Turbine Announcements
New 10th Anniversary Wallpaper
Original Link - http://ac.turbine.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=503:new-10th-anniversary-wallpaper&catid=39:articles&Itemid=53
New 10th Anniversary Wallpaper!
In celebration of the upcoming 10th Anniversary of Asheron's Call, we have created a new desktop wallpaper featuring some of our favorite lore characters!
Click here for 1280 x 1024
Original Link - http://ac.turbine.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=501:10th-anniversary-teaser-image&catid=39:articles&Itemid=53
10th Anniversary Teaser Image
With the 10th Anniversary fast approaching, The team thought it would be a good idea to throw out a preview image of one of our new features. So without further delay, here is a quick shot of the new Quest Journal.
Original Link - http://ac.turbine.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=473:asherons-call-10th-anniversary-teaser&catid=39:articles&Itemid=53
Asheron's Call 10th Anniversary Teaser
So everyone has been wondering what is coming for the 10th Anniversary of Asheron's Call. After talking with the team I convinced them to let me give everyone a sneak peek at just one of the things we have in store for our special event.
We hope you enjoy it!
Developer Comments
New Character Slot
I finished it earlier in the week. It's in, unless Q/A finds some issue.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Both get it, although older accounts will still be down a slot.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Augmentations
It's Friday and since the team is in a good mood we thought we'd leak some more 10th anniversary goodness.
(Edit: NoWorries commented to me that he is actually not in a good mood so I have falsely reported.)
In the form of... new Augs!
Yes we are adding new Augmentations for you to obtain as part of the 10th anniversary.
~ Infused War Magic By mastering the art of War Magic you become infused with it. You no longer need any Foci or component to cast War Magic spells, though you still require scarabs.
~ Infused Life Magic By mastering the art of Life Magic you become infused with it. You no longer need any Foci or component to cast Life Magic spells, though you still require scarabs.
~ Infused Item Magic By mastering the art of Item Magic you become infused with it. You no longer need any Foci or component to cast Item Magic spells, though you still require scarabs.
~ Infused Creature Magic By mastering the art of Creature Magic you become infused with it. You no longer need any Foci or component to cast Creature Magic spells, though you still require scarabs.
~ Master of the Steel Circle Your skill at using all melee weapons is increased. Your effective melee skill when using any melee weapon is increased by +10.
~ Master of the Four Fold Path Your skill at casting all schools of magic is increased. Your effective magic skill when casting any spell is increased by +10.
~ Master of the Focused Eye Your skill at using all missile weapons is increased. Your effective missile skill when using any missile weapon is increased by +10.
~ Frenzy of the Slayer All damage you cause from melee weapons, missile weapons, or magical spells is increased. You gain a damage rating of 3 which increases all damage you do with any attack. (Damage rating is basically a percentage increase, but it is additive with other damage rating boosts. It multiplies all damage by (100 + Rating) / 100.)
~ Eye of the Remorseless Your chance to make a critical hit with any melee attack, missile attack or damage spell that can get critical hits is increased by 1%.
~ Hand of the Remorseless Your damage for any attack that successful scores a critical hit , be it melee attack, missile attack or damage spell is increased by 3%.
~ Iron Skin of the Invincible All damage you take from weapon or spell is decreased. You gain a damage reduction rating of 3 which reduces all damage you take. (Damage reduction rating is basically a percentage decrease, but it is additive with other damage reduction rating boosts. It divides all damage by 100 / (100 + Rating). Basically a damage reduction rating of 3 will negate a damage rating of 3.
(As an aside, we understand that some players are nearing XP cap for getting more augmentations. The tech to remove augmentations and restore the experience from that augmentation is complex and won't be in for the 10th anniversary. We went back and forth on whether to include new augmentations in this patch, but we decided that putting them in was more of a boon to the 20th anniversary despite this limitation.)
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Gearcrafting
We wanted to give players a preview of another new feature of the 10th anniversary update:
All over Dereth, with the release of the 10th anniversary patch, geared trinkets infused with Aetherium have begun to appear. Creatures have begun finding these in remote corners of the land and carrying them. Many of these trinkets have strong magical properties. People throughout the lands have found that they can find and activate these trinkets and the enchantments they contain, though only one will work for them at a time. Rumors abound that some craftsmen and women have learned a previously unknown new skill that allow them to enhance the magical properties of these geared trinkets to rework them into powerful magical wards and talismans.
With the 10th anniversary we are introducing a new item slot; the trinket slot. This new gear slot will allow you to equip a new type of loot called, not surprisingly, trinkets. These gear worked items can carry enchantments just like jewelry and will drop from loot. Trinkets will drop at all levels so low and mid level characters will be able to enjoy these items as well.
In addition, there is a new skill called Gearcrafting. This skill (cost is 2/-) allows a character to imbue trinkets with a variety of enchantments. Unlike most items, trinkets can be imbued 3 times through crafting which uses this new Gearcraft skill. Using the Gearcraft skill does not attune/bond items to you; you are free to sell or trade trinkets that you have imbued using Gearcraft. Each trinket can be imbued with one major, one moderate, and one minor imbue. These imbues add spells to the trinket that can have a variety of effects.
In additon, Gearcraft can be used to create special geared items that will make some of the less used skills more, well, useful. These items have a variety of levels, and their effectiveness increased with their skill requirement.
~ Assess Creature items: Special lenses can be crafted that can be employed by characters skilled in Assess Creature. When equipped and used, these lenses will expose the weaknesses of the enemy, allowing you to do more damage. This debuff works like Imperil and allows characters with high Assess Creature to cast an Imperil like debuff on targets. Though this won't stack with Imperil, it allows weapon using characters with rending weapons to debuff a creature without needing magic. The highest Expose Weakness debuff is equal to Imperil 7.
~ Deception items: Special crystals have been found that are enchanted by the Virindi to boost their magical knowledge. Gear crafters can craft trinkets to hold and power these crystals. These crystals appear to be slightly self aware, and though these crystals can not normally be used by those who are not Virindi, characters with a high Deception skill can fool the crystals enough to get these trinkets to activate. When used from your pack these crystals boost the Arcane Lore of characters with Deception. These crystals will buff your Arcane Lore skill, allowing you to use items previously too complicated for you to understand. The highest Arcane Lore buff will add 40 points to your skill.
~ Leadership items: Special gear enhanced war horns can be crafted that can be employed by characters skilled in Leadership. When used from your pack these war horns buff your entire fellowship. This buff adds to the hit points of everyone in the fellow for 30 minutes. The highest buff will add 10 Health to the fellowship for 30 minutes. Multiple buffs of this type don't stack with each other, but they stack with other buffs.
~ Loyalty items: Special gear enhanced medals can be crafted that can be employed by characters skilled in Loyalty. When used from your pack these medals help boost the moral of your entire fellowship. One type of medal adds a Stamina buff to everyone in the fellowship, while another type of medal adds a Mana buff to everyone in the fellowship. The highest buffs will add 10 Stamina or 10 Mana to the fellowship for 30 minutes. You can have both Stamina and Mana buffed at the same time, and these stack with other buffs. Multiple applications of these buffs do not stack with themselves.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Does this mean that there will be an augmentation added to specialize the skill or that it is not specializable?
A: 2 to train, and an aug to specialize.
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Is this PvM only or PvP too? Could you explain more how the items will work? Will they also stack with cantrips?
A: It should work in PvP just like Imperil.
If it casts on others, like the Expose Weakness debuff, the item must be equipped like any caster. If it buffs you then you just click the item in your inventory like a gem. All simply have an appropriate skill requirement before they can be equipped/used.
Once you have a lens crafted it will always work. It will have short cooldown to prevent spamming. You don't have to keep crafting stacks of items like grenades.
Gearcrafting is used to create the items, but it isn't needed to use completed items.
It stacks with both standard enlightenment spells and with cantrips.
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: What the spellcraft is, how long the cooldown timer is, and what the reqs are to wield/activate the top tier lens? Are these lenses casters (can we cast spells with them equipped) or are they only able to be used for their debuff?
A: As a follow up to the question on the viability of Assess Creature and Deception, we are currently looking at removing the effects of attributes and make the skills attribute neutral. This would reduce Assess creature and Deception across the board to use *only* the skill. We would change Assess Person as well to keep it in line with the modified deception.
That way no particular character build would have an advantage using these particular skills.
The plan is that spellcraft will be equivalent to the alchemy grenades.
The cooldown timer for buff gems will be 3 seconds. There will be no cooldown for the caster since the casting animation itself would prevent it from being spammed.
Correct. They are currently planned to only be used for the debuff. We didn't expect they would be used by casters since casters already have a better version of Imperil.
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: I'm wondering how the gear items are going to be used/equipped?
A: To be clear, the items to add functionality to the less used skills are *not* trinkets. They are items crafted by Gearcrafting. They don't need to be equipped except, of course, the lens (caster item) needs to be wielded to cast the Expose Weakness effect.
Trinkets and their imbues are a completely different and additional feature. These will drop from loot. Base trinkets will have properties similar to jewelry except they are equipped into your trinket slot and they have special imbues.
These items can be placed in your inventory hot key slots like any item.
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: While you're working on adding Augs to spec this skill, mind adding any augs to unspec tinkering spells?
A: The way Augs are implemented makes it hard to add tech to remove Augs. It's on my list of things to do.
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Are there any plans on making Alchemy a full-time combat skill?
A: We don't have plans to turn Alchemy into a full attack skill. The skill cost isn't high enough as compared to magic skills to warrant the addition of decent offensive power in the form of vials.
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: I'd still prefer that deception reduced the aggro range of critters.
A: With the way our agro system works the performance hit would be too great.
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Are we getting 2 new quests that give skill credits?
A: As for a way to get extra skill credits, no that is not planned.
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: What are the attributes for gearcrafting?
A: FOCUS/COORD
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
~ On the lens versus runed weapons: The lens is not a "proc" on a weapon. You don't swing it at the opponent. It's an item that casts an Expose Weakness spell that only someone with the appropriate Assess Creature can use.
~ On Assess Creature versus Alchemy: If you use Alchemy solely as an Imperil source then yes, Assess Creature + these items would be an alternative to that.
An alchemist can debuff multiple creatures from behind a shield; that's a lot of protection if you are casting on all the creatures in a group. Even if you are pulling from a distance and depending on most of the creatures running back to their home, the ones that don't are still landing hits on a shield-less character using the Assess Creature lens.
Alchemy gives you a lot more to make than just the Imperil debuff.
That said, we acknowledge the alchemy costs are high, and we are looking at giving Alchemists more buff phials per mote and reducing the costs for the debuffs. Giving them Fester is also a possibility for the future, but we don't have the cycles to get it in for the 10th anniversary.
~ On Assess Creature having alternate functionality activated when someone attempts the Assess. First, I was concerned about the extra messaging back and forth that is required and it's impact on the server. Second, a lot of more powerful creatures are just set to resist all attempts at assess for flavor and that would make them immune to such functionality.
Since players have been looking for alternate ways to create "pure" weapon characters while still getting the debuffs they need so we went in that direction with the Assess Creature items.
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Quest XP
To the original topic, we are changing quest XP so it will pass up to your patron as part of the 10th anniversary.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Does that include Essence, gold and other trophy turn ins?
A: Basically it's anything that gives level proportionate XP.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Could you think about reducing some of the xp quest timers?
A: We did make the decision that all recent quests should have a generous overlap time. If you see new quests with a 24 or 23 hour timer it's probably something that slipped by; these should default to 20 hours.
One thing I am hoping is that the timer tab of the new quest journal will make tracking all these timers much easier. If you add one quest timer to each page you can go to the quest journal Timer tab and look at all of them. You can all sort all your timers.
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
10th Anniversary: Quest Journal
The team wanted to share with you some preliminary details of another 10th anniversary addition: the Quest Journal. This feature provides you with an in game Journal where you can record and organize quest information.
Before I go into the details, I wanted to go over our design goals and the technical limitations we have imposed on the system. I feel that to understand where we are coming from with the design you need to understand our goals and limitations.
DESIGN AND LIMITATIONS
~ The system will add as little load and storage to the server as possible.
~ The system will expose as little of the quest flag system (if any) to the client as possible.
~ The system will allow players to record and track information about quests.
~ The system will not hand over quest information to the players as some kind of easy mode. We want a system that supports a player recording information, not a system that hands them answers.
~ Since almost all quests in AC can be repeated after a time, the system should give the players a way to record and easily view the varied and numerous quest timers players can accumulate.
~ If possible, the information should be accessible to add-ons.
THE QUEST JOURNAL
The Asheron's Call client will have a new icon button in the icon bar.
This button, Quest Journal, now populates the icons bar, tucked between the Attributes and the Map icons. The icon looks like a quill. Clicking this icon brings up the quest journal panel. The quest journal panel has two tabs; Journal and Page List.
THE JOURNAL TAB
The Journal tab shows a single journal page and has controls to navigate to other pages. Each page has the following panel elements on the page:
Title: The player can add a short title to the page.
Entry: the player can add a long description to the page. This field supports cut and paste so you can cut text from your chat panel and paste it into the description. This will allow players to store description text from NPCs and add their own notes to the page.
Location: This button allows you to add your current location to the page. The page only stores one location, and underground or indoor locations cannot be added. Basically if your interface shows a location you can add it to a page.
(The system is designed so sometime in the future we may add a system where you can click on this location and get an arrow to that place and perhaps an icon on the map while you are outside. That is an option that is unlikely to make the first incarnation.)
Countdown: This area allows you to start a countdown timer to track when a quest might be available again. Although the current design specifies that you will have the option to choose a timer time from some list of standardized times, the actual number of different quest timers is fairly large and we may have a more free form series of entry fields to specify the timer. This timer has three states; No Timer, Counting Down, and Ready.
Page Navigation: The tab will have navigation tools that will allow you to move from page to page. Next, Prev, First, Last.
THE PAGE LIST TAB
The Page List tab shows a listing of all the pages you have entered. The list shows the page number, your title (or as much of it as can fit) and the timer of the page if there is any. You can sort by any of these three fields so it should be fairly easy to sort by timer and see all your timers that are in the Ready state and which timers are coming up.
Double clicking a specific list item (or selecting it and hitting a Go button) will open the Journal tab and take you directly to that page.
THE QUEST JOURNAL FILE
One technical note is that all the information will be stored client side in a quest journal file. This file will be plain text and use tags to store the information. It means that the information does not need to go up to the server, so text sizes can be substantially higher, performance won't be affected, and add-ons can access the file. Someone who uses one computer probably wouldn't notice. For people who use multiple computers, they will either have to keep their journal on one or the other or move their quest journal file over manually.
This will allow the total journal size to rise very high. We felt the size limitations of a server side quest journal would be too limiting for our players with the number of quests available in the game.
With this addition players should be able to quickly record notes about the numerous quests in the game without leaving the client.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: I would prefer that the timer begins automatically.
A: One goal in the design was "We don't add things to your Quest Journal. You do." We want you to decide what to track and make decisions about how and what to add to your journal.
Another consideration is that Quest Timer compiles information after players have explored the content and compiled information. We don't want to by pass or reduce the exploration phase of content.
As to add ons, our players tend to be very industrious and we thought that some players might find this aspect of the design interesting.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
We thought everyone might enjoy seeing just ONE of the things we have coming to Asheron's Call for our 10th Anniversary.
Make sure you head over to http://ac.turbine.com/ to check out the exclusive teaser!
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Frelorn AC Community Relations |
Q: I guess I should abandon mace now in favor of sword?
A: The Two Handed Combat skill will allow the use of any two handed weapon.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: The damage seems pretty unbalanced.
A: Two handed weapons do indeed strike twice because of their animation, but they are balanced around that fact. One of those two hits will not do the damage of a single hit weapon.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: So it's a totally new skill then? So will they do more damage than one regular hit? Or will it essentially do half + half ?
A: We are currently testing two handed weapons to do damage equivalent to 110% of sword DPS, divided between the two swings. So the two handed weapon will essentially do two hits, each at 55% of what a sword might do. The exact number might change.
Of course you give up the protection of a shield.
In addition some two handed weapons have a "Cleave" effect. Each strike also hits an additional creature in the 90 degree attack arc in front of you. Because PvP players might not want this effect if they are grouped some two handed weapons (usually the piercing types) don't cleave.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: So a "Cleave" weapon will have over double the effective DPS of sword, rather than just double, assuming two mobs are in front of you?
A: Against multiple foes if you line up the cone, yes. Against bosses or smart players, no.
It is very early in the process though, so just to be clear the exact damage numbers could change.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Will cleaving only be with slashing weapons?
A: Bludgeoning weapons also cleave. Most piercing weapons don't. But specific quest weapons could possibly be different.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Is this a 180+ skill? Will the under 180s get missed on 2 handed and dual wield?
A: No. You can create a brand new character with the Two Handed Combat skill.
(There is no dual wield skill.)
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Will there be elemental cleaving weapons?
A: Yes. If the weapon has an elemental effect then the cleaving attack will also be elemental.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: What will this skill cost?
A: There will be a brand new skill called Two Handed Combat (though we might shorten it to Two Handed or something) that costs 8 and 8.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: Will two handed weapons require the new skill and another melee weapon skill?
A: If you take the Two Handed skill, no additional weapon skill is needed to use two handed weapons.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: What attributes will it be based on, Strength and Coordination again?
A: Yes.
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |
Q: How will shields work?
A: You cannot equip a shield while you have a two handed weapon equipped, but purchasing the skill itself does not prevent equipping a shield.
Sev~
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Severlin Senior Game Engineer |