Live Dev Q&A Summary - June 25, 2015

Otherworlds

The Otherworlds Campaign was announced a couple of weeks ago and takes place in a mirrored version of each realm.  It deals with King Uther who’s back from the dead and doesn’t realise Arthur has died and lost Albion. King Uther wants to reunite all 3 realms under his banner, and you’re here to stop him! The campaign also takes place in Jotunheim with Ymir, who is a Norse Giant God, and he wants to destroy Midgard and all the realms. Queen Cliodna on Hibernia has also set her sights on taking over the realms.

• Otherworldly Rings are a reward from Chapter 2 (the encounter released with patch 1.118) of the campaign will be trade-able and you will be able to equip two of them if you get 2.
• Can only get the reward (ring) once per character, though, as it is a quest. No trade-ins for a different ring.
• Ymir/Uther/Clionda Realm Point potions quest going away with next Chapter going in (when 1.118 goes live), potions not changing to be trade-able at this time.
• Chapter 1, currently on live, difficulty will be reduced in 1.118. One well-built group could complete it.
• Chapter 2 will be players taking the battle to the Otherworlds. 3 encounters per zone. 3 planned zones with an extra encounter to be announced somewhere else. The first zone will range from solo to small groups, the 2nd will range from solo to full groups, and the 3rd will range up to a battlegroup
• Difficulty changes to Chapter 1 now a lot less difficult to complete. On Pendragon right now is how it will be when it goes live and should only require at the very most 2 groups. Chapter 1 will need to be completed before Chapter 2 can be attempted but in order to keep the portal aggro-free for those that have completed Chapter 1, someone new who has never done the encounter before is required to start the Ch.1 encounter.
• 11 planned chapters! Tons of content!
• Why PvE content? RvR is very important in the game and we did a huge RvR patch last year and a huge tweak patch last summer, and is still the focus of the game and we still have tweaks and ideas coming in. The culmination of this campaign will be extremely RvR focused and extremely focused on improving it in massive ways. So stay tuned!!
• As these are new zones we can run events in them for example they look so spooky – Halloween events! And maybe something RvR related....gotta wait and see!
• Why not have this in the frontier areas? We don’t want to upset the day to day RvR as it is and a lot of people don’t like the events we run in the Battlegrounds as it takes away from that, so we have to consider the effect this Campaign would have had on RvR if we had done it in RvR zones and we want to avoid messing with that as much as we can.
• Most changes and additions will be hotfixed – no server downtime!
• Campaign Rewards will include 6 new craftable potions (including the draught of supremacy), 2 new legendary weapon types (and potentially other legendary weapon improvements), and new loot with mythical caps!

Herald

• New revamped Herald website due by end of the year. Redesigned from ground up!
• Character & Guild search and stats will work again once 1.118 goes live and will include archived server character searching!

Pet Pathing

• Went live today in 1.118b, please test and let us know of any issues!
• Feedback in twitch chat from people who had visited Pend already reported amazing changes in pet pathing!

UI/UX

• First we’re looking at quickbar changes.
• Bob from Bob’s UI is working with us to help integrate a fully new UI that’ll heavily borrow from Bob’s but also have new windows  put in, mainly around the quick bar and ability lists. We’d like to get that to where you can right click a quick bar and assign a key.
• Auto filing hot bars for new players without needing to go to ability lists each level or after training.
• Next phase for UX will be housing. Market explorer needs a big overhaul such as adding more bonuses, cross server searches, and so forth.

Crafting

• New potions will have a quest to show you how to gather components in 1.118, and a further quest, a couple of weeks or so after 1.118 comes out (Chapter3), to allow you to gather them.
• Each potion, 6 new ones, will require a new speciality essence item which will be difficult and rare to obtain, but easier than they are now. They won’t be too rare, and as the campaign advances they’ll become less rare as more opportunities to obtain the components open up.
• Don’t want them so rare they become impossible to use or too expensive and out of most players’ reach, but we also don’t want them to be too common either. We want to see them on the marketplace, but not see them for 100p each!
• High end alchemy drops – the dungeons have a lot of the high-ish end drops and when it’s time for the higher level dungeons to be revamped, they will be looked at and adjusted if necessary.
• Cost for new potions does take into account a) the new components and b) the existing high end alchemy components. They should be coveted and take some effort, at first.
• New components for potions will be soloable, but not farmable. Not dropped, but collected. You’ll have to find them!
• 1 dropped component for 1 item/potion for the draught of supremacy and 2 other new potions. For the other 3 potions, it’ll be a better ratio.

Legendary Weapons

• Adding new Body and Energy craft-able weapons.
• Not being added immediately, will be later on in the campaign before these are available.
• Will there be class balance changes regarding these weapons? Probably likely with certain classes who could potentially exploit the body damage especially.
• Weapon colours being reworked more than likely for all 6. Currently we’re planning on: Heat – Orange, Body – Red, Spirit/Air – White/Grey, Cold – Blue, Energy – Pink.
• Not planning on changing the innate body/energy melee resist damage tables now, but that doesn’t mean we won’t. Feedback is key!

Artifacts

• Not looking too closely at them just yet, but definitely on the table to do something with them down the road. Don’t want to overload players with too much PvE content at once.
• Artifact encounters currently are very easy, most, not all, but if we change and update Artifacts, then the encounters would also need to be updated.

Class balance patch

• We are looking at class balance and it has been something we wanted to hold off on until after the RvR patching to make sure things were settled and RvR was working correctly without throwing too many things into the mix.
• A class balance patch is coming, it may not be in 1.119 but we can try get some fixes in that patch, but 1.120 and 1.121 will contain class balance changes.
• We won’t change every class, nerf or boost, but tweaks to classes may change things very quickly, especially with the new legendary weapons. It’ll be slow and small and over a few patches.

Stat caps

• Item stat caps now go to 127 with the new Otherworlds Campaign gear. We’ve reached a point where players are hitting perfect templates, and while that’s cool, we think for the longevity of the game we have to raise that ceiling again and make players make more choices and sacrifice some stats for others.
• Will have effect on other parts of the game, like CC and damage, and it’s all on the table to be looked at over the next couple of months.
• Thresholds like dex threshold where you can cast a certain spell at speed or the diminishing returns on strength, etc. are not being changed.
• Item bonus stat caps will allow other races or classes who can’t reach those thresholds the ability to now reach them and not spend so many realm points on augmented stats, and force other classes to make choices and rethink their ToA or resist bonuses. All about player choices and we’re trying not to change too much with the power curve, although some may happen since the stat caps are raising.

Guild Emblems

• Will look into making some new guild emblems. New art intern working on terrain textures, more on that later, so she may also do some guild emblems.
• Revamping the guild emblem picker interface is on the list of the UI/UX changes but not top 10. Quick bar updates and market explorer updates and housing updates in general are a higher priority.

Returning players

• If you’re just returning to the game after a long break, the first thing you want to do is visit the King’s Throne room. The King’ has a free epic gear set for every level 50 which is about 85-90% capped on stats to help returning players get started and able to be competitive.
• Focus on obtaining Master Levels and Champion Levels (CL15 now) all much easier to gain through bounty points and glass for MLs and a multitude of quests and through RvR for CLs.
• No characters/accounts are deleted, nor items on characters, though you may have lost your house. Items on housing can be retrieved from vault NPCs in housing marketplaces.

Darkness Falls

• Trash mob difficulty has been reduced in Patch 1.118b to help return it for small groups and assassins to sneak around and do some damage to the other realms.
• If boss mobs give trouble they may be adjusted, but no current plans to change them in any way.
• No plans to make Blood Seals trade-able, but we may change drop rate to make it easier to get seals. Still being considered, 1.116 only went in last December.

Champion Level Weapons

• No plans to change the CL15 weapons. Feedback is key, but we’re pretty happy with where they are right now.

Spread Heal

• Spread heal not going to change to be worth RPs for healing due to trickiness of the spell i.e. no line of sight required, and heals a lot more than other spells.

RP Bonus

• July 4th RvR bonuses coming next week
• Mid-Summer RvR event will focus heavily on RvR and more RP bonuses.

Marketing

• MMORPG video and Massively interviews out and we’ve done a lot with streaming and the Newsletter.
• DAoC’s birthday in October will see more marketing.
• We want to get a lot of the UI/UX changes out before we really hit into marketing.
• More dev Q&A’s!

Pict Weapons

• Otherworlds Campaign more geared towards level 50 and not battlegrounds at the moment, so no plans for anything similar to the Pictish lower level weapons.

Patcher

• Sound on the patcher splash screen will be lowered.