Part 1 Update for Patch 1.05

[Arthur_Parker]

linky

Folks,

Okay, here’s the first part of the 1.05 patch from us. The 1.05 patch is the anxiously awaited “Combat and Careers” patch. As I mentioned already, it is over 17 pages long and still growing and it includes, among other things, adjustments to every career in the game. Some careers got a special shot of extra-loving goodness and some careers also got some tough love as well as some goodness as well. We hope to post the full patch notes tomorrow morning but as we continue to conduct a final review of all the preliminary changes and the notes themselves, it might be held up a bit longer, but I certainly hope not. It is, by far, the largest WAR patch yet and is by its very nature, full of far-reaching and sweeping changes. Here are some of the highlights of the patch.

1)   We are pleased to announce the official opening of our Public Test Server. Similar to our Pendragon sever for DAoC, this server will be both open to all players but players will be able to copy (not transfer, your character remains on its server) their existing characters over to this server at anytime. This server will get the latest, but not final, version of the game and feedback from this server will be used in making any further adjustments to the version. We encourage all players who want to help in the development process to give it a shot. More information on the PTS will be posted on the Herald.

2)   Rally masters have been put at every Warcamp to make moving around the world a bit easier and faster. This is only the first part of some improvements we are making to the transportation system to cut down on the time that players have had to spend simply running back and forth between places. The next step will be to allow players to have multiple bind points.

3)   Players’ should be able to use the morale button abilities more effectively now. In other words, the darn thing should work every time.

4)   Many of the issues with spell/abilities animations not firing off/ending properly have been corrected. Hopefully we got all of the issues but only time will tell.

5)   An additional gold bag will be generated when a keep or fortress is taken.

6)   Morale abilities will now display their cooldowns correctly at all times. This is just one of many UI fixes.

7)   The "Ability Not Ready" message will no longer display when the remaining cooldown on an ability is less than or equal to the full global cooldown.

8)   Corrected an issue with the cooldown timers on the action bar buttons that was causing them to count down improperly. The timers will now count down in half-second increments beginning at 3 seconds remaining. See, I said there was more than 1 other UI fix. 

9)   Another “warhammer to the head” to those that try to AFK in scenarios and PQs.

10)   All classes have had some abilities buffed and some abilities have been debuffed a bit. For example, the Squig Herder has gotten 30+ adjustments to its abilities. Out of those 30+ adjustments, the phase “damage has been increased” shows up about 80% of the time. As part of this update, the team has looked at every career in the game and made adjustments. Things such as Electromagnet, Fire Cage and snares/roots in general have drawn particular attention from the team and have had numerous changes/fixes made to them. Of course, where major changes have occurred to the careers a free re-training has been offered. Tomorrow’s notes will detail all of the changes and considering that the career changes are about 14 out of those 17+ pages, I think you can say that we made a whole lot of changes.

So, hopefully tomorrow's 1.05 patch notes will put an end to the “Mythic doesn’t respond, doesn’t want to make changes” threads eh? Nah! 

Again, 1.05 is primarily the C&C patch, expect more other big patches coming as well over the next month or so. When you see the contents of the patch, I hope most of you, if not all of you, will see why we have been taking "baby steps" with C&C changes up to now.

Mark

17 pages should be a fun read.

[schild]

For posterity:

Look, since you're being blunt, so will I.  Do you think that I can just snap my fingers and all of a sudden loot drops, new gear, stat changes to current itemization, exp. boosts can happen in one day?  You're a hell of a lot smarter than that.  Let's say I'm in 100% agreement with you.  So, I walk into the EPs office, say that to him and tell him I want it on Monday.  WTF do you think his reaction would be?  Frankly, he would think I had lost my mind just like HRose said I did.   Do you really think that doing all that in a few days is simple?  What do you think it would go like this "Yeah, sure, Mark.  I'll get the team right on it and they will go through every RvR item in the game, boost stats, create new items, redo all the loot tables, change the experience/renown gain on every kill, change the exp. and renown gain on taking RvR objectives and do it perfectly well the first time, no testing necessary!  We'll start right away!  Is tomorrow morning too late?"

You're way off base here.  You're pissed off and it's early in the morning.  You're talking about making sweeping changes to every aspect of the RvR game and expect us (if you're right) to do that all at once and right away.  Please, let me know what team on this planet could possibly do that in the space of a few days, let alone a week.  We've already boosted RvR, we're going to boost it more this week and continue to boost it through 1.1 and beyond.

Mark

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=14972.msg529958#msg529958

[schild]

10 things? Shit, why not, in my deepest of hearts, I still want to play the game:

5)   An additional gold bag will be generated when a keep or fortress is taken.

NOT ENOUGH, REWARD EVERYBODY.

10)   All classes have had some abilities buffed and some abilities have been debuffed a bit. For example, the Squig Herder has gotten 30+ adjustments to its abilities. Out of those 30+ adjustments, the phase “damage has been increased” shows up about 80% of the time. As part of this update, the team has looked at every career in the game and made adjustments. Things such as Electromagnet, Fire Cage and snares/roots in general have drawn particular attention from the team and have had numerous changes/fixes made to them. Of course, where major changes have occurred to the careers a free re-training has been offered. Tomorrow’s notes will detail all of the changes and considering that the career changes are about 14 out of those 17+ pages, I think you can say that we made a whole lot of changes.

Nothing better than having to balance to fix all of the balance changes. Buffs and nerfs are one of the only things in any game I think should be taken really, really, really slowly.

So, hopefully tomorrow's 1.05 patch notes will put an end to the “Mythic doesn’t respond, doesn’t want to make changes” threads eh? Nah!

Then why is there nothing about killing the grind in the 10 things that are supposed to entice me? Or anyone for that matter? (Or itemization/loot drops for that matter, other than that weak gold bag shit).

[khaine]

I almost cracked up when I read the "one additional gold bag for keep takes"

I mean , if that doesn't show just how out of touch they are with how bad open rvr is I dont know what else does

[mol]

Nothing about what really matters. /sigh

[khaine]

The sheer amount of virtual ass kissing that is going on in that thread is beyond anything I have ever seen

No wonder it's the one place Mark keeps going to ,

[Hindenburg]

Oh, now that's grand.

On a no scenario server, he had this gem to say, page 4 of that thread.

Never promised it. Hopefully we won't need one (which was my point) if open RvR is buffed up enough to attract tons of attention from the players. If we do that and still don't have enough oRvR fun and if enough players want to play on a scenario-free or scenario-limited server, we will probably add one.

Mark

So his point was that a no scenario server WASN'T needed? Really now? So he kept insisting on that retarded idea every single time (and still does) because he honestly believes it isn't needed? 

[amiable]

Why? Why does he still think this a good idea?

Why are they altering class balance at warp speed and altering RvR incentive at a snails pace?!?

Clownshoes.

[Ashmodai]

I'm quite impressed with 17 pages of class changes, they are quite needed, and I do think they aimed their efforts in the right direction here.  I'd venture to say more people are frustrated by that than anything else, so these changes actually impress me.  This is a very good start.  This is the stuff I would have expected to take a while to happen, judging by my experience with other MMOs, so to see it so quickly is refreshing

Alot of the unmentioned stuff isn't hard to fix.  1 extra bag for open RvR is a joke, Keep Takes dropping 5 gold bags, 10 purple bags and 20 blue bags or so might be more interesting, as it is the only way you can hope to get any keep loot is to repeatedly sneak in with a tiny group of guildies off hours and ninja cap a keep with 4-5 people.  Which plenty of people do, I'd say more keeps switch hands at 2-5am than any other time of day, usually by small guild groups farming loot.  But making mobs drop more loot isn't hard.

XP, well, again, not hard to fix.  Triple quest XP across the board, and implement some sort of diminishing returns on XP loss for grouping so that you don't get hammered on your XP/RP gain so badly by being grouped, make that apply to both PvE and RvR.  2-man groups could maybe get 66% each, 3-mans get 50% each, 4-mans get 40% each, and so on, some sort of scale that makes it worthwhile to group up and play together, nothing like being in a warband in Open RvR and getting 100xp per kill when you need a half million to level, just because you're splitting the reward 24 ways.  That's unnecessary.

[Ashmodai]

Why? Why does he still think this a good idea?

Why are they altering class balance at warp speed and altering RvR incentive at a snails pace?!?

Clownshoes.

RvR incentives are very important, but they are also relatively easy (in the short term - they might need to actually create new items and rewards in order for a "real" fix) to fix, it's mostly a matter of numbers.  If everyone got good XP and good loot from Open RVR they would do it, and to make that happen all they need to do is twiddle a few numbers, I would think.

I agree that 1 gold bag per keep take is a joke, though.  Nothing is going to be imbalanced by offering a shed load of bags so that everyone walks away with something (not vendor trash), and at least 5 people walk away with something good they will wear.  Take all of the people around the keep, count them (they already have, of course - the participation table is there), then spawn 10% gold bags, 20% purple bags, 30% blue bags and 40% green bags according to that number of participating people, and I can't see how that would imbalance the game at all and everyone would probably be happy.

Do the same for overland PQs, but shift the quality level down a notch - 20% purple, 30% blue, 50% green, or something, so that gold bags only drop from open RvR (and maybe dungeons).

[UnSub]

Why? Why does he still think this a good idea?

Why are they altering class balance at warp speed and altering RvR incentive at a snails pace?!?

Clownshoes.

Because some people think that it is scenarios that detract from the number of people who play RvR, so if they took away scenarios then things would be fixed.

Of course this ignores the reasons why people play scenarios, the way WAR is structured, why people don't currently do RvR en masse and even basic common sense.

Pending further patch notes, the thing I see time and time again from Mythic is that they have no idea at all about why their players behave in certain ways. None at all. The designers appear to have it in their heads that players should be behaving in a certain way, then when they aren't, get all confused and try throwing a meagre extra bone onto their system of choice as if that will fix it. An extra gold bag for keeps? Really? No freaking idea at all.

Also, it is nice to see that I wasn't the only one finding morale powers difficult to activate (especially when you only have a second for it to go off before you are in big trouble) and that it looks like a player can bind to multiple locations at once for quick travel (probably once every 60 minutes, but it is a start).

As for class balance there is obviously a recognition that players are playing differently to how the classes were designed to work... but I'll wait until I see the patch notes before changing my mind that Mythic has an understanding of the issues at play.

[Tuncal]

I have this deja-vu feeling with the way they're hyping the patch. "We will have a new patch soon!" --> "Patch notes, 17 pages of them, up soon!" --> "Top 10 patch notes!". I've never seen a patch with so much developer hype around it, let's hope it does not dissapoint. I also find it a bit worrying that their first 10 highlights of the patch doesn't include any ORvR incentives other than the 1 extra gold bag. I hope there's more in the other 16 pages.

[ffc]

5)   An additional gold bag will be generated when a keep or fortress is taken.

NOT ENOUGH, REWARD EVERYBODY.

I was disappointed that Mythic decided not to reward every single person in the Witching Night PQ with a mask/item/ANYTHING from the PQ chest.  No chance they would go for blanket keep/fort rewards.  Fun be damned.

Tick tock tick tock.  News of people fleeing back to WoW may give us an 84 page patch-note to the 17 page patch-notes.  One can only hope.

[Pringles]

100% agree an extra gold bag isn't enough...
I hope its merely to appease people until REAL RVR reward changes can be made for 1.1 or earlier.

I am pondering resubbing atm to check out these patches tomorrow and so I can transfer my character off of Ulthuan.

[Kail]

... the Squig Herder has gotten 30+ adjustments to its abilities. Out of those 30+ adjustments, the phase “damage has been increased” shows up about 80% of the time.

Hey, that's great!

As part of this update, the team has looked at every career in the game and made adjustments. Things such as Electromagnet, Fire Cage and snares/roots in general have drawn particular attention from the team and have had numerous changes/fixes made to them. Of course, where major changes have occurred to the careers a free re-training has been offered.

That's, uh, less great.  Reduction of snares and EM/Rift are great news for my melees, but vague and mysterious possible nerfs hanging overhead of every class are... less good news.  Especially given how confused Mythic seems about their mechanics.  I'm worried that I'm going to log in and find some "adjusted" ability that completely kills one of my favorite characters (*frets about Ironbreakers*).

As a related note, the addition of a test server is interesting, but does it come up before or after this "seventeen page list of changes to every class" patch goes live?

[Megrim]

100% agree an extra gold bag isn't enough...
I hope its merely to appease people until REAL RVR reward changes can be made for 1.1 or earlier.

I am pondering resubbing atm to check out these patches tomorrow and so I can transfer my character off of Ulthuan.

protip: this is how they get you to continue paying.

[waffel]

XP, well, again, not hard to fix.  Triple quest XP across the board, and implement some sort of diminishing returns on XP loss for grouping so that you don't get hammered on your XP/RP gain so badly by being grouped, make that apply to both PvE and RvR.  2-man groups could maybe get 66% each, 3-mans get 50% each, 4-mans get 40% each, and so on, some sort of scale that makes it worthwhile to group up and play together, nothing like being in a warband in Open RvR and getting 100xp per kill when you need a half million to level, just because you're splitting the reward 24 ways.  That's unnecessary.

Not a bad idea. I'm playing a 33 shaman, grouping with my friends (sorc, BO) and we're group-grinding PQs with all melee mobs doing AoE pulls, around a banner with 9% exp bonus, while on a 20% exp bonus transfer-server and I'm rested and I still think the exp is going a little slow and could be a bit faster. Boggling just how bad the grind gets.

I'm excited about the class balancing and such, but the 1 gold bag is a slap in the face. Everyone I talked to that read it said the same thing "Wow one extra bag? Woop de fuckin do!"

We'll see how it pans out, but 17 pages SOUNDS good right now, I'll probably be saying something different when this patch hits the servers, though.

[Tmon]

Rally masters have been put at every Warcamp to make moving around the world a bit easier and faster. This is only the first part of some improvements we are making to the transportation system to cut down on the time that players have had to spend simply running back and forth between places. The next step will be to allow players to have multiple bind points.

 I  like that they are putting rally masters in the war camps, can't for the life of me figure out why they insisted on making RVR hard to get to.

[Gurney]

10 things? Shit, why not, in my deepest of hearts, I still want to play the game:

5)   An additional gold bag will be generated when a keep or fortress is taken.

NOT ENOUGH, REWARD EVERYBODY.

10)   All classes have had some abilities buffed and some abilities have been debuffed a bit. For example, the Squig Herder has gotten 30+ adjustments to its abilities. Out of those 30+ adjustments, the phase “damage has been increased” shows up about 80% of the time. As part of this update, the team has looked at every career in the game and made adjustments. Things such as Electromagnet, Fire Cage and snares/roots in general have drawn particular attention from the team and have had numerous changes/fixes made to them. Of course, where major changes have occurred to the careers a free re-training has been offered. Tomorrow’s notes will detail all of the changes and considering that the career changes are about 14 out of those 17+ pages, I think you can say that we made a whole lot of changes.

Nothing better than having to balance to fix all of the balance changes. Buffs and nerfs are one of the only things in any game I think should be taken really, really, really slowly.

So, hopefully tomorrow's 1.05 patch notes will put an end to the “Mythic doesn’t respond, doesn’t want to make changes” threads eh? Nah!

Then why is there nothing about killing the grind in the 10 things that are supposed to entice me? Or anyone for that matter? (Or itemization/loot drops for that matter, other than that weak gold bag shit).

I find the scope of #10 rather frightening.  No way they can have adequately designed and tested such sweeping changes.  Rift and magnet needed emergency maintenance, sure.  But every single class with multiple tweaks?  Yowza.  Unless they weren't well tested to begin then I guess who the fuck cares?  How the fuck did rift/magnet get in at late Beta anyway?  Bleh.  Bunch of frigging tail chasing.

[Hindenburg]

protip: this is how they get you to continue paying.

Protip: this is how they get me to quit playing.

[Pringles]

100% agree an extra gold bag isn't enough...
I hope its merely to appease people until REAL RVR reward changes can be made for 1.1 or earlier.

I am pondering resubbing atm to check out these patches tomorrow and so I can transfer my character off of Ulthuan.

protip: this is how they get you to continue paying.

If I ever wanted to play again, I don't want to be stuck on some dead end server because Mythic fucked up, so I will pay $15 to make sure it doesn't happen and so that I can stay with my guild...aaaaand if 1.05 rolls out like they say I will get to test the balance patch, which was my main complaint with the game in the first place.

Besides its not like I said I'm going to buy a 6 month subscription.

[Bismallah]

I find the scope of #10 rather frightening.  No way they can have adequately designed and tested such sweeping changes.  Rift and magnet needed emergency maintenance, sure.  But every single class with multiple tweaks?  Yowza.  Unless they weren't well tested to begin then I guess who the fuck cares?  How the fuck did rift/magnet get in at late Beta anyway?  Bleh.  Bunch of frigging tail chasing.

This was almost the exact same phrase that came out of my mouth... every single class?? I can understand the Squig Herder buffs, that class was a JOKE in beta and we reported it time and time again but they put band aids on it for release. BW crit mechanic is out of control, WE proc rates for kisses are just insane... Rift/Magnet was just stupid. Being able to kite people inside of a keep with this ability considering they hyped up all this collision detection is beyond me.

So, what have we got, a net loss of about 10 servers, a 1.0.5 patch that looks like it might have been the 1.1 patch but the ship is sinking so fast they had to make some sweeping changes now, and btw not to be a hypocrit I did get on last nite I did get 35 on my Warrior Priest on Ostermark and you know how many people I saw in Praag or Thunder Valley or any other T4 RvR area? About 4 people...

Yes, 4. A couple High Elves running around questing, one dwarf, and one baddie that ran when he saw me (probably exploring). Wow...

I really liked that article about folks heading back to WoW, and it's so true. I already split my time to get ready for WotLK and I am sure once it hits we see those source servers merged and we see more transfer.

Edit: I would really like to see a statistic of players that put DAOC on hold to try WAR and are already back on DAOC, that's where I would expect to see the mass of folks that have swapped back. Sure folks will come over from other games to try out the new shiny, but if you touted a game as RvR heavy and folks are just leaving to go back to DAOC's RvR you got problems.

I wish Mythic the best (even though I wanted them to die in a fire with old patch notes in DAOC), but changes to every class, server mergers under the guise of free transfers within 6 weeks is writing on the wall for this game and far earlier then I expected.

[Shatter]

Lol at Engineers

From MarkJacobs

"Okay, but just because it's you.  I hope the notes will go up early tomorrow and then we begin testing on it as well on PTS. Once the PTS is up and running players will begin to be able to play there and help test the patch. As to one tidbit per class, sorry but I have to turn that request down. However, here is a sample from one of the most talked about abilities on the VN:

Electromagnet: The cost has been reduced significantly. The cooldown has been increased. The build time has been increased. The ability can no longer be cast on the move. The pull-in maximum number of targets has been decreased and can now be defended against."

[UnSub]

Prior to Jacobs posting this up, I was reading a thread were people were convinced that there were going to be "no nerfs" in WAR's career balancing - that everything could be fixed by buffing classes to a "balanced point".

Those poor dumb bastards.

[Grumlic]

I find the scope of #10 rather frightening.  No way they can have adequately designed and tested such sweeping changes.  Rift and magnet needed emergency maintenance, sure.  But every single class with multiple tweaks?  Yowza.  Unless they weren't well tested to begin then I guess who the fuck cares?  How the fuck did rift/magnet get in at late Beta anyway?  Bleh.  Bunch of frigging tail chasing.

From what I understand, the patch will be put on the new PTR first, to be tested there by the players before it is sent to the live servers. How well the patch does depend on whether people will actually join the server to test. We will be able to make character copies to the Test server so it should hopefully be done well enough. Time will tell though.

[Nebu]

Prior to Jacobs posting this up, I was reading a thread were people were convinced that there were going to be "no nerfs" in WAR's career balancing - that everything could be fixed by buffing classes to a "balanced point".

Those poor dumb bastards.

They've already broken the first rule: Having some classes able to generate dps high enough to kill someone in a heartbeat.  This is the first in a long line of class nerfs.  Those of you playing overpowered classes, get ready to suck. 

[Hindenburg]

are there any classes besides BW/Sorc and WE/WH that are capable to do that?

The marauder, at least up to t2, sure as hell can't.

[Shatter]

There are a few things in PvP that IMO needed to be adjusted.  One was the electromagnet BS and pulling people through walls needs fixing.  IMO what he posted addresses both problems and I love the fixes proposed.  There are definitely Eng on my server that abuse this ability at every chance.  Next up is  BW's damage needs a nerf, especially the dots.  If they dont nerf BW damage then other classes including sorc need to be brought up to par.  Also AE snares need to be fixed cause an entire team stuck in a AE snare for 10 seconds is retarded in PvP, especially on the class thats far outdamaging all others.  Third is knockbacks, I fully expect some rework here either longer cooldown or capped # of players it affects as well.  Something is wrong when an IB can knockback and entire team.  Aside from these few items I dont have other issues and the only reason I have issues with these is because of the amount of abuse they get.  In fact I know a number of people who rolled these classes after they found out about how powerful these abilities are.  

[schild]

are there any classes besides BW/Sorc and WE/WH that are capable to do that?

The marauder, at least up to t2, sure as hell can't.

[Bismallah]

Good picture.

The Enchanted Arrow tactic in the Scout line for SWs used to allow the Festering Arrow to also bypass all resistances. Pop Vengeance, Steady Aim, shoot your Throat Shot and then Festering Arrow and almost 1 shot Shamans... used to do it in Praag on Beta, was brutal. I just shook my head and thought, what a joke.

You can still almost replicate it, but they changed the Enchanted Arrow tactic a bit so it doesnt effect Festering. However, with Corporeal debuffs from BWs, if you /assist a BW you can bring down anything you want, even if they are healed. Considering both the BW and the SW have roots, and the SW has a knockback = a good SW is very hard to take down with non stealthy character, period.

Things like this make me wonder wtf where they thinking in their conceptual designs...

[schild]

I don't know when you think they changed Festering Arrow + Enchanted arrow to not go through armor, but as of the last time I played, it still did - this is a couple weeks ago. That shot was in fact done with Festering arrow.

I've capped out at around 4k on a hit with my level 2 morale popped. It's just silly.

Either way, doesn't matter, had my fun, game is in the arms of death.

[Mrbloodworth]

This overview is in the right direction, And for those that missed this, its going to the test server. I look forward to the patch notes, and the QQ'ing that will come.

[Bismallah]

Yeah I didn't verify (my bust), I thought they changed it because we turned in a lot of damage logs parsed out showing HUGE hits with Festering in Beta, oh well. I do remember them saying they were looking into it, but that was it.

SW in beta with the massive amounts of pathing issues was like shooting fish in a barrel, talk about boring as shit. I would watch tv and solo farm PQs all day, never getting touched because of the bad pathing. Shoot mob, it faces you, turns around, runs sideways, starts to head your direction, second shot, turns around, goes back to spawn point still damaged, third shot it realizes you are in THAT direction and starts towards you, fourth shot, it's dead.

You could almost do it with just auto shot, but that would be dreadfully boring.

I should have never played live because I do feel bad ditching my guildies should I quit cold turkey within the next week due to the patch sucking huge amounts of donkey balls.

[Shatter]

This overview is in the right direction, And for those that missed this, its going to the test server. I look forward to the patch notes, and the QQ'ing that will come.

Oh its gonna be funny as hell to watch some of these high power classes bitch when other classes get caught up or they get nerfed.  Since I play a class thats going to be on the major improvment list Im sure I will enjoy the new things I will be able to do I cant today :)  Its payback time bitches!

*gets popcorn*

[rk47]

This overview is in the right direction, And for those that missed this, its going to the test server. I look forward to the patch notes, and the QQ'ing that will come.

nah BW is perfectly balanced with top RR kills in every server. L2P Sorc.