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Patch 1.05 Notes [Test Server] ~ Biggest Patch Ever + Explanation!
AmazingAvery
Age of Conan AdvocateMember UncommonPosts: 7,188
http://forums-tl.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=42444
Update Notes for Update 1.05
**These notes do not necessarily reflect the final version that will be deployed on Live**
PLEASE NOTE! This update includes many changes to the game. Before reading through this list of changes, we strongly encourage you to read through the posted articles that explain each change more in-depth : Class Changes, System Changes, and Gem Revamp.
TESTLIVE
* Fate should now have a separate option for spawning the same items you get when she boosts your character. Please note that Fate will now give out a different item set. If you have obtained generic equipment (items containing class names etc.), you need to visit Fate for an upgrade since these items are now deprecated.
GENERAL
* The debuffs for death have changed in which stats they affect. The net change is not big, but they now reduce your damage done a bit more, and increase your damage taken a bit less than before.
* Fixed several causes of crashes and memory leaks.
* Fixed several exploits.
* You should no longer sit on the floor when attempting to sit on a bench in the Armsman's Tavern.
COMBAT
* Base HP for all characters has been increased. The HP gain per Constitution has been greatly increased.
* All combos have had their damage and stamina cost re-calculated.
* All spells and abilities have had their damage and mana cost re-calculated.
* The Rest ability will now correctly give the 10th "tick" at the end of the channeling.
* The out of combat regeneration granted by food and drink (for health, mana and stamina) has been increased to account for the increases to those stats players have received.
* Fixed animations for instant cast spells.
* If a high level in a team with lower level characters contributes damage to an NPC, he will cap/diminish the XP for the lower level characters, even if he leaves the team.
* Pets now inherit 50% of the critical rating and 100% of the hit rating from their owner.
* If you select a character after he has started to do an action, you will now always see their casting bar.
* Positive magic effects will now continue after resurrecting from a PvP death.
* The distance check for cone spells is now adapted to work the same way as for melee and normal spells.
* Archer NPCs will no longer give up chasing you when line of sight is broken.
* Offhand attacks now deal 50% of normal damage.
* The same buff, if applied to different characters at different times, should display different timeouts.
CLASSES - General Info
* All classes : You can now use all weapons open to your class from level 1.
* All classes : Updated descriptions of feats referring to Invulnerabilities to refer to Protection and Armor where appropriate.
* The Dark Templar and Conqueror classes are now able to equip full plate armor.
* You will now lose all buff effects from spells given by feats when you untrain those feats.
* Herald/Tempest/Demonologist/Necromancer/Bear Shaman - The long duration spells Arcane Abatement, Damnation of Set, Glorification of Set, Rune of Resistance, Rune of Resilience, Mystic Suppression and Quell the Ether have been changed. These are now instant-cast short duration tactical spells, rather than long duration buffs. Their effect has been vastly increased, now giving a large amount of protection against the damage type (or types) they protect against. For the Bear Shaman, Rune of Resistance and Rune of Resilience will place each other on short cooldowns when used. For the Tempest of Set, Damnation of Set and Glorification of Set will place each other on short cooldowns when used.
* Soldiers/Priest - Fixed a bug where Vindicator would not update properly when you entered Defensive Stance.
* The formula used for calculating hitpoints gained from leveling has been modified.
* The following buffs are removed from the game. Contribution from these buffs have been moved elsewhere :
Grizzled Hide (Bear Shaman)
Infernal Knowledge (Demonologist)
Diabolic Insight (Demonologist)
Mark of Dagon (Demonologist)
Sign of Xotli (Herald of Xotli)
Vile Insight (Necromancer)
Dark Knowledge (Necromancer)
Bone Ward (Necromancer)
Shielding Litany (Priest of Mitra)
Set's Armor (Tempest of Set)
Mage – General
* The natural mana regen given by the general feat Mage Blood has been significantly reduced.
* With the removal of the magic rating buffs for your class, the Archmage feat has been redesigned. It now increases the amount of mana you gain when using mana potions, by 2% per rank.
* Crimson Shield HP bonus increased to be in line with new health pools. Increased the bouns for rank 2 and 3 of this feat.
* Dark Meditation has been moved to tier 2 in the general tree. This spell will now also give you stamina each tick, so the Herald can get full benefit from it.
Priest - General
* Bear Shaman/Tempest of Set/Priest of Mitra - the power of your rank 1
cone heal (both on the target and on yourself) has been increased pre-level 24.
* Cast time for team health buffs has been significantly reduced.
* The natural mana regen given by the feat Ether Flow has been significantly reduced.
* Spiritual Aegis - Changed to increase the mage/priest magical protection. This feat will increase in power when the player levels.
* Spiritual Armament - Changed to increase the magepriest armor. This feat will increase in power when the player levels.
Rogue - General
* Natural Protection - Changed to increase the rogues magical protection. This feat will increase in power when the player levels.
* Toughness - Changed to increase the rogues armor. This feat will increase in power when the player levels.
* Assassin/Barbarian/Ranger - Swift Shadows now increases your hiding skills. Concealment has been replaced by Lethality and will now increase your base weapon damage by 3.5% per rank. The dependency between Lethality and Swift Shadows has been removed.
Soldier – General
* Irritate: New innate taunt ability to all Soldiers. This ability is received at level 15.
* The natural health regeneration given by the general feats Recovery and Lifesaver has been significantly reduced.
* Stone Skin - Changed to increase the soldiers magical protection. Iron Skin has been changed to increase the soldiers armor. The bonuses from these feats scale with the player's level.
* Guardian/Conqueror/Dark Templar - The way that Sadism/Vengeance/Furious Inspiration triggers has been tweaked, and you will now gain these bonuses when the person in your team being attacked is your own class (previously if you were grouped with a Soldier of the same class, you would not gain your appropriate buff - now you will).
ASSASSIN
* Arcane Backlash has been augmented. If you are affected by the Corrupted Body effect and Arcane Backlash triggers, it will change into Corrupted Backlash. This inflicts poison damage against the attacker, in addition to the normal Arcane Backlash effects. Further ranks increase the Corrupted Backlash damage.
* The feat Burden to Bear has been changed. It now gives you a chance of triggering the heavy physical invulnerability debuff (-15% to slashing/piercing/crushing/poison). Additional ranks increases the chance for the debuff to proc from your attacks.
* The Corrupted Body feat has been changed. This feat now gives you a 10/20/30% chance of gaining the Corrupted Body effect when hit with a hostile spell effect. The Corrupted Body effect increases your protection value by 10% for 15 seconds and can stack up to 3 times.
* Flesh Necrosis has been augmented. In addition to existing effects, each feat now also passively increases the damage of Corrupted Backlash.
* Fixed an issue with Flesh Necrosis where it would appear that the ability would sometimes not work. This ability no longer has a cast time, so can be used while moving, where previously it would fail silently if used while you were moving.
* Every rank of Grim Corruption will give -10% to Slashing, Piercing, Crushing, and Poison Invulnerability Rating in Poison Stance. In Unholy Stance, it will be -10% to Holy and Unholy invulnerability rating.
* Seeds of Corruption has been changed. It now gives your attacks a chance to build a stacking debuff on the target. When you use Grim Corruption, this stack is consumed and the target is struck with unholy damage. More feat points increase the proc chance, the maximum stack size and the damage inflicted.
* Unholy Armor now gives 20/40/60/80/100% armor bonus when in Unholy Stance.
* The power of Life Leech has been greatly increased.
BARBARIAN
* Barbarians now have a new innate ability from level 1 called Savage Rage. Whenever the Barbarian performs a critical hit, he will gain bonus damage for 15 seconds. This damage bonus can stack up to 3 times.
* The Great Weapons Master feat has been changed, and is now called Devastation. It gives you a chance to increase your critical rating if you haven't performed a critical hit recently. Once you perform a critical hit, this buff will be consumed.
* Hand Weapon Expert has been removed. It has been replaced with the feat "Ability - Blitz". This grants you a charge ability. Putting more points into this feat increases the damage of the charge.
* Rampage and Rampaging Horde have had their positions swapped on the feat tree. We felt that it was a little contradictory having an ability increasing your strength based on dead people be dependent on one increasing your strength based on living people.
* The Savage Rage combo line is now called "Whirlwind." This combo hits all enemies around the Barbarian. This combo has a 1 minute cooldown across all ranks.
* The Boiling Blood feat now reduces the cooldown of Whirlwind by 5 seconds per rank.
* The Cyclone of Razors feat now increases the damage of Whirlwind by 1% per rank.
* The Gushing Wounds feat has been renamed to Tempered Steel. This feat now increases the damage of Cyclone of Steel by 1% per rank.
* Wreck Armor now inflicts a stacking armor debuff on the target.
BEAR SHAMAN
* Animalistic Fury now increases damage done by Shrewd Blow by 1/2/3/4/5%.
* Fixed a bug with Improved Ether Theft where it was not increasing the amount of mana the bear shaman gained. Increased the effectiveness of Improved Ether Theft to +150%/+300% mana gained.
* With the removal of the Grizzled Hide buff, the Improved Grizzled Hide feat has been replaced with the Scarred Hide feat. This feat gives: When hit with a physical critical attack, you have a 33/66/100% chance to gain a 20% bonus to your armor for 10 seconds. This effect cannot occur more than once every 15 seconds.
* Manifestation: Hostile Territory spell has been converted into one rank gained at level 65. This spell now applies the light physical invulnerability.
* Feat Spell - Rune of Slaughter proc now applies the heavy physical invulnerability debuff effect. Further ranks of this feat grant the Bear Shaman bonus Armor Penetration while the spell is active.
* Increased the base damage shield values of Spirit Totem: Profane by 10 times.
* Increased the damage bonus gained from the reactive proc on Spirit Totem: Feral. Removed the Invulnerability increase from the reactive proc.
* Spirit of the Bear now gives a team HP buff. The power of this buff is the same as that from the other priests. This buff does not affect the bear shaman. The Improved Spirits of the Bear feat does not increase the power of the team buff, it still only affects the bear shaman.
* Crush Armor: Now casts 'Physical Invulnerability Armor Debuff Master' instead of the old rank specific Crush Armor variations (Crush Armor I-IV). Crush Armor now stacks up to 5 times.
* Spirit totem: Venom has been replaced by Spirit Totem: Miasma. This spell passively increases Natural Stamina Regeneration instead of Poison Invulnerability. Places a DoT on enemies around the target. This DoT stacks up to 3 times. At the 3rd stack, it also drains stamina. This can only happen once every two seconds.
* Occasionally Balance of Nature would fail to buff you, so the proc rate has been increased to solve this issue.
* Wild Energy can now crit.
* The Nature's Revenge spell can only trigger on players every 8 seconds.
* Fixed a bug where the heal from the Bloodthirst combo was not increasing in power with more feats.
* Adrenaline Surge has been changed to have a single rank. It is now a channeled spell with a 5 minute cooldown that returns 15% mana/stamina per tick (60% total). Improved Adrenaline Surge now lowers the recast time by 30 seconds per rank.
CONQUEROR
* Death’s Door: This feat increases the Protection and Immunity Rating of the Battle Cry: To the Death.
* Bladeweave's cooldown has been increased from 20 seconds to 40 seconds.
* Blessed Conquest has been changed to no longer apply the War Fatigue debuff after you use the ability.
* The Defiance ability has been unlinked from Furious Inspiration - you now no longer need to have Furious Inspiration running to be able to use Defiance. The amount of healing gained from Defiance has been very significantly increased, however, the time before you can be affected by another Defiance has been increased to 30 seconds (the re-use timer of Defiance remains at 60 seconds).
* The amount of stamina and mana gained from Improved Defiance has been increased. The implementation of Defiance and Improved Defiance has been changed, so it is now possible to see the base amount of health/stamina/mana gained when inspecting the ability, and to see the upgrade % when inspecting the feats.
* Every rank of Feint Attack will now give -10% Slashing, Crushing, Piercing, and Poison Invulnerability.
* Guardsman Feint - Changed to increase the Conquerors armor by 2/4/6/8/10%.
* The Reaping Blade feat has been changed. It no longer grants a separate ability, but rather extends the duration of the Rend Flesh ability by 5 seconds. It is dependent on the Improved Rend feat. With Berserk Inspiration being added making it more possible to utilize Bladeweave, we felt that Reaping Blade had became significantly less useful.
* Conquest. This has been replaced with the Ability Berserk Inspiration. Allows the player to stack Furious Inspiration via normal weapon attacks, but they cannot proc the team Resurrection effect when at 10 stacks. Canceling Berserk Inspiration removes all Furious Inspiration stacks. Feat points increase the proc rate.
* Two Handed Master: This has been replaced by Ruthless Assault. Every time the conqueror crits the crit chance is increased for 10 seconds. This can only happen once every 15 seconds. Additional feat points in the line increases the critical hit chance bonus.
DARK TEMPLAR
* The feat "Ability - Soul Barrier" has been moved up the Desecration tree, to tier 4. The feat "Soul Infusion" has been moved up the Desecration tree, to tier 6.
* The feat Spell - Covenant of Putrescence has been replaced by Deadly Covenants. This feat now improves the damage of Covenant of Arms, Pestilence, and Putrescence by 7% per rank.
* Removed the self-damaging component from Covenant of War. Significantly increased the Melee Shield bonus from Covenant of War.
* Desecrated Blood feat now improves the damage bonus gained from Covenant of War.
* All Covenants will now correctly proc from spell attacks.
* The Life Tap percentage gained from Covenant of Death has been doubled.
* Any killing blow performed by the Dark Templar or his team while Covenant of Death is running will place a buff in the templar, increasing his unholy melee damage for the next 3 hits. This effect cannot occur more than once every 30 seconds.
* Dread shadow is now a spell obtainable at level 70 if you feat for it.
* Dark Hand feat has been changed. This feat now gives you an instant cast spell that inflicts unholy damage on the target and instantly heals you. The amount of damage inflicted is increased if the target is affected by the Drain Strength, and the amount you are healed is increased if you are running Blood Pact.
* Unified the Ravenous Eater buffs. Both Soul for Our Feast and Leech Life will cast a 10 second duration buff increasing your damage. This should now allow for a 100% uptime.
* Sadistic Glee has been removed. A new feat "Seal of Chaos" has been added, granting you a new spell. This spell taunts up to 4 nearby enemies, and gives you a short duration increase to the amount of healing you receive (that increases by the number of enemies affected by the spell). Some additional feat synergies exist: If you have Consuming Bulwark trained, a heal over time is added to the Seal; If you have Crystallized Ether trained, a mana heal over time is added to the Seal; If you have Ether Reap trained, a damage over time effect is added to the Seal.
* Masochism no longer has a pre-requisite feat.
* Renamed the "Spell - Soul Barrier" feat to "Ability - Soul Barrier". When training this feat you will now get an ability called Soul Barrier, not a spell as previously. Soul Barrier is now an ability that you toggle on or off, not something that you need to continually recast.
* Changed Soul Infusion. Added the ability for this effect to critically hit. This now gives you back a percentage of your maximum mana, not a static amount (5% of your maximum mana). Rank 2 increases the amount gained by 100%. This mana gain cannot occur more than once every 10 seconds.
* Every rank of Unhallowed Blight will now give the following Invulnerability debuffs:Holy Invulnerability Rating -10.00%, Unholy Invulnerability Rating -10.00%.
* The feat Spell - Covenant of Putrescence has been renamed. This feat now offers all the benefits of the previous Covenant of Putrescence feat, combined with the previous Vile Putrescence feat.
* Updated the description of the second rank of Vile Soul to show that it allows for the Unholy Damage to happen at 6 Sadism stacks.
* Wisdom now increases your spell damage bonus as it does for priests.
* Soul Infusion. This effect can now critically hit. The mana regain have been changed from a static amount to 5% of your maximum mana. Rank 2 increases the amount of mana gained by 100%. This effect can only occur once every 10 seconds.
* Vile Pestilence and its offshoot feats have switched places with the Cabalistic Hunger feat.
* Improved Blood Pact and Invulnerable Soul have switched places in the feat tree.
* Increased the duration of Martyrdom 0.5s to ensure that the player receives all healing ticks.
DEMONOLOGIST
* Chaotic Blast cast time has been reduced from 4 seconds to 2 seconds. Chaotic Blast damage has been reduced. Chaotic Blast now always applies its invulnerability debuff.
* Cursed by Hell and Cursed by the Heavens no longer apply invulnerability.
* Fiery Torment - The mana cost has been changed to 10% of base mana.
* Let Them Burn - The damage has been slightly increased.
* Living Firestorm; This spell will now deal less damage on the opener but more on each tick of damage. The overall damage has been slightly increased. Casting time has been reduced to 1.5s.
* Living Firestorm is now able to crit on the initial and pulsing AOE damage.
* Storm Chains - The level check on the target has been removed. The cost has been changed to 10% base mana cost.
* Mystic Suppression. This spell is now instant cast with a 6 second duration and 45 second cooldown which increases your unholy protection. This is now a spell that is meant to be used tactically in combat instead of a longtime buff.
* Demonic Wrack. This feat has been replaced by Shock Lance. This replaces the old Demonic Wrack feat (which was a stacking invulnerability debuff that is no longer a good 5 point end feat with the new generic invulnerability debuff system).
* Shock and Shockstrike now build up Empowered Shock Lance on the caster. This increases the critical chance and lowers the casting time per stack.
* Shock Lance consumes 2 Empowered Shock Lance stacks.
* Casting Shock Lance will increase the mana cost of the next Shock Lance. This is a mechanic so you can choose to get extra damage from Shock Lance and end up being incredibly mana inefficient, or get consistent mana-efficient nuking. Shock Lance is a column spell, and will hit all enemies between the caster and the target (although only a 1m radius).
* Soul Resonance no longer feeds your pet mana. When you cast Shock, that target will explode 2 seconds later, inflicting electrical damage on nearby enemies.
* Spell - Pact of Earth Walking is now a permanent effect on your pet. The damage increase has been lowered to compensate for this.
* Pact of Earth Walking now allows pets to cast the Team Heal effect. This spell can only be cast once every 20 seconds.
* Investing feat points in Wicked Bolts now also increases the damage dealt by this spell by 100% per rank.
GUARDIAN
* Combat Mastery feat has been changed. This feat now provides you with the Combat Mastery Stratagem. When active, this stratagem increases your base weapon damage.
* Updated the description of the Combat Mastery Stratagem feat to reflect the new functionality.
* The border of your active Tactic/Maneuver/Stratagem will now highlight.
* Changed the Guarded buff you get when using your Guard combos. This now gives you a 10% bonus to your armor while active. Swapping weapons still removes this buff.
* Updated the description of the Guarded buff to reflect its new functionality.
* Polearm Mastery feat has been replaced by Relentless, and should now give the player a 2,4,6,8,10% chance to resist stun & fear effects.
* The natural health regeneration from the Toughness feat has been reduced.
* Toughness - Changed to increase the Guardian armor by 1/2/3/4/5%.
* Weapon Master feat has been changed. It now grants a new ability - Cry of Havoc. This ability hits the closest 4 targets near the Guardian for minor damage and generates a high amount of hate.
HERALD OF XOTLI
* The pulsing area fire damage from Avatar of Xotli has been corrected to gain the same benefit from bonus magic damage as the Desecrating Essence pulsing area damage (it was too high).
* Clarity of the Mad now provides passive resistance to fear effects instead of modifying the Sign of Xotli spell to have this resistance effect.
* The increase in damage of the pulsing Hellstep damage when you are polymorphed has been decreased to 100% down from 400%.
* The Hell on Earth and Tongue of Xotli "pets" are now able to crit on their pulsing AOE damage.
* Inferno Curse has been changed. There is now just a single rank of this spell (rank 2 and 3 will no longer appear in your spellbook and cannot be cast). It now causes a 10% elemental invulnerability debuff (affecting fire/cold/electrical). The cast time has been reduced from 2 seconds to 1.5 seconds. This spell now costs 7% of your base mana to cast. This spell also has a DoT and a negative damage multiplier.
* Updated Mindless Brute to match the new health values.
* Touch of Hell now reduces the cooldown of Hellstep by 15 seconds.
* Burning Skull is now an instant cast 3 charges spell that triggers when someone attacks you.
* Lingering Hell: Removed the debuff from this and made it increase the ticks from the AoE after the Hellstep by 1 tick per point.
* Flame Tongue: The Duration of this buff has been changed to 15 seconds, up from 10.
* Xotli’s Vengeance: The duration of this buff has been changed to 15 seconds, up from 8.
* Body and Spirit Wrack: Reduced the animation length of the combo finisher.
* Fiery Enervation: This spell and it’s effects have been merged into Inferno Curse.
* Arcane Abatement: This spell is now instant cast, has a 6 second duration, 45 second cooldown, and greatly increases your cold protection. This is now meant to be used tactically in combat, not as a long duration buff.
* Avatar of Xotli: There is now a new model for this buff.
* Exultation of Xotli: This has been changed into 4 ranks. You now gain the first rank at level 30.
* Increased the max absorb value of the Herald's damage absorb shield spell Contract of Protection. It should now be equal to the Necromancer and Demonologist versions.
* The bonuses for rank 3 and rank 4 for Improved Phoenix Cloak were inverted, giving the rank 4 bonus at rank 3 and the rank 3 bonus at rank 4. This has been fixed.
* When you gain the Fury of Xotli buff, a short, basic particle effect is now played to make it easier to spot when you have a free Hellfire Breath.
* Fixed the Hellfire Feast feat to correctly give you physical mana tap as per the intention and description, rather than magical mana tap.
* The Fiery Weapons proc can now crit.
NECROMANCER
* Because of the vastly different natures of Reanimation vs Nightfall necromancers, the manacost of the necromancer hostile spells have been changed to be a percentage of your base mana.
* With the removal of the two magic rating buffs, that controlled which type of nukes you used, we used this as an opportunity to change the way some of your core nukes work. Pestilential Blast will not longer be a nuke-over-three-seconds spell, but turned into a true DOT. Flesh to Worms has been made into a long duration DOT. Chill is now instant cast and will consume Pestilential Blast for significant burst damage. Lifestrike has been changed to be a direct lifetap and had its stamina cost removed. Certain reanimation pet-augmenting feats will now also affect Lifestrike.
* All spell casting pets are now able to crit. The Corruptor's Aura of Corruption is now able to crit.
* Blasphemous Ruin damage increased.
* The proc from Blasphemy can now critically hit.
* Blighted One (melee pet) now has a proc to stack up a de-buff that lowers the target's Holy and Unholy Protection.
* Bursting Bomb now has a secondary effect. It increases the damage that Chill inflicts.
* Chill has had its base damage lowered. Chill is now instant-cast. Manacost of chill increased. If Pestilential Blast is running on the target, Chill will now consume Pestilential Blast and inflict a significant amount of damage.
* Corrupted Soul now has a secondary effect. It increases the amount healed by Lifestrike. It no longer increases the damage of Lifestrike (given the small amount of damage that spell now inflicts).
* Corpse Detonation (fixed a bug where the damage did not get recalculated when pet damage was changed from 3% to 7%). Increased target damage spec, but overall damage is reduced slightly because of this previous bug (down around 50ish points on average at level 80).
* Deathly Blizzard will now stack up with minus elemental protection instead of cold invulnerability.
* Dread Blight now has a secondary effect. It increases the amount of stamina gained from Harvest Spirit. It also causes your Lifestrike spell to additionally inflict stamina damage on the enemy, and increases the amount of mana damage inflicted by your Lifestrike spell.
* Flesh to Worms has been changed to a 30 second dot.
* Flesh of the Wight: The dots from this ability can now crit. They now also gain bonuses from your bonus magic damage. Changed the cast time to 1 second and the duration to 4 hours.
* Freeze can now crit. Removed the level check on these spells so that the crowd control aspect will affect all levels. Fixed the Freeze effect triggered from Tome of Epithur to be in-line with the other freeze effects (was using the old mezz-type freeze)
* Frenzy will now also put a -15% Unholy and Holy debuff on the target.
* Frost Blast damage increased slightly. Removed the level check on these spells so that the crowd control aspect will affect all levels.
* Gangrenous Stench will now give -10% invulnerability to all physical stats.
* Gelid Bones has been changed from a weak DOT to inflict instant damage. The base area size has been increased by 1m. This spell will now inflict triple damage against minions.
* Grim Hunger is now a 33/66/100% chance to built up Spiritual Protection Debuffs.
* Grip of Death damage has been lowered slightly. Manacost has been reduced. Grip of Death will do more damage the closer the target is to death. This will take effect when the target is below 60% and additional effect when the target is below 20%.
* Ice Strike has had its cooldown removed. This is now your primary nuke spell.
* Decay and Soul Frost have been changed slightly. The trickledown from bonus magic damage for these spells has been lowered. The damage has been increased slightly.
* Fixed a problem where No Rest for the Dead would place Shatter on cooldown, and vice versa
* Lifestrike now takes 0.5 seconds to cast, inflicts a small amount of instant damage but gives back significant health. The cooldown has been increased to 12 seconds, and no longer takes stamina to cost.
* Mark of the Devourer - this spell has been changed slightly to emphasize its healing nature more than its damage nature (as Nightfall necromancers don't have the same range of healing options available as Reanimation necromancers). The duration has been reduced to 30 seconds, to make it in-line with your other core dots. Damage has been slightly reduced. The buff you receive that increases the damage of the Mark of the Devourer will now increase in power ever 7 seconds, rather than every 15 seconds. The healing power has been increased - healing will now occur every 6 seconds rather than every 10 seconds, and the amount gained each tick of healing has been increased. The increase in healing gained by spending additional points in this feat has also been increased. Additionally, if this DOT runs its entire duration, you will receive a significant heal at the end (this end heal is not increased in power by putting additional points into this feat).
* Necrotic Pustule now has a secondary effect. It increases the duration of your Flesh to Worms spell, and Infestation effect by 6 seconds.
* Night of the Harvester now has a secondary effect. It causes your Lifestrike spell to additionally grant you mana (Harvest Soul) and stamina (Harvest Spirit). It also increases the amount healed by Lifestrike. It also lowers the mana cost of your Lifestrike spell (by 50/100%).
* Pestilential Blast has been changed to a 15 second dot. Its damage has been lowered.
* You will now get Pestilential Blast (Rank 1) at level 7 and Chill (Rank 1) at level 1.
* Plagued Heart Curse - reduced the casting time to 1 second. The damage caused if this triggers can now also crit.
* Ruined Blight now has a secondary effect. It increases the amount of mana gained from Harvest Soul. It also causes your Lifestrike spell to additionally inflict mana damage on the enemy.
* Set's Cold Hatred, Set's Ruin and Blasphemy have all been changed. These buffs now exist in only a single rank, and do not expire (but you can still only have one active at once). Set's Cold Hatred now gives you a passive amount of armor and critical rating, and whenever you perform a spell critical hit, your pets gain a short term damage buff. Set's Ruin now gives you a passive amount of fire, cold and electrical protection, in addition to spell penetration, and whenever you use Chill to consume Pestilential Blast you gain a short term increase to your base spell damage. Blasphemy now gives you a passive amount of holy and unholy protection in addition to hit rating, and while active your Flesh to Worms has a chance of inflicting 2 ticks of damage whenever it inflicts periodic damage. Blasphemy does not stack with the conqueror's Marshal the Ranks battle cry. The goal behind these changes is to make these spells more of a choice, depending on what role you are playing.
* Unholy Hands - increased manacost.
* Tome of Epithur - Changed cast time to 1.5s. Changed mana cost to 25% of base mana. Changed self frost/unholy +bonus damage to +generic magic damage.
* Wither Soul has been renamed to Withered Soul, and has been changed. When you perform a critical hit, you have a 50/100% chance to gain the Withered Soul effect, which makes your next Ice Strike instant cast. This cannot occur more than once every 10 seconds, and cannot occur if you are under the effect of the Death God buff.
* Wretched Heart Curse has been changed. When trained, it will change the Plagued Heart Curse spell to cause the cursed enemies to place a heal-over-time effect on their target when it triggers. This heals 1/2/3% of total health every 4 seconds for 8 seconds, and cannot be placed on the same target more than once every 20 seconds.
* Lifestealer and Harvester: The heal/regen from these two pets now persists for 1 second, so you can only get an effect every second at max. (In the past you would occasionally get bursty patches of lots of healing/regen procs). Removed the variance from these spells, so they always give you the same amount back. Slightly increased the amount based on the proc chances.
* The Master of the Dead feat now also removes the Shackled Heart requirement from the Ghoulish Feast spells in addition to its current effects.
* Ghoulish Feast duration has been reduced to 15 seconds for all ranks.
PRIEST OF MITRA
* The damage and mana costs of all the hostile PoM spells have been re-calculated.
* Avert Thine Eyes will now add -15% Unholy and Holy Invulnerability. The effect off the miss-chance on target has been reduced.
* The feat Blinding Light has been removed and replaced with the feat Divine Halo. Your holy nukes build up Divine Blessings on yourself. When this reaches 5, you gain the Divine Halo effect, which will periodically heal the lowest health friendly target close to you. Each heal performed will use up a Divine Blessing.
* Clarity of Mind has been rebalanced. Cooldown has been reduced by a third, and damage % component of the spell has been reduced by a third.
* Imperil is reduced to one rank. The debuff part has been increased to -10% holy and unholy damage invulnerability.
* The mana cost of Lance of Mitra has been split between the base spell and the Divine Lance feat. Training the Divine Lance feat will increase the mana cost of Lance of Mitra with each rank.
* Sustaining Faith has been changed to have a single rank. It is now a channeled spell with a 5 minute cooldown that returns 15% mana per tick (60% total). Undying Belief now causes Sustaining Faith to place a separate absorb shield buff when channeling has finished, and reduces the cooldown of Sustaining Faith by 30 seconds per rank. Determination and Relentless Faith no longer affect Sustaining Faith.
RANGER
* Armor Ripper has been changed. It now applies a standard 10% physical invulnerability debuff on the target (slashing/piercing/crushing/poison invulnerability).
* Bow Specialization has been renamed to 'Ranged Specialization.' This feat now increases the Ranger's ranged DPS by a percentage of his weapon's DPS (3/7/11/15/19% per respective feat point). For example, a 100 DPS ranged weapon with this feat maxed out would be a 119 DPS ranged weapon.
* The feat Crossbow Specialization has been changed. It is now called "Ability - Terror Totem". This grants you an ability where you can place a totem on the ground. This totem pulses a fear that affects minion monsters, causing them to run away from that area for a brief period of time. This will also affect necromancer Undead Minion pets (only those summoned via the Undead Minion class of spells - the caster pets are unaffected). More points in the feat increases the duration of the totem.
* Debilitating Aim has been changed. This feat now no longer affects Armor Ripper, and now gives you a passive amount of Armor Penetration.
* Silent Shots should apply when hitting a target, not on the combo starter. This was only the case for shadow snipe.
* The damage of the Splintering Puncture has been greatly increased. The area of effect has been reduced to 2/3/4 meters per rank.
* Splintering Puncture duration has been increased to 30 seconds. Splintering Puncture will be consumed when Bleeding Puncture is used. It will not go on cool down until Bleeding Puncture has been used.
* Pin Down: These combos now have a visual effect.
* Ricochet will no longer apply Snare Immunity to NPCs.
* Hail of Fire will now proc when using Piercing Shot I.
* Improved Pitch Pot now reduces the cast time by .3/.6/1 seconds per respective feat point, making the ability instant when fully feated.
* Pitch Pots can now perform critical hits.
* Fixed an issue which caused the Barbed Arrows feat to not always apply its bonus damage.
* Increased the duration of Puncture to 12 seconds. (was 6)
TEMPEST OF SET
* Spell damage coefficient for Storm Crown has been significantly reduced.
* Call Lightning is now a 1.5s cast and target AoE. It now hits up to 6 targets within a radius of 8 meters. The duration of the buff it gives you (Thunderhead) has had it's duration increased to 15 seconds. The effect has changed to be a +5% to your base spell damage. If you have cyclones nearby when you cast Call Lightning, they will receive a +5% damage buff.
* Curse of Set has been changed. Its cast time was reduced to 1.5 seconds, and it will now apply the 15% elemental debuff (applying to fire/electrical/cold), rather than the smaller electrical-specific debuff.
* Degradation of Set has been changed. There is now just a single rank of this spell, applying the debuff effect. The mana drain component has been replaced by a passive increase to the mana cost of the spells that can trigger Degradation while it is active (except Charged Blast, which does not get a mana cost increase). The casting time has been reduced to 1 second and the duration has been increased to 4 hours.
* Divide and Conquer has been changed. The Division of Law and Division of Chaos now have persistent particle effects, making it easier to see what buff you have.
* The Idol of Set is now able to crit. Cyclones of Set are now able to crit.
* The casting time of Lightning Strike has been reduced to 2.5 seconds. The spell damage and the spell damage coefficients have been reduced because of this.
* Each Call Lightning and Lightning Strike cast while Overcharge is active will stack up a debuff on the Tempest. This debuff can only be cleared by casting Life of Set.
* Improved Overcharge feat now allows the Disrupted Charge effect from Overcharge to have a chance to damage physical attackers. When this damage occurs, the Disrupted Charge stack is decremented one step.
* Overcharge has been condensed into one rank, received at level 45. Overcharge is now a permanent buff which increases the damage of Call Lightning and Lightning Strike.
* Shock and Awe has been changed. When a target is debuffed with either Chaotic Awe or Lawful Awe, they will also gain a stacking elemental protection debuff (affecting fire/cold/electrical protection). Fixed a problem where Fires of Gehenna could not trigger the Chaotic/Lawful Awe effects if rank 5 of Shock and Awe had been trained.
* Putting additional feats into Vital Shock now also lowers the recast time by 10 seconds per feat, in addition to the previous bonuses (down to a 20 second recast time).
* Triumphant Life of Set: This spell has been fixed so it can no longer be chain cast.
* Faith in Set has been changed to have a single rank. It is now a channeled spell with a 5 minute cooldown that returns 15% mana per tick (60% total).
GUI
* You will now not get the need/greed dialog if the item is a unique item and you already have it.
* Corrected an issue where white or blank icons would appear on your bank/inventory window.
* The normal and detailed team GUI now displays the actual values of the player's stats on the bars (wherever it fits).
* The fixed and floating portrait GUIs (target and target's target) also display the actual stat values for team/raid members instead of percentages.
* When joining a raid (as character or team), the raid channel will be available immediately.
* When disbanding from or leaving a raid, the raid channel will now be gone for those who left the raid.
* Spell icons should now correctly reset after fear ends.
* Weapon tooltips now only show the innate weapon damage instead of the total character when equipped.
* There's now a new chat channel called 'Trial'. This is by default muted for normal accounts, but can be subscribed to in the chat window options. Trial accounts won't be able to communicate in any other chat channel.
* Fixed a bug where the quest reward system would require a free slot in your inventory to give you an item which there is room for in an existing stack of the same item.
* Added a command /who, for getting information about players.
* Revamped the look and information included in the character GUI.
* Revamped the look and information on item tooltips.
* You will now not get the need/greed dialog if the item is a unique item and you already have it.
* There is now a "player equipment inspect" GUI, accessible via right clicking on their target bar.
GUILDS
* The guild search view will now also show guilds which are currently not recruiting.
ITEMS
* All classes now have access to the cloth/silk armor type.
* Nectargold will now restore mana and increase max mana pool instead of stamina.
* All items have been changed for the new systems in the update.
* New loot has been added to Atzel’s Fortress.
* Class requirements have been removed from raid tier weapons.
NPCS/MOBS
* All monsters have changed. HP has increased, DPS has increased, they have been given armor. These changes are in place to match the increased player power.
PVP
* PVP Dropped resources are now put sorted into the loot bag based off power level and then level/tier.
* PVP Dropped resources will now automatically stack in the loot bag.
* Warnings about teammates who are involved in criminal activities will now go to the criminal system channel.
QUESTS
Destiny Quests
* Soldier and Rogues will now gain extra weapon damage from their Destiny Quest rewards instead of Attack Rating. The Ranger will gain extra ranged weapon damage.
* Mages and priests will now gain a spell damage multiplier from the Destiny Quest. If they select that at all stages they will gain 1% more spell damage. Heralds get the weapon damage bonus.
TRADEPOST
* You can now attach resources to mails straight from your resource inventory.
TRADESKILLS
* All crafted 1 handed items can now be dual wielded in both hands.
* The tradeskill window will no longer disappear if you try to open it when you don't have any tradeskills, and then learn some tradeskills and try to open it again.
* All crafted gear has been re-itemized.
* All crafted progression gear for weaponsmiths and armorsmiths have additionally had their gem-slots reduced from 3 to 1 as part of the re-itemization. This was in order to “make room” for inherent mods that have been added, and to generally fit with the gem revamp.
* Crafted culture recipes no longer class specific.
Gem Revamp
* All existing uncut gems (deprecated) have been replaced with new uncut gems in player inventories.
* All existing unsocketed cut gems (deprecated) have been replaced with new uncut gems in player inventories.
* All existing socketed cut gems (deprecated) have had their values adjusted to coincide with gem revamp.
* All new cut gems have been created, and the corresponding recipes should appear in the tradeskill book of players who have obtained the appropriate tier.
* New cut gems follow completely new rules and mechanics, which you can read about in the linked article.
* New cut gems stack.
* New uncut gems have had their stack size increased.
* All Gemcutting progression quests have been modified to accommodate gem revamp.
New Recipes
* New dropped recipes for gemcutters can be found somewhere in and around the commons district.
* New dropped recipes for alchemists can be found somewhere in and around the commons district.
* Planned for 1.05: an epic crafted item can now be forged somewhere in wing 3 of black rock citadel.
Vendor Purchased Resources
* A “mini-revamp” of white vendor-bought tradeskills resources has occurred, in order to be more efficient with inventory space. This will greatly reduce the amount of vendor-bought items required for the weaponsmith and armorsmith professions.
Misc/Bug Fixes
* Bluesteel Half Plate and Skymetal gauntlets are now the correct material type
* Planned for 1.05: various upgrades to dropped recipe GUI
* In some cases, the recipe "Blood of the South" could not properly be learned by players. This has been fixed.
Explanations + Information:
Class changes
This article is intended to lift the veil on the core class changes that will go Live with the next major game update. As always, these changes are subject to change throughout the test server development cycle, but hopefully this article will give you an overview of some of the changes, tweaks, and additions to each of the different classes. Please bear in mind that these changes come in relation to the new core system changes, so please be sure to read the Core Systems Changes article first <<insert link here>>.
Please note, this article does not list all of the changes to each class (those can be read in the preliminary update notes). Many of the feats and abilities have been altered to use the new core systems.
So, all that having been said, let’s take a peek to see how your favorite class will be changed!
Soldiers
The headline change here is that all soldiers in Hyboria will be able to use plate armor! This means that in the future as new content comes in, heavy armor will have DPS oriented statistics and plate armor will have more defensive statistics, offering soldiers a choice as to their preferred armor set-ups.
* New ability: Irritate. Irritate is a low cooldown ability which temporarily adds threat to your current target.
Guardian
* Cry of Havoc – A new low cooldown AoE threat ability to pick up groups of mobs and salvage your team from annihilation. It also deals damage to the affected monsters.
* Combat Mastery – A new purely beneficial Stratagem which increases the Guardian’s damage.
* Relentless – A passive buff to increase your resistance to stun and fear effects.
Conqueror
As the leaders of the battlefields, Conquerors will also be given more effects to strengthen their allies in combat:
* Berserk Inspiration – Normal attacks will stack up your Furious Inspiration.
* Ruthless Assault – When the conqueror performs a critical strike, subsequent attacks will have a higher chance to crit.
* Retaliation – A new medium cooldown AoE threat ability to pick up groups of mobs and bring order to chaos. This ability also places a short duration damage shield on the Conqueror.
Dark Templar
The defensive capabilities of Dark Templars will be improved with new threat abilities and buffs that increase the health of the Dark Templar, while increasing his damage. The majority of the Dark Templar’s base covenants have also increased in power:
* Seal of Chaos – A new medium cooldown AoE threat ability which also gives the Dark Templar a short duration increase to healing received.
* Dark Hand – A new instant cast lifetap spell.
* Soul Barrier – Feat changed from spell to ability. You no longer have to keep recasting this buff to have it running.
Priests
Casting times on all health buffs have been reduced to 1.5 seconds.
Priest of Mitra
Priests of Mitra are getting abilities to debuff spell protection abilities and will get increased healing power:
* Divine Halo – A new feat which makes your holy nukes build up Divine Blessings on yourself. When this reaches 5, you gain the Divine Halo effect, which will periodically heal the lowest health friendly target close to you. Each heal performed will remove one Divine Blessing from the stack. When the stack reaches zero, the pulsing heal will stop.
* Avert thine Eyes and Imperil will now give significant holy and unholy invulnerability debuffs on the target. Avert thine Eyes will still increase the miss chance on the target.
Tempest of Set
The Tempests of Set’s spells have been adjusted to better balance the rate and relative amount of their damage output. It has been shifted to force players to have to better time their spells and choose when to use certain spells. In line with these changes, several of their spells have received a faster casting time.
* Lightning Strike is going from a 3 second cast to a 2.5 second cast.
* Call Lighting has been changed to a 1.5 second cast targeted AoE spell. The Thunderhead buff is maintained, and – in addition – any cyclones nearby will receive a buff to their damage.
* Damnation and Glorification of Set have been made instant cast and will grant powerful buffs to magical protection. They are put on a shared cooldown to make them tactical spells that the Tempest will actively use in combat.
Bear Shaman
As a melee and healer hybrid, Bear Shamans will receive increased survivability versus both physical and magical damage. Some of the more important changes are:
* Their Feral totems offensive effect has been strengthened while the defensive effect from the totem has been removed.
* A new totem - Miasma - replaces the Vemon totem, increasing stamina regeneration and placing a DoT on several targets around the target. The DoT stacks up to three times and will also drain stamina.
* Improved Grizzled Hide will be replaced by Improved Scarred Hide, which will give you a chance to get extra armor if you are victim of a critical hit. The chance increases with each number of feat points allocated, and maxes out at 100% with three feat points.
* Spirit of the Bear will now also provide a team health buff.
Rogues
Rogue-like abilities have been strengthened and longevity in combat has been increased.
* The old Concealment feat has been merged into Swift Shadows, which now both increases speed while in stealth and increases your hiding skill.
* Lethalty – A new feat replacing Concealment, which increases base weapon damage. More ranks will improve the effect.
* Excellent Balance will grant stamina when knocked back in addition to the existing effect. Quick Recovery will now provide an increase to stamina regeneration. These feats have also swapped places in the feat tree.
Assassin
The assassin will have more debuffs available to lower a target's physical damage mitigation, effectively increasing damage dealt by the Assassin and his companions through-out the fight.
* Lunge has been improved to be a 10 second buff increasing the damage of all the Assassins attacks.
* Grim Corruption will lower the target’s physical mitigation. The type of damage with reduced mitigation will depend on the Assassins stances.
* Seeds of Corruption will now give attacks a chance to build a stack of debuffs on the target. When Grim Corruption is used, damage is inflicted on the target and the stack of seeds is removed.
Barbarian
The barbarian has further evolved as a master of chaotic fighting through receiving a new powerful AoE combo. They will also get a new charge ability at their disposal.
* Blitz – New charge ability with medium cooldown replacing the Hand Weapon Expert feat. Barbarians can spend feat points to increase the amount of damage dealt when charging.
* Devastation – Feat which replaces Great Weapons Master. Every time the barbarian attacks without getting a critical hit there is a chance to increase the critical hit chance. More feat points spent will increase the chance of this happening.
* Savage Rage has been turned into a passive buff which increases damage after performing a critical hit.
* Whirlwind – New area combo which hits all the enemies around the barbarian.
Ranger
The ranger has received some new tactical abilities to add to their toolset.
* Terror Totem – New ability that gives the ranger a totem to place which will fear minions and the weakest Necromancer pets.
* Splintering Puncture’s damage has been significantly increased, at the expense of the radius, which has been reduced. The duration of the debuff has been increased and will be consumed when the target is hit by Bleeding Puncture.
Mages
The most significant change here is that pets will now scale in power with the caster, inheriting a portion of their damage, critical hit, and magical protection bonuses.
The Archmage feat will change to increase amount of mana gained from mana potions. Additional feat points in this feat will increase the effect. School specific buffs have been removed and mages are no longer restricted to one school.
Herald of Xotli
Visually, players of the Herald are in for a treat as Avatar of Xotli has a new and even more frightful look!
* Arcane Abatement has been made instant, and grants a powerful buff to cold damage protection. This is a short duration tactical buff intended for active use in combat.
* Lingering Hell - The debuff has been removed from this feat, and it now increases the duration of the Hellstep AoE. Touch of Hell will now decrease the cooldown on Hellstep.
* Fiery Enervation has been merged into Inferno Curse. It applies debuffs to magical protection and damage.
Demonologist
* Chaotic Blast is now a ground targeted AoE spell. It applies an invulnerability debuff and does fire damage by default. If you have Cursed by the Heavens running, the damage will be electrical.
* Mystic Suppression has been made an instant cast powerful unholy protection buff with a short duration, making it tactical buff to use in combat.
* Shock and Shockstrike will build up Empowered Shock Lance stacks on the caster, increasing the critical hit chance and lowering the casting time of Shock Lance.
* Shock Lance – New spell replacing the old Demonic Wrack feat. Shock Lance will consume Empowered Shock Lance stacks and deal column damage. For each Shock Lance cast, the mana cost of the next will be increased.
Necromancer
The bigger change for the necromancer is how their pets will improve in strength as the Necromancer improves their stats, but we’ve also modified several of their abilities due to the changes to invulnerability ratings in this update.
* Spell rotation has changed, Flesh to Worms is now a long-duration DoT, and the cooldown has been removed from Ice Strike.
* Chill has changed to consume Pestilential Blast to inflict damage.
* Wither Soul has been converted to Withered Soul which gives you an instant cast Ice Strike when you get a critical hit.
Pestilential Blast has had its duration increased to 15 seconds.
Comments
System Changes
General Itemization Changes
In general, items will now have more of an increased effect on core combat statistics than before. Hit points, stamina, mana, damage, and other mechanics will be more heavily influenced by your gear – and the scale of the numbers has increased. You will no longer see items that give a fractional percentage. With the new rating system described below, you should only see whole numbers on these statistics as well as your attributes.
We have opened up for more statistics to be available to more inventory slots. Where strength, for example, previously only was available to six slots, it will now be available on all your equipment slots. This has given us the opportunity to make a much greater variation in equipment.
The DPS stat on weapons will now have a more significant impact than before and will vary more with the power level of the item. As pure casters do not need this stat, spell damage statistics found on gear has been made high enough to match the weapon DPS stat.
As such, all the gear in Hyboria has changed one way or the other. With the removal of several stats from items, such as invulnerability ratings, defense rating and the physical bonus damage statistics (piercing, crushing, slashing, poison), we have converted the items to be more meaningful to the player with our new and enhanced set of item statistics. Inevitably, some items will have slightly changed personality – going from a class agnostic setup to a more class specific setup.
Out of combat regeneration statistics have also been removed from items, but these are replaced by new trickle-down effects from attributes.
Attribute Trickle-downs
Below is the complete list of how different attributes trickle into other statistics.
1 Strength
* Increases Combat rating when using melee weapons (except daggers) by 3
* Increases Armor by 2
* Increases Natural stamina regeneration by 0.05 (0.0125 stamina per second)
* Increases OOC stamina regeneration by 0.15
* Increases Stamina by 2
* Increases OOC health regeneration by 0.15
1 Intelligence
* Increases Spell damage by 0.6 for spells with Intelligence attribute (mage spells)
* Increases Mana points by 3
* Increases Natural Mana regeneration by 0.07 (0.0175 mana per second)
* Increases OOC Mana regeneration by 0.38
* Increases Protection from Electrical/Fire/Cold magic by 0.5
1 Constitution
* Increases Health points by a number depending on class
- Soldiers get 8
- Ranger, HoX and Assassin get 6
- Other classes get 5
* Increases Stamina points by 2
* Increases Natural stamina regeneration by 0.05 (0.0125 stamina per second)
* Increases OOC stamina regeneration by 0.15
* Increases OOC health regeneration by 0.15
1 Dexterity
* Increases Evade rating by 0.5
* Increases Stamina points by 2
* Increases Combat rating with ranged weapons and daggers by 3
* Increases Natural stamina regeneration by 0.05 (0.0125 stamina per second)
* Increases OOC stamina regeneration by 0.15
1 Wisdom
* Increases Spell damage by 0.6 for spells with Wisdom attribute (priest spells)
* Increases Mana points by 3
* Increases Natural mana regeneration by 0.07 (0.0175 mana per second)
* Increases OOC mana regeneration by 0.38
* Increases Protection from Holy/Unholy magic by 0.5
Armor and Protection Mitigation
There is a new mitigation system for both physical and magical attacks. Your items (and some spells) will now give you armor, which will mitigate damage from all physical damage types (slashing, piercing, crushing, and poison damage). You can also get items and buffs that give you protection, which will mitigate damage from all spiritual and elemental damage types (holy, unholy, fire, cold, electrical).
There are some abilities and spells that still give you invulnerability amounts, but that will no longer exist on any items (all items have been converted to use armor or protections). The effect from any invulnerability bonus (for example Defensive Stance) is applied after the damage mitigation from armor or protection is applied.
In PvP, there is a special case for your mitigation value. The defender uses their level to determine their mitigation, rather than the attacker’s level. This means that if you are exceptionally geared but attacked by a player of higher level, you keep your own mitigation and don’t suffer a penalty.
Hit Table
Conan has moved to a single roll system to determine the outcome of an attack. Previously, when making an attack, you had separate rolls to determine whether you missed, whether the target evaded, and finally whether you performed a critical hit. Your hit rating is used to overcome the miss and evade chance outcomes.
Spell attacks suffered from the same problem, with individual rolls for innate resistance, immunity, and critical hits. There is now just a single roll for spell attacks as well. Your hit rating is used to overcome the immunity outcome. Innate resistance (which some classes get through feats or spells, such as the Barbarian’s Insanity feat) is not overcome with hit rating.
Glancing Hits and Overwhelming Hits
Two new combat outcomes have been added for physical attacks. A glancing hit means you hit the target, but inflict reduced damage. You can overcome the glancing hit chance with high enough hit rating. Overwhelming hits occur only when you are being attacked by four or more non-minion monsters at the same time, and will cause increased damage. The more monsters that are attacking you at once, the higher the chance of suffering overwhelming hits.
Rating Stats
You will now see a number of new stats appear in the game, in the form of ratings. Some of these increase stats that you have seen before as percentages, while others are for all-new stats. Some of these ratings, like Immunity, will be introduced with this update, but heavier itemization around it will happen in later updates.
Rating stats will scale with level, meaning that if you do not improve your equipment the effect of the stat will go down as you level.
Converted ratings:
* Combat Rating – giving you increased damage with melee and ranged attacks
* Evade Rating – giving you the chance to evade melee and ranged attacks
* Immunity Rating – giving you the chance to fully resist magical attacks
* Hate Increase Rating – giving you increased threat generation
* Hate Decrease Rating – giving you reduced threat generation
* Fatality Rating – giving you increased chance to perform fatalities
* Offhand Rating – giving you increased chance to do offhand attacks
New ratings:
* Hit Rating – giving you increased chance to hit a target
* Critical Rating – giving you the chance to critically hit.
* Critical hits will now give you 50% extra damage
* Critical Damage Rating – increasing the damage of your critical hits
PvP Stats
Several stats will also have a PvP specific version that will exist on PvP gear. The effects of these stats will include the normal stat. For example, if you have 20 in evade rating and 20 in PvP evade rating, your effective PvP evade chance will be calculated from having a 40 evade rating.
PvP Stats:
* PvP Evade Rating – giving you the chance to evade melee and ranged attacks
* PvP Hit Rating – giving you increased chance to hit a target
* PvP Immunity Rating – giving you the chance to fully resist magical attacks
* PvP Armor – increasing your mitigation versus physical damage
* PvP Protection – increasing your mitigation versus magical damage
Pets Getting Gear Bonuses
The power of pets will now scale with your gear. Damage increases based on your highest magical damage bonus. Pets will fully inherit their owner’s hit rating and will inherit half of their owner’s critical rating. In addition, they gain one quarter of their owner’s protections. This will allow the reanimation necromancers, in particular, to scale correctly with their gear, although this affects all summoned pets and is not specific to the necromancer.
Heroic System Changes
We are removing the system with using heroic rating proficiencies on equipment. We are introducing a system with a similar effect, but we are instead checking against more natural statistics. The new system will only apply to raids.
For a tank being hit by a raid monster, there is a threshold value for armor being checked. If the tank meets or exceeds this value no damage adjustments are done except the normal ones. If the tank does not meet the armor threshold value the damage dealt to him is increased based on the amount of deficiency. This penalty comes in addition to the reduced amount of mitigation caused by having less armor. The value checked does not include contributions from temporary buffs, only from feats and items.
Such checks are also in place for combat rating, spell damage and protection. There is also a special case in which meeting your armor threshold also makes you automatically meet your combat rating threshold, but of course it still does not actually increase your combat rating. The actual threshold values will vary between classes.
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Gem Revamp
Introduction
The next major game update sees a total overhaul of the gem system with a new, more flexible system for augmenting your equipment with gems.
Addressing the Issues
The first task we set ourselves when looking at the gem system was to identify why the original gem system had not lived up to player’s expectations and why it had ended up being difficult to balance correctly.
Firstly, there were too many gems (both uncut, and cut – which did not stack), and this greatly stressed player inventory. The random element of gem cutting did not allow players to make the gems they wanted. Gem stacking lines were unclear as was which uncut gems could ultimately yield which cut gems, and where these gems could be socketed. The latter issue was further exacerbated by the large number of gems in existence.
In addition, the crafted items themselves have also been improved and enhanced to be more flexible and better balanced. The initial three gem slots on crafted items meant a player had a total of 42 gems socketed on equipped gear at any given time. For balance reasons, this necessitated very low fractional values on any individual gem. Since crafted gear had no inherent mods (just 3 gem slots), so we concluded that the system itself was probably too fragile in that changes to the Gemcutter profession had full impact on two other professions. This is something we want to avoid in the future to minimize the occurrence of what players might perceive as ‘drastic’ changes as happened after launch.
The City and Culture crafted items released in Patch 3 were designed with knowledge of the goals of this Revamp, while the Progression crafted items (from recipes taught by the trainer) will require greater changes.
The Gem Revamp will address the issues above, and also provide a solid foundation for allowing the Gemcutting profession to grow in future updates.
So what’s been done?
Now we get to the details. This article hopefully covers the changes relatively comprehensively so that you get a good overview of the changes and what they mean for tradeskills and using gems. So let’s start by taking a look at the gems themselves and how they are changed.
Gem Colors
With the Gem Revamp, the number of Gem Colors has been reduced from 8 to 6. Additionally, we have removed the concept of Flawless uncut gems. All uncut gems introduced with the Gem Revamp will be of the same quality level, and will remain world-drops. Higher quality levels of uncut gems will be reserved for future updates to denote new uncut gem drop types. Some examples might be: dungeon, raid, bosses, PvP, etc.
Thus, the total number of uncut gems in Conan has been reduced from 96 to 36.
Alchemical Transformation and Gem Families
Every gem has been given a Gem Family. There are 6 Gem Families, with one gem of a different color assigned to each tier. Every gem within a tier has a unique color and unique family at that tier.
Transformation Recipes will be introduced with the Gem Revamp that will enable alchemists to transform uncut gems across colors and tiers. For example, a higher level uncut gem may be transformed to multiple lower level uncut gems within its Gem Family. This is to allow higher level players a method to obtain uncut gems at lower tiers (should they choose) without having to farm humanoids at that lower tier.
Gem families have no bearing on the actual cutting or socketing of gems, and solely exist for the purpose of converting different uncut gems within a group.
Why Alchemists? One over-arching goal of tradeskill improvements has been to provide synergies between any two crafting professions a player may choose. This is so any combination of crafting professions a player pursues has some added convenience when taken together. With this in mind, we felt that alchemists were the best profession for the transformation recipes. Keep in mind that any alchemist will be able to obtain these recipes, but there's just more convenience if the player also happens to be a gem cutter. Since each gem family contains 6 different colors, Alchemical Transformation will help to stabilize the uncut gem market if there's a greater demand for some colors over others.
Pre-Patch Uncut and Flawless Gems
When a player logs in after the Gem Revamp hits the live servers, the total number of uncut gems in his/her inventory will be greater than or equal to the number (plus flawless) prior to the Gem Revamp.
An uncut gem of tier X will remain an uncut gem of tier X. The color will be different if that color was removed. The name will also likely change to accommodate its new gem family, as we wanted the gem transformations to make some sort of fictional sense within the Conan universe. Flawless uncut gems will be converted at a favorable ratio, so one pre-revamp Flawless gem will yield more than one post-revamp uncut gem of the appropriate tier and color. We decided on a ratio of 1 flawless gem yielding 3 uncut gems.
Cut Gems
The following concepts have been removed from cut gems: stacking lines, gem size, and the random element. The number of cut gems has been reduced from around 1380 to under 100 (It's currently 70, but this may change slightly). Additionally, cut gems will now stack.
Socket Colours
Socket colors are how we enforce “soft” stacking rules in the Gem Revamp. Every gem socket has a color, which matches one of the 6 gem colors. A gem of color X may only be added to a socket of color X. The color of a socket and gem is clearly indicated in the tool-tip. Any crafted item type may have gem sockets of any color. But players should never see a crafted item with multiple sockets of the same color, and this creates a conceptual “soft” stacking line.
For the cut gems, each color loosely follows a theme, and related mods tend to be in the same color. So for some material types/weapon types, sockets of certain colors tend to make more sense than others, and this is represented in the distribution of socket colors to those types.
The goal is to create meaningful choices for players within each color line. Examples of some meaningful choices are: DPS v damage mitigation, burst DPS v sustained DPS, generic damage v specific damage, magic damage mitigation v physical damage mitigation, hit rate v critical rate, & etc.
Many of these choices exist within the same color line, but some choices may be more relevant to certain specs and certain classes than others. Generally speaking, for hybrid classes or specs, since more mods are useful this also means more of the choices have meaning. However, great care has been taken to ensure that for all major specs of a given class at least one meaningful choice existed in the color lines favored by the material type/weapon type used by that class.
Most classes should find useful gems in most colors lines, but each class has at least two colors that are absolutely relevant, and provide a range of options. Some classes/specs have more. Therefore players should always have a viable choice for what to socket, and this opens up a new degree of customization possible with the gem system.
Scaling Mechanic
In order to avoid unnecessary duplication of gem effects, a scaling mechanic was invented. This allows us to have a single gem scale its value depending on the tier of the gear it's being socketed into.
As an example, the strength gem is the Tier 5 cut black gem. This is the only strength gem. When socketed into Tier 5 gear, its value is fixed at 10 strength. When the same cut gem is socketed into Tier 10 gear, its value is fixed at 20 strength. Thus, the cut gem scales with the gear.
Gems only scale up. A Tier 6 gem may be socketed into Tier 6 up to Tier 10 gear, but never into Tier 5 gear. The tool-tip of a cut gem displays its value at all valid tiers. In the maximum case (a Tier 5 gem) the tool-tip has entries for 6 tiers. At Tier 10, there is one entry in the tool-tip.
The “sexiness” of gems within a color line generally increases with the Tier. In many cases this translates to how specific the mod is, especially when many mods contribute to the same underlying stat. For example, specific weapon damage types are offered at higher tiers than generic weapon damage types. Which, in turn, are offered at higher tiers than base attributes that ultimately trickle down into physical DPS. In a general sense, what's increasing with tier is the ability to min/max (and to many players, this is what a “sexy item” often means).
An important point to note is that Tier 5 gems will still be useful at Tier 10. For Tier 5 gear, there is one option for a given color socket – that color's gem at Tier 5. At Tier 10, all tiers within that color provide gems of varying utility to the player. The usefulness of the Tier 5 gem is greatly diluted, but sometimes players will want to forgo all the fancy options and just socket the more generic gem, depending on what they are trying to achieve with their crafted gear.
This ties into Alchemical Transformation, as higher level players deliberately seeking the lower level gem need not farm lower level mobs to obtain its uncut version.
Other Mechanics
Some gems will be marked in the tool-tip as “Armor Only” or “Weapon Only.” Such gems will generally be seen at Tier 9 and Tier 10. Reactive and Active procs are a good example of gems that require this sort of mechanic for us to allow them in game.
Cut Gem Power Tiers
Gem recipes learned from the trainer will yield gems of power-tier green (not to be confused with the gem color green). A handful of recipes will drop from encounters. These will yield gems of power-tier blue. The blue gems are not necessarily better than green gems in terms of pure numeric values, but they will provide more choices, especially in cases where we want to offer mods outside of their normal color association. These gems exist to increase the usefulness of crafted gear to more classes and builds that can equip the item, when that item has a color slot which otherwise doesn't offer a clear choice given the spec of the character.
Changes with Existing Gear
With the revamp, existing socketed gems should be left mostly as they are. This should be true even if the gem would otherwise be invalid given the socket color (as all existing gear will be given colored sockets). However, the new gems are definitively better, so players will naturally cycle out the old gems using the gem solvent introduced with Patch 4.
In cases with progression items, which formerly had 3 gem slots, we have reduced the gem slots to 1 and given the armor normal innate mods. Players wanting to socket one of the new gems will have to delete the 3 existing gems down to 0. However, the new gems are balanced around a greatly reduced number of slots, and this is reflected in their power. For any cases that crop up where 3 old gems are better than 1 new gem, you may find the old gems reduced a little in power so they do not surpass the power of the new gems.
Base items will continue to have no gem slots, and thus are unaffected by the gem revamp. City & Crafted Culture/Regional items will retain the same number of gem slots. In general, all crafted items will greatly benefit from the re-itemization project which is being released along-side the revamp.
Leftover Cut Gems
Players will be compensated for leftover cut gems from before the revamp, as they would obviously not be able to socket these gems given all the changes to the system. These gems will be converted over to their uncut versions, with power-tier blue cut gems converted in the same 1-to-3 ratio as the flawless uncut gems.
Gemcutter Progression Quest
The gemcutter progression quests will need to be updated to reflect the new gems. Many gem recipes will be removed from the game, and what's left will be modified to fit the revamp. Players with a gem cutting quest in an incomplete state when the Revamp goes Live will have to re-acquire the quest. We will try to make this as painless as possible for players in the middle of a gemcutter profession tier, but that simply won't be achievable for all scenarios given the scope of the revamp.
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Wow!
Geez, i'll busted by monthly bandwith limit when they'll release that patch. I mean, they fix 2-3 things and for some reasons we always endup having to download hundreds of Mo. I cant imagine how many Go this patch will be.
Really looking forward to seeing how this plays out on testlive.
crying over patch size, saying it fixes 3 things.. while it fixes maybe 3000.. how moronic can ppl get.. get connection where downloading 500 mb isnt much with
This is the polish the game has lacked for so long. I hope it goes well.
Kind of sad by the full plate for all soldier change, that's the only reason I rolled a guardian in the first place.
Also, this overwhelming hit business sounds like I'm going to be a bit weaker.
All in all it sounds like steps in the right direction, just don't like having to relearn.
Can't wait to test this.
I'm sure we're gonna have months (maybe two) ahead of balancing and tweaking until all this is ready to hit the live servers.
Dark Templars deserve the plate. Conq's meh, i think they just need stronger buffs, but keeping them in medium is a better idea.
Terror Totem for the Ranger is just craptastic. I mean, how does that make sense at all? LAME.
Most of the rest sounds good.
Around 180 megs right now on testlive.
By the way, I'm with ya, I wish developers would quit doing so much work and giving us GBs of FREE updates, they're such a hassle to download, I'd prefer the game never changed.
Around 180 megs right now on testlive.
By the way, I'm with ya, I wish developers would quit doing so much work and giving us GBs of FREE updates, they're such a hassle to download, I'd prefer the game never changed.
LOL....sarcasm is free at mmorpg.com
If someone had came up to me in 1980 when I was on my Atari 2600 and said we will be playing games with thousands of people at the same time.I guess my response would have been,"but I only have 2 joysticks"
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/235780/page/8
Alright I played the game when it was first released as a Dark Templar. Graphics were good, action was ok, but my class was bad and I ended up with no quests at level 52. I did not renew.
Now that the DT can finally wear plate armor and that the xp issues are gone I am very interested in starting again. I'll download the trial, since I gave my account away. When is the 1.05 patch due?
Seems like they are creating an entirely new game.
O and to the other class that can wear plate now, enjoy next patch will give plate and nukes to all class..we need balance lol
Wheres the fuuking full plate for assassins? Also, no fix on bunny hopping, but not going to judge this patch quite yet, need to test it. Looks pretty good tho, full plate for conq? GTFO! Conqs are OP as it is, tho i hope they did something about it. All in all, huge patch, lets hope it goes well. Cant wait to see avatar graphics!!!! WOOOHOOO!
Now please excuse me, i'm going to need to clean my pants.
Damn it! Thats whay you call a patch : )
well the 3 things that i wanted in this patch....they got 1 out of 3...not bad..lol
Things that i wanted
1: A point to the stats on items. Variety of items (player made) They did it!
2: I thought they were adding more models to the items list? (appearances) Like taking all the NPC items and giveing them to players.... Plus adding more... this was one of the biggest problems with this game...A bunch of clones running around in Skirts. Your looking at an already modeled and renderd armor/ weapon sitting on an NPC...wanting to have it...WTF. but no.
i want a butchers cleaver already!!!
dont know if they did it????
3: Finsh the voice acting!!! That so killed it for me. After tortage the whole feel of the game was gone. I found myself clicking thorugh the text and doing the quest by the radar. Before i would listen to everthing... pissing off the rest of my group.
dont know if they did it????
but nice full game revamp.
Its like this was suppost to be the release date instead of releaseing it a year ahead of time.
"Beauty is only is only skin deep..." said the AMD/ATI fan. "Blah..Thats just what ugly people say..." said the Intel/Nvidia fan. You want price / performance, use the dollar menu..
I think a few points to take from this to begin with is; not to read to much into specific class changes.
Just because one class seems to be OP now doesn't mean they are, that is just a though process in conjunction with information in the mind on how other classes are where as the thing to remember is they are getting changed up too.
The way defence works, DPS, gear stats and so on will all change.
The patch will go through some rigourous testing, the actual forum part for feedback for it on test server is buzzing with activity like no other patch before it so far and it is a day old! ( well thats exaggerated a bit lol (get the idea) )
It is really hard at the moment to get an overall idea or real accurate picture without knowing how each class plays off each other. Lets not forget there is balance for group play more than 1v1 too.
What is really clear is there a fundamental shift here. Yes it is a wall of text and takes some reading through with a full glass of beer or cup of coffee but there are dozens of gameplay mechanic's changes too to consider.
I for one will 'simmer' the changes for a while and see where things go.
My whole HD isn't even as big as this game
Damn, great stuff. I can't beleive some people still find a way to bitch about this.
People will always find something to complain about. If you look at some of the replies it is just inital reaction. It is like "OMG WTF" like with the plate thing. Reality is that things are balanced differently now, plenty of cause and effect from class to class and gear to gear going on.
Things need to be put into perspective a little and wait to see what testing yields. There is also some strong issue on test server un-intended with this patch for the short term.
This is awesome. I'm so glad this game is FINALLY getting the DEV attention it deserves.
About as I expected, though...it took almost a year to get the game to where it should have been on launch day....
Really like the new patch from what I seen of it so far. Things looking good
Playing: Battlefield - Bad company (Xbox360) Arma2, DFO (PC)
On my radar: TSW, MO
MMO's played: SWG (pre cu/cu), WoW, AoC, WAR, DFO, Planetside
MMO's that I have tested: Lotro, L2, Aion, Ryzom
That's cool, then you probably can't play it anyways.
This is nothing, all MMOs are getting bigger and bigger. But harddrives are cheap and large today, bandwith is increasing so it's not really a problem.
It wasn't long time ago that games was limited to the size of CDs or smaller mediums, but good graphics and lots of content takes a lot of spaces.
The patch sounds good to me but it will have to be tested and see if it's fun enough or need tweaking.
DT/Conqs have the ability to wear plate in 1.5 however we have no raid plate sets available to us.
For those that don't know what I mean by that, we (conqs/DTs) will be better off tanking in our current tier1/2 heavy armor than plate blues.
That being said, from what I understand in the future of the game, raid-wise we will have plate sets available but who knows(T3+?). We will also lose our dps capabilites if we opt to wear plate with the new itemization revamp.
Choice of gear matters. Guards should also see very nice dps increases if they choose to go that route and wear heavy. Thoerycrafting but meh.
i agree the fullplate is a much needed addition but I have T1 boots of the triumphant, and the girdle/belt and im sure stat wise they are better than Fullplate blues. so until the new "fullplate gear" for conq's and DT's are introduced we will most likely be better off with T1-T2 heavy armor equivelants that far surpass what current Fullplate can give in its current form. but nonetheless this patch I absolutely love. Also as a lvl 80 conqueror myself, this patch gives conqs a much needed boost, both in group management buffs, dps, and mitigation and the itemization is killer cause for me I got alot of strength and constitution and dexterity so ill be golden when this patch hits
. i think all around this patch will reinfuse this game with the changes it needs and I for one greet it with open arms. frankly i can hardly wait 
hell we might even see a new increase in subs which is always good.
thanx for the patch notes avery.
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