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Feedback Fri…Monday - 21st January 2008

21st January 2008 11:50 Posted by Avatea

1.4 to PTS!

The new 1.4 build arrived onto the Public Test Server last week with the character database from the Orion server. We hope that you will be able to read through the PTS Patch Notes and test out the new content. Remember! If you have any comments or suggestions about the 1.4 changes, please make sure to send them using our Feedback Form.

Below we address some of the “hot topics” found in the patch notes.

Purple Drops

In a recent publish, we significantly improved the power of Green, Blue, and Purple items. In prior versions, item rarity color was simply an indication of the number and strength of the enhancement modules on the items. Rarer item colors also enjoy higher success rates with crafting. High rarity did not make a very significant difference in the overall power of an item. In order for mission rewards to be valuable, many of them were assigned relatively strong enhancement modules, which bumped up their rarity.
Now, however, each level of rarity adds 20% to the damage of weapons or 20% to the absorption rating of armor, so Purple items are now intrinsically more powerful than Blues, and Blue items are intrinsically more powerful than Greens. Mission rewards were not re-worked at the same time, and as a result many “easy” missions were giving out Blue and Purple items. Also, due to “legacy” item conversion errors, many of those higher rarity mission rewards were not correctly converted to have the higher stats.
The 1.4 publish contains many updates to address these issues:
• Typical shared map missions now only give out Green items (with the appropriate +20% bonus to stats) as rewards
• Typical instance missions now give out Blue items (with the appropriate +40% bonus to stats) as rewards
• Purple items are best obtained from instance map mini-bosses
• All “legacy” items have been up converted so their rarity and stats match:
o The majority of these had stats that were too low for their rarity, so their stats have been increased
o A few erroneous items had stats that were higher than their rarity, so their rarity has been increased to match
We have gone to great effort to ensure that existing items received before these changes are not nerfed, and instead large numbers of items will receive stat or rarity boosts. There is one unfortunate side-effect to this with respect to armor: in cases where the rarity of armor pieces was increased, that armor will now have a different visual appearance than before.

Staff, Blades, and Hand to Hand

The Staff ability has two attacks, a ranged attack and a melee attack. Currently increasing the Staff skill in the Guardian class will only increase the damage of the ranged attack. In order to increase the damage of the melee attack you have to increase the Recruit Hand to Hand ability. As the Dev Team continues to investigate the Guardian class, this functionality may change.
The sword damage is only dependant on the Blade ability in the Spy class. It does NOT rely on the H2H ability. Increasing the H2H skill does not add to your sword damage.

Test Fest ‘08

The contest to win Black Dye from playing on PTS, “Test Fest ‘08” will be starting on Monday 21st January 2008. Players playing on PTS longer than 2 hours will be able to get 10 Black Armor Dyes on the Live server that will be handed out on a later date. Details will be posted on Monday.

Audio Files

We now have the English audio files from inside the game available for download in our new Audio section! Listen to your favorite NPC berate both you and the enemy! Apologies about the French and German files that won’t be made available for legal reasons.

Font Files

Depending on your settings, your font may appear to have changed or be too large on PTS. We are making another version of 1.4 for Live that will go to PTS sometime soon. This build will include a fix for this issue.
As a work around, you may go to “installpath\Tabula Rasa\data\misc” and copy f1.lff to the same directory in the PTS install.

Click on the following links if you want to have a look at the previous Feedback Friday newsposts:

Feedback Friday – 11th January 2008

Feedback Friday – 4th January 2008

Feedback Friday – 21st December 2007

Feedback Friday – 14th December 2007

Feedback Friday – 7th December 2007

Feedback Friday – 30th November 2007

Feedback Friday – 23rd November 2007

Feedback Friday – 16th November 2007

Feedback Friday – 9th November 2007

Feedback Friday - 2nd November 2007

Feedback Friday - 26th October 2007