Project: Gorgon News

Welcome to another large Project: Gorgon patch! This is a dense update with a lot of moving parts, including balance changes, new powers and abilities, and a large new dungeon. And these are some really long update notes... so let's get to it!


This update includes a new solo-oriented dungeon, the Rahu Sewers. This dungeon hides many secrets and is home to new types of level 60 creatures. Some of these monsters pose new challenges to overcome, and the dungeon itself holds various tools to help you overcome them. (Along with the many tools that already exist in the game!)

The sewer is balanced around players who have decent level 50-55 equipment. We know that it can be difficult for solo players to get gear in the level 50-55 range -- that's something we'll be working on in a future update! If you don't feel that your equipment is up to par, you might consider some pick-up duoing with another player in the short term. (And remember: being in a group boosts the XP you both earn, too!)

While the dungeon is intended for solo (or duo) play, there are also a few Boss monsters tucked away as challenges for pick-up groups. They aren't pushovers, though. If you run into a boss warning screen, don't get complacent: the boss curses here are real!

A few NPCs in Rahu have favors connected to the sewer, although you need to meet certain requirements before those favors are accessible.



There are quite a lot of changes in this update that touch on high-level game balance and underlying damage formulas. This section gets really dense, so feel free to skip ahead if your eyes start to glaze over. (If you do skip ahead, just remember: There may be bugs. If it seems weird, report it!)

We want to get you up and running with these changes quickly in order to help us gather data and feedback, and to find the less obvious bugs. So for the next week(-ish), transmutation tables will not consume enhancement points when you transmute an item. This will give you a chance to re-configure your equipment a bit more quickly and easily.

In conjunction with these changes, we've also reduced the health of all Elite/Boss monsters by 12% to 30% (depending on the level and tier of Elite/Boss). This adjustment is really just an initial estimate on our part, though; there have been a large number of combat changes, so it's difficult to predict how much damage player groups will be able to deal at top level. This is one of the areas where we'll be gathering feedback, and we will buff or nerf monsters as needed.


Percentage-Damage Treasure Rebalance
Treasure effects that boost a specific ability (such as "Finishing Blow Damage +25%") are now a bit weaker. A typical ability that had two percentage-based treasure buffs will be reduced in damage by about 8%. But it's difficult to talk about a "typical ability" in this game! The exact impact will depend entirely on what treasure buffs you use. (And the other combat changes described below will affect it further.)

To give a feel for what this change means, here are some examples from the Sword skill. Other skills have changed in a similar fashion. (Note that the numbers used here are for level 80 treasure effects, which cannot yet be found in-game. That's the worst case scenario, so the actual change for you will be a bit less than you see here.)

Example changes from level 80 Sword treasure:

• "Debilitating Blow Damage +66%" => "Debilitating Blow Damage +55%"
  
• "Decapitate Damage +55%" => "Decapitate Damage +47.50%"
  
• "Finishing Blow Damage +53%" => "Finishing Blow Damage +44%"
  
• "Flashing Strike and Hacking Blade Damage +33%" => "Flashing Strike and Hacking Blade Damage +29%"
  
• "Parry and Riposte Damage +54%" => "Parry and Riposte Damage +49%"
  
• "Precision Pierce deals +188% damage but its reuse timer is increased +4 seconds" => "Precision Pierce deals +145% damage but its reuse timer is increased +3 seconds"
  
• "Parry and Riposte Damage +24% and Power Cost -8" => "Parry and Riposte Damage +20% and Power Cost -8"
  

Damage-Type Calculation Changes
This update also changes how damage-type-specific buffs are calculated. Previously, these were added very late in the calculation process. This meant that a flat damage-type buff such as "Slashing Damage +5" would indeed add 5 to the damage, but the +5 wouldn't get multiplied in with other ability multipliers. This is different from most flat bonuses which are added in before multiplicative bonuses. On the other hand, percentage damage-type buffs such as "Slashing Damage +10%" benefitted from this setup, because they were a separate multiplier piled on top of everything else.

Damage-type-specific buffs are now calculated exactly the same way as other buffs: flat boosts are added to the ability's damage first, then all multiplicative boosts are added together before multiplying by the flat amount. This means that flat damage-type boosts ("Slashing Damage +5") are more effective, since other ability multipliers now include them. But percentage damage-type buffs ("Slashing Damage +10%") are weaker because that percentage buff is now lumped in with other percentage-damage buffs.

Whether this is a "nerf" or a "buff" depends on the particular treasure and abilities you use. Treasure like "Double Hit causes your next attack to deal +100 damage if it is a Crushing attack" is more potent, but treasure like "Piercing Damage +16% when Animal Handling Skill Active" is weaker. We didn't make this change specifically to nerf or buff anything -- we changed it so that it'd be easier to understand and remember, for both players and developers! (In fact, many of the existing treasure effects were designed with the assumption that it worked this way already, because we'd misremembered how damage-type calculations worked. Hence the programmer mantra: "Having fewer special cases is better!")

We've made some changes to specific abilities and skills as a result of this change -- as described in the lengthy notes below -- and we will make additional revisions in future updates as necessary.

Base Damage Changes
Base Damage Multipliers are one of the few special cases we intend to keep around. Base Damage Multipliers increase your ability's damage, but they aren't supposed to be multiplied by anything else. In theory, if your Sword attack does 100 damage and you have "Sword Base Damage +10%" treasure, the treasure should never add more than 10 damage, no matter what other bonuses you may have. But due to the way the game engine worked, some bonuses multiplied the base damage: damage-type bonuses (such as "Fire Damage +5%" equipment) and damage-type vulnerabilities (such as when monsters are inherently weak to fire).

Since we were fixing damage-type calculations, this seemed the best time to also fix the base-damage calculations. Now, Base Damage Multipliers will no longer get multiplied by anything else. (Theoretically -- bugs are always possible! Did we mention that you should report any bugs you see?)

There's an upside to this change: every combat skill except Animal Handling has a treasure effect that boosts base damage for that skill. For Sword skill, this is "Sword Base Damage +26%", for Unarmed it's "Unarmed Base Damage +26%", etc. These effects needed a bit of a boost, but the system change needed to happen first. Now that that's done, these treasure effects can scale up:

• All combat skills: Highest tier of "Skill Base Damage +X%" changed from +26% base damage to +40% base damage.
  

We intend to use Base Damage in more interesting ways in the future.

(A note on terminology: there used to be a related concept called "Base Damage Bonuses", which were flat bonuses such as "Sword Base Damage +5". These bonuses would get added to damage after certain other multipliers were already applied. We removed this special case several updates ago. Those bonuses are now just regular bonuses, like "Sword Damage +5". They get added in with all other flat bonuses first, before any multipliers. This change was made a while ago, but some treasure effects still used the old labels. We've cleaned up the game's terminology to be more consistent.)

Ability Damage Formula Recap
As of now, here's how ability damage is calculated:

• Start with ability's base damage.
  
• Add all additive (a/k/a "flat") damage buffs (universal damage boosts, skill-specific boosts, damage-type-specific boosts, boosts just for Kicks or Bombs, etc.).
  
• Now sum together all percentage buffs (universal multipliers, damage-type-specific multipliers, multipliers for a specific ability, multipliers for Epic Attacks, etc.) and multiply by the previous step.
  
• Now multiply by target's vulnerabilities and resistances (universal vulnerability, damage-type-specific vulnerabilities).
  
• Now add in bonus damage from Base-Damage Multipliers (reduced if the target is resistant to the damage type).
  
• Now reduce damage by the target's Mitigations (armor mitigation, universal damage reduction, damage-type-specific mitigation, etc.). If mitigation is negative, they take that much extra damage instead
  

This gives a general idea of how it's supposed to work. If it seems complicated, well... it is. But it was a lot more complicated before this update!

There are literally hundreds of ways to get boosts and buffs, though, so there's lots of space for mistakes or omissions. If you find problems, especially problems where the ability tooltip wildly disagrees with the actual damage done, please assume these are bugs and report them!

Remember to report the gear, abilities, and buffs involved, plus the monster you're attacking -- the monster is very important since it can have vulnerabilities and resistances. You can 'attach' an item to a bug report, which is handy, but we don't yet have the ability to include screenshots in your in-game reports. So if you want to include a screenshot, please make an in-game report and then also e-mail the screenshot to [email protected], or post the screenshot to the forum. Thanks!

Fire Magic
One of Fire Magic's core combat abilities was pretty irrelevant: Fire Bolts simply didn't have much purpose anymore, given the availability of better area-effect attacks. After some prototyping a replacement, we ended up with ... an ability that's pretty much exactly like the Shield ability "Fire Shield". But it's more potent, and hey - it stacks with Fire Shield! (... which also received some improvements in this update. See below.)
- The ability Fire Bolts has been replaced with a new ability, Molten Veins. All equipment that affected Fire Bolts has been revised to affect Molten Veins -- albeit in different ways, since the abilities are entirely different.

Other Fire Magic changes:

• Wall of Fire costs less Power, and treasure effects that boost Wall of Fire are more potent.
  
• "25 seconds after summoning a Fire Wall, you regain 77 Health" => "You heal 10 Health per second when you are near your Fire Wall"
  
• "All fire spells deal up to +36 damage (randomly determined)" now has a much higher random boost (+115).
  
• "Scintillating Flame and Scintillating Frost stun and deal +100% damage to Vulnerable targets": This effect was previously found on three gear slots: Hands, Head, and Main-Hand Weapon. It is now only found on Hands. (This was done to make room for new treasure effects, since the stun didn't stack anyway.) If you had gear with this effect on Head or Main-Hand Weapon, the item has become Legacy and will need to be replaced with the "Legacy Item Replacer" golem in Serbule.
  

Druid
Healing Sanctuary, intended to be one of the most potent tools in the druid's arsenal, was finnicky and annoying to use. And due to technological limitations of pet-buffing -- which have since been fixed -- the treasure effects were mostly kinda dumb. So:

• The requirement for the Healing Sanctuary itself to be "in combat" (meaning that it could detect an enemy nearby) has been removed.
  
• The requirement for the healing recipient to be "in combat" has also been removed.
  
• "Healing Sanctuary immediately restores 80 health to you upon summoning" => "Healing Sanctuary restores 16 Power with each heal"
  
• "Healing Sanctuary immediately restores 115 armor to you upon summoning" => "Healing Sanctuary restores 40 Armor with each heal"
  
• There are also new treasure effects for Healing Sanctuary.
  

Other Druid changes:

• Brambleskin deals more damage to enemies, especially at higher levels.
  
• "Brambleskin heals you for 82 health" => "Brambleskin deals +96 Nature damage to melee attackers"
  
• "Cloud Sight and Delerium Damage +X%" => significantly reduced percentage (bug fix)
  
• Pulse of Life is now fully marked as a Minor Heal ability. (Some minor-heal buffs already applied to it, but not all.)
  
• Rotskin's damage debuff is more potent (-48 mitigation vs -22) and treasure can further improve the debuff. However, multiple Rotskin debuffs no longer stack. (If multiple druids cast Rotskin on a target, only the strongest debuff is used.)
  
• "Rotskin hits all targets within 10 meters and deals X direct health damage" => "Rotskin hits all targets within 10 meters and further debuffs their mitigation -X"
  

Shield
Since we were adjusting the damage-reflection abilities of Druid and Fire Magic, we also adjusted Shield's damage reflection ability, Fire Shield.

• Fire Shield now deals more damage when melee attackers hit you. Reset time is 20 seconds instead of 60. Power cost is increased.
  
• A new treasure effect increases the potency of Fire Shield's reflection; other Fire Shield treasure effects tweaked.
  

Other Shield changes:

• "Shield Team grants all allies X% evasion of burst attacks for 10 seconds": The higher-level versions of this effect were the same as the level 50 version; they now grant higher percentage evasion.
  
• "Shield Team grants all allies +8 mitigation of all physical attacks (Crushing, Slashing, or Piercing) for 20 seconds" => +16 mitigation
  

Other Skill & Treasure Changes

• Various: A number of abilities have slightly adjusted base damage and power costs; their treasure effects have been revised as a result.
  
• Various: A dozen or so treasure effects that restore health or armor were buffed to heal 5-20 more health or armor. (formula change)
  
• Various: Several treasure effects of the type that 'generates no Rage, and reduces Rage by X' have slightly reduced Rage reduction numbers. (formula change)
  
• Various: An assortment of treasure effects had higher tiers that were identical to lower tiers. These have all been fixed.
  
• Various: Numerous treasure effects gained a skill prerequisite that they were missing. For example, the Giant Bat mod "Sonic Damage +X%" is now "Sonic Damage +X% When Giant Bat Skill Active". (bug fix)
  
• Healing Sigils' AI was changed to work similarly to the druid's Healing Sanctuary: they can now heal without needing to have line of sight to a nearby enemy.
  
• Animal Handling: "Sic Em causes your pet's attacks to generate -X Rage for 10 seconds" has improved rage reduction. (bug fix)
  
• Archery: "All Archery attacks deal +52 damage but cost +4 Power" => "Archery Damage +70"
  
• Giant Bat: "Screech has a 60% chance to deal +X% damage": Higher-tier versions now have a significantly lower damage percentage number. (bug fix)
  
• Hammer: Reckless Slam removed less than the amount of armor listed in the ability description. This has been fixed.
  
• Lycanthropy: "Taunt from Attack Damage -33%" => "Taunt from Attack Damage -27.5% while Lycanthropy skill active" (formula change, plus fixing missing skill requirement)
  
• Rabbit: Treasure effects that boost Carrot Power are more powerful. (formula change)
  
• Shamanic Infusion: "Signature Debuff abilities restore X Power" => "Signature Debuff abilities cost -X Power"
  
• Shamanic Infusion: Added missing earlier-tier prerequisites (e.g. the third tier of a recipe is supposed to require you to already know the second tier, etc.).
  
• Shamanic Infusion: You now receive bonus synergy levels in Shamanic Infusion when you reach Alchemy 42, Animal Handling 32, Battle Chemistry 41, Mycology 55, Anatomy 50, and Anatomy 70.
  
• Sword: "Precision Pierce deals +X% damage but its reuse timer is increased +4 seconds => " ... reuse timer is increased +3 seconds" (side-effect of formula change)
  
• Sword: "Sword Damage +16" => "Sword Damage +70"
  

Belt Changes

• Belts that you find in loot now have a chance to be Uncommon rarity -- green tier, that is, with one treasure effect. The effect is always a generic power that isn't tied to any particular skill.
  
• Any belt-creation recipe that requires a trophy skin also now generates Uncommon belts.
  
• Recipe for Great Hardcore Belt was changed to require a trophy skin (to generate Uncommon belts).
  
• "Lucky Belts" for specific classes are now just called "Belts" (e.g. "Lucky Belt of the Swordsman" is now just "Belt of the Swordsman"). These belts once affected random-loot generation, but that was long ago. Now they boost damage, so the "lucky" terminology seemed weird.
  
• All formerly-lucky belts increase Base Damage Multipliers a bit more than before (10% for single-skill and 7% for double-skill).
  
• Belts that actually affect treasure in some way are still called "Lucky".
  
• Added missing belts/recipes for rabbit and priest belts.
  

Quest-Item Fixes
"Quest Items" are items that are only needed for a certain quest. (Their icons have a thin red border.) If a special monster drops one of these items, each player that can loot the monster is supposed to be able to pick up their own copy of the quest item -- or, if the monster only has a chance to drop the quest item, each player has their own separate chance. A few monsters didn't behave this way: "Mr. Squeaky", James Eltibule, and Mudtusks. These monsters now drop quest items per-player as intended.

Another problem was that solo-oriented quest monsters could be buried or eaten by the first person that looted them, thereby preventing other players from looting their quest items. So quest-item-dropping monsters can no longer be buried or eaten.

Spawn Precognition
There are new rituals (recipes) that allow you to detect where a newly-spawned enemy will appear a few seconds before it actually arrives. Ashk in Rahu teaches two of these rituals. The first, allowing you to see respawning monsters 3 seconds before they appear, can be learned if you've completed the Eye of Fate favor and have Meditation 25 or Shamanic Infusion 25.

Other Changes

• Added "Accuracy Boost" stats to the Miscellaneous Enchantments tab of the persona screen. (Only shown if you have any accuracy buffs.)
  
• Shamanic Infusion now requires much less XP to level, and recipes earn more XP. Now the first-time completion of a recipe (of your current level) will always raise your level by at least 1, and usually raise it by 2. (Existing skill levels are unchanged.)
  
• The drug Sharpen has been revised so that it is significantly more potent. However, the higher tiers of Sharpen now have Survival Instincts requirements.
  
• Cooking: Recipe "Tart Applesauce" has been changed to actually use tart (green) apples.
  
• Necromancy: skeleton mages no longer flee to create distance between themselves and melee assailants.
  
• Fixed recipe for "Amazing Cloth Pants (Max-Enchanted)", which incorrectly required Maximized Sardonix x2, among other problems. It now correctly requires Vervadium x1 like other level 70 crafting recipes.
  
• Fixed some work order scrolls whose level requirement (to read the scroll) did not match the actual work order's level requirement.
  
• Replaced the weird yellow "sewer rat" model with a different model (which is also temporary, but much less terrible in the meantime).
  
• Fixed a small (100 m square) chunk of the Ilmari desert where nothing could be selected.
  
• Fixed various monsters whose combat sounds were too loud (because they were not using 3D positioning, so were always at max volume regardless of distance).
  
• Fixed a bug that caused fire walls to make combat sounds repeatedly when not in combat. This also fixes some Sigil-Scripting sigils that had the same problem.
  
• The "Proto-Druid" and "Proto-Wolf" titles can no longer be earned. (They were actually supposed to stop when alpha ended.)
  

The "browse recent orders" option on Player Work-Order boards now lets you see orders for just a particular category of thing, such as arrows or gems. This helps work-order fulfillers see a broader picture of demand for their particular skill.

We've created a lot of browse categories just to see what ends up being useful to players, and we'll evolve them based on usage. (If a work order doesn't show up in the category you expect, such as a crystal order not showing up in the Crystals section, please report it as a bug.)


Necromancer's zombies were too hard to keep alive, even with necromancer-provided healing. There are a few changes to help alleviate this:

• zombies' inherent self-bleed is reduced by about 75%
  
• zombies now reap 25% of the health damage they deal (meaning that every time they deal damage to an enemy's health, they are healed by 25% of the health damage they dealt)
  

• Battle Chemistry: the trainer in Rahu now uses the Training system for golem conditionals and abilities, instead of selling them as books. This makes it easy to tell which ones you've learned: only ones you haven't learned yet will show up!
  
• Tanning: previously the easiest way to learn Tanning was to complete a favor for Kleave. This is too hidden for such an important low-level skill, so Kleave's training menu now has an entry to Learn Tanning for 500 Councils, which she teaches at Comfortable. (If you prefer, you can still learn it by completing the favor. This will save you a few hundred Councils in Training costs.)
  
• Learning the first level of Tanning (from whatever method) now teaches the first Tanning recipe. (The other Tanning recipes are still taught by Kleave.)
  
• Leatherworking: Kleave now teaches her Leatherworking recipes from the Training menu, like a normal trainer. (She previously sold books of leatherworking recipes instead)
  

• the ability Set Broken Bone did not have the intended 33% chance to consume the Master First Aid Kit. (Instead the kit was always consumed.)
  
• added another background music track to Red Wing Casino
  
• Spider: Treasure effect "Premeditated Doom channeling time is -1 second and boosts your Indirect Poison damage +X (per tick) for 20 seconds" was bugged. Data errors caused this effect to use the level 80 version for all levels 60-80
  
• the game now tries a bit harder to ensure that summoned and deployed items (such as tapped kegs, growing vegetables, motherlodes, etc.) are in an accessible location, and not trapped underground or in a wall. Note that as a side-effect, they can now spawn up to 12 meters away from you (instead of 5 meters as previous), and can now appear above or below you in some cases, so you may need to look around for them
  
• removed terrifying error about speed-hacking when you try to turn off a toggleable ability too quickly (such as giant bats' Echolocate). You can now turn off abilities like this instantly, without having to wait for the ability's reuse timer to be up.
  
• fixed a bug where the Party chat channel could be dropped from custom chat tabs when leaving a party
  
• as a side-effect of cleaning up some old treasure system mechanics, the drop-chances of some treasure effects have changed. Most notably, effects that boost base-damage (e.g. "Sword Base Damage +X%") used to drop at a rate 15x higher than regular mods; they now drop 5x as often. (During pre-alpha those effects were extremely crucial and they needed to show up a lot, but they're more "optional" now.)
  

Winter is here, and humans and their friends across Alharth have begun celebrating the winter festival dedicated to Ri-Shin, god of plants and trees. Many towns and communities are looking for help to make their areas a little more festive, and you may find that your NPC friends have New Years' gifts for you as well!



When we opened the Red Wing Casino a few updates back, we introduced blacksmithing recipes to "dangerously improve" some types of weapons. This was a bit of an experiment for us as we looked at different ways to meet our goal of helping level-40 players improve their gear.

After watching the recipes in action and tweaking them a bit, we've realized that this implementation will probably never meet our goals: it just requires too many resources for level-40 players to afford. And since "dangerously improved" weapons were overpowered in the hands of higher-level players, it didn't make sense to leave them in the game as they were.

We apologize for having to remove this experiment. We're still prototyping replacement systems that will meet our goals better, and when we've chosen that new system, we'll attempt to update your equipment in whatever way seems to make sense. We'll do our best to preserve the time and effort that you've put into your "dangerously improved" weapons and translate that into the new system.

In the meantime, we've left the non-working enhancements encoded into your weapons; you may seem them listed as "Do Nothing +X". Similarly, the recipes are still in your recipe list, labeled as "OBSOLETE", until we decide how the new system will work.



Several treasure effects were misconfigured, making them unavailable on randomly generated items. These have never actually been seen in the game before. So really, it's like they're brand new effects! Other treasure effects were only available in some of the locations or on some of the objects they were intended to cover.

Bard:

• Some treasure effects for main-hand weapons could only be found on Lutes, and some effects for off-hand weapons could only be found on Horns.
  

Battle Chemistry:

• "Toxic Irritant boosts your Nice Attack Damage +X for 8 seconds" is now available on rings and main-hand weapons.
  

Druid:

• "Toxinball Damage +X%": This was intended to be findable on necklaces and main-hand equipment, but couldn't be found on main-hand equipment.
  

Ice Magic:

• "Tundra Spikes deals +X% damage, gains +Y accuracy, and lowers targets' Evasion by Z for 20 seconds": This mod comes on two equipment slots, but the evasion-debuff aspect of the mod did not stack with itself.
  
• "Ice Spear heals you for 46 health after a 15 second delay": This was intended to be findable on gloves and off-hand items, but couldn't be found on off-hand equipment.
  

Knife:

• Many treasure effects for main-hand weapons could only appear on Daggers. Now that dirks can be wielded in the off-hand, it's now reasonable to have a sword with Knife effects!
  
• "Poisoner's Cut boosts indirect poison +X per tick" is now available on pants and off-hand weapons.
  
• "Gut deals +X% damage and reuse timer is -1 second" is now available on shirts and necklaces.
  

Pig:

• "Grunt of Abeyance restores X Power to all targets": This was intended to appear on necklaces and main-hand equipment, but couldn't be found on main-hand equipment.
  

Staff:

• "Phoenix Strike deals +10% damage and triggers the target's Vulnerability" is now available on staves.
  

Werewolf:

• "All Werewolf attacks have a X% chance to deal Y Trauma damage over 8 seconds": This was intended to appear on helmets and main-hand equipment, but couldn't be found on main-hand equipment.
  

Unarmed:

• All main-hand treasure effects could not be found on daggers (but could be found on other weapons such as swords).
  

Other:

• Fixed several dozen Feet-slot treasure effects that could not be found on animal shoes (such as Deer Shoes).
  
• Fixed a handful of other cases where certain treasure effects could not be found on certain specific types of equipment.
  

Several skills have gotten a bit of holiday love! For the following skill changes, we've tried to avoid turning gear "Legacy". (Legacy items are invalid items; they stop working and have to be replaced after 30 days.) To do that, retired treasure effects have been replaced with new effects that use the same equipment slots as the old. As a side-effect of squeezing new effects in wherever they can fit, it's possible that your gear will have effects for entirely different abilities than it had before! Sorry about that. We try to avoid that, but sometimes it's unavoidable.



Necromancy has never been especially powerful at high-level, in large part due to a bunch of buggy treasure effects. You could build some interesting "darkness blaster" necromancers, but at high-level the pets were generally useless. We started out just fixing the bugs, but then decided to go a lot further: the majority of Necromancy's treasure effects have been altered with an eye toward creating interesting pet-oriented playstyles and skill combinations.

Ability Changes:

• "Create Super Zombie": This ability has been removed! It is now merged into the Raise Zombie ability (which was previously called Create Shambling Corpse).
  
• "Create Shambling Corpse" was renamed "Raise Zombie". (It was already called in some parts of the game.) You can now use Raise Zombie even while you have a zombie alive, in which case it buffs and heals the existing zombie. The reuse timer on Raise Zombie is increased to 60 seconds and the Power cost is higher. All gear pertaining to zombies has been revised, and many new gear effects have been added for zombies.
  
• Wave of Darkness: Changed from a 20m burst to a 10m burst. Changed base reuse time from 30 seconds to 18 seconds. All treasure mods that affected Wave of Darkness have been rebalanced as a result.
  
• Provoke Undead: The inherent damage boost is slightly larger. Also, all treasure effects that were supposed to boost the damage from Provoke Undead were bugged and did (almost) nothing. These effects have been fixed and significantly revised, and new effects were added as well.
  

Since there were almost no Necromancy treasure effects that were entirely unchanged, this just lists the ones that changed significantly in function. Many other effects were rebalanced but not fundamentally changed, and a bunch of other Necromancy effects were entirely removed to make room for new ones. (See below.)

• "Provoke Undead causes target undead to deal +X% damage for 10 seconds" => was bugged and did not work. It has been refactored to deal +X% damage but also deal Y damage to your minions over a 10 second period.
  
• "Provoke Undead causes target undead to deal +X% damage for 10 seconds, but also take Y Health damage after a 10-second delay" => also did not work correctly. It has been refactored to deal damage immediately, not after a delay.
  
• "Provoke Undead causes target undead to deal +X% damage with their Fire/Ice/Electricity attacks (if any) for 10 seconds" => also didn't work correctly. It has been refactored into a flat global damage bonus instead of an elemental percentage bonus.
  
• "Life Steal targets all enemies within 10 meters and deals +X damage but reuse timer is +3 seconds" => was tweaked a bit because the +X flat damage wasn't useful. It is now: "Life Steal targets all enemies within 10 meters and steals +X health, but reuse timer is +3 seconds and Power cost is +Y".
  
• "Wave of Darkness heals you for 66 health" => was replaced with a new effect: "Wave of Darkness damage +X and reuse timer is -1 second".
  
• "Rebuild Undead restores X health/armor to your undead after a 15 second delay" => now has a 10-second delay.
  
• "Summoned Skeletons deal +X direct damage with each attack, but take Y% more damage from any cold attacks" => damage bonus is a percentage instead of flat.
  
• "Summoned Skeletal Archers and Mages deal +X direct damage, but take +50% more damage from any slashing, piercing, or crushing attacks" => damage bonus is a percentage instead of flat.
  
• "Summoned Skeletal Archers deal +X direct damage with each attack" => now also applies to Skeletal Mages.
  
• "All Summoned Skeletons deal +X damage with each attack, but are instantly destroyed by ANY Nature attack" => damage bonus is a percentage instead of flat, and this effect no longer applies to skeleton swordsmen.
  
• "Death's Hold causes target to take +X% damage from Slashing for 15 seconds" => was quite overpowered, or would have been if it worked. It works now but has reduced efficacy.
  
• "Rebuild Undead restores X health/armor to your undead after a 10 second delay" => accidentally healed the necromancer, not the undead minions.
  

All of these have been replaced with entirely new effects.

• "Death's Hold deals +X damage and Stuns target after a 15 second delay": This effect was almost always useless. It has been replaced.
  
• "Necromancy Base Damage +%": The skill actually had two of these mods for a total of 4 slots' worth. This didn't seem to fit the Necromancy skill as it is currently envisioned, so two of those slots have been repurposed to boost Skeleton pet damage instead.
  
• "Summoned Skeletal Archers and Mages regenerate +X health every update, both in and out of combat": Most tiers of this ability did not work on the right kinds of skeleton. It was fixed, but then completely replaced with a new effect.
  
• "Summoned Skeletal Mages deal +X direct damage with each attack": This effect has been merged with a different one (above), so it was repurposed for a new effect.
  
• "Create Super Zombie also heals yourself for 192 health, 192 armor, and 38 power": This has been replaced with a new effect that buffs Raise Zombie.
  
• "Create Zombie also heals yourself for X health": This has been replaced with something that actually makes zombies better.
  
• "Provoke Undead causes target undead to recover 66 Armor": Although it was one of the only Provoke Undead treasure effects that actually worked, it was thematically inappropriate for the ability. It has been replaced.
  
• "Heal Undead restores +X Health/Armor and boosts targets' Slashing damage +Y for 8 seconds": The amounts here were so small as to be useless. Replaced.
  

Cows' gear configuration posed a slightly thornier problem. While it was possible to build robust tanky builds, it required a lot of gear before it started to work: there were separate treasure effects for crushing, slashing, and piercing protection, and a typical "tank" would need all three -- and at high level they would probably want two of each. And since all six of those effects appeared on only Hands and Feet gear, cow gear ended up feeling pretty uninspired. We've changed those effects around, and also tried to address some other problematic play aspects and build limitations.

• "Chew Cud boosts Crushing Mitigation +22 for 10 seconds" => "Chew Cud boosts Crushing/Slashing/Piercing Mitigation +14 for 10 seconds". In addition, this effect is now available on 4 slots instead of 2.
  
• "Chew Cud boosts Slashing Mitigation +22 for 10 seconds" => was replaced with a new effect.
  
• "Chew Cud boosts Piercing Mitigation +22 for 10 seconds" => was replaced with a new effect.
  
• "Stampede Damage +X" => "Stampede Taunt +X" (for a much bigger X).
  
• Ability "Tough Hoof" has been revised. "If the target attacks and damages you within 5 seconds, you regain X health" => is now "Each time the target attacks and damages you within 8 seconds, you regain X health". The ability's damage is a bit lower and reuse timer is 12s instead of 10s. Treasure effects have changed also.
  
• There is also a new ability for Cows, as well as a bunch of new treasure effects. The new ability can temporarily be learned from Raul in Animal Town. (Although not permanently, as he finds it extremely uncouth.)
  

• Cuteness Overload is now marked as an Epic Attack for purposes of equipment that boosts Epic Attacks.
  
• "Summoned Deer deal +X damage" => damage is now percentage-based instead of flat.
  
• "Deer Kick deals X armor damage and reduces target's rage by Y" => accidentally dealt Health damage instead. It has been refactored to just deal regular damage.
  
• "Deer Kick implants insect eggs in the target. Future Deer Kicks by any deer cause target to take X Nature damage over 5 seconds" => didn't work. It now works as intended. In addition, all attacks made by player-summoned deer are now considered "Deer Kicks" for the purposes of this treasure effect.
  
• "Deer Bash heals X health" => accidentally restored Armor instead.
  
• Plus a new ability and a number of new treasure effects! The new ability can temporarily be learned from Jumper in Animal Town.
  

The rabbit skill was unfinished: it had basic treasure effects but the selection was very shallow, which especially caused problems at high level. We've added two new abilities and dozens of new treasure effects to give Rabbit players a wider range of builds. Rabbits are the only animal form that can access Ice Magic, so some of the new rabbit treasure synergizes with it. We've also deepened the possibilities for melee rabbits (when combined, presumably, with Unarmed) and added more tools to build supportive Mentalist rabbits.

We've also worked harder to make Carrot Power the defining feature it was meant to be. Rabbits love veggies and we want rabbit players to love veggies too, thanks to their powerful game effects! There were two problems with carrots: they was too expensive to use routinely, and the effects didn't really justify that hassle. So we've tackled the problem from both directions, making rabbit abilities consume far fewer carrots (especially with gear effects), as well as buffing up the potency and versatility of the ability's treasure options. (And remember that the ability's requirement for "carrots" can also be met with carrot-flavored rabbit treats, which can be bartered in Animal Town. This is how you turn other veggies into "carrots"!)

Other changes:

• Reuse timer of Hare Dash changed from 30 to 25.
  
• Reuse timer of Play Dead now gets faster with each tier of the ability.
  
• "Carrot Power Boosts Direct Cold Damage" => now boosts direct and indirect cold damage.
  
• Fixed effect-ordering bug where the Play Dead effect that boosted Psychic damage did not apply to the Play Dead effect that dealt Psychic damage.
  
• Plus two new abilities and a large new assortment of new treasure effects! The new abilities can temporarily be learned from Cinnamon in Animal Town, although they will be taught by a different NPC in the future.
  

Abilities:

• Incubate is no longer marked a Nice Attack. Spit Acid is now a Nice Attack.
  
• Incubate can now be placed on the sidebar.
  
• Baby spiders' rage attacks now have significantly better poison DoTs, and the spiders have smaller rage bars so they can use their poison a bit more often.
  
• Spit Acid now destroys more armor on immediate impact.
  
• Inject Venom's poison DoT deals more damage in a much shorter time window (12s instead of 20s).
  
• Premeditated Doom reset time changed from 40s to 20s. Durations of various treasure effects adjusted accordingly.
  Treasure:
  
• "Incubated Spiders deal +X direct damage with each attack" => now boosts damage by a percentage instead of a flat number
  
• "Spider Bite has a 50% chance to deal +X damage" => now works for both Spider Bite and Infinite Legs, and it boosts damage by a percentage instead of a flat number.
  
• "Combo: Gripjaw+any+any+Inject Venom deals +X damage and +Y over 20 seconds" => now deals +X% damage instead of a flat boost. The Damage-over-Time aspect has been dropped, but it was awful and you won't miss it.
  
• "Spider Bite deals +X% damage" => has been replaced with "Combat Refresh restores +Y Power while Spider skill active".
  
• "Premeditated Doom restores X health" => restores health after a 10-second delay.
  
• "Premeditated Doom restores X armor" => restores armor after a 10-second delay.
  
• "Infinite Legs restores X health" => now also applies to Spider Bite.
  
• "Spider Bite restores X health" => was made obsolete because the Infinite Legs version now applies to both abilities. So it has been replaced with a completely new effect, one that buffs Premeditated Doom.
  
• "Infinite Legs restores X armor" => has been replaced with "Infinite Legs deals +X% damage and reuse timer is -0.5 seconds".
  
• "Grappling Web causes the target to take +X% damage from Poison attacks" => now correctly stacks with itself when the effect is present on two equipment slots.
  
• "Poison Mitigation +X while Spider skill active" => now also mitigates Acid.
  
• "Acid Mitigation +X while Spider skill active" => has been replaced with a new treasure effect for Spit Acid.
  
• Plus various rebalances and new treasure effects to flesh out the spider's arsenal.
  

• Abilities that summon pets now list the treasure effects that will apply (just as other types of abilities do).
  
• You can now click on your pets in-game and examine them to see a rudimentary report of their combat stats at that moment. (Previously this was only available to Animal Handling pets.)
  
• Sammie Grimspine in Serbule Hills sells Skinning Knives to her Friends. (This is a backup method for demo players who lose the knife they get from Ivyn's favor reward.)
  
• Fixed equipment-crafting bug where using two of the same gem could generate Legacy items.
  
• Fixed bug preventing Rabbit treasure mods from being extracted into Malachites.
  
• Equipment-crafting recipes are changed so that using two of the same gem now usually results in gear for that skill + generic enhancements (rather than being for that skill + a randomly-picked skill) .
  
• Fixed a bug where Death Avoidance gear did not always take your remaining armor into account before activating.
  

This is a quick touch-up to last week's update.

• Inventory window: did not show the special overlays shown on top of quest items and broken hardcore items.
  
• Practical Summoning: manually typing a number did not always correctly change the number summoned.
  
• Recipe Sorting: the "Sort by Times Used" option did not work in some situations
  
• Inventory window: showed incorrect status messages in the chat history when locking/unlocking a folder.
  
• Fixed the level requirement on about two dozen work orders. These work orders' rewards are unchanged, only the level requirement was incorrect.
  
• Fixed physics bug that could cause oversized monsters to fall through the world
  
• Miscellaneous very minor data tweaks.
  

Discuss this update on our forum!

Today's update contains a huge array of new features, bugfixes, and quality of life improvements.

Practical Summoning: You can now learn "Practical Summoning", an advanced teleportation technique that allows you to teleport recipe ingredients from nearby storage vaults into your inventory while you are crafting.

When you learn Practical Summoning, it adds a special feature to the Crafting UI. If you don't have an ingredient on hand, the Crafting UI will display a "Summon" button. Pressing this button will attempt the teleport. You can also right-click a recipe ingredient and choose Summon Ingredient.

To learn this technique you will need Teleportation level 12. For now, Irkima in the Red Wing Casino teaches this to his Friends for a price of 10,000 councils. (It will likely be moved in the future when more practical summoning techniques are added.)

Auto-Repeat & Recipe Delay: We've tweaked auto-repeat crafting: the "repeating recipe" progress bar, which is displayed to give players a few seconds to cancel the recipe, will no longer be shown if the recipe already has a suitable built-in delay. For instance, carding cotton at a cotton gin takes 3 seconds, so the "repeating recipe" progress bar isn't needed -- there's already time for you to abort the auto-repeat.

We've also removed the inherent recipe delay from many intermediate recipes, including most tool-creation recipes and all textile-creation recipes except for carding cotton. In addition, the inherent recipe delay of in-the-field decomposition recipes changed from 5 seconds to 3.

Other:

• You can now sort your recipe list in three ways: alphabetically, by recipe level, or by most-used recipes. There is no button for this UI feature yet; to access it, just right-click the name of a recipe in the list in the Crafting UI.
  
• You can now mark recipes as Favorites by right-clicking the recipe name in the list. There is a new drop-down option at the top of the list to show only favorite recipes.
  
• When crafting an enchanted item, the crafting window now shows info about the base item (the unenchanted version of the resulting item).
  

Vendor Lock: If you've unlocked at least 1 extra inventory folder, you can now right-click the folder and choose "Vendor Lock" to keep the contents of that folder hidden from the vendor sales screen. Items from vendor-locked folders simply won't be shown in the sales list at all, just as items used in a Loadout are not shown.

Inventory Hints: The inventory panel now offers you hints about items that are useful for your current situation. For example, when you are giving a gift to an NPC, the UI will highlight appropriate gifts in the inventory window with an animated overlay.

Similarly, when you are viewing a storage vault that can only store certain types of items, items you are allowed to store in that vault are highlighted. Likewise with consignment: the items you are allowed to consign with that vendor are highlighted.

Sorting Tweaks: We've refined the Inventory Sort button to automatically recognize new categories of items. The goal is for similar types of items to clump together when sorted. For example: mushrooms now sort next to each other, different stages of cotton sort together, silk sorts together, skinning knives appear near other tools, throwing knives sort together, and many more.

Other:

• Added an "Update this Loadout" button to loadout window; this button just replaces the contents of the loadout with the currently-active abilities and gear.
  
• Added a spot on the inventory window that you can drag items onto to get More Info. This is the same as right-clicking the item and choosing More Info.
  
• Fixed several subtle mouse-click bugs with the inventory window. Most notably, you couldn't drag items around in inventory while you were "in combat".
  
• Cleaned up confusing error messages and sometimes-buggy behavior with the Split Stack window. (BTW, did you know you can quickly split a stack of items by clicking the inventory item while holding down the SHIFT key?)
  

Drag Lock: If you want to prevent accidentally messing up your ability bars, there's a new option for you in the Settings window under the GUI tab. Just disable the option "Allow dragging things off of ability bars". You'll still be able to drag icons from the Abilities window ONTO your bars; you just won't be able to drag them OFF of the bars.

Effect Wiggle: Beneficial effects that last more than 5 minutes will now "wiggle" when the effect is nearly over. This is intended to alert you that important buffs (such as Food) are wearing off, and that you had probably better do something about that.

Other:

• Added a new setting to let you turn off the player stats bar that's usually in the top-left corner. This is for players who would prefer to just use the stats globes to track their health/armor/etc.
  
• The sidebar now has a right-click menu item to bring up the Special Abilities list, similar to the option already available on the bottom bars.
  
• Fixed bugs with the sidebar's contents getting changed or lost when using potions and effects that increased the number of sidebar slots (such as Gur-Horta)
  
• Fixed bug where changing the horizontal/vertical layout of the ability bars was not always saved in the settings for the next time the game started.
  
• On the character selection screen, if the character is not Hanging Out with someone, it instead shows the area the character is in.
  

Steam Family Sharing: We no longer support Steam's Family Sharing feature, which lets other family members "borrow" your games while you aren't playing them. This was being used by a few people to create extra "mule" characters for free.

Very few players are affected by this change, but if you are affected and you need help sorting things out, just drop us an e-mail at [email protected]. (And remember that if you want to let someone try out the game, you just can point them at the free demo!)

BookSaveToFile: Remember the old save-reports-to-file feature that was lost when we replaced the UI? No? Well, we've re-implemented it. If you add BookSaveToFile to your special settings, the "book" UI window will have a button that saves the contents to a file on your hard drive. This feature is intended to let players save reports such as the results from '/isearch' or '/guild who' so they can reference this information outside of the game. (Please note that this convenience feature may eventually be restricted to people who have the VIP subscriber plan.)

Other:

• At the Guild Management Sign, the Roster option can now be sorted by rank/name (the default, as before) or by Last Time Online.
  
• When using the Eject Guild Members option, that popup list is sorted by Last Time Online. (We assume that if you're making room in the roster, you probably want to eject people who haven't been online recently.)
  
• Fixed a bug with Dwarven Fixer: It did not correctly block the bright-lights screen effect of Delerium Tremens (the nastiest withdrawal state of an alcoholic). If you have Dwarven Fixer in your system already, you may need to drink another dose to get the fixed effect.
  
• Dwarven Fixer now lasts 3 hours instead of 1.
  
• Fixed several scripted scenarios where the game said you were lit on fire, but you weren't actually lit on fire (such as when trying to break into Ivyn's chest or when giving the wrong answer to the creepy crystal).
  
• Fixed various scripting bugs that caused players to receive items with impossibly-high stack sizes instead of receiving multiple stacks of the item.
  
• Fixed bugs when using the /leave command to leave a chat room that was in use in more than one chat channel.
  
• Improved the heuristics for closing chat tabs automatically.
  
• Fixed bug that caused the Group window to sometimes lose track of a party member (showing blank health/armor/power bars for them).
  
• Miscellaneous performance optimizations related to the user interface.
  
• Added new icons for resource items that are commonly confused with other resource items.
  
• Added missing titles from player packages. If your account still doesn't have a title and it should, please e-mail [email protected] ASAP so we can get you sorted out.