Remiem's Weekly Community Update | January 14, 2015

[Remiem]

Happy Wednesday, Legends!

Is it that time of the week already? Time flies! Get ready for your weekly community update.

This week we put some focus on a few different things, some short-term, some long term, and I think you'll be happy with the results.

Here's what we focused on this week:

Undead Vials

A lingering issue from the Planar updates was how difficult it was to find Undead Ectoplasm Vials, the crafting material used to create Nekro. This one is delicate, because loot drop rates are determined based on rarity (Epic, Rare, etc.) not by individual item. That means, if we were to make a blanket increase of the drop rate to fix vials, it could displace the drop rate of other items of the same rarity. That could be bad! So, with that in mind we have made the following changes:

Drop Rate
We don't want to touch the drop rate, however we would propagate the Vial drop to also be available from Planar Tombs Elite content. Currently it only drops from Shuyal and Tindirin Elites, and this would keep it in line with where we want to see it. The other benefit is that it would now potentially drop in addition to the Planar goodies that are being actively farmed, and not explicitly the reason for doing Elite Shuyal content we hope. Player's already farm Planar, this would just get added to the mix!

Ultimately this results in more relevant mobs with a chance to drop the vial, which should help pad the Vial population in a healthy way.

Recipe Change
Currently the recipe requires 15 Undead Vials and the Arcane Fossil to craft a Nekro egg. The proposed change would reduce this number to 10. So you won't have to find so many in order to be able to craft Nekro.

These changes will go into effect in the Thursday, 1/15 update.

Frost-Touched Weapon Updates

Based on your feedback on the new Frost-Touched mythic weapons we made the following changes:

Frost-Touched Bulwark
The proc rate on the bulwark was actually pretty high already. In fact, it had a higher proc rate than the Elondrian Bulwark! However, we did identify some places where we could make it feel just a little more worth it's Mythic Rarity:

+ The proc now buffs the user with an armor boost.
+ Now has a chance to proc an armor debuff on enemies. This is a separate proc from ice spikes.
+ There is now an increased chance to proc on a charged attack.

Frost-Touched Rifle
There was some confusion on this one initially. The proc for the rifle was more of a charge and less of a random occurrence. The first hit applies a 20% reduction in movement, then 40%, 60%, 80%, then freezes on the 5th one. The applied slow effects drop off after about 4 seconds, so on a single target should stack up appropriately with a constant rate of fire. However, the stack starts over if the target dies or you switch targets, so the freeze appears to be very rare. This also does not apply to Bosses, much like other freezes and stuns don't for the most part. Here are the changes:

+ Now provides a mana regen passive effect and we increased its INT stat.
+ The proc now happens in 3 hits, up from 5, as above: 33% movement reduction on the first hit, 66% on the second, then frozen.
+ Now gives a 10% chance on hit to do an AOE spread of the slowing effect and do a small amount of damage.

Frost-Touched Bow
The proc rate on this one was indeed quite low, so we made the following changes:

+ Proc rate has been increased
+ The proc'd whirlpool now sucks in enemies toward it instead of knocking them back.
+ Whirlpools now do more damage per tick and on impact.
+ Now two proc'd whirlpools can be active at once, up from 1.
+ The bow now has a a 50% chance to freeze on the first hit (PvE only.)

These changes will go into effect 1/15.

Bug Fixes

The following bug fixes will go into effect during the update on 1/15.

Melee Distance Bug
After we fixed this last week we identified some bugs with the Maul of Ollerus that still caused this bug to happen. This has been fixed. If this bug still appears for you, please help us by reporting which weapon you are using. This will help us greatly with further fixes.

Can't get rid of Forged Energy Kits
You are now able to remove Forged Energy Kits from your inventory to clear up space.

Sorrax and Ferrix
This was a minor one, but we're giving everyone the right name back.

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Coming Next Week

We want to thank you for providing us with such great feedback on last week's post. We record each and every bug report, idea and suggestion and compare it against our schedule, available resources and more to help determine what we will focus on in the week ahead. This week we will be taking a look at:

+ Buffing Nekro
- We've heard your suggestions and will be looking into how to make Nekro's value match all effort you're putting in.

+ Assessing PvE gold payouts.
- There have been a lot of economic changes in AL over the years, but none to our PvE quest payouts. Many players believe that it's not longer a viable way to get the money you need to play the game! We'll be assessing that this week to see what we can do to make questing more worth your while.

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In Other Community News

Breeze

Carapace put out a post late last week with the proposed changes to Breeze, and we've hit a pretty good happy medium on his stats so that he's still worth the effort to obtain, but isn't completely overpowered in PvP. You can read that discussion here: http://www.spacetimestudios.com/show...d-Undead-Vials

Here's a look at the proposed changes:

Breeze General
- Breeze's Movement speed has been increased about 10% to help him stay closer to his owner when playing catchup. This felt like a good way to boost him a little bit after the adjustments that are being made to his other abilities

Breeze Passive Attacks
- Maximum freeze time has been reduced from 4.0 seconds to 2.5 seconds, this applies to PvP only. PvE is unaffected and remains at 4.0 seconds.

• Four seconds feels long enough thinking about it, but when you're actually in the heat of battle it's just too long even with a chance every 1 second to remove itself

- During this freeze in PvP, there is a 25% chance every .75 seconds that the freeze will remove itself early, that's 3 chances to break early

• This makes it consistent with other stuns in PvP. You may get lucky and be able to shrug off that freeze early, or have to struggle through the full 2.5s

- After the passive freeze has been removed it will apply a freeze immunity independent of the stun immunity. This immunity will last either 7.5s or 10s. It will always be at least 7.5s, and at 7.5s it will have a 50/50 chance to stay on for another 2.5s or fall off at that 2.5s

• This is a separate immunity in order to maintain Breeze being a bit more special given the amount of time he has been available with his present overpowered stats. We didn't have to do this, but it feels like a good middle ground. The length of the stun immunity is also a bit longer on average than normal stun immunities.

- Damage remains the same, as does it's ability to reduce movement speed

• The only components of this to change are the ones causing the problems basically

Breeze Activated Ability
- Upon cast, there is a 50% chance to apply the 1s stun instead of 100% chance

• Every time it was cast, it was getting a guaranteed

- The ice pool left on the ground now has a 50% chance to apply the same stun every tick instead of 100%

• Subject to the same rules as the original cast, in lesser intervals. If you get away from the danger zone in a timely manner it won't catch you

- The stun effect applied in this ability is now subject to the 7.5s stun immunity shared by other pet abilities and skills like Fireball Knockdown

• This prevents "stun lock" scenarios once the ice well goes down

- The initial damage caused by this ability has been increased to help compensate for the freeze and stun changes. This can crit

• This should help compensate for the removal of stun locks, by giving a bit more damage on the front end

- Standing in Breeze's ice pool will now give you a 3% crit boost instead of dmg.

• This part of the AA was bugged when it was released, and did not correctly grant the dmg boost. Damage Bonus is not incredibly useful though, given most players have +x% damage bonuses already which would negate the bonus of this so we will be changing it to Crit instead.

So, the next question is, When will these changes go into the game? These changes have gone to QA for testing and will be out as soon as testing is done. Since there is no way to predict what bugs might come from testing and how long those bugs will take to fix, I can't say an exact date, but know that we will get this out as soon as possible. For everyone's good, we're going to take the time that we need to make sure that we're putting in a solid update, not releasing fixes that create more bugs to fix.


Class Balance
We have seen a lot of discussion about class balance and suggestions on how to level the playing field in PvP. We are definitely listening and taking all of your feedback to heart. If you recall, last year we started the conversation about some updates to the current Arcane Legends skill system. While I'm not at liberty to go into detail just yet, we are focusing more on that this year and think that it will make a big difference in class balance going forward. We're in the process of weighing out what it will take to get these system updates done and in game, so I will have more detail for you on this as we get more clarity on that. For now, just know that it is on our mind, but rather than put in band-aids and quick fixes, we really want to put the time in to fix it from the ground up.

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What's Next?

What do you want to see next, folks? Let us know in the comments what you would like to see us put our attention on next and share your most brilliant ideas. I'll see you in next week's update!