Today on QA (R93)

We played around a bit on QA yesterday, and came across some interesting stuff.


QA Build 1253:


The Novia Slide was just a fad. At least, nothing I was able to do reproduced this overworld movement bug, so hopefully it is indeed fixed for good.


Devilcult's work on a tidier expanded stats window is looking rather sharp and is considerably easier to read. This was first brought to my attention by Gwendolyn Obscuro, and the consolidation helps to fit all stats of heavily worked items on screen, even at lower resolutions. (Random Protip: Binding CTRL+F11 as your alternate screenshot hotkey will let you intuitively take screenshots that include the expanded stats)

Spoiler: New Layout for Expanded Stats

Cone of Cold Skill removed as a combo and added to the water tree. The stats for this spell are clearly unfinished at the moment, Rinaldi informs us that it cannot yet be trained.

Spoiler: Cone of Cold skill in the water tree

Lightning Storm skill has been added to the Air tree. This skill was borrowed from the Frost Giant, and one would imagine that the immense 30 unit radius will be greatly reduced. (By comparison a Ring of Fire is Radius 5). As per Rinaldi this skill's currently unavailable from the master air trainer.

Spoiler: Lightling Storm skill in the air tree

Misc. Check-In Items that weren't necessarily expected to change (and didn't) include:

• Horses Jumping (not yet implemented)
  
• Non-Tired Artifacts (such as Cabalist Hoods and Weapons)
• Pax Rings give no Imbued Gem on Salvage

 

QA Build 1255:

Town Vendor Search has been implemented though it does not currently give an option to mark the vendor.

Spoiler: Vendor Search Window

 

@DavidDC only JUST alphabetized that menu. that didn't last long...

 

There is also a new quest in Jotengrund

Spoiler: New quest

Talk to dog trainer guy in the camp at the entrance.
He asks you to find out what happened to his best sled dog.
Search the zone, you will find one of several sled dog corpses.
One has the collar of the dog in question.
Return the collar for reward. It looks like a one-time quest.
The quest seems to be working as intended

As far as I can tell, there was no faster travel option added to Jotengrund.

Ships with red sails take us to overworld. In Jotengrund, the sled that takes you to overworld has some red on it, but it is rather indistinct. I did not really notice the red, and happened to hover my mouse over the sled to see it was click-able. Maybe make the red more distinct (less snow on outside of tent so the red shows through more)? What do you think @Vas Corp Por ?

 

Two skills have been adjusted to make charged/stacked versions more powerful than the single stack version:

Inner Strength: Single stack seems to give a bit less strength than on live for same amount of time, 5 stack gives me about 4.5 more strength than live for double the time (about 8 minutes for me) The decrease for the single stack may be real or may be due to me leveling the skill slightly on live.

Celestial Blessing: 5 stack gives more resist than single stack but both give me less than I got on live. Stacking doubles the time to one hour. Also the focus penalty was increased from 20 on live to 100 or 120 depending on stacking on qa. Not sure this one will be staying on my buff deck.

 

For Inner Strength, it was confirmed that it would be weaker but stacking it would make it stronger, not a bug, and you weren't crazy!

For Celestial Blessing, did you train it up? I recall reading that due to its effects never scaling, only the duration, that many left it at the minimal level of 20, so maybe training it up gives it more resistance, which could be a way to recover what was lost?

 

Celestial Blessing no longer features a static bonus of 20 to 4 types of magic resistance. Now, the resistance amounts scale based upon your skill level, meaning many if not most players will notice a reduction in the bonuses provided, but players can obtain greater amounts of resistance as they increase the skill's level. This skill also can now stack which allows players another avenue for increasing the effect amounts. The focus penalty has been increased and scales with skill level. Moon specialized players can receive extra bonuses to these resistance effects, and they also now receive a greatly reduced focus penalty. CL 213795

Just needs to patch in. This guy needed scaling for a long time, so sorry since a nerf for most since there was little reason to level this before, but it does open up an avenue now to get greater than 20, but folks will just need to work at it. At 120, non-specialized, 5-stack, you'll be close to what you had.
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...essing-charging-stacking-has-no-bonus.166956/

 

oh I wasn't suggesting that inner strength being weaker with one stack was a bug, I just didn't take the time to train it up on QA so it matched my current level on live, and the difference is so small that may have accounted for it.

For Celestial Blessing mine is level 100. I"m sure it gets stronger at higher levels and I am all for that part of the change. I'm sure it will still be a very useful skill for many. The reason I may need to stop using it is that I am Tamer Blades. More than half of my focus already goes away just for having a pet out. The main reason to use celestial blessing would be against undead but that is already where I have my worst focus problems since I'm not mixing in stacked rends. So I don't think the focus for resistance trade-off would be worth it for me since I wouldn't have enough focus left to try to kill stuff.

 

If the focus drain goes live as high as stated above at GM, I'll ditch the skill from my buff deck in no time.

 

They have essentially killed Celestial Blessing:



This will be removed from my buff bar.

 

With the affordability of it for many builds (those not focus starved) and increased duration I'll be adding it to my long term buffs bar for the first time in ages. It used to be only situationally useful and have a medium length buff timer that was a bit annoying for my playstyle, so I didn't much bother.

There are some builds and playstyles where it's now a poorer choice to be sure, but certainly the skill is far from dead. For some builds it was even given a nice buff.

 

It was "meh" enough before the update. Now it's out of my buff deck as well.

 

Any new chaos skills?

 

i'm not dismounting changing scenes! mount horse, enter westend from overworld, still on horse, ride back out, still on horse...

 

Sadly not. Checked all the trees and only the two new skills pointed out by Rinaldi seemed to be in. Chris mentioned some Life Totem skills as well, but they weren't there yet.

 

QA Build 1257:


Town Vendor Search performance has been much improved. A tweet mentioned a 5x performance increase, but it seems a fair bit better than that in large towns. There is still a reasonable delay in the most populated vendor towns, sometimes over a minute, but others load in seconds.

 

Cool, I'll check it out later. I literally fell asleep last time I tried it.

 

I'm ready.

 

#ME2

 

New tameable wyverns and dragons are on QA!

The large and huge wyverns at well of aldur can now be tamed, though a little too easily for now. They summon at level 79 but that has been bug reported and hopefully the summon level at least will be increased before they go live. Also both large and huge tame to a ferocious wyvern which is confusing.

As for dragons, anywhere a young dragon spawns there is supposed to now be a 1 in 4 chance at a juvenile. Alley Oop did spot one in grundval shardfall, so at least some are in game. But I have not been able to find any in Northwest Blackblades despite finding lots of young yellow dragons so that map might have been missed. If any tamers want to brave the PVP zone they can try to tell us if taming dragons in grundvall is even possible with the skill cap- if they are bugged like the wyverns they would be but if not I don't know the minimum skill levels needed to tame a destroyer. Meanwhile I have been searching out dragon encounters in hopes of a very rare spawn. Wish me luck!

Edit: forgot to mention the new wyverns do summon with a lot more health than regular wyverns. On par with a lupine destroyer. But I havent done a lot of fighting with them yet.