Director's Notes
Faye is the final update in the planned series of Biome Updates. The forest biome it brings completes the list of our five biomes, each with unique visuals, resources and exciting wildlife. On top of that it will introduce guard towers, bring back Royal Guild versus Guild fights and much more. See below for the full changelog.
‘Tis also the start of the holiday season in Albion. It is time for a snowball fight, or to enjoy some fireworks, before the year 2016 will come to an end.
We're now focussing all of our efforts on Galahad, the next major update. Amongst many other changes it will bring a completely new layout of the Outlands, Royal Continent, as well as major improvements to the PvE experience and Destiny Board Progression. It will be one of the last steps before before the release of Albion later in 2017.
Improvements
Forests Biome
The
Forests arrive, rounding out Albion's full set of biomes! The domain of the
Keepers expands to the old growth of Albion's ancient forests. As well as abundant
wood, you can also find
rockoutcrops and ferocious
beasts in the depths of the forest.
Mount mechanics rework
When (voluntarily) dismounting,
your mount remains in the world and continues to provide you with its
load bonus, and allows you to quickly re-mount it. If you get knocked off your mount by an opponent, or you attack another player, your mount will make a swift exit! On top of this,
mount health is now depleted first while you're mounted, so when mount health reaches zero you will dismount at full health. With this change various mount values, such as speed, health and mount up time have been adjusted.
Royal Continent Watchtowers
GvG is back on the Royal continents! Most yellow and red areas now have a Watchtower, which can be
claimed and fought over using the GvG system. Watchtower territories rely on
NPC guardsrather than magic barriers to keep them safe, and resources inside the watchtower's territory can only be harvested by members of the owning Guild, yielding
twice the usual resources. The double gathering yield also works for Watchtowers in the Outlands. GvG battles on the Royal continents will have a
soft cap of 900 Item Power.
Building renovation
You can now
upgrade, repair, downgrade and demolish your buildings from within the same interface. Downgrading and demolishing buildings allows you to recover 90% of materials used in their construction!
Emotes
Added a range of emotes to the game, accompanied by player animations! Find out more by typing
/emotes in chat.
World map improvements
The world map has had a light
visual makeover, and now also allows you to
search for clusters(includes autocomplete and cycle-through-options functionality).
Offscreen nametags
With this option enabled, you will now see the
nametags of approaching players at the edge of your screen as soon as they're in
detection range, so you can see who's coming before they enter the screen. The distance that you can spot other players is thus
the same for everyone, regardless of screen resolution etc.
Refining, transmutation and fragment overhaul
- All T4+ mobs now drop Essences, which are needed to refine enchanted resources.
- Transmutation going up tiers now requires no silver, but instead requires multiple copies of the resource you're attempting to transmute from.
- Fragments have been merged and converted into magical materials: Runes, Souls and Relics.
- Journeyman's Fragments are no more; they have dissolved back into the ether.
- They no longer have "color", but can still be melded into artefacts.
- Essences can be transmuted into Runes, Runes into Souls, and Souls into Relics.
Guard Towers and Outlaws
- Anyone losing reputation (on the Royal continents), or attacking a non-outlaw or aiding an outlaw (in the Outlands), will be considered an Outlaw for five minutes.
- When logging out, Outlaw players will not disappear from the gameworld until their Outlaw status has expired.
- The various leaders of civilized Albion have erected guard towers at city entrances and the edges of patrolled territory (the Green zone), and created additional safeguards to ensure Outlaws can never enter their cities.
- Any Outlaw coming close to a guard tower can expect to be bombarded with heavy weaponry.
- Being honorable sorts, the guards have clearly demarcated their areas of control, and will refrain from executing downed Outlaws...
- ...but your fellow players may not be so forgiving!
New orchestral music
The soundtrack has received a major overhaul, having been rescored and expanded by Finnish composer Jonne Valtonen, and recorded with a live orchestra in Prague. Alongside a re-recording of the main theme and existing GvG music, we now have unique tracks for cities, all five biomes (Forest, Highland, Steppe, Highland, Mountain), mob camps and dungeons, player and Guild islands, and boss fights. Be sure to turn the music up a little so you can appreciate the full impact!
Other Improvements
- Most critters now have abilities of their own - don't get caught out!
- Health and mana bars should now be more readable against colorful backgrounds.
- Market categories have been given a substantial overhaul, and should now be more useful.
- All mount stats are now displayed on their item details screen.
- Made preparations for winter festivities.
- A "Looking For Group" chat channel has been added.
- Reroll costs have been reduced by a factor of five!
- Furniture chest weight limits have been increased considerably (Expert's chest went from 1661kg to 24,295kg).
- Bank weight limit increased to 100,000.
- Furniture chests now use the Bank UI rather than the old hovering UI.
- If you disconnect, you can now log back in immediately, rather than needing to wait for a delay first.
- If you disconnect while knocked out, your character will remain in the world until either you recover (at which point you disappear) or you are killed (at which point you die). This includes the case where you disconnect while changing areas.
- Crafting nutrition use reduced by 50%.
- Added a confirmation step when spending LP.
- Updated some agent portraits to match their model.
- There is now a setting to auto-deny duel requests.
- Market filters are now disabled in the "complete" tab.
- Brittle Skeletons have learned some new tricks.
- Increased drop rates for raid bosses.
Changes
- Albion's audio subsystem has been switched out. This should result in better audio features and better performance in future, but such a large change may have side-effects at first.
- A soft gear cap of 900 Item Power is now enabled for Green and Yellow zones. Items with more than 900 IP will have their IP reduced somewhat in these areas.
- Help channel text has changed color.
- Transmutators are being retired. Transmutation services are now provided by refining buildings. Existing transmutators become non-functional, and can be demolished to recover their resources.
- Aspect ratios must now be between 4:3 and ~21:9 (upper bound is actually 43:18, for 3440*1440).
- Mobs no longer execute players in Green and Yellow zones, bringing it in line with where players can execute.
- Reintroduced building decay (should vary between 3.5%/day at Novice and 0.5%/day at Elder).
- Reduced nutrition storage of Novice buildings to 100; Novice crafting uses no nutrition, and nutrition amount is now carried over when upgrading, so Journeyman buildings will need feeding once upgraded!
Combat Balance Changes
AoE Escalation
With this patch,
AoE escalation will be more relevant and powerful in large-scale fights. This should allow for better counter-play against larger groups and over-stacking players. Smaller-scale fights shouldn't be affected that much by this change.
- AoEs now start escalating after the third player hit. (Mobs do not count.)
- The base damage values of AoEs have been reduced to compensate for this change.
- Each additional player increases the ability's damge by 10%.
- Ability hits 2 players: 100% ability damage
- Ability hits 3 players: 110% ability damage
- Ability hits 4 players: 120% ability damage
- Escalation maxes out at 200% ability damage
- Duration of Crowd Control effects does not increase with escalation.
Resilience Penetration
Melee weapons are now able to
pierce through a portion of the Focus Fire Protection. This change will make pure DPS melee weapons more viable in large-scale fights. In such fights, they will now be especially effective against enemy tanks, which usually have a lot of targets attacking them and thus a high Focus Fire Protection. For any small-scale combat, the impact of the penetration is very small.
- Focus Fire Protection is now called Resilience. (To keep names short and easy to remember!)
- Melee weapons now have a new stat, called Reslience Penetration.
- Resilience penetration ignores a percentage of the target's Resilience.
- Example:
- Your weapon's Resilience Penetration is 50%
- Your attack would normally inflict 100 damage
- But the target has been attacked by multiple players, and their Resilience reduces any incoming damage by 40%
- However, this 40% Resilience will be penetrated by 50%, reducing it to an effective Resilience of 20%
- This means ultimately out of your 100 base damage, 80 will go through (compared with 60 without the Resilience Penetration)
- The amount of Resilience Penetration varies between weapons. The value is listed in the item details screen.
Axes
- Rending Strike
- Energy Cost reduced by 40%
Arcane Staffs
With so many strong buffs in the game, the Arcane Staff's control potential with multiple short cooldown purge abilities was making this weapon too strong. Therefore, the cooldown times of Arcane's purging abilities have been adjusted.
- Purge
- Arcane Orb
- Explosion Radius: 7m -> 5m
- Cooldown: 15s -> 20s
Bows
Cursed Staffs
New Q-Slot ability: Cursed Scythe
- Vile Curse
- Max Stacks: 3 -> 4
- Cooldown: 3 -> 2
- Base Damage reduced by 25%
- Desecrate
- Root Duration increased by 24%
- Death Curse
- Damage scaling adjusted to 4 stacks. (Min and max damage stays the same.)
- Area of Decay
- Hit interval: 1.5s -> 1.2s
- Field of Death
- Invisible enemies are now revealed inside the ability's area
- Cast Time: 1.5s -> 0.s
- Hit Delay: 0s -> 0.6s
Fire Staffs
New W-Slot ability: Fire Ball
Frost Staffs
New W-Slot ability: Frost Beam
- Frostbolt
- Frost Bomb
- Damage increased by 35%
- Slow Strength: 40% -> 20%
Hammers
Holy Staffs
- Flash Heal
- Heal increased by 7%
- Cast Range: 11m -> 12m
- Holy Explosion
- Now keeps knocking back for the entire duration
Maces
- Defensive Slam
- Energy Cost reduced by 40%
- Spell doesn't stack up anymore
- Resistance Increase doubled
- Resistance bonus is now applied to up to 5 allies in a 4m radius
- Damage reduced by 7%
- Stalling Slam
- Energy Cost reduced by 60%
- Damage increased by 66%
- Snare Charge
- Pull Area
Quarter Staffs
- Concussive Blow
- Energy Cost reduced by 40%
- Forceful Swing
- Enemy Attack Speed Reduction: 40% -> 80%
- Fatal Blade
- Ability Hitbox: 4m -> 3m
- Range: 11m -> 9m
- The ability no longer removes the target's Crowd Control Resistance
- Can now maximally pull up to 5 enemies
Swords
Swords provided very high mobility coupled with high damage output and high resistances. All in all, this kit was just too strong and outperformed other weapons; therefore, Iron Will and the damage output of various E-slot abilities was nerfed.
- Iron Will
- Cooldown: 15s -> 20s
- Speed Increase: 40% -> 30%
- Energy Cost increased by 22%
- Incoming damage is now always reduced by flat 25%, instead of the scaling resistance buff.
- Charge
- Spinning Blades
- Base Damage decreased by 7%
- Extra damage versus players: 5% of max health -> 3% of max health
- Mighty Swing
- Fearless Strike
Armors
- Electric Field
- Wind Wall
- Hit delay: 0.4s -> 0s
- Duration: 3s -> 4s
- Energy Drain
- Enemy energy loss increased by 60%
Helmets
- Bear Trap
- Removed the spell indication area
- Doubled slow duration
- Slow strength: 91% -> 90%
- Trap lay-down delay: 0.4s -> 0.2s
- Smokebomb
- Stone Skin
- Self damage reduction: 50% -> 30%
- Now also reduces the caster's Heal Power
- Incoming damage is now always reduced by flat 60%, instead of the scaling resistance buff.
- Duration: 10s -> 7s
Shoes
- Invisibility
- Now a movement buff is charged up, while channeling
- No longer reveals other invisible players
- Sprint Shield
- Duration: 4s -> 6s
- Move Speed Increase: 50% -> 60%
- Shield strength reduced by 45%
- Evasive Jump
- The Jump duration is now always 1s, no matter the distance
Fixes
- Fixed situations in which you could circumvent the self silence of the Flee ability.
- Fixed an issue where items would sometimes go missing when selling to multiple-unit buy orders.
- Fixed an issue where you could be too good at refining, preventing you from using Focus.
- Fixed more instances of agents not having missions; this remains an ongoing project!
- Fixed an issue where the Wind Wall ability would knock people back the wrong way.
- Fixed an issue where Keeper and Hell artifacts could not be listed on the market.
- It should no longer be possible to gain a reputation above 0 while flagged hostile.
- Fixed an issue where knocked down players were getting up too quickly when fighting non-lethal mobs.
- Skinning, rigging, and animation improvements and fixes.
- Fixed various ability tooltips and descriptions.
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Оригинал.