Coming in March

(These are items that are coming in the March event. In the past, we would have saved this information for the March Rollout Article. Under the new communication system, they are appropriate for the Letter to the Players.)

“Hidden” Properties No Longer Hidden

There are several quest weapons, such as the Quadruple-Bladed Axe, that have what we’ve referred to in the past as a “hidden property”. Starting in March, these properties will appear when you ID such an item.

We want to warn you in advance that Ulgrim won’t be found in his house immediately after the March event. Don’t worry, he’s not gone for good! He’s just run into a bit of trouble – see the teaser. You’ll be seeing more of Ulgrim later in the month, and you’ll be able to complete the quest in his house again before the month is over.

In Development

(These are the game changes that we are working on for the April event. None of these items are guaranteed to be added for April, as scheduling and priorities can change. Once the process has matured over the next two months or so, In Development will contain items from the In Concept section that we’ve discussed with you and decided to put in the development pipeline. There is no set schedule for In Development items to go into an episode; this section only notes that they are being worked on.

Settlement Portals

For some time, the Settlement Portal Hubs have been found outside almost all of the towns and cities of Dereth. These Hubs provided fast transportation all across Dereth, but many players have complained that... well, they just look ugly.

In April, we are planning to introduce the first phase of a two-phase process to remove the Settlement Portals. The first phase is the creation of portal summoning gems for all of the Settlements that are currently linked to the Hubs. Each Settlement will have a vendor who will sell that Settlement’s gem.

The second phase, currently planned for May, is the removal of the Settlement Portal Hubs entirely.

The goal of these changes is to remove the ugliness of the Hubs, as well as encourage exploration and travel through Dereth’s wilderness. If there are several Settlements that you visit regularly, you have the opportunity to purchase gems for these Settlements in the month of April, before the Hubs are removed. If you wish to visit your friend’s home, you can ask you friend to purchase that Settlement’s gem for you. We would not be surprised to see gems for particularly popular Settlement destinations being traded in the Marketplace!

Content Revisions

We plan to revise two towns and two quests in April. Holtburg will be revised in the same way that Shoushi was in January and Yaraq will be in March. The portal drops and Lifestone locations will be made more convenient, and the surrounding content will be adjusted for balance.

The second town that we are planning to revise is the Lugian fortress of Linvak Tukal. It will be getting a Lifestone and direct portal access, without the need to fight through the entryway.

Along with Linvak Tukal, we plan to revise the Arm, Heart, Mind quest. Confusing aspects of the quest timing will be fixed, and the quest rewards will be adjusted.

The second quest to be revised is the Little Green Seeds quest. Terese’s interactions and the Swamp Garden will be revised, and new types of seeds for higher-level creatures will be introduced. This doesn’t mean new colors of dye, however.

Vendor Buy-Sell Rates

Ever since the creature spawn changes, there have been some disparities between the difficult of hunting around certain towns and the buy-sell rates of the vendors inside those towns. In April, we plan to adjust the vendor buy-sell rates in several towns to better reflect the surrounding area.

In addition, to give each town some unique flavor, each town will have one or two vendors who have better buy/sell rates than the rest of the town.

Dispel Revisions

For some time, the dispel gems have been considerably better than any of the dispel spells or dispel potions. Dispel gems could remove all of your debuffs in one shot, they only removed negative spells, and they could remove level VII spells.

To improve the situation and create more versatility and usefulness for dispels, we are planning to add level VIIs to spells and potions, and decrease the power of gems:

• Dispel spells: There will be level VII versions of Item, Creature, and Life dispels, both Self and Other. These spells will remove a random number of negative spells from the target when successfully cast, and will not remove positive spells.

• Dispel potions: There will be level VI and VII player-craftable dispel potions, which will be created in a process similar to the existing dispel potions. One option we are considering is the removal of the two lowest levels of dispel potions and shifting the entire crafting process “down” two steps. For example, the process that currently results in a level V dispel potion would now create a level VII dispel potion.

  These potions will remove a random number of negative spells from the user, and will not remove positive spells.

• Dispel gems: These gems will have their power reduced. They will no longer remove all negative spells from the user, they will instead remove a random number. We are also looking at the possibility of making them stackable.

In general, when I write, “a random number” above, the final random range has not yet been finalized. We’re looking at a range of or near 1-6 spells for each dispel.

Buffing Improvements

The Buffing Changes article that will be following will provide information on all of our planned buffing improvements and how they fit together. The first of these, faster self-buffs, is planned for April.

In April, we plan to make all Creature and Life Self buffs cast at the same speed as a level I spell, no matter what their level. This should cut down on the amount of time spent preparing for battle for players who cast their own buffs.

Why the Self spells and not Others? We believe that training a skill yourself should always have some advantage over relying on others who have trained the skill.

What about Banes? As there are no “Self” or “Other” versions of these spells, we need to be a bit more careful about our changes to them. You’ll see some information regarding our plans for Banes in the In Concept section below, as well as in the coming Buffing Changes article.

House Purchase Timer

An issue that has resulted in a great deal of feedback is that of players camping houses solely for the purpose of resale and a profit.

After receiving all of your feedback, we've come at this issue from a different angle. If we can prevent these players from being able to quickly unload these houses and purchase new ones, it will impede their ability to tie up the entire housing market.

To that end, we would like to introduce a one month timer on purchasing cottages, villas, and mansions. Residential Quarters will be exempt from this timer. This timer is per account, not per character. The timer would not extend across worlds.

What does this mean? All players, whether they own a house or not, would have a field in their housing panel stating the last time that they purchased a house (for these purposes a "house" is a cottage, villa, or mansion) and when they can purchase another one. You cannot purchase a house until 30 days after the last time that you purchased a house.

It is important to note that this has nothing to do with when you lose a house, either through @house abandon or failure to pay maintenance. If you have owned a house for several months and abandon it, you will be able to purchase another house immediately. What you cannot do is purchase a house, abandon it less than 30 days later, and then purchase another house immediately.

Purchasing an apartment in the Residential Quarters does not change this at all. You could buy a house, immediately abandon it, and then immediately purchase an apartment. However you would still have to wait the 30 days before you could purchase another house.

There is a feedback thread on this specific proposal here.

Treasure Changes, Phase 3

We’ve already mentioned several of the ongoing Treasure changes coming in April in the March Letter to the Players, such as adjustments to border creatures. In addition, we plan to make the following changes:

• Attack and Defense modifiers will appear more frequently on weapons. In March, we’re adjusting the minimum, maximum, and average modifiers that are found – in April, you will find these modifiers more frequently in general.

• Mana Conversion modifiers will also appear more frequently on casters. At high levels of loot, you will no longer be able to find casters that don’t have a Mana Conversion modifier. In addition, the average Mana Conversion modifier will adjusted upwards.

• New Defense Modifiers. In April, you will be able to find Melee Defense modifiers on casting items, and Missile Defense and Magic Defense modifiers on all weapons and casting items. Casters will now be able to have Defender cast on them, as well as be tinkered with Brass. At some point in the future we may create equivalent spells and tinkers for Missile Defense and Magic Defense modifiers on weapons and casters.

• Casting items will have the ability to generate with Defender due to the above change, and will also have the ability to generate with the Hermetic Link spell or cantrips for any of the spells that can be found on them.

“Second-class” Weapons Get Upgrades

In the past, some weapons within a weapon class were just plain undesirable. For example, if you were a Mace user and you wanted maximum damage, there was no reason to look at anything other than a Morningstar. You turned up your nose at a Kasrullah.

In April, we’ll be making changes to bring the low-end damage weapons closer to par with the maximum damage weapons in each class. This is similar to the changes we made to bows and crossbows last year; however we are not necessarily giving all weapons within a class the same maximum damage. In many weapon classes there will still be weapons that have a lower maximum than others, but the difference will be much smaller.

No weapon class is having its maximum damage increased, and some classes are being changed more than others. For example, all three types of Unarmed Combat weapons had the same maximum damage, so they will not be touched. Weapons that are considered to be a “secondary damage type” – Rapiers, Spiked Clubs, Naginatas, and Warhammers – are not being changed, and we are taking into account the differences between hiltable and non-hiltable Swords and Daggers.

Fellowship Spells

As we have hinted in the past, we are introducing spells that can be cast on all members of a fellowship simultaneously. The first of these spells are planned for April. We are taking it slow with these – they are only attribute buffs, and no more powerful than existing spells.

Envoy Policy Changes

Katahdin is working with the Dev Team to help the Envoy team better assist you, our players. Here are two of the ideas that we are currently considering:

• Inscriptions. While their primary responsibility would always to be handle calls that are in the Help or Abuse queues, Envoys could make themselves available to uninscribe items upon request. There would also be scheduled times and places on each world where you could find an Envoy to uninscribe your item. We’re still working on many of the details and are interested in your thoughts on this topic.

• The Marketplace. On some worlds, trade bots are not placed in the outlying rooms and instead cluster in the primary portal drop room. This can create graphical lag and issues for players who are portaling in to the Marketplace.

The Envoy team would like to encourage players to move their bots into the outer rooms of the Marketplace. In addition, players need to ensure that the speech that they are having their trade bots use is not offensive. We are considering removing offensive or badly-placed trade bots from the Marketplace. These bots would not be banned or booted, but would be removed to isolated rooms until their owners return.

Tell us what you think of the ideas In Development!

In Concept

(These are the game additions and changes that we are thinking about for May and beyond. We cannot guarantee that any of these additions and changes will be added to the game. The whole purpose of this section is to let you know what we’re thinking about doing, give you a chance to comment and to have a dialogue with us about them.

I can’t stress strongly enough – it is entirely possible that none of the changes listed below will ever make it into the game. We are going to be carefully watching what you post about these concepts.)

Content Revisions

In the future, we would like to revisit all towns in the same fashion that Shoushi has been revisited, and Yaraq and Holtburg will be revised in March and April respectively.

We’ve recently made or proposed a number of changes to the world of PK and PKL combat, and we’d like to take this time to provide more information on where we are, where we’re going, and how we feel about the state of Asheron’s Call’s PvP.

Much of the information in this document comes directly from the feedback we requested on our forums. Some of the changes were not taken directly from the feedback, but are part of our overall vision for PvP.

It’s important to note that what we describe below is not set in stone. While we feel strongly about many of the gameplay changes we suggest, we want to hear your feedback on them. The enormous amount of negative feedback regarding the March PvP changes reminded us of exactly what happens when we don’t come to the PvP community before implementing these changes.

The Current Status

The current state of Asheron’s Call PvP is, in our opinion, very good, but nowhere near perfect. While there are a number of issues that need to be resolved, we believe that our PvP combat is as good as, if not better than, the PvP that you’ll find in any other fantasy MMP. What makes AC’s PvP so good?

• The animation and physics system. Projectiles are real objects that can be dodged. You have the ability to maneuver in combat, and your movement choices have real consequences.
• Character choices. The skill system, the vast amount of varied equipment in the game, and the ability to prepare for different opponents creates a number of different tactics and strategies for players.
• Player skill matters. While numbers – such as number of levels and number of opponents – are very important, they are not necessarily the deciding factor. A skilled player can defeat a more powerful unskilled player, although it may be difficult.
• Speed. One mistake in PvP combat – just one – can cost you your life. Combat can happen at any time.
• Very few safe zones on Darktide. One of the hallmarks of Darktide is the knowledge that nowhere is “safe”. You can be attacked anywhere, at any time. The housing system has thrown a bit of a wrench in this, however.

However there are a number of factors that prevent AC’s PvP from being as great as it could. Some of these factors are:

• Balance issues. While Mage / Sword balance is very tight, the other melee classes and archers are currently less competitive. There is still a wide gap between the Weeping Weapons and all other weapons and weapon classes in PvP combat.

• Animation issues. The same system that makes AC’s combat feel realistic has a number of problems. Jump-spin, “godmoding” potions and other consumables, fastcasting, slidecasting... these are just the top issues. This has been exacerbated by varied Dev Team response and a lack of communication regarding which, if any, of these actions are “acceptable” and which are “exploits”.

• Time spent preparing. Since you can be attacked at any time, you must be at maximum readiness at almost all times. This results in a great deal of time spent buffing and not fighting.

• Lack of meaningful fights. By this we mean battles that have consequences, whether that is control of a location or resource, or some sort of recognizable achievement such as placement on a PK ladder. Left with this void, players on Darktide have created their own resources to fight over – macroing locations.

All of the above issues need to be handled in order to make AC’s PvP all it can be.

Our Goals for the Future

Our vision for AC’s PvP can be summed up in one sentence: Improve upon the positive and eliminate the negative. We want to take those features mentioned in the first bullet-point group above and add to them, while resolving the issues in the second bullet-point group.

When designing for PvP combat, the first group that we must always consider is Darktide. Darktide is the home of the majority of our most loyal and experienced PvP players, and any changes we make to PvP combat should be done to improve their gameplay first and foremost.

One goal that we strive for is balanced group combat. There is a considerable difference between, say, PKL dueling and a Darktide raid. In the former, the two opponents can set rules and guidelines, such as, “No debuffing,” or “No gems”. In the latter, you have no way of knowing which tactics your opponents may be ready to use against you.

In addition, we want to have an environment in which a diverse group will tend to be more powerful than a group of similar characters. For example, two melees and a mage should have an edge over three melees of a similar level. This edge should not be overwhelming – the three melees may be skilled enough to defeat their opponents – but we want to encourage diversity.

We want to increase the number of options and tactics in PvP combat. To give you an example of what we’re trying to avoid, think of a typical arcade fighting game. When your opponent picks his character, you know – in general – what to expect and how best to try and counter it. While player skill is extremely important, you know the type of attacks that will be coming as soon as you see which character your opponent selected.

This is what we don’t want in Asheron’s Call. When you are attacked by a mixed group, you should not be able to know ahead of time exactly which tactics they will be using. There should be multiple equally effective tactical options, and each option should have an effective counter. This last paragraph speaks to a number of recent changes – banes should be able to be countered with an appropriate lure, and Blood Drinker should be able to be countered with Blood Loather. Negative spells should be able to be countered with dispels.

Specific Proposals

I’d like to take the bullet points above and speak specifically on what our plans are to emphasize, or resolve, each one.

Animation and Physics

Most of the issues here will be touched on under resolving the negatives. It is important to stress that we want to keep the ability to move in combat.

Character Choices and Player Skill

Some of our more controversial recent changes have been towards increasing the number of options available to players in combat. These include the ability to debuff Weeping weapons and player worn armor, the planned changes to dispel gems, and the changes to Arc spell words. We seek to increase the number of choices available to players in combat, and to make multiple viable responses to the choices made by their opponents.

In the case of Arcs, we want to continue to reward players who recognize the spell words used by their opponents and adjust accordingly. In the case of the Dispels, we wanted to create the option of dispelling level VII spells through a means other than gems, and then balance gems alongside these new methods. We are still considering much of the feedback that we’ve received on this topic, such as timers, speed of spellcasting, and stacking the gems.

Other planned changes include the upgrades to “second-class” weapons and adjustments to the damage-over-time of the PvP weapon suites. We are also looking at the possibility of creating PvP-specific imbues for loot weapons. It is our goal that, for example, a melee who wants to take part in PvP combat has options beyond “Weeping Sword or nothing”. To that end, we plan to adjust the Weeping, Hollow, and Phantom weapons.

We are looking at ways to improve the low-end weapons in PvP, as well as improve the Hollow and Phantom weapons, without significantly impacting their balance in PvM play. The goal is for Hollow and Phantom weapons to be viable alternatives to Weeping weapons, and for other melee weapon groups to be viable alternatives to Sword. Sword will still be strongest, but the gap between it and the other weapon groups will be decreased.

It needs to be stated plainly: It may be necessary to decrease the damage of the Weeping Sword. Our current damage-over-time charts, as well as in-game experiences, indicate that it may be slightly stronger than intended.

Speed

The most important goal with regard to speed is that we not change the current situation. While we may introduce further “countermeasure” equipment such as the Aegis shield, this equipment should have drawbacks in group combat. In addition, tactics that decrease a player’s damage should be able to be countered through spell or dispel.

Safe Zones

This brings us to the topic of housing barriers on Darktide. There is strong feedback to do something about them, but the best solution may not be technically feasible for some time. We are looking at removing them altogether, only removing barriers from villas or mansions, or introducing some form of PK timer on the ability to pass through friendly barriers. One feature which we’ve seen requested – the ability to temporarily destroy a hostile housing barrier – is most likely not something we can add to the game anytime in the near future.

This issue is still in discussion internally, and we value any feedback that you may have.

Balance Issues

Many of the topics mentioned under Character Choices and Player Skill apply equally to Balance. We have also tackled other balance issues recently, such as the imbalance in the low-level life transfer spells.

There are a few topics for the future that are quite specific to Balance, primarily the state of missile characters in PvP. We currently have three ideas in concept to improve the state of PvP missile characters.

• Aegis-like equipment. Our current design is an item that could be used on any loot missile weapon to add a Magic Absorbing property to it. This property would be similar to the Aegis Shield and would scale based on the wielder’s Magic Defense. The downside is that the missile weapon would lose any melee defense adjustment that it might possess. Also, obviously, one would need to choose between this weapon and one’s Weeping Bow, Crossbow, or Atlatl.

We are also looking at the possibility of creating similar equipment for casting objects, in order to give mages a choice similar to the choice we are giving missile users.

• Pathing options. We would like to introduce a new pathing type for missile attacks. War Mages have the ability to choose between Bolts and Arcs for the purposes of targeting, whereas missile users have only one option. Any new option would likely be either through some sort of option in the attack bar, or through a new form of ammunition
   

• Speed vs. accuracy. Currently setting the speed/accuracy slider to the far left allows you to fire at maximum speed, but penalizes your skill by 50%. Likewise, setting the slider to the far right gives you a 50% bonus to your skill, but fires at the slowest rate.

We are investigating the possibility of adjusting this slider to allow for fastest speed with a smaller penalty – or no penalty – without changing the bonus given at slowest speed.

These ideas are still in the design process and your feedback would be useful.

We are working to ensure that many of the topics listed in the March Letter to the Players Follow-Up, such as higher wield-req weapons, do not negatively impact PvP balance.

Animation Issues

Right off the bat, we’d like to differentiate between animation issues that we now consider to be legitimate player tactics, and animation issues that we plan to resolve.

Legitimate Tactics:

• Player-controlled casting times – the current “fastcasting” and “delay casting”. However if a new form of fastcasting emerges that would allow players to rapid-fire spells beyond that which is currently seen, it would likely be considered an issue to resolve.

• Slide-casting within the current movement limits.

Issues to Resolve:

• Jump-Spin. More on this below.

• “Godmoding” potions and food.

• Getting around the PK jumping stamina loss. (The Jump-Spin resolution may make this a non-issue.)

• Animation-breaking issues not listed above. This is the catch-all for lesser-used animation-breaking actions or ones not discovered or reported yet.

Jump-Spin deserves its own paragraph, if not more. One the one hand, it seems unfair that a player should be able to so badly throw off his opponent’s client simply by jumping and spinning mid-jump that it breaks sticky melee and allows the player to run away. On the other hand, if that is the only means of escaping from a melee, what else do we expect that player to do?

We are still working on solutions to this issue. We have previously considered solutions such as restricting movement while jumping, only to find that they did not resolve the issue. Currently we are designing and testing several other solutions, such as adding a PK jump timer (which would allow you to jump-spin, but not as frequently) or improving client prediction such that a target jump-spinning does not throw off sticky.

We are also investigating the relationship of the Run skill to sticky melee. Perhaps a character with a high Run skill should have a chance to break sticky from a slower opponent? These are questions that require research, both into whether we can do this, and whether or not we should.

Time Spent Preparing

A number of topics in the Letter to the Players Follow-Up touch on this directly, from faster self buffs to multi-stat buffs and fellowship spells. In general we want to decrease the amount of time you spend preparing for a fight, and increase the time you spend actually fighting.

Lack of Meaningful Fights

This is perhaps the most long-term issue to resolve. It is clear that the PvP community, Darktide in particular, wants something to fight over. We have just scratched the surface with our town revisions (putting Lifestones in towns) and the PK battle dungeons in the February event. We would like to add more things to fight over, with better and more tangible rewards.

However, it is in our best interests to resolve the other issues listed above before we create meaningful combat goals and rewards. So this may be one of the last issues we resolve. As we work on it, we will ask you for your feedback on our ideas and proposals.

Lag

A frequently mentioned issue for the Darktide community is the subject of lag. We receive frequent reports that lag on Darktide is worse than on any other server. We are always working to resolve any server-side lag issues that we find, in addition we are working on adding improved performance monitoring to our servers. When this is completed our ability to diagnose and resolve any server-side issues should be greatly improved.

Conclusion

Asheron’s Call’s PvP players are some of our most dedicated, passionate, and vocal. Many of you know the guts of this game as well as we do, and we respect that. We want to improve our communication with you so that you can help us make Asheron’s Call’s PvP as great as we all know it can be.

We hope that this article has been helpful in understand the Dev Team’s goals for PvP. As I wrote earlier, the proposals that I’ve listed above are not set in stone. Your feedback will help us prioritize and update these ideas to better match what it is that you want to see in AC.

In the end, we want PvP in AC to be fun. If it’s fun, we’ll enjoy designing for it, and we’ll all enjoy playing it. Thanks for taking the time to read this, and let us know what you think!
 

You were right; we were wrong. We made a mistake with the recent PK changes.

We introduced several new dynamics in March that were primarily aimed at the PK audience, including spell redirection to chest armor and changes to the spell words of arc spells. Our intention was to add more elements of optional tactics to PK combat, but the feedback that we have received since the March update -- as well as our own observations in game -- have shown us that these dynamics are not playing out the way we had hoped that they would. The majority of feedback we have received is not happy with these changes -- and since PK is one area of the game in which parity, fun, player opinion, and player demand are so delicately balanced, it behooves us to listen carefully. We've said that we're going to communicate with you more, and listen to you better, and this is an excellent opportunity for us to put our money where our mouth is. We were wrong about these changes, and we're going to revert them.

So later this week, we will be bringing down the servers to patch the following PK-related functionality:
- Item enchantment spells cast on a player will not redirect to the chest armor of a player. They will still redirect to a shield if one is wielded, but if no shield is wielded the spell will fail (as they did prior to the March update).
- The spell words for all arc spells will once again be identical to the spell words for the corresponding bolt spell.
- PK/PKL players will no longer be able to use @die at the very last minute in a PK/PKL battle to protect their corpse.
- Weeping weapons will once again resist all magic cast on them.

This last PK bullet point may surprise you, since Weepings have been debuffable since last December. The feedback we have received, however, indicates to us that this is where we started to go wrong with our PK changes -- a lot of players were beginning to see a plausible, workable balance before these changes. So that is what we need to return to before we can go forward. And we will be going forward -- but only after talking more about what you want out of PK and discussing the options with you.

In addition to those changes, we will also be fixing a few important bugs at the same time:
- The hookable portal from the Temple of Ixir Zi will no longer be able to be hooked on non-mansion housing. Existing portals hooked on non-mansions will remain where they are, but once they are unhooked you will only be able to re-hook them on a mansion. This portal will also look correct when hooked, although you will need to rehook it to see that change.
- The spell issues on the Crown of Anointed Blood -- spells that affected the wrong attribute, or had the wrong magnitude of effect -- will be fixed.
- The golems in the Knorr quest will once again be willing to tell players their riddles.

This patch is tentatively scheduled for Thursday, 3/18 at 9:00 AM EST. If that date needs to change for any reason, we will inform you as soon as possible.
 

Treasure in Asheron's Call - from the Turbine Site (3-23-03)

Introduction

The treasure system is perhaps one of the best gameplay systems in AC. It’s exciting, it’s flexible, it’s addictive, and it integrates well with other aspects of the game. But after four years and a lot of plastering, patching and mending, it was beginning to show its age. So recently we started on a multi-month project to reinvigorate the treasure system.

This effort has raised a lot of questions with players. It’s not intuitively obvious to you what we’re doing to treasure or why we want to do it – or what benefit you’re going to get out of it. And changes of this scope are understandably a bit discomfiting. So we’ve written this article to tell you a bit about where we want to go with treasure and how we plan to get there. And, of course, we’d like your feedback on our plans. After all, this treasure is meant for you.

Background

Before we start talking about the changes to treasure and our goals for the future, it’s going to be necessary to tell you a good bit about how treasure in Asheron’s Call works.

All treasure generators in AC – both creatures and chests – figure out what treasure they will actually generate based on a treasure profile. This profile controls treasure generation in fairly broad strokes. For instance, it specifies how many items can be generated – perhaps 3 to 5, or 5 to 15. It also specifies what types of items can be generated and how likely each type is to generate. For example, an Olthoi might drop pretty much anything, but an Elemental might drop more gems, and no lockpicks at all.

It is important to understand, however, that the types of items that the profile can specify are very general. For instance, the profile might specify that a chest generates mostly armor and weapons with perhaps a few gems thrown in, but not which kinds of weapons, armor, or gems.

(Interesting fact: With very few exceptions, trophy items like crystal shards and little green seeds are not handled by the treasure system at all, but by another system entirely. This can occasionally make things rather confusing. The wall spells in a Steel Chest, for instance, are actually handled by the trophy system, while the bolts and arc spells are handled by the treasure system. That’s because the treasure system requires that a spell exist for all 7 levels, and that’s not true for wall spells.)

Perhaps the most important property that the profile specifies is the wealth rating. There are six wealth ratings – from 1 to 6. (In the past we’ve also called these ‘loot levels’, but considering how many levels we have to talk about these days – player levels and creature levels and skill levels and loot levels – it seems best to stick with ‘wealth ratings’ for now.) The wealth rating of a profile is used in two distinct ways during treasure generation. First, it is used in selection to select the exact item that is going to be generated; and secondly it is used in mutation to determine how that item is going to be changed by the treasure system.

Let’s look at an example. The treasure profile used by the Broken Fragment says that when the creature dies, it’s going to create 3 to 5 items. One of those items is going to be either a healing kit (15% chance) or a mana stone (15% chance) or a scarab (70% chance). The profile also says that this is going to be an item with a wealth rating of 1. So when the fragment dies, it rolls a random number – and let’s say that it decides that one item is going to be a healing kit. Then it checks a table for the possible healing kits that can occur in wealth rating 1, and determines that the healing kit can be either a crude kit (75% chance) or a poor kit (25%) chance. It rolls again to decide exactly which kit it will generate.

That’s how the profile and the wealth rating control selection, but what about mutation? Well, all crude healing kits are just crude healing kits, but for something like a dirk the selection of the item is only the first step. Once we know that we’re generating a dirk, we still need to figure out all sort of things about it: how much damage it will do, its attack and melee defense modifiers, its speed, its burden, what item enchantments are on it, what creature endowments it casts, if it has cantrips, how much mana it has, its wield requirements, its skill and heritage requirements, etc. Each of these properties is assigned by mutation, and for each of these properties, we are going to consult a table that is organized by wealth rating.

For example, if the profile has a wealth rating of 1, then a dirk generated by this profile has a 10% chance to have a base damage of 7, a 15% chance to have a base damage of 8, a 25% chance to have a base damage of 9, and so forth. A dirk from a wealth rating 2 profile will have different possible damages and different chances to get those damages. Mutation is one of the most complicated – and one of the coolest – parts of the treasure system, and there are hundreds of data tables devoted to describing this behavior. These examples just give you a taste of the system.

So now you know in general terms how the treasure profile controls the types of loot that you find. And you know that the wealth rating is probably the most important property of the profile because it controls the fine-grained selection of treasure items as well as their mutation. With that knowledge under our belt, let’s talk some about how treasure has worked historically in Asheron’s Call.

Where We Were

Although the basic structure of the treasure system has remained the same for the past four years, the way that we use that structure has changed. The best example of this is the way that we use wealth ratings.

Wealth ratings were originally intended to control the quality of treasure – the higher the wealth rating, the better the loot, period. There was no notion of treasure being best for a particular level of player, because the higher treasure was always going to be better for everyone. You can see this philosophy in many places still today – a peerless healing kit is always better in all ways for all characters than an excellent healing kit, an excellent healing kit is always better than a good healing kit, and so forth.

This was originally true for weapons and armor as well, but that all changed with the addition of wield requirements at the beginning of 2002. Wield requirements are controlled by the wealth rating of the treasure profile, so in a sense they correlate to the quality of the treasure. But wield requirements also define brackets of treasure that corresponded (roughly) to character levels rather than to simple quality. In other words, a 325-wield sword is just not as useful to a newbie sword character as a no-wield sword, and so you can’t really judge the quality of the two swords on the same scale for all characters.

As a measure of quality, wealth ratings have suffered from somewhat random assignment to creatures over the years. Asheron’s Call has always had exactly six wealth ratings, but when the game first shipped, only the first five were commonly available to players. The lowest wealth ratings were assigned to the low level creatures; wealth rating 4 was assigned to the high level creatures; and wealth rating 5 was assigned only to very special creatures like Olthoi nobles. Keep in mind, however, that the high level creatures at the time were aimed at characters of perhaps level 20 or 30.

Later on, as players reached higher levels and higher quality treasure became more widespread, the middle wealth ratings were pushed both down into lower level creatures (in an attempt to keep lower level players interested in treasure) and up into higher level creatures (in an attempt to keep from running out of wealth ratings). After a year or two, wealth rating 6 was made more available to players through Singularity Troves, which helped the high level issue temporarily, but then the addition of wield requirements confused the issue – because wield requirement weapons occurred at relatively high wealth ratings, but realistically lower level players needed more access to those weapons. And finally, creature rebalancing and redistribution came through like a whirlwind last year and shredded whatever tatters of rhyme or reason may have remained in the assignment of wealth ratings.

This lead to a situation in which the wealth ratings were all bunched up at the low end and spread terribly thin at the high end, with some just being completely out of whack. We might have gone on this way for years, if not for two factors: 1) a desire to bring new players into Dereth, and 2) the growing issue of high level players.

New players want a consistent world to play in and live in, and they probably aren’t going to understand offhand why all the treasure they are finding just plain sucks and that they should go hunt Olthoi Harvesters. High level players, on the other hand, need high level content and high level content should drop high level loot, and the fact was that once you were past level 60 or so you were pretty much looking at the same treasure for the rest of your character’s lifetime was just not exciting to us, or to you. So somehow, we needed to straighten the system out.

It didn’t help matters that traditionally each creature and each chest had its own individually named treasure profile and so any changes to treasure would need to modify over a thousand data files. That may sound good on paper – each creature has its own unique profile – but in practice it didn’t quite work out the way you might think. The main difference between two particular golem profiles, for instance, was that one had a 67% chance to drop a gem, and the other had a 70% chance to drop a gem. Unfortunately, the sheer number of data files involved meant that slow, step-by-step change was not feasible for the treasure system – we were really looking at a second creature rebalancing.

Our Goals

So between the changing game environment and the maturing of the players themselves, you can see how the treasure system was stuck in a hard place. In order to grow, it first had to change. But how did we want to grow the treasure system?

Well, as we said in the February Rollout Article, our goals for treasure are pretty simple: we want treasure to be useful and interesting. To expand on that a bit, we want creatures in a particular level range to drop loot that could be useful to characters in that level range. Now mind you, that doesn’t mean that every single piece of treasure will be the best you’ve ever seen – that might be useful, but it would very soon stop being interesting. But it does mean that you should have a good chance of finding something pretty darned useful. We want everyone to have good reason to check the corpse of every creature they kill, because they might just find something fantastic.

Where We Are Now

February

In February, we started the laborious process of cleaning up the treasure system. First, we defined a set of generic profiles for use with all creatures. By limiting the number of profiles that creatures used, we made the entire system easier to work with and we ensured that further changes to treasure would be more feasible and easier to test.

Now, some players were worried that standardizing the treasure profiles would rob the treasure system of a lot of its richness and flexibility. This is an understandable worry, but in context … Well, you have to understand the scale here. We started with approximately 1200 treasure profiles – roughly one for each creature and each chest. There are approximately 500 treasure profiles in use today, and ideally we’d like to reduce this a bit further, say to 250 profiles. But even 250 different treasure profiles still gives us an awful lot of flexibility and opportunities for individuality among different creatures.

We also wrote a tool to help us set the treasure profiles for every creature in the game. The tool helped us quite a bit, but because of the sheer number of changes involved we still only managed to get about 2/3 of the creatures done for February. Most of the rest will be changed with the April update, but we’ll probably be dealing with stragglers – quest creatures, mostly – for another several months.

In order to assign profiles to creatures in a rational fashion, we correlated each wealth rating with a target level range. Initially, each wealth rating lined up exactly with the main level ranges on the creature distribution map: newbie, low, mid, high, extreme, and uber. However, after reading a good bit of player feedback we realized that we needed to tweak the ranges down a bit, so that you can start collecting equipment for the next level range before you actually get there. These tweaks will go live with the April update, and you can see the effects of these tweaks in Table 4 below in the April section.

Of course, changing the treasure profiles on creatures had a lot of side effects. Some creatures saw changes in the types of items or in the number of items they dropped. But the biggest side effects were tied to changes in the wealth rating, and these included both changes in selection and mutation.

In terms of selections, for example, a creature that previously used a wealth rating 3 profile would have previously dropped mostly good healing kits. If after the realignment, however, their profile had a wealth rating of 2, they would now drop primarily poor healing kits. Likewise, selection changes also affected what types of weapons (tungi vs. silifi), what kinds of armor (leather vs. yoroi), what kinds of gems, which healing kits and lockpicks, and what levels of spell scrolls you might find on a particular creature.

We knew that all of these areas would need to be addressed eventually – and some sooner than others – but we also knew that it wasn’t feasible to address them all at once. Spell scrolls we addressed in March, armor types will be addressed in April, and the others we hope to address in the near future.

But we felt it was more important for us to address the some of the nastier mutation side effects immediately. A good example of this can be seen with the wield requirements on missile weapons. Before February, you could only find 250-wield missile weapons at wealth rating 4 or above. Had we left this unchanged when we adjusted the profiles, you wouldn’t have had any chance to find 250-wield missile weapons until around character level 60. So it was important for us to adjust the wield requirement mutations, as well as other mutations, to account for the wealth rating changes. Table 1 shows the distribution of wield requirements for weapons after the change.

Table 1: Weapon Wield Requirements
 

Wealth Rating	Melee Weapon Wield Requirements	Missile Weapon Wield Requirements
1	0	0
2	0, 250	0, 250
3	250, 300	250, 270
4	250, 300, 325	250, 270, 290
5	250, 300, 325	250, 270, 290
6	250, 300, 325	250, 270, 290

One thing you may notice here is that the top three wealth ratings are all identical. In actual practice, your chances of finding each level of wield requirement are different, but the range of possibilities is the same. This is one area in which we have plans for the future.

(Incidentally, please keep in mind when you are looking at these tables that because some creatures have not yet gotten their new treasure profiles, you may occasionally run across treasure that doesn’t fit neatly into these tables. Feel free to tell us about it, and we’ll get it fixed.)

In addition to weapon wield requirements, we also adjusted the mutation of weapon variance, adding more possible levels of mutation and smoothing out the curves so that the best mutations were not so rare. We increased the maximum damage mutations for the racial weapons, which were falling rather behind in terms of damage over time, and we raised the maximum damage modifier for the crossbow slightly for the same reason. Finally, we broke the possible damage modifiers for all the missile weapons down into smaller chunks. All of these actions supported our goal, presented above, of providing more diversity in treasure.

One mutation that we did not adjust – but which we should have – was that of the offense and melee defense modifiers on weapons. Because the frequency and magnitude of these mutations depends on the wealth rating of the treasure profile, weapons in February were generating with fewer and lower modifiers than players were expecting. In March we adjusted the magnitude of the modifiers, and in April we will adjust the frequency.

As you can see, we concentrated mostly on weapon mutation and did not adjust the mutation of armor. In retrospect this was a mistake, but at the time we were hoping that we could update the entire armor system in March at the same time as we incorporated our new racial armors. That wasn’t ultimately feasible, and so we are making interim adjustments to correct the mutation issues with armor in April.

Another major mutation change in February involved the levels of enchantments that can be found on items, and the wealth ratings at which you can find major and minor cantrips. After player feedback, we adjusted these spell levels again in March.

Finally, we adjusted the treasure profiles on a number of special chests. Generic chests we tackled in March, but in February we changed the wealth ratings of chests like the Virindi Troves, Runed Chests, VoD chests and the like to bring them into line with the target character levels.

March

Due to some peculiarities in our schedule, the March update took place only two weeks after the February update. Because of this, the treasure changes in March were generally more subtle than the February changes.

First, we updated the profiles of the generic chests – you know, those plain old treasure chests that hang out in dungeons but aren’t special or part of any particular quest. This actually left us with an interesting problem for the future: because the content designers were well aware that the old chests had low quality treasure, they would often place only wealth rating 3 and 4 chests in their dungeons, regardless of the target level of the area. Now, of course, this means that a lot of those chests are out of whack and need to be revisited, but there are an awful lot of them and it’s going to take us months to find them all.

As part of this change, we also added a new treasure profile for the lowest level of Runed chests and adjusted the existing Runed chests in places like Holtburg and Yaraq – those Runed chests should no longer try to give newbies 325 wield requirement weapons!

Secondly, we fixed scrolls drops. Previously, you could only find scrolls of one level in each wealth rating, but with some clever hackery in the treasure code we diversified scroll drops and brought them down where they were more useful to players. The following table illustrates exactly what we did.

Table 2: Scroll Levels
 

Wealth Rating	Scroll Levels – Previous	Scroll Levels – March
1	2	1, 2, 3
2	3	3, 4, 5
3	4	5, 6, 7
4	5	6, 7
5	6	7
6	7	7

At the same time, we also adjusted the levels of the spells that you can find on items. We had done the first pass of this in February, but we weren’t satisfied with how the levels played out, and neither were you. So in March we adjusted them, as the following table shows.

Table 3: Item Spell Levels
 

Wealth Rating	Item Spell Levels – February	Item Spell Levels – March
1	1, 2, 3	1, 2, 3
2	2, 3, 4	3, 4, 5
3	3, 4, 5	4, 5, 6 + minors
4	4, 5, 6 + minors	5, 6 + minors, majors
5	5, 6 + minors, majors	5, 6 + minors, majors
6	5, 6 + minors, majors	5, 6 + minors, majors

One thing you may notice here is that the top three wealth ratings are all identical. In actual practice, your chances of finding each level of spell are different, but the range of possibilities is the same. This is one area in which we may want to expand in the future, possibly by adding level 7 spells to treasure or possibly by adding some new sort of cantrip-like spell effect.

Lastly, we made some adjustments to the mutation of offense and melee defense modifiers. We had overlooked these in February – an unintentional nerf – and so we wanted to get them in somewhat better shape as soon as possible. We ended up adjusting them again in April, however, so see that section for more details about the final state of these modifiers.

There was one other very important – but fairly subtle – treasure change in March. At the beginning of this article we talked a bit about how wealth ratings used to indicate quality but are now used to indicate target character level. That leaves us without a handy way to indicate quality, however – and one aspect of our treasure system that we would like to maintain is the notion that some creatures and some chests and just better for loot. So in March we added a new ‘quality’ property to treasure profiles that indicates their quality level.

Now ‘quality’ operates within the wealth rating, but it means that treasure produced by that profile is more likely to be near the maximum that that wealth rating can produce. For instance, a high quality profile of wealth rating 3 cannot produce major cantrips, but it is a lot more likely to produce minor cantrips. Likewise, a high quality profile of wealth rating 1 will still produce spells of levels 1, 2, and 3, but it’s a lot more likely to produce a lot of level 3 spells and rather few level 1 spells.

This new property only appears in a few profiles in March – namely in the Virindi Troves, Runed Chests, the Golden Gambling Chests, some VoD chests, and a few special quest chests – but in April it will also appear on special creatures

April

The April update isn’t live yet, of course, and as I write this we have another week of implementation followed by a week of polish. So some of the information presented here may change before the April update.

As we mentioned in the February section, one major change in April involves tweaking the target character level for each wealth rating, so that you can start collecting equipment for the next level range before you actually get there. Table 4 illustrates this tweak.

Table 4: Wealth Ratings and Target Player Levels
 

Wealth Rating	Target Character Level – February	Target Character Level – March
1	1-20	1-15
2	20-40	16-35
3	40-60	36-55
4	60-80	56-75
5	80+	76+
6	100+	96+

In addition, we are extending the new ‘quality’ property to a host of creatures, including randomly spawning boss monsters like the Lord of Decay and Plaguefang, as well as creatures like Crystal Golem and Reedshark Slasher. We also added larger treasure profiles to group-oriented creatures so that they drop more pieces of loot.

Many of the other April changes have already been discussed in the March Letter to the Players Follow-Up, but we’ll list them again here in short form as well:

• Offense, melee defense, and mana conversion modifiers will be more common at all wealth ratings. In fact, at higher wealth ratings items will almost always have these modifiers.
• Magic casting ‘weapons’ such as wands, orbs, and magic staffs will generate with melee defense modifiers just like missile and melee weapons do. Magic casters will use the same mutation tables as the other weapons, so the chance to get a modifier and the maximum possible modifiers will be the same for all three types of items.
• In conjunction with this, magic casters can be enchanted with Defender and Lure Blade spells, and tinkered with brass.
• Magic casters will also have the chance to generate with appropriate item enchantment spells (Defender and Hermetic Link) and with appropriate major and minor cantrips (including skill cantrips for things like alchemy, but not for things like sword).
• All weapon types – magic, melee, and missile – will have a small chance to generate with very small bonus modifiers to magic defense and missile defense. To begin with, these modifiers will have a maximum of 2.5% and they will not be able to be enchanted or tinkered in any way. We’re excited about these new modifiers because they offer some really neat new options for weapons of all types, but because of the balance implications, we want to start off slow.
• Some ‘second-class’ melee weapons such as jittes and shou onos – weapons that are far behind the more popular weapons that use the same skill – will get a small boost to their damage in order to make them more attractive to characters of all levels.

In addition to these changes, we are also addressing many of the issues with armor in April. First, we are adjusting the selection phase – what kinds of armor you can find at various levels. The following table illustrates the difference. Note that ‘plate’ refers to platemail, scalemail, and yoroi, and that ‘heritage’ refers to Amuli, Koujia, and Celdon.

Table 5: Armor Selection

You’ll notice that in wealth rating 5 and 6 there is a listing for ‘New Heritage Armor’. The artwork for these is still in production, so they may not make it into the April update. But the plan is for these new armors to be very similar to Amuli, Koujia, and Celdon – except that they will look much cooler.

We are also addressing many of the concerns about the mutation of treasure armor in April. The main change is that all treasure armor will mutate – which means no more AL 20 armor in the Valley of Death. We are also adjusting the magnitude of armor level mutations so that the distribution will better match the distribution that you were used to before February. In addition, some of the lower types of armor – like leather – may end up with higher maximum armor levels than they could achieve before.

Finally, we will also be updating Covenant Armor. Previously, Covenant armor used a mathematical formula to determine its wield requirement based on its armor level. In other words, if you had a piece of Covenant armor with AL 213 and a melee defense requirement, then that melee defense requirement was going to be about 208. This wield requirement might also be increased more if the piece mutated its protections.

In April, however, the wield requirements on Covenant armor will work much more like the wield requirements on weapons: if the piece has an armor level between 300 and 350 and a melee defense requirement, then that requirement is going to be 300 regardless of the exact armor level or the protections. The following two tables describe this behavior.

Table 6: Covenant Armor – Wield Requirements vs. Armor Level
 

* Shields do not occur with these profiles.

Table 7: Covenant Armor Mutation
 

Wealth Rating	Profiles (from Table 6)
1	N/A
2	N/A
3	1, 2, 3
4	1, 2, 3, 4, 5
5	1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
6	1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Two important things to note: Covenant armor will be able to occur with a magic defense wield requirement as well as melee and missile defense requirements. In addition, most pieces of Covenant armor will be available with higher wield requirements and higher armor levels than previously. We wanted the best Covenant armor to be able to compete with fully tinkered non-Covenant armor in terms of armor level. The one exception is Covenant shields, which for balance reasons we have limited to lower armor levels.

The Future

Going forward, we still have a number of changes that need to be made in order to meet our goals for the treasure system. We also have a lot of cool new treasure features that we’d like to add.

We need to revisit a lot of the selection tables for supplies like healing kits, lockpicks, mana stones, scarabs, potions, food, etc. One option that we are considering is removing most of these items from creature treasure and instead making them more available at vendors. Another option is to change these items so that items from higher wealth ratings are not always better than items from lower wealth ratings in all situations.

For instance, healing kits have two important properties – a skill bonus that increases your effective healing skill, and a healing boost that increases the maximum amount that you can heal. Right now, healing kits from higher treasure have both a higher skill bonus and a higher healing boost than kits from lower treasure – they are just better in every way. But perhaps we should change that so that kits from lower treasure tend to have a higher skill bonus, while kits from higher treasure have a higher healing boost. In this way, lower level kits would presumably be more useful for lower level characters.

Another area that we’d like to revisit is arcane lore, and in particular how arcane lore requirements are affected by rank and skill requirements. This may fit in well with adding level 7 spells to treasure items, if and when we do that.

In terms of cool new features, we’re considering adding higher level wield requirements to missile and melee weapons, and adding wield requirements to magic casters at high levels. For melee weapons, it would be sufficient to increase the damage of these weapons, but for missile weapons and magic casters we have a slightly different idea in mind. In short, missile weapons would get a flat damage bonus (similar to the bonus from Blood Drinker) *only* when the damage type of the arrow in use matched the damage type of the bonus. Similarly, magic casters might have a damage bonus multiplier that worked the same way – applying the modifier only when the damage of the war spell matched the damage type of the bonus.

The following table presents our current thoughts on the skill levels we would like to see in the future for wield requirement. Note that magic casters come in at a higher level, because below that level the spell levels provide an effective scale of damage.

Table 8: Future Weapon Wield Requirements
 

Melee Weapons	Missile Weapons	Magic Casters
0	0	--
250	250	--
300	270	--
325	290	290
350	315	310
370	335	330
405	360	355

This is only one option we are looking at for higher level wield requirements on weapons, but we are pretty certain that we want to add them in some fashion. Some players have expressed concerns already that higher level wield requirements will further encourage a ‘min-max’ mentality, and that more well-rounded characters will be left behind. For this reason, we want to design these higher weapons so that they provide only a negligible benefit in terms of damage but function more as a status symbol for high level characters.

We would also like to revise and expand our armor system in the future, both by adding more types of armor and by possibly adding more types of wield restricted armor. These are the most tentative of our plans right now, however.

Conclusion

So there you have it – a detailed explanation of how the treasure system works, why we wanted to change it, where we want to go with it, how we’ve changed things so far, what’s in store for the near future, and some ideas we have for the far future. Hopefully you’ve managed to stay awake all through this article, and it’s answered some of the questions you may have had. As always, we are extremely interested in your feedback, so let us know what you think!
 

Dispell Spells - from the Turbine Site (3-23-03)

Dispel Spells

As we mentioned in the recent March Letter to the Players Follow-Up, one our near-term projects is to increase the usefulness and versatility of the dispel spells. After reviewing your feedback from the Letter and discussing the options in a number of team meetings, we’ve come to a consensus on the following plan. Now we’d like to present it to you and get some final feedback before we put this plan into action.

Player-Cast Dispels

Dispels Remove Only Negative Spells:

Dispels that are cast by players currently remove both negative and positive enchantments. Because of this, an NPK player could not use a dispel on a fellow NPK player – because they would dispel the other player’s buffs. Player-Killers could however use dispels to remove both positive and negative enchantments from their target – an effect that was not entirely desirable for either friend or enemy. To address these issues, we are planning to change all dispel spells cast by players to remove negative spells only. This will affect both existing and newly-learned spells: all dispel spells currently in a player's spell book will change to spells that remove negative enchantments only, and all newly-learned dispels will also remove negative enchantments only.

Level 7 Dispels:

Dispels that are cast by players are currently only available up to and including level 6. We will be expanding to include level 7 dispels for each of the three schools that currently have them (Creature, Item, and Life). The level 7 dispel spells will follow the same “double-scarab” pattern found in other dispels, using Platinum and Diamond scarabs.

Mana Usage:

Dispel spells currently require a substantial amount of mana to cast, starting at 50 mana for the level I versions. We feel that the mana cost is slightly too high for these spells, so we are considering adjusting them downwards. The following table shows current mana costs for dispels, and our possible new mana costs.
 

Spell Level	Current Mana Cost	New Mana Cost
I	50	40
II	100	80
III	150	120
IV	200	160
V	250	200
VI	300	240
VII	--	280

Number of Spells Removed:

Dispels that are cast by players currently remove up to 3 spells for the lower levels (level 1 and 2); up to 4 spells for the mid levels (level 3 and 4), and up to 6 spells for the highest levels (level 5 and 6). We would like to increase the number of spells removed for the lower-level dispels. The following table shows the current number of spells removed per level, and our possible new number of spells removed per level.
 

Spell Level	Current # of spells removed	New # of spells removed
I	1-3	3-6
II	1-3	3-6
III	2-4	3-6
IV	2-4	3-6
V	2-6	3-6
VI	2-6	3-6
VII	--	3-6

Learning the Spells:

Currently, the scrolls for dispel spells are found in Steel Chests exclusively, and all levels of dispel spells are found in Steel Chests. Our plans include the ability to find all levels of dispel scrolls in creature treasure and in chests. Creatures of all level ranges that can currently drop spell scrolls will have the chance to drop dispel scrolls. And Level 7 dispels will occur in Steel Chests. Scriveners will not sell these spells.

Gems, Potions, and Magic Casters with Dispel Ability

Dispel gems, dispel potions, and magic casters with an inherent dispel spell (such as the Awakener and the Attenuated Awakener) are very similar, but in the past they have rather different behavior in terms of what kinds of spells they dispel and how many spells they dispel. Going forward, however, we propose to give them all the same behavior in these areas.

Dispels Remove Only Negative Spells:

Dispel potions currently remove both positive and negative enchantments which we feel reduces the usefulness of these craft items. Our plans include changing dispel potions to remove negative enchantments only. Dispel potions will use the same type of dispel spells used for both dispel gems and magic casters with dispel ability.

Level 7 Dispels:

It is only possible to create dispel potions up to level 5 currently. Our plans include the ability to craft level 6 and 7 dispel potions using techniques similar to the current dispel potion crafting processes. In addition, the lower gems –which current dispel level 4 and 5 spells – will dispel level 5 and 6 spells respectively.

Number of Spells Removed:

Dispel gems and the Awakener and the Attenuated Awakener currently have no maximum limit on the number of negative spells they will remove when used. This behavior will not change, but dispel potions will gain the same behavior to bring them into line. In other words, dispel potions will also dispel every negative spell on the player.

Stacking:

In order to increase the convenience of dispel gems and dispel potions, these items will now stack to 25.

Other Important Issues

Layered Spells:

We had originally discussed removing the ability for dispel gems to remove all negative spells. One issue with this however is the fact that creatures will frequently cast the same negative spell on a player multiple times, creating multiple “layers” of the same spell. Many players voiced their concern that removing the ability of dispel gems to remove all negative spells would result in a situation where they could only remove several layers of a spell, and not all layers. This issue could also impact magic casters with dispel abilities. In response to these concerns, we have decided to hold off on removing the ability for gems to dispel all negative spells while we investigate solutions that would prevent the layering effect from occurring.

Creature-Cast Dispels:

Due to the planned changes in dispels, we will also be removing the ability for most creatures to cast dispel spells on players. Traps, however, will keep this ability (as will very special ‘creatures’ such as Asheron himself).

PK Timer:

Many Player-Killers have expressed concern over the current use of dispel gems and dispel items in PK combat. With the coming dispel updates and additional dispelling options, Player-Killers foresee the current, relatively moderate issue with dispels and dispel items quickly degrading into a perpetual dispel-debuff-dispel stalemate. We are investigating the issues involved in tying the use of dispel spells, dispel gems, and other dispel items to the 20-second PK combat timer. This is one area in which we would particularly like to hear more of your opinions.

Feedback

These changes impact PvM combat and PvP combat in very different ways. Because of this, we've created two separate feedback threads: one for PvM and one for PvP.
 

Buffing Improvements - from the Turbine Site (3-25-03)

Hunting in Asheron’s Call requires certain safety precautions: a skill that allows you to kill your foes, the defensive skills to avoid harm from your foes and powerful magic to lessen the damage that your foes can do. As we have added more difficult challenges and creatures to the game we have introduced higher-level spells and increased spell durations on critical buffs. These changes, while positive, did nothing to lessen the amount of time that was taken for hunt preparation. In fact, the inclusion of harder-hitting monsters and more powerful spells increased the amount of spells that some felt was necessary for hunting; as a result, Item spells were added to buffing queues and the wind up time on level seven spells lengthened the buffing process. Based on our analysis as well as player feedback, we’ve realized that something indeed needs to change. Thus, we have come up with the following document to present the future of buffing to all Asheron’s Call players.
 

Hunting Skills

Multi-Stat Spell (2 spells)	Multi-Stat Spell (3 Spells)
Weapon and Melee Defense	Weapon, Melee Defense, and Missile Defense

Magic Skills

Multi-Stat Spell (2 spells)	Multi-Stat Spell (3 Spells)
Life Magic and War Magic	Life and War Magic with Mana Conversion
Creature Enchantment and Item Enchantment	Creature and Item with Mana Conversion

Defensive/Secondary Hunting Skills

Multi-Stat Spell (2 spells)	Multi-Stat Spell (3 Spells)
Melee Defense and Missile Defense	Melee Defense, Missile Defense and Magic Defense
Healing and Arcane Lore	Healing, Arcane Lore and Mana Conversion
Mana Conversion and Magic Defense

Because these are only being conceptualized at the moment there is still a lot of room for change to occur.