Yet another update is coming and, with it, the next part of the gear rework, the final portion of instance difficulty levels, as well as a handful of fixes and new features. When? Very soon, on December 12th! Want to know what awaits you? Read on.
The return of the sets
The most important changes to legendary gear have been implemented and so the time has come to update its alternative. Yes, the time for sets has come!
Sets have long occupied a certain niche. They were best for players who didn’t progress very fast but still wanted their characters to be powerful, and also for tournament participants. We decided that a target like this is fine and shouldn’t be changed dramatically. All we needed to do was make sets able to compete with rares, which got a lot of customization options and whose longevity increased significantly due to incrustation. However, we added some extra mechanics to them that should make them useful not just to the aforementioned groups of players but to other portions of our playerbase. We want sets to be good not just for casuals or dedicated tourney-goers, they should be good as both alternative and main gear for everyone.
We will not make any changes to the current mechanic of additional effects that get more powerful as you equip more parts of the set. However, we are going to adjust some values and the attributes provided by the gear. This change aims to balance various sets for the same level and adapt them to the current standards that changed with the introduction of drifs. The effects themselves will remain unchanged with the exception of the knight set for level 100 where melee defense and critical hit resistance will be replaced by damage reduction and damage-over-time reduction.
Moreover, effects provided by sets will no longer be taken into account when calculating the reduction for the number of gear pieces with the same modifier. After the update, only drifs will count toward it. This means that synergetics will also be affected by the change.
Additionally, all elements of each set will be given one slot. Just like with rares, you’ll be able to insert into them any drif whose size matches the rank of the gear. However, the inserted drifs will work differently - they won’t gain any experience but they’ll provide their bonus as if they were at maximum level. For example, a magnidrif inserted into a level 100 set will act as if it had level 16 no matter how much experience it has. Thanks to this, sets will be a great fit not only to those who progress more slowly but also to players who want to try out new things or need specialized gear for special occasions. Especially that extracting drifs from sets doesn’t require a vulsor. ;)
We will also change the way charging set gear works to make it work the same as with rares. This means that if an element of a set contains a drif or an orb, it’ll start discharging. However, we will increase the number of charges to make it significantly higher than in other types of gear. The new number of charges will be 10,000.
We will also equalize the number of set parts for matching sets. And so the Pinari set will get an additional part - Uruk Boots, while the Roar of the North will no longer require gloves. They will be converted into a rare named Pressors obtainable from Construct v1.
Champions - where art thou?
Changes to sets are cool but what about their availability? Here, we’re also making a couple of alterations. We still want set gear to be rare but not as rare as currently. The overall droprate will be increased so that there are more of them on the servers, but they will still stay less common than legendaries.
Apart from that, we decided to adjust the spawnrate of many champions. Which one of you have ever encountered Psychopath, Tilsai, or Ragak? At the moment, they are hard to find,. but once the update goes live, they (and many other champions) will spawn more frequently. We have also adjusted the places they spawn to make them easier to see and more fun to hunt for.
Instances - additional difficulty levels and changes
In the next update, we’ll add the final portion of instances. They are as follows:
path of discovery and challenge:
- Ichtion
- Construct v1
- Construct v2
path of challenge:
- Angvalf-Htaga
- Selena
At the moment, we have no plans to add difficulty levels to more instances. However, there may be some adjustments to the current ones.
It’s worth mentioning that the way you enter the above instances has changed - otherwise their difficulty levels simply wouldn’t work. All of them will be accessible via the normal entrance, without the need to talk to anyone. This means that, among others, we will disable the Selena’s Returns quest. More details will be given in the changelog.
In addition to that, we made several changes to the Construct v2 instance to make it more accessible to physical classes. The changes include a new AI for the third form - we have not only modified the current tactics but also added new ones that include melee attacks. Construct will adjust its behavior depending on the class it sees - physical classes will need to focus more on melee defense while magical ones will need more mental defense. Of course, you’ll also have to defend against ranged attacks. Moreover, we changed the resistances of all the mobs inside the instance.
The new version of the Construct instance was tested both for its target level range and for single players in endgame gear. In the first case, no matter the party composition, the instance duration was similar, although slightly longer than before. For this reason, we decided to increase the amount of experience gained from sentries to compensate for the extra time players need to spend there.
As for the characters completing the instance singlehandedly - our testers checked the instance on their own characters (if they had ones that could do it) and also on other characters with similar progression. In the end, we managed to achieve the desired effect. The classes who have been doing fine won’t feel much of a difference while others will see improvement that should make the instance more fair. Our testers felt that the difficulty level and clear speed were similar within the same group of classes (damage dealers, debuffers, support) and the instance durations we monitored confirmed this.
Other changes and fixes
The update will focus mostly on the above features, but some minor ones will also be implemented. The most important of them will be the improved world map - we want it to be clearer and more user-friendly. In addition to that, you will no longer need to note down the last time the potato beetles event fired. ;) All you need to do is open the map and you’ll find information about the start times of every dynamic event there. Apart from that, we’ll fix some errors and add some functionalities that should make the gameplay smoother. A small spoiler just for you: we’ll add a new, very useful location to the teleportation tower. What do you think it’ll be? ;)
