Greetings, Taernians!
At the end of June, another big update is going to be implemented, so it’s high time we lifted the veil of secrecy. Well, at least as far the main content goes. As you know, the previous update introduced the first part of the gear overhaul and was met with a warm welcome. From what we have seen, the ability to customize your gear with drifs made you double your efforts in acquiring rare items. You created many new builds and even simulators that aid players in choosing the right gear. We are very impressed with your creativity - keep it up!
However, drifs are not the be-all and end-all - many of you are surely waiting for the next steps of the announced changes. Soon, we are going to give you new mechanics that will bring even more fun. The update will include a reworked gear star system and changeable difficulty levels of instances.
Upcoming gear changes
When implementing the concept of the gear overhaul, we made some changes that we would like to share with you. In previous articles, we mentioned an extra slot where you would place an item akin to a drif that would add attributes from destroyed gear. It was supposed to give you an alternative path to upgrading with upgrade flasks and also provide another way to utilize your rares. However, the longer we thought about it, the less this idea fit with the game design-wise. It was too close to upgrading and stars, making it unintuitive. After intense brainstorming, we decided to reject this idea.
However, it turned out that what we needed from that idea fits perfectly to another process we wanted to introduce - incrustation (the rework of the star system). This process will now contain the mechanic of destroying rares to add more attributes that would previously be provided by the rejected system.
Let us give you some more details about the process itself. Once the update goes live, all legendary gear, including sets and epics, will receive an equivalent of the present day stars - we call these new stars “ornaments”. You can have a maximum of nine ornaments on each piece of gear. There will be three levels with three ornaments each. You will be able to either loot or craft gear with a higher ornament number. Incrustation, the process of adding ornaments, will be available in the shops. It will require shards obtained from shattering other pieces of gear. Of course, the better the gear, the more shards you can get from shattering it.
The new system will give you a more complex mechanic than the current stars. At the moment, more stars means only more attribute points. Incrustation will provide more resistances (both physical and magical), a multiplier for upgrades, drif enhancement, and increased gear capacity. Not all of these bonuses will be active at every stage - some will only be available at level two, the best ones at level three.
Pieces of gear with the same name will have exactly the same attribute bonuses at ornament level one. Incrustation will then add random attributes and resistances to the base, meaning that the same piece of gear may have different attributes and resistances for each player. However, you will also be able to reforge gear in exchange for gold. This will randomly redistribute the extra attribute points and allow you to create gear better suited to your playstyle. For example, if a piece of gear had +50 dexterity and +50 strength at base level while incrustation added +10 dexterity and +10 strength extra, you would be able to change the distribution of the 20 points in a way that favors strength or dexterity.
You must be wondering what will happen to the gear you currently have. We are here to satiate your curiosity. Gear without any stars will be converted to ornament level one. Gear that currently has stars may have a higher ornament level depending on the number of stars. The present attribute distribution will not be changed, but if some pieces of gear lack attributes, the missing points will be added at random.
Additional instance difficulty levels
Together with the gear overhaul explained above, we will also introduce additional instance difficulty levels. They will expand the game by providing new activities for those who prefer a more close-knit group (easy) and those seeking a greater challenge (hard). Of course, the more difficult the instance, the higher the rewards.
Let’s start by reminding you that the instances currently in the game will mostly remain unchanged and will act as a baseline for the other difficulty levels. At easy, opponents will be easier, but the droprate, experience, and psychoexperience will be reduced. In addition to that, you will only loot low-value items, e.g. gear with fewer ornaments. Hard instances will work the other way. All mob attributes will be increased and you will be able to loot better items.
We also plan to introduce other differences. Easy instances will be meant for a maximum of two players. Leveling pets will also be easier in them due to an experience bonus. On the other hand, the number of runs in hard instances will be limited by entry items that you can acquire from instances of any level. Various level ranges will require different entry items to prevent people from farming Chieftain to get to the hard difficulty Morana. ;)
At first, only some instances will support this system. More will be added in future updates. The next one will include.
Easy and hard:
- Elemental Specters,
- Garthmog,
- Geomorph,
- Fyodor and GMO,
- Vidvar,
- Vough,
- Nidhogg.
Hard only:
- Morana and Lugus.
Of course, the update will add more features, but these two are the ones we wanted to focus on, because they are the most anticipated.
What comes next? We will keep you posted about what is going on in the Broken Ranks workshop. We’ll be sharing our thought process and various scenarios we considered along the way. Soon, we will give you more details about Thalia and its postponing. At the moment, we want to focus mostly on finishing the long-awaited mobile version (which warrants a separate article). Of course, we’ll also keep working on Thalia. We do not want to spoil too much, but… we want to share a part of the Occupied Thalia:
