Greetings everyone.
It’s been quite a few months since the last diary, as appears to be our custom with these sorts of things. Lots of hard work has been done to both RvR and PvE, but we’re still deep in the Alpha state trenches. The team as a whole is solid, and we’re committed for the long run to bring out a Warhammer experience that we have all had lingering in our imaginations for years. This process of course takes time, experimentation, and a few disruptions along the way. We understand and appreciate that these things interfere with the status quo of the server, but that simply cannot deter us from walking the hard path forward. I hope you all understand that we want to build something better, and at times that means tearing down old structures to build them back up again.
To help us out with the raze and burn process, we have brought CegeePegee and Thayli onto the team. Both have experience with the coding language we use on the server side, and they’re currently going through the Database Dev gauntlet. Learning all the things, what’s broken, what’s frustrating, what’s probably impossible, and hopefully taking notes on all the things they might hope to achieve in the future.
First, some good news. We are planning on releasing three sets in the near future and some new RvR carrots to acquire.
Releasing The Carrots
Conqueror is the set you’re all familiar with.This will be taking the place of Annihilator in Gold Bags at the keeps, and will have it’s own currency which will only be downconverted for a good period of time. Boots and Gloves will not drop for this set in RvR, so you’ll either need to grind out the currency, or get some lucky gold bags. Currency will drop from players of the appropriate level, and will be awarded from RvR activities.
Annihilator will remain in place as a purchasable set with existing T4 currency and the costs will be reduced so it’s an entry level set to T4 RvR that doesn’t require the end-game grind it’s enjoyed since T4 released.
Subjugator gear will be assigned to Purple keep bags, and the rest of the current items will be shifted down a bag. Yes, that means Genesis gear in the blue bags. You’ve all waited long enough. Subjugator will include R40 79.8/55 DPS purple weapons with new never-before-seen-on-RoR appearances and procs. There will also be some R40 purple accessory/back pieces to collect, as well as diluting the chances of receiving a weapon from your first bag, of course.
Dominator gear is a new set that is equivalent to Conqueror in stats. This will also have its own currency that will take the place of Merc emblems from each 100 points earned in scenarios. Similar to Conq, Boots and Gloves will not drop from kills during scenarios. Currency will also drop for players of the appropriate RR rank during scenarios, and will only be downconverted. While Subjugator is the counterpart to Conqueror, Dominator will have Glory and Tyranny weapons purchasable with currency.
Mercenary will have its costs reduced, similar to Annihilator treatment, and you will earn the Merc emblems from completing the scenario win quests, as well as from player kills.
Beastlord is another new set that has been created for the purpose of bringing some real reasons to go out and fight the Lair Bosses in the world. This is a step up from Ruin, but not quite at the power levels of the new sets. As you may have experienced, we have had some good success at making sure bosses in our Live Events pose a reasonable challenge, and re-building the lair bosses means we can assign gear worthy of their power levels. Although, with a twist. We will be flagging the lairs as RvR enabled, and both realms will be tasked with hunting the same beasts. There is also a player kill requirement to complete the related quest line, which means we fully encourage getting your group into conflict when the bosses are spawned.
Renown Compression
We’ve got a bunch of cool stuff coming soon*. So here’s the bad news. You know how we’ve been repeating that no wipes are planned currently? We have moved beyond that current position. Wipes are planned, ~Two Weeks™. RoR meme incoming.
Spoiler:
We were initially going to apply this rollback with the new gear coming into play. This is not the case, as we would like to also address the RR40+ system in general. When it does occur, you can expect a scaling rollback based on how much renown you’ve accumulated. The math on this isn’t complicated, but I’ll spare the details. Essentially the closer you are to RR80, the closer you will be placed to RR50. This will only affect accounts above RR43. So if you’re close, this is your last chance to get out there and be one of the first to hit RR80 before you’re slapped back down with the rest of us plebs.
Renown Mastery
Objectives that we have in changing the system will be to address power creep, in particular the backend advantages of a free mastery point every 10 RR’s. The old renown tree was also brought up in conversation with positive regard for the visual implementation of points, and the ability to separate the abilities into tiers. The current system allows you to purchase the most powerful renown abilities without having to build up to them. This leads to stacking renown abilities in a way that makes them a requirement for several playstyles instead of a strategic decision based on your current playstyle.
Spoiler:
The Client Patcher™
Which brings us to the Patcher, ah the patcher, something of a mythical beast for how long we’ve talked about wanting it. We’ve also talked about how we (staff) already have it, and have had great success in using it both on the private dev server, and pulling things over to live. Things started small.
Tooltip updates are a dire necessity when it comes to class balance. Otherwise we can only have hidden changes, or in the rare case, swapping an unused ability for a used one. This was a huge issue with the changes to Warrior Priest and Disciple of Khaine. Unless you were fully aware of the changes via the forums, there were no significant indicators in-game. Even for the current implementation on Archmage and Shaman, being able to update the balance indicator with what stacks are actually doing goes a long way to providing clarity to players who would be trying out the experimental mode for the first time, instead of mentally cataloguing the changes and adjusting in combat as you can best recall them.
There are also a vast list of gear in-game that is assigned to NPC’s, and while it would be trivial to use these appearances on armor or weapons currently, they’re unfortunately tied to inventory icons. This means the Khorne or Nurgle gear for Chosen shows up as a blank icon. Oh, and the pants are actually a back piece. Not particularly ideal, certainly not something we would be comfortable intentionally putting into the game, for the sake of quality at very least.
With the patcher, and some Londo wizardry, he has managed to pull assets from Wrath of Heroes into the game. Several abilities and models are compatible which could lead to some interesting opportunities. Currently there’s nothing planned for these assets, just an interesting side effect of having client patching active. There’s more Londo sorcery here if you want to watch some demonstrations of things what could eventually be done beyond the scope of Two Weeks™
As a matter of large importance, further significant RvR changes rely rather heavily on being able to patch. Same as changing tooltips on abilities, we badly need to be able to update the objectives in order to establish what the RvR system is actually doing. For every person who understands the VP system currently, there are a dozen who are fighting the blob in RvR because it’s not plainly obvious what they should be doing.
Good UI design includes all sorts of information. For example, when a Keep is taken down, the attackers need to be notified that their new objective is to capture the BO’s and let VP tick upwards to 100%. Defenders on the other hand need to know that they can take back control of their keep by holding off defenders for a set amount of time, and then pushing their own VP past 45%. Without good information the game gets confusing. What are we supposed to be doing? Are you sure this is working? How do we know? Well, we know when things are patched and the information is displayed as intended.
With that, we can finish up with some questions from the community that were gathered over a couple hours on each realm.
Pre-gathered Q&A Session
Hellpit
Guild banners and abilities?
No progress currently. This is a Core Dev task that requires decoding any existing packets, and quite a bit of experimentation to get things working properly. While we could go ahead and activate the remaining guild ranks, there’s enough stuff not working currently that we would want to fix before doing so, not to mention finding things that aren’t working later.
Egil
Legendary weapons from Warhammer Lore?
Adding items with existing assets is a rather trivial process. What is quite a bit more complex, in process and in regards to the IP, is adding customized skins to the existing models that significantly change their appearance. One would assume that keeping it in the Age of Reckoning era would be rather safe, but that would be a measured risk we would need to address internally before we dive into it.
Tarashar
Higher gear cap?
Beyond Conqueror is a magical place where we have things like Instances and Dungeons in full effect. Where we can implement sandy beaches, a functioning sewer system, and Slaanesh pleasure resorts. Where the very cities you visit occasionally to re-spec become battlegrounds to beat each other over the head in Champion mode. Yes, a higher gear cap is coming eventually, but we’re a ways off. However, the higher gear cap will use a flatter scale than the live implementation. This means less impact from set-to-set as you grow in Renown Rank, although gains will certainly a part of things, as we’ve determined by the state stabilization thread.
What would be interesting to note about a higher gear cap, is not just the stuff that existed before, but how we can implement new things at each level. What if you would only be able to acquire a set during the window of a temporary live event? We could go so far as releasing parts of the set over the course of several events. There are untapped dimensions of gear distribution that simply never got approval, or went unconceivable in the era of big MMO subscription content.
Lazydna
When will the wheels on the ram turn?
They do. Unless there's a specific model we've missed.
Baraakiel
Timeframes for new content?
Conqueror/Subjugator/Dominator/Beastlord - ASAP, finishing up some details and they will be released.
Public Quests - Every patch we should be releasing a few or a dozen, depending on the difficulty implementing them.
Live Events - Find the next holiday on a map, flip a coin. If Sigmar then maybe, if Tzeentch, also maybe. If Slaanesh then Dickbutt and go home.
Patcher - No ETA
Instance Builder - No ETA
Dungeons - See Patcher and Instance Builder ETA’s for details.
Renown Compression - Two Weeks™ or more. Wait, that’s not new content...
Akari
Dungeons, yes please.
I agree. Yes please. Give us the ability to create them and we will be happy to dump all the existing dungeons somewhere in-line with T4. Considering the amount of work that’s going to go into them, the working theory is that low rank dungeons will be tweaked to for R40 at various levels of power and difficulty. It was a shame that Mount Gunbad was criminally underplayed on live, so we want to make sure it, and other low level dungeons, have a place in end-game progression. Perhaps at some time in the distant future beyond, they can be tweaked again to be instance based on the party level, but we want to have content in place where the most good will come of it. Or else, stuff like PQ’s happen… 188 PQ’s, all unloved beyond the level 1-40 process...
Tpot
Class balance?
We feel pretty good about the current state of balance. Let’s qualify that a bit. There are no incredibly weak, or overwhelmingly powerful classes at this point in the game. You can still point out “the best” class for each archetype, and “the worst” class for each archetype. No matter how close you come to a perfect level of balance, this will be the case. When we have long debates about which class deserves that top spot, we know we’re getting close. The low hanging fruit that can be more easily addressed is where classes have underperforming, or straight up undesirable mastery trees. Shadow Warrior and Squig Herder melee trees come to mind. Bringing these specs up to a reasonable level allows these classes to show what build diversity really brings to the class, and will then result in further balancing for the class as a whole, if it’s still warranted.
Tion
Dok/WP changes are returning? Same implementation?
These changes were rolled back because the implementation we’re able to achieve with server-only changes did not line up with what we hoped for the classes. Simply put, too many variables were hidden, and too many abilities were overperforming while being obscure in the methods implemented. Client patching will allow us to take a more thorough pass at was is possible. Same implementation? Not exactly, but a similar direction. These are melee healers, we desire them to perform as such.
Zeb
Why are Boundless Faulds (kobs belt) missing?
This is a result of the packet sniffer that was run on the live servers. Dozens of players accumulated data from live over the course of a few months before shutdown. Not everything was recovered, and several things were never recorded, dropped, misinterpreted, or scrubbed during the implementation process. This means many items are missing stats, and many items also simply don’t exists. There are thousands of items for each class, having items missing is just a matter of someone on the DB team rebuilding them and adding them in where they belong. Feel free to check on the bugtracker if items like this appear to be an issue, and report them if there is no existing report available.
The way you will implement it is also very nice. I like the idea of events and open rvr lairs, that stuff should be quite exciting. So this Beastlord set is actually a quest set, similar to Stalker?
. Was fun time
