Folks,
Okay, here’s the first part of the 1.05 patch from us. The 1.05 patch is the anxiously awaited “Combat and Careers” patch. As I mentioned already, it is over 17 pages long and still growing and it includes, among other things, adjustments to every career in the game. Some careers got a special shot of extra-loving goodness and some careers also got some tough love as well as some goodness as well. We hope to post the full patch notes tomorrow morning but as we continue to conduct a final review of all the preliminary changes and the notes themselves, it might be held up a bit longer, but I certainly hope not. It is, by far, the largest WAR patch yet and is by its very nature, full of far-reaching and sweeping changes. Here are some of the highlights of the patch.
1) We are pleased to announce the official opening of our Public Test Server. Similar to our Pendragon sever for DAoC, this server will be both open to all players but players will be able to copy (not transfer, your original character remains on its server) their existing characters over to this server at anytime. This server will get the latest, but not final, version of the game and feedback from this server will be used in making any further adjustments to the version. We encourage all players who want to help in the development process to give it a shot. More information on the PTS will be posted on the Herald.
2) Rally masters have been put at every Warcamp to make moving around the world a bit easier and faster. This is only the first part of some improvements we are making to the transportation system to cut down on the time that players have had to spend simply running back and forth between places. The next step will be to allow players to have multiple bind points.
3) Players’ should be able to use the morale button abilities more effectively now. In other words, the darn thing should work every time.
4) Many of the issues with spell/abilities animations not firing off/ending properly have been corrected. Hopefully we got all of the issues but only time will tell.
5) An additional gold bag will be generated when a keep or fortress is taken.
6) Morale abilities will now display their cooldowns correctly at all times. This is just one of many UI fixes.
7) The "Ability Not Ready" message will no longer display when the remaining cooldown on an ability is less than or equal to the full global cooldown.
8) Corrected an issue with the cooldown timers on the action bar buttons that was causing them to count down improperly. The timers will now count down in half-second increments beginning at 3 seconds remaining. See, I said there was more than 1 other UI fix. happy
9) Another “warhammer to the head” to those that try to AFK in scenarios and PQs.
10) All classes have had some abilities buffed and some abilities have been debuffed a bit. For example, the Squig Herder has gotten 30+ adjustments to its abilities. Out of those 30+ adjustments, the phase “damage has been increased” shows up about 80% of the time. As part of this update, the team has looked at every career in the game and made adjustments. Things such as Electromagnet, Fire Cage and snares/roots in general have drawn particular attention from the team and have had numerous changes/fixes made to them. Of course, where major changes have occurred to the careers a free re-training has been offered. Tomorrow’s notes will detail all of the changes and considering that the career changes are about 14 out of those 17+ pages, I think you can say that we made a whole lot of changes.
So, hopefully qill tomorrow's 1.05 patch notes will put an end to the “Mythic doesn’t respond, doesn’t want to make changes” threads eh? Nah! happy
Again, 1.05 is primarily the C&C patch, expect more other big patches coming as well over the next month or so. When you see the contents of the patch, I hope most of you, if not all of you, will see why we have been taking "baby steps" with C&C changes up to now.
Mark
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