augments exist and learn how they work.

This also means that players don't have to deal with that scheming elf Nightshade. Of course, he will still teach you how to install augments yourself if you have the cash, and I've made the augment-installation recipes cheaper by removing the extra recipe ingredients, like Fire Dust. But I expect most players will just use these NPCs, at least until they're very high-level.

The Augment skills have always been intended to be dedicated crafting skills: Augmenters create Augments, which can be sold to other players. So I'm hoping this update will jump-start the Augment economy a bit! We'll probably need more shopping tools to really make Augment-buying easy, but hopefully this will get things started.



The next update will arrive in a few days! In addition to the stuff I've talked about, it also has the usual bug-fixes and skill tweaks. It also lays the groundwork for the new Gorgon Shop. We'll be bringing the shop back online a few days after this update, so people who missed our Pre-Release Packs will be able to buy them. (But this time they're implemented as add-on packs, so they expect you to already have a Steam key. They just add features to your existing Steam account.)

I'll be back with more dev-blogginess soon!

Update Notes: June 8, 2018

This is primarily a bug-fix update. It includes important server-side bug-fixes, plus other fixes and improvements that happened to be ready to go.

General Changes
  • Fixed more server-side performance bottlenecks, and installed a new tracking tool to find remaining bottlenecks.
  • The winners of the Steam Screenshot Contest will receive an in-game notification, along with a package of items, later today.
  • To make finding the 3rd-party-tools JSON a bit less mysterious, tools developers can now just visit http://client.projectgorgon.com. This page will automatically redirect you to the page for the most recent game data, along with available documentation.


UI Fixes and Improvements
  • The Skills window now remembers which parent skills you had opened/closed in the skill tree (between runs of the game).
  • Fixed a timing bug that caused chat messages to be lost if they arrived during a certain part of the loading-screen process.
  • Improved the Training UI so that it doesn't forget your scroll position when you train something.
  • The tooltip for ability scrolls now shows a warning message if you need to learn an earlier ability before you can learn this one. (Previously the error message only showed when you tried to use the scroll.)
  • Fixed a bug with the Last Seen time in the Friends list window. Part of the calculations were done in UTC time instead of your local time zone, so if a player had just logged off, instead of saying they were last seen a few minutes ago, it would say they were seen X hours ago, where X is how many hours you are behind UTC time. (If your timezone is ahead of UTC, it would say they were seen "< 1 Min ago".)
  • Due to a bug, if you had multiple informational message boxes waiting for you when you logged in, some of those messages could have been missed. Only certain types of messages were vulnerable to the bug, including messages about e.g. shop items that didn't sell. The item would still be returned, but you might not get a message about it. (If you are worried you may have missed a message, note that you can always use the "/messages" command (without quotes) in chat to see recent messages.)


Skill Changes

We're in the process of converting all damage-over-time (DoT) effects in the game to use a new system that stacks better and has more information in ability-tooltips. (We're about 2/3 finished with that conversion as of this update.)

While doing this technical conversion, we're also recalculating DoT treasure effects using new formulae and guidelines that should make DoTs more useful and understandable. (One of these guidelines is that a DoT that lasts more than about 12 seconds is too long.)

We're also trying to normalize DoT tick count to every 2 seconds. Some DoTs would "tick" (deal damage) every second, while others ticked every 2 seconds, or 3, 4, or 5 seconds. This was done to work within other existing balance ideas, but when all DoTs behave so differently, it's too hard for players to understand what's going on and how to make their DoTs better. So we're unifying most of these DoTs to deal damage every 2 seconds.

Most DoTs will deal increased damage under the new balance guidelines, although a handful of DoTs that had 1-second ticks may effectively be weaker (depending on what per-tick buffs you had).

Aside from DoT changes, there are some other bug-fixes and problem-adjustments that were easy to fix while doing the conversion.

Animal Handling:
  • Ability: "Call Living Stabled Pet" did not work at all.
Archery:
  • Treasure: Fire Arrow suddenly deals an additional 335 indirect Fire damage after a 15 second delay => 320 after 12 second delay
  • Ability: Poison Arrow 6 deals 240 damage over 20 seconds => 180 over 12 seconds
Battle Chemistry:
  • Treasure: All bomb attacks ignite the target, causing them to take 130 fire damage over 10 seconds => 140 over 10 seconds
Druid:
  • Treasure: Heart Thorn coats the target in stinging insects that deal 180 Nature damage over 15 seconds => 306 over 12 seconds
  • Treasure: Heart Thorn deals Poison damage (instead of Nature) and also deals 192 Poison damage over 12 seconds => 258 over 12 seconds
Fire Magic:
  • Ability: Ring of Fire Deals 63 additional damage over 35 seconds => 150 damage over 12 seconds
  • Ability: Fire Breath deals 80 damage over 40 seconds => 168 damage over 12 seconds
  • Treasure: Calefaction causes 213 additional damage after a 20 second delay => 213 damage after a 12 second delay
  • Ability: Flesh to Fuel: this ability was sharing an icon with a mentalism Psi Wave ability; it now has a unique icon.
Giant Bat:
  • Treasure: The damage portion of "Drink Blood deals 96 damage over 12 seconds, and 50% of the damage becomes health for you" => this damage was applied to the caster, not the victim.
Hammer:
  • Item: Flame Basher: All Hammer attacks have a 25% chance to ignite the target, causing 50 damage over 20 seconds => 33% to cause 30 damage over 12 seconds
  • Treasure: Rib Shatter deals +160 Trauma damage over 20 seconds => 220 over 10 seconds
Mentalism:
  • Treasure: Agonize deals +425 Psychic damage over 10 seconds => 576 over 12 seconds
  • Treasure: System Shock deals +48 Psychic damage and 100 more over 10 seconds => 186 over 12 seconds
  • Corrected icon coloration inconsistencies between the various Psi Wave abilities.
Necromancy:
  • Treasure: Death's Hold deals +175 Fire damage over 15 seconds => 228 over 12 seconds
  • Spark of Death deals 105 Psychic damage over 10 seconds => 168 over 12 seconds
Pig:
  • Ability: Pig Rend 4 deals 75 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 96 over 12 seconds
  • Treasure: Pig Rend deals +238 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => +240 over 12 seconds
  • Treasure: Squeal deals 266 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 260 over 10 seconds
Priest:
  • Treasure: "Exhilarate, Triage, and Invigorate restore +47 Health if you haven't been attacked in the past 15 seconds" only applied to Exhilarate, not Triage and Invigorate.
  • The tooltips for various Priest abilities reported 0 healing when there were treasure mods that could make the ability provide that healing, but the treasure mods weren't in use.
Shield:
  • Ability: Stunning Bash causes the target to take 145 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 210 over 12 seconds
  • Treasure: "Fire Shield causes melee attackers to ignite, dealing 42 Fire damage over 9 seconds" => 100 Fire damage over 10 seconds.
  • Also fixed a bug with the lowest-tier version of this effect (found on level 1-10 gear); it did not work correct, instead briefly boosting your Fire Mitigation.
Spider:
  • Ability: Spit Acid 5 Deals 400 acid damage over 9 seconds => 400 over 10 seconds
  • Treasure: Spit Acid deals 228 Acid damage to Health over 12 seconds => 270 damage over 12 seconds
Staff:
  • Ability: Pinning Slash 3 deals 60 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 180 damage over 12 seconds
  • Treasure: Double Hit ignites the target, dealing 135 Fire damage over 15 seconds => 198 over 12 seconds
Sword:
  • Ability: Hacking Blade: "Deals 210 Trauma damage over 15 seconds" => 252 Trauma damage over 12 seconds (but fewer Ticks)
  • Treasure: Hacking Blade deals 120 Trauma damage over 4 seconds => 192 Trauma over 12 seconds
  • Treasure: Hacking Blade and Debilitating Blow deal 126 Trauma damage over 12 seconds => 138 over 12 seconds
Unarmed:
Note: Slashing Strike's damage was calculated incorrectly; this affects the ability and all treasure effects related to it.
  • Treasure: Slashing Strike damage +51% => Slashing Strike damage +35%
  • Ability: Slashing Strike deals 120 damage over 15 seconds => 180 damage over 12 seconds (but fewer Ticks)
  • Treasure: Slashing Strike deals +26% damage plus 45 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => Slashing Strike deals 126 Trauma damage over 12 seconds (w/ no direct damage boost)
  • Treasure: Slashing Strike deals +23% damage and hastens the current reuse timer of Hip Throw by 2.5 seconds => Slashing Strike deals +15% damage and hastens the current reuse timer of Hip Throw by 2.5 seconds
  • Treasure: Infuriating Fist taunts +460 and deals 150 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => Infuriating Fist taunts +460 and deals 138 Trauma damage over 12 seconds

Additional skill and ability changes, including tweaks to how area-of-effect attacks work, will be in the next update (in a few weeks). The treasure-mod rebalancing discussed in the May 2018 Dev Blog will still happen, but we're delaying it for bit while we collect more up-to-date gameplay metrics.


Eltibule Changes
  • Bug-fixes and adjustments to Eltibule include:
  • Tweaked arrival spot from Serbule. (Just a gentle tweak - it didn't move across the zone this time!) As a side-effect, one of the meditation pillars in Eltibule has moved a short distance.
  • Adjusted map so that it covers the entire area. (Previously there were some edges that were "off the map".)
  • Fixed scenarios where bird-form druids would stop being birds if they flew too close to certain edges of the map (and then fall somewhat hilariously to their deaths).
  • Fixed scenarios where attempting to craft a map or survey could generate the error message: "You must be near an Eltibule to do that."


Miscellaneous
  • Recipes for max-enchanted priest staves had incorrect (easier-than-intended) ingredients.
  • Arisetsu Medallions incorrectly allowed the Familiar's Recall ability to be used by long-term animal players that had bonded to a master.
  • The item-description for the necklace 'Treatment of the Poor' was lost and has been restored.
  • Sidebar abilities that involve using knives (such as Poison Blade) require the user to have hands.
  • Some musical performance abilities were grouped incorrectly in the skills UI listing.
  • The "Neurotoxin" movement-debuff from Biting Vines always succeeded regardless of movement-speed debuff protections.
  • Previously, tapped alcohol kegs showed a generic error if you were unable to drink for any reason: "Drink failed. You can only have 3 beer/wine and 1 hard liquor drink active at a time." Kegs now show more specific and accurate error messages if you are unable to drink for an unusual reason.
  • Fixed a bug introduced with the new UI that prevented many alcoholic beverages from bestowing their special effects when drunk from inventory.
  • If a chat message included items and had a spoiler-begins tag without a spoiler-ends tag, the chat line was displayed incorrectly.
  • For our volunteer guides: when -Guide- or -Moderator- chat flair is enabled, speech filters are ignored and spoken Words of Power are not activated.
  • Added internal tools to help us assist guilds whose guildmaster is gone.

Update Notes: May 27, 2018

This is a hotfix update to fix some bugs in Friday's major update. (A "hotfix" is just our term for any update that doesn't require you to download a new game client.)

  • "Bleeder Shiv" incorrectly boosted direct Poison damage by +500%. It was supposed to be a flat +5 boost. But while fixing the bug it was revised so that it no longer does any direct poison boost, instead it boosts indirect poison a bit more.
  • Note: the previous patch notes were incorrect; you DO earn extra XP for re-exploring Eltibule, but this is "phantom XP" that will disappear in a later update (when we make the Cartography skill do something meaningful).
  • Fixed data bug that prevented bard+priest gear from being generated.
  • Righteous Flame specified that it restored 0 Body Heat (which is true, but it doesn't need to tell you that).
  • The max-enchanted recipes for some items had the wrong prerequisites. This included: Crafted Cloth Shirts, Camouflaged Shirts, Cow Barding, Snail Coats, Bard Gloves, Crafted Winter Boots, and Spring Fairy Pants.
  • Fire Rats had the wrong internal settings. They now have fiery attacks, fire resistance, and if tamed they don't turn into a normal rat. (Previously-tamed rats are unchanged.)
  • Gloria Stonecurl was not appropriately peeved by the presence of necromancy pets.
  • Some weapons could not be augmented (this is fixed retroactively for existing weapons): Mutterer's Katar, Flask of Chills, Pounding Cestus.
  • The recipe "Amazing Cloth Pants (Max-Enchanted)" created max-enchanted Great Cloth Pants instead.
  • The recipe to install Dirk augments required Fire Dust instead of Fish Scales, which is what off-hand weapons are supposed to use for some reason.
  • Added the missing augmentation-installation recipes for bardic lutes and horns.
  • The various recipes for Bard Leggings generated lower-level gear effects than intended. (This can’t be fixed retroactively; existing items are unchanged.)
  • Previously, pets could attack monsters that were 'mezzed' if at least half the mezz duration had elapsed (the same time in which players can break the mezz). Now pets never directly attack mezzed or feared targets. Note that as a side effect, this means you cannot order your pet to attack a mezzed or feared enemy; pets now consider them "invalid targets".
  • Fixed a bug that prevented monsters in some areas from fighting. (Fixed in an earlier reboot.)


We'll have a bunch more bug fixes in a full client update soon.

Update Notes: May 25, 2018

There's a new combat skill in this update! The Priest skill is primarily a healer and is especially powerful in groups. Unlocking Priest requires either Compassion 25 or Psychology 25. A priest in Kur Mountains' inn area can assist you in learning the skill.

The Knife Fighting skill has also been improved. There is a new kind of knife for your off-hand. Off-hand knives are called Dirks. All pre-existing knives are main-hand knives, collectively called Daggers. You can wield a Dirk, a Dagger, or both when using the knife skill. If you wield two knives at once, you can take advantage of a few new treasure effects and a new dual-wielding-only knife ability found on loot scrolls.

General Combat Changes
  • Burst attacks (or "AoEs", that is, attacks that hit multiple enemies) now deal reduced damage if they hit more than 3 enemies at once. The damage drops off rapidly as the number of enemies hit increases. Note that this only applies to direct damage from the attack; debuffs and other special effects are applied at full potency to all targets
  • DOTs (damage over time effects) incorrectly calculated their damage amount on every tick, instead of just once at the start of the DOT. This meant that if you poisoned a monster, then drank a +5 indirect poison potion while the monster was still poisoned, the remaining poison in the monster would magically do +5 damage per tick! While this this might sound like a beneficial bug, it actually made many small buffs worthless. For instance, Poisoner's Cut boosts indirect damage for 5 seconds, which is enough time to use one or two abilities. But due to this bug, after 5 seconds, the poison you'd just applied to enemies suddenly became weaker. This bug has been fixed so that DOTs behave like you'd expect: the damage of the DOT is calculated once, right when it's applied. (Note that this involved significant code refactoring, so please be on the lookout for weird behavior that may have cropped up.)
  • Treasure and spell effects that boosted a certain damage type by a flat amount ("All Electricity attacks deal +7 damage") worked correctly in combat but the damage was not shown in the abilities' tooltips in the client
  • Abilities with casting times (now called "Channeling Times") now show their channel times in the ability info tooltips
  • Abilities that have Extra Taunt were displayed incorrectly; e.g. an ability that taunted +300 would be listed as adding +30000% taunt


Recipe Prerequisites


Many equipment-crafting recipes now have prerequisites, other recipes that you must already know before you can learn the new one. For instance, you must know the "Decent" version of a recipe before you can learn the "Nice" version, and must learn the "Nice" version before you can learn the "Quality" version.

There is one major exception to this rule: max-enchanted recipes. To learn max-enchanted recipes you don't need to know all the previous max-enchanted recipes in that line; you just need to know the base recipe. For instance, to craft a "Quality Leather Helm (Max-Enchanted)", you need to know how to craft "Quality Leather Helm", but you don't need to know how to craft "Nice Leather Helm (Max-Enchanted)".

Players who had already learned recipes "out of order" will still have the recipes in their list (so they don't have to re-learn it), but the recipes can't be used until their prerequisites are learned.

Player Titles


If you preordered a deluxe version of the game that includes a custom title (such as the Kickstarter 'Duke' package, or similar packages from Indiegogo or the Gorgon Shop), that title is now available! (Assuming that you filled out the backer form to tell us what title you want... we are still waiting on those forms for dozens of people.)

All characters on your account will automatically receive the title when you log in. You can also give your unique title to other players if you want to. There are two ways: you can use the new chat command /entitle to give your title to a nearby player (e.g. type "/entitle Bob" in chat, without the quotes, to give a player named Bob your title). In addition, you can create scrolls that bestow your title on whoever reads one -- these can be sold or given away. You can create 5 of these scrolls every 7 days. Use the command "/redeem CustomTitleScrolls" to get a stack of 5 scrolls. (You can use the command "/redeem" without anything else to see if your 7 days are up: if it says you have no redemptions available, you still have to wait!)

NOTE: Once given out, you cannot take the title away from someone. So take great care!

If you do NOT have a title and you think you should have a title, don't panic -- this is just the first pass, and there may be data errors or omissions. Just let us know and we'll straighten it out in the next game update!

Note: Player-owned titles are colored yellow for now, but we are still deciding on colors, so that may change.

Graphics Changes
  • Each race now has slightly customized out-of-combat idle stances (all animations are works in progress)
  • Fixed weird jerky foot movement in some Unarmed Combat animations
  • Fixed the shininess of several metal armors that were set up as leather instead of metal
  • Improved culling of distant particles
  • Previously if you set your "Shadow Distance" to 0 in the preferences, the game engine still did some of the computations needed for shadows, even though none could possibly be seen. Now if you set it to 0, all shadow processing is disabled
  • New special setting ForceHardShadows makes the game use a simpler system for generating shadows, which can improve framerate. However, note that this is automatically enabled for all graphics levels up to and including "2: Fair". So this does nothing unless your graphics quality level is 3 or higher.
  • Fixed the "T pose" of female avatars (when humanoids were past the animation cut-off distance, and had not yet had a chance to animate at all, they were supposed to be in a pose with arms extended, called the "T pose". Males were, but females were instead partially embedded in the ground)
  • Serbule only: adjusted the animation cutoff for fellow players so that they stop animating at about 35 meters instead of 70 meters. This is roughly equivalent to setting your "Entity Animation Distance Modifier" to 0.5 in the previous update, except that this only affects players, and only in Serbule.
  • New special setting PlayerAnimationCutoff=100: sets how close other players need to be in order for you to see them animating. (Distance is in meters. Note that this value is multiplied by your 'Entity Animation Distance Multiplier', which can be changed in the advanced graphics settings.) By default, the game determines this setting on a per-area basis, with values ranging from 35 to 80.
  • If you had manually overridden the "Entity Animation Distance Multiplier" graphics setting, it has been un-overridden, reverting back to the default for your graphics level. We did this because we changed the underlying distances that this setting modifies (see above), so it's unlikely you'd still want it to be set at whatever you had it set at! (You can, of course, override it again as you see fit.)
  • Fixed the Thentree Helmet, which was using the wrong texture and looked like a monstrosity


Detailed Knife Changes


The knife skill underwent many subtle adjustments over multiple iterations. It's possible that small tweaks were made that are not reflected in this list. (But we probably found them all.)
  • You can now wield a new kind of knife, called a Dirk, in your off-hand. You can wield either an off-hand knife or a main-hand knife (or both) to use Knife Fighting attacks
  • Boosted how much Poisoner's Cut increases indirect (dot) damage
  • There is a new Knife ability called Duelist's Slash. This is a variant of Slice that requires two knives equipped (dual-wielding). The ability can be found via loot scrolls
  • When a monster is Feared, it is treated as "not looking at anyone" for the purpose of abilities that do more damage if the target isn't focused on you.
  • When a monster is Mezzed, it is treated as "not looking at anyone" for the purpose of abilities that do more damage if the target isn't focused on you. (This was supposed to be true before, but was bugged in some cases.) [Note: previously there was a typo in this patch note that said it worked on Stunned enemies instead of Mezzed. Stunning an enemy does not prevent them from looking at you; this is intentional and is not going to change.]
  • Knife abilities no longer generate the error message "The target is looking at you!" (even when it's true), because it was spammy and unnecessary
  • Fixed several bugs related to the monster-looking-at-you system
  • Lisi the fairy (in Sun Vale) now trains some Knife special abilities (instead of Bahdba): Poisoner's Cut, Backstab, and Surprise Throw.
  • Lisi no longer trains level 60 knife; that's Rick Snapley (in New Prestonbule)'s job!
  • Flia the fairy (in Serbule) also had redundant training for some Knife abilities; these are removed
  • Lisi the fairy sells a couple of knife-related skill belts that had previously been unavailable
Knife treasure changes:
  • Changed "Gut deals +48 damage and if target is not focused on you, also reduces rage by 800" => "Gut deals +48 damage and if target is not focused on you, Gut's trauma damage is increased 50%"
  • Changed "Indirect Poison Damage +X%" => this now buffs both indirect Poison damage and indirect Trauma damage
  • Changed "Poisoner's Cut deals 120 Poison damage over 10 seconds" => this mod was replaced due to technical limitations (the ability's purpose is to buffs DoTs, but it couldn't buff its own DoT, which is stupid). The mod now adds a Poison DOT to Slice instead.
  • Changed "Fending Blade restores 24 Health to you immediately and reduces the target's Rage by 320 after a 10 second delay" => now a 5 second delay
  • Changed "Slice ignores mitigation from armor and deals +65 direct health damage" => now deals +76 regular damage, not direct health damage (mainly a stylistic change)
  • Changed "Surge Cut deals +146% damage" => "Surge Cut deals 205 Trauma damage over 10 seconds"
  • Changed "Indirect Poison damage reduction +16 while Knife Fighting skill active" => "When wielding two knives, all Knife Fighting attacks have a 40% chance to restore 33 Power"
  • Changed "Projectile Accuracy Boost +19% while Knife Fighting skill active" => "Thrown Knife attacks deal +39% damage and reuse timer is -1 second"
  • Changed "Venomstrike has a 33% chance to deal 80 direct health damage and stun the target" => "Venomstrike has a 46% chance to stun the target and deal +48 damage"
  • Changed "Blur Cut has a 50% chance to deal +160% damage" => " Blur Cut deals 105 Poison damage over 10 seconds"
  • There are a couple of new treasure effects to flesh out the skill's repertoire
  • When viewing a Knife ability that deals damage over time, you can now press the Alt key (the "more info" key) to see additional details about the DOT, including how many times it "ticks". These changes were made to the Knife skill first as a prototype and when we're happy with them we'll adjust all DOTs in the game to display in this manner


Changes to Other Skills' Treasure Mods


Note: in the newest developer blog, we discussed an upcoming adjustment to percentage-based-damage treasure mods. This change has NOT been made yet because it needs more internal testing; it will happen in a future update.

The following changes are side-effects of bug fixes or tweaks to how DOTs are calculated. There are more DOT-related treasure changes necessary; they will happen in a future update.
  • Battle Chemistry treasure that boosted specific golem abilities did not work for the past few updates (e.g. "Your golem minion's Poison Bomb deals +50 damage")
  • Ice Magic treasure that boosted the Cold Sphere's Rage Attack did not work for the past few updates
  • "Virtuoso's Ballad restores X Armor" => this accidentally restored Power instead
  • Changed "Heavy Shot and Heavy Multishot Damage +33%" => "Heavy Shot and Heavy Multishot Damage +21%"
  • Changed "Mangling Shot deals +9.5% damage and 330 Trauma damage over 20 seconds" => "Mangling Shot deals 330 Trauma damage over 10 seconds"
  • Changed "Mangling Shot causes target to take +14% damage from Piercing for 10 seconds" => "Mangling Shot causes target to take +11.5% damage from Piercing for 10 seconds"
  • Fire Arrow's burn (damage over time) changed from 300 over 20 seconds to 210 over 15 seconds (this change was made so that archery DOT treasure mods can stack more elegantly in the future)
  • Healing Injection, Revitalize: these Minor Heal abilities did not benefit from buffs that boost the healing of Minor Heals
  • Strategic Preparation: this ability is supposed to have a 1.5 second channeling time, but due to a bug the channel only took 1.0 second


Miscellaneous Fixes
  • Increased size of chat history log
  • Fixed bug with dummy items from vendomatics
  • Brewing: brewing effects that caused you to deal extra damage vs. specific types of enemies did not work
  • Fixed a bug that caused some buffs to stick around for an arbitrary length of time after the caster had left the area (most obviously with Battle Chemistry mutations, since they last the longest). The intent is that any buffs that come from an ability (and that last longer than a few seconds) should abort if the buff's caster is not in the same server area as the person they buffed, OR if the caster switches to a different combat skill.
  • Revised the heuristic that determines druid event size. When very few druids are online (at the moment of premonition), druid events will be easier and shorter
  • Bellema Deftwhisper now likes Peridots, not Lapis Lazuli. People change.
  • The weapon "Gut-Ache's Chopper" did not have crafting points and could not be augmented; this has been fixed (retroactively for existing weapons)
  • Changed the map orientation, arrival point, and some of the spawns, in Eltibule. (The map had gotten turned all around; while fixing it we also tweaked and improved some spawns.) As a result the fog has been reset; apologies for the inconvenience! You will not earn Cartography XP for fog that you already cleared in Eltibule, but you will resume earning Cartography XP once you've cleared more fog than you had previously cleared.
  • Fixed monster AI issues that slowed down server processing