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Patch Notes – 0.50 Update

Happy Friday Folks,

Update 0.50 arrives today, and with it two major new gameplay features – the Scout archetype, with a unique class for each Realm, and the first iteration of siege mechanics, with craftable trebuchets to rain hell upon enemies and Keep gates alike. Additionally, we’ve introduced some new combat stats, mechanics, balance tweaks, and plenty of bug fixes.

Above: The war intensifies with the introduction of Scouts and trebuchets.

Scouts are highly mobile classes with a toolbox of utility, debuffs, and CC. They specialize in moving rapidly around the map to collect information for their allies. During engagements, they’re also very capable at manipulating a fight to give their side the advantage, though they tend to lack in raw damage output compared to other classes and are at their best when playing a supportive role rather than stepping into the thick of things.

The passive abilities for the Scouts are the following:

Wisp, Tuathans – Capricious: Grants the Vanish ability. Vanish instantly sends you to the Veil, but is only usable while below 50% Health.

Above: The Wisp’s skill tree makes the player an evasive, persistent menace.

Spectre, Arthurians – Self-Possessed: Grants the Ghost Form ability. Ghost Form is a toggled “stance-style” ability that grants benefits while active and allows access to a couple exclusive abilities, but also restricts you to only being able to use Scout Archetype abilities and Spectre Class abilities labeled as “Usable in Ghost Form.” While active, Ghost Form provides increased Movement Speed and Physical Resistances, and applies Stealth while out of Combat.

Above: The Spectre haunts their opponents to learn all they can about them before acting.

Arisen, Vikings – Walking Dead: When you would die, you instead go to 1 Health and gain immunity to damage, increased Movement Speed, and increased Melee Damage for 8 seconds. There’s a 5 min cooldown after this ability is triggered.

Above: Returned from Hel, the Arisen excels at stalking an individual foe and sticks in the fight longer than their counterparts.

In addition to Scouts, combat will see a refresh with the introduction of the Action Speed stat and diminishing returns for Control effects.

Action Speed is a new stat we’ve added to CU. Increasing Action Speed will reduce the activation time of all non-instant abilities. This includes both Spells and Weaponskills equally. Only the activation time is affected however; the recovery time on abilities will remain the same, regardless of the amount of Action Speed a character has.

At the moment, this stat is only provided by the Blackguard’s Siege Stance ability. In the future, equipment and other abilities are planned to provide it as well.

Chaining Control effects together to keep players unable to act for extended periods of time has been an issue, especially in larger fights where multiple players can focus their Control effects on single targets. To help remedy this, we’ve implemented a system of diminishing returns where repeatedly applying Control effects to the same target will have reduced effect and then no effect at all. The goal here is to still allow Control effects to shine, but to make maximizing the effect of individual Control abilities key in fights, rather than just having more of them than your opponents.

But wait, there’s more!

We’re also landing the first iteration of Siege this week.

Weaponsmiths, Woodworkers, and Leatherworkers can now craft the deployable trebuchet kits as a 9th level recipe. The kits themselves can be deployed from your inventory anywhere in the RvR zones – but keep in mind that they are one-time-use items, so choose your positioning wisely.

Above: A comparison between old trebuchet models and the new base model. Additional faction-specific variants will be added in the near future.

While bombarding your enemy’s fortifications, (or splattering other players if you’re lucky) keep an eye on the clock. Siege engines will deteriorate and be destroyed after ten minutes, and they can also be targeted by other players. Players also do significantly less damage to outer gates now, emphasizing the importance of siege weapons in taking Keeps. During internal playtesting we committed an excessive amount of same-faction griefing with our beloved trebuchets, so worry not, friendly fire is disabled.

Above: A Tuathan trebuchet in action, which you can expect to see in a later update.

World Changes and Balance

  • Added respawn sickness to Keep respawns to balance defenders’ advantage.
  • Increased respawn timer for local defenders when not controlling the local Chapel.
  • Updated Class XP gain to grant XP based on the level/difficulty of enemy NPCs.
  • Updated Class XP gain to grant experience when applying status effects to enemies in RvR combat.
  • Added UI identifiers to Gathering capture points to indicate tier of resources present.
  • The minimum amount of candleberries gathered from medium bushes has been raised from 2 to 4.
  • The minimum amount of candleberries gathered from large bushes has been raised from 4 to 8.
  • Wax will now only require 6 candleberries to produce.
    • Additionally, we will be introducing changes to help alleviate the bottlenecks with Coal and Salt gathering in a near future update.

Class Changes and Balance

General

  • The Scout archetype has been added with three classes.
    • The Arthurian Spectre.
    • The Tuathan Wisp.
    • The Viking Arisen.
  • Class Experience Gain
    • Killing NPCs now grants your party/warband XP based on the NPC’s level.
    • Applying hostile statuses to players in RvR now grants the caster XP.
    • Slightly increased XP granted by killing players and by dealing damage and healing in RvR.
  • Added a new Action Speed stat. Action Speed increases activation speed of non-instant abilities.
    • Note that the Recovery time of abilities is not affected by Action Speed.
    • Action Speed isn’t derived from Attributes, and is only granted by abilities and (in the future) equipment.
  • Control Effect Diminishing Returns
    • When a player receives a Control effect, they will be applied with that effect for the full duration as normal, but also receive CC Resistance for 10 seconds.
    • When receiving a Control effect while they have CC Resistance, the Control effect will be applied for 50% of its normal duration, CC Resistance will be removed, and the player will receive CC Immunity for 6 seconds.
    • CC Immunity prevents all Control effects for the duration
    • As part of this update, Snare will no longer be classified as a Control effect, meaning that it won’t interact with Control Effect Diminishing Returns and will no longer interact with or consume Panicked.
    • The new effect “Forced Into the Veil” is classified as a Control effect.
  • Class Progression respec costs have been temporarily reduced to 10g per level.
    • This cost will be increased before release, but we wanted to make sure we weren’t blocking people from trying out different builds while earning gold is still in its infancy.
  • Healing potency has been slightly reduced across the board.

Archers

  • Blackguard
    • Fixed a bug causing Arcane Arrow to require a minimum amount of Focus.
    • Siege Stance now grants +20% Weaponskill Multiplier instead of 10%, and also grants +35% Action Speed.
  • Forest Stalker
    • Spore Cloud no longer costs Focus.
    • Spore Cloud’s cooldown increased from 12 seconds to 30 seconds.
    • Spore Cloud’s range reduced from 70 meters to 60 meters.
    • Spore Cloud’s Damage over Time duration after leaving the cloud reduced from 4 seconds to 3 seconds.
    • Spore Cloud’s cast time increased from 0.6 seconds to 1 second.

Assassins

  • Fixed a bug causing Red Cap’s Flare of Corruption to require 4 poison stacks instead of 3.

Performers

  • Dark Fool’s Dark Allure is no longer Channeled. It now has a 2 second cast time, charms for 4/7 seconds, and deals Mind damage once.

Audio

  • New sound effects for Scout abilities and statuses.
  • New sound effects for the introduction of trebuchets.
  • Significant Enhancements to Combat Audio and Spatialization.

General

  • Introduced craftable trebuchets.
    • Can be made at your Keep’s Woodworking station.
    • Currently can be used to target enemy players, NPCs, and Keep/PoI gates. This will be expanded upon with walls and other targetable areas in the future.
  • Abilities used by NPCs will now have names in the combat log.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed some items which had the wrong name prefix.
  • Dark Iron Ore now properly uses Fragments instead of Dust.
  • Removed Audio Emitters erroneously displayed in Silvermine Mountains.
  • Resolved a number of Tier 1 recipes incorrectly utilizing Tier 2 ingredients.
  • Resolved a number of Tier 2 recipes incorrectly utilizing Tier 1 ingredients.
    • There were naming mismatches between several recipes and the items. This generally manifested as showing up as a “Recruit’s Maul” in the recipe list, but actually being the recipe for a “Recruit’s Greathammer” (which the tooltip and crafting output properly showed)
  • Resolved an issue where Cleanse and Crowd Control immunity was not affecting forced movement effects such as Charm and Fear.
  • Fixed Gathering combat logs to accurately reflect what you have gathered.