Announcements - Asheron's Call 10th Anniversary Event Preview
Augmentations
It's Friday and since the team is in a good mood we thought we'd leak some more 10th anniversary goodness.
(Edit: NoWorries commented to me that he is actually not in a good mood so I have falsely reported.)
In the form of... new Augs!
Yes we are adding new Augmentations for you to obtain as part of the 10th anniversary.
~ Infused War Magic By mastering the art of War Magic you become infused with it. You no longer need any Foci or component to cast War Magic spells, though you still require scarabs.
~ Infused Life Magic By mastering the art of Life Magic you become infused with it. You no longer need any Foci or component to cast Life Magic spells, though you still require scarabs.
~ Infused Item Magic By mastering the art of Item Magic you become infused with it. You no longer need any Foci or component to cast Item Magic spells, though you still require scarabs.
~ Infused Creature Magic By mastering the art of Creature Magic you become infused with it. You no longer need any Foci or component to cast Creature Magic spells, though you still require scarabs.
~ Master of the Steel Circle Your skill at using all melee weapons is increased. Your effective melee skill when using any melee weapon is increased by +10.
~ Master of the Four Fold Path Your skill at casting all schools of magic is increased. Your effective magic skill when casting any spell is increased by +10.
~ Master of the Focused Eye Your skill at using all missile weapons is increased. Your effective missile skill when using any missile weapon is increased by +10.
~ Frenzy of the Slayer All damage you cause from melee weapons, missile weapons, or magical spells is increased. You gain a damage rating of 3 which increases all damage you do with any attack. (Damage rating is basically a percentage increase, but it is additive with other damage rating boosts. It multiplies all damage by (100 + Rating) / 100.)
~ Eye of the Remorseless Your chance to make a critical hit with any melee attack, missile attack or damage spell that can get critical hits is increased by 1%.
~ Hand of the Remorseless Your damage for any attack that successful scores a critical hit , be it melee attack, missile attack or damage spell is increased by 3%.
~ Iron Skin of the Invincible All damage you take from weapon or spell is decreased. You gain a damage reduction rating of 3 which reduces all damage you take. (Damage reduction rating is basically a percentage decrease, but it is additive with other damage reduction rating boosts. It divides all damage by 100 / (100 + Rating). Basically a damage reduction rating of 3 will negate a damage rating of 3.
(As an aside, we understand that some players are nearing XP cap for getting more augmentations. The tech to remove augmentations and restore the experience from that augmentation is complex and won't be in for the 10th anniversary. We went back and forth on whether to include new augmentations in this patch, but we decided that putting them in was more of a boon to the 20th anniversary despite this limitation.)
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Gearcrafting
We wanted to give players a preview of another new feature of the 10th anniversary update:
All over Dereth, with the release of the 10th anniversary patch, geared trinkets infused with Aetherium have begun to appear. Creatures have begun finding these in remote corners of the land and carrying them. Many of these trinkets have strong magical properties. People throughout the lands have found that they can find and activate these trinkets and the enchantments they contain, though only one will work for them at a time. Rumors abound that some craftsmen and women have learned a previously unknown new skill that allow them to enhance the magical properties of these geared trinkets to rework them into powerful magical wards and talismans.
With the 10th anniversary we are introducing a new item slot; the trinket slot. This new gear slot will allow you to equip a new type of loot called, not surprisingly, trinkets. These gear worked items can carry enchantments just like jewelry and will drop from loot. Trinkets will drop at all levels so low and mid level characters will be able to enjoy these items as well.
In addition, there is a new skill called Gearcrafting. This skill (cost is 2/-) allows a character to imbue trinkets with a variety of enchantments. Unlike most items, trinkets can be imbued 3 times through crafting which uses this new Gearcraft skill. Using the Gearcraft skill does not attune/bond items to you; you are free to sell or trade trinkets that you have imbued using Gearcraft. Each trinket can be imbued with one major, one moderate, and one minor imbue. These imbues add spells to the trinket that can have a variety of effects.
In additon, Gearcraft can be used to create special geared items that will make some of the less used skills more, well, useful. These items have a variety of levels, and their effectiveness increased with their skill requirement.
~ Assess Creature items: Special lenses can be crafted that can be employed by characters skilled in Assess Creature. When equipped and used, these lenses will expose the weaknesses of the enemy, allowing you to do more damage. This debuff works like Imperil and allows characters with high Assess Creature to cast an Imperil like debuff on targets. Though this won't stack with Imperil, it allows weapon using characters with rending weapons to debuff a creature without needing magic. The highest Expose Weakness debuff is equal to Imperil 7.
~ Deception items: Special crystals have been found that are enchanted by the Virindi to boost their magical knowledge. Gear crafters can craft trinkets to hold and power these crystals. These crystals appear to be slightly self aware, and though these crystals can not normally be used by those who are not Virindi, characters with a high Deception skill can fool the crystals enough to get these trinkets to activate. When used from your pack these crystals boost the Arcane Lore of characters with Deception. These crystals will buff your Arcane Lore skill, allowing you to use items previously too complicated for you to understand. The highest Arcane Lore buff will add 40 points to your skill.
~ Leadership items: Special gear enhanced war horns can be crafted that can be employed by characters skilled in Leadership. When used from your pack these war horns buff your entire fellowship. This buff adds to the hit points of everyone in the fellow for 30 minutes. The highest buff will add 10 Health to the fellowship for 30 minutes. Multiple buffs of this type don't stack with each other, but they stack with other buffs.
~ Loyalty items: Special gear enhanced medals can be crafted that can be employed by characters skilled in Loyalty. When used from your pack these medals help boost the moral of your entire fellowship. One type of medal adds a Stamina buff to everyone in the fellowship, while another type of medal adds a Mana buff to everyone in the fellowship. The highest buffs will add 10 Stamina or 10 Mana to the fellowship for 30 minutes. You can have both Stamina and Mana buffed at the same time, and these stack with other buffs. Multiple applications of these buffs do not stack with themselves.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
We thought everyone might enjoy seeing just ONE of the things we have coming to Asheron's Call for our 10th Anniversary.
Make sure you head over to http://ac.turbine.com/ to check out the exclusive teaser!
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Frelorn AC Community Relations |
Developer Comments
Quest XP
To the original topic, we are changing quest XP so it will pass up to your patron as part of the 10th anniversary.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Does that include Essence, gold and other trophy turn ins?
A: Basically it's anything that gives level proportionate XP.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
10th Anniversary: Quest Journal
The team wanted to share with you some preliminary details of another 10th anniversary addition: the Quest Journal. This feature provides you with an in game Journal where you can record and organize quest information.
Before I go into the details, I wanted to go over our design goals and the technical limitations we have imposed on the system. I feel that to understand where we are coming from with the design you need to understand our goals and limitations.
DESIGN AND LIMITATIONS
~ The system will add as little load and storage to the server as possible.
~ The system will expose as little of the quest flag system (if any) to the client as possible.
~ The system will allow players to record and track information about quests.
~ The system will not hand over quest information to the players as some kind of easy mode. We want a system that supports a player recording information, not a system that hands them answers.
~ Since almost all quests in AC can be repeated after a time, the system should give the players a way to record and easily view the varied and numerous quest timers players can accumulate.
~ If possible, the information should be accessible to add-ons.
THE QUEST JOURNAL
The Asheron's Call client will have a new icon button in the icon bar.
This button, Quest Journal, now populates the icons bar, tucked between the Attributes and the Map icons. The icon looks like a quill. Clicking this icon brings up the quest journal panel. The quest journal panel has two tabs; Journal and Page List.
THE JOURNAL TAB
The Journal tab shows a single journal page and has controls to navigate to other pages. Each page has the following panel elements on the page:
Title: The player can add a short title to the page.
Entry: the player can add a long description to the page. This field supports cut and paste so you can cut text from your chat panel and paste it into the description. This will allow players to store description text from NPCs and add their own notes to the page.
Location: This button allows you to add your current location to the page. The page only stores one location, and underground or indoor locations cannot be added. Basically if your interface shows a location you can add it to a page.
(The system is designed so sometime in the future we may add a system where you can click on this location and get an arrow to that place and perhaps an icon on the map while you are outside. That is an option that is unlikely to make the first incarnation.)
Countdown: This area allows you to start a countdown timer to track when a quest might be available again. Although the current design specifies that you will have the option to choose a timer time from some list of standardized times, the actual number of different quest timers is fairly large and we may have a more free form series of entry fields to specify the timer. This timer has three states; No Timer, Counting Down, and Ready.
Page Navigation: The tab will have navigation tools that will allow you to move from page to page. Next, Prev, First, Last.
THE PAGE LIST TAB
The Page List tab shows a listing of all the pages you have entered. The list shows the page number, your title (or as much of it as can fit) and the timer of the page if there is any. You can sort by any of these three fields so it should be fairly easy to sort by timer and see all your timers that are in the Ready state and which timers are coming up.
Double clicking a specific list item (or selecting it and hitting a Go button) will open the Journal tab and take you directly to that page.
THE QUEST JOURNAL FILE
One technical note is that all the information will be stored client side in a quest journal file. This file will be plain text and use tags to store the information. It means that the information does not need to go up to the server, so text sizes can be substantially higher, performance won't be affected, and add-ons can access the file. Someone who uses one computer probably wouldn't notice. For people who use multiple computers, they will either have to keep their journal on one or the other or move their quest journal file over manually.
This will allow the total journal size to rise very high. We felt the size limitations of a server side quest journal would be too limiting for our players with the number of quests available in the game.
With this addition players should be able to quickly record notes about the numerous quests in the game without leaving the client.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: I would prefer that the timer begins automatically.
A: One goal in the design was "We don't add things to your Quest Journal. You do." We want you to decide what to track and make decisions about how and what to add to your journal.
Another consideration is that Quest Timer compiles information after players have explored the content and compiled information. We don't want to by pass or reduce the exploration phase of content.
As to add ons, our players tend to be very industrious and we thought that some players might find this aspect of the design interesting.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: I guess I should abandon mace now in favor of sword?
A: The Two Handed Combat skill will allow the use of any two handed weapon.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: The damage seems pretty unbalanced.
A: Two handed weapons do indeed strike twice because of their animation, but they are balanced around that fact. One of those two hits will not do the damage of a single hit weapon.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: So it's a totally new skill then? So will they do more damage than one regular hit? Or will it essentially do half + half ?
A: We are currently testing two handed weapons to do damage equivalent to 110% of sword DPS, divided between the two swings. So the two handed weapon will essentially do two hits, each at 55% of what a sword might do. The exact number might change.
Of course you give up the protection of a shield.
In addition some two handed weapons have a "Cleave" effect. Each strike also hits an additional creature in the 90 degree attack arc in front of you. Because PvP players might not want this effect if they are grouped some two handed weapons (usually the piercing types) don't cleave.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: So a "Cleave" weapon will have over double the effective DPS of sword, rather than just double, assuming two mobs are in front of you?
A: Against multiple foes if you line up the cone, yes. Against bosses or smart players, no.
It is very early in the process though, so just to be clear the exact damage numbers could change.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Will cleaving only be with slashing weapons?
A: Bludgeoning weapons also cleave. Most piercing weapons don't. But specific quest weapons could possibly be different.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Is this a 180+ skill? Will the under 180s get missed on 2 handed and dual wield?
A: No. You can create a brand new character with the Two Handed Combat skill.
(There is no dual wield skill.)
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Will there be elemental cleaving weapons?
A: Yes. If the weapon has an elemental effect then the cleaving attack will also be elemental.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: What will this skill cost?
A: There will be a brand new skill called Two Handed Combat (though we might shorten it to Two Handed or something) that costs 8 and 8.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Will two handed weapons require the new skill and another melee weapon skill?
A: If you take the Two Handed skill, no additional weapon skill is needed to use two handed weapons.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: What attributes will it be based on, Strength and Coordination again?
A: Yes.
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: How will shields work?
A: You cannot equip a shield while you have a two handed weapon equipped, but purchasing the skill itself does not prevent equipping a shield.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |