Dungeons And Dragons Online: Weekly Development Activities (Mar 05, 2007)

It's Monday and that means Samera has posted her weekly dev report:

In QA

These items are in QA and should be part of the next update, "Academy Training".

General

• The first time looting a chest after the ransack timer has expired will now properly result in normal loot for that chest.
• Corrected a bug that was not properly limiting treasure levels in chests if the character was much lower level than the quest.
• The Who Panel has been re-engineered to use up less client memory. Players on higher population servers will see a greater performance increase.
• Occasional accidental interactions with items in your backpack that are selected while interacting with objects in the world have been fixed.
• By popular vote we have added the /stop emote into the game.

UI Improvements

• Removed the sorting arrow from the outstanding request window in the social panel, since those columns are not sortable. This also fixes a formatting bug that would break up the world "level" to two lines.
• Auctions
  • The Auction UI will now better estimate time remaining on items posted for sale.
  • There is now a "cancel bid" button so you may remove bids, as long as you are no longer the high bidder. This will allow you to bid on more items at one time.
  • Added page number and total number of pages display to the bottom of the auction list.
  • When you change pages the new page will now sort based on your previously selected criteria.
  • Once you select a sort type, the auction house will remember your choice and always sort by that criteria until you select another sort button.

Monsters

• The Marilith's Efreeti Elite Guards now display their names above their heads to indicate to players that they have the boss ward effects on them.

Combat

• Attack three in unarmed attack chains no longer gets a +15 but respectively gets a +5 to hit just like all the other weapon styles for their third attack.

Spells

• The false life spell temporary hitpoints buff will no longer stack with the false life favor reward buff.
• Deific vengeance is now considered "good" damage, and is amplifiable by any effects that increase good damage.
• Heroes feast now has our intended (1 minute per level) duration.
• The Protection from Energy spells now state the correct duration in their descriptions.
• Spell critical chance and spell critical multiplier items and enhancements now stack with each other. Previously if you had an item that had a 10% bonus to spell crit and a feat that granted a 15% bonus to spell crit you would only receive the 15% bonus. Now you will receive a 25% bonus. Because of this, both enhancements and items will have a corresponding reduction in bonus (please note: if you have a chance to crit, your base critical multiplier will be 1.5x before any items or enhancements). For example:
  • Minor Acid Lore - Acid spells have a +3% chance to critical hit. Increase Acid spell critical damage by adding 0.25 to the spell critical damage multiplier.
  • Lesser Acid Lore - Acid spells have a +6% chance to critical hit.
  • Acid Lore - Acid spells have a +6% chance to critical hit. Increase Acid spell critical damage by adding 0.25 to the spell critical damage multiplier.
  • Greater Acid Lore - Acid spells have a +9% chance to critical hit. Increase Acid spell critical damage by adding 0.25 to the spell critical damage multiplier.
  • Superior Acid Lore - Acid spells have a +9% chance to critical hit. Increase Acid spell critical damage by adding 0.5 to the spell critical damage multiplier.

Skills, Feats, & Abilities

• Song of Freedom is now properly adding bard level to its dispel checks.
• Paladin Aura of Good bonuses to AC and saves have been reduced from 2 to 1. Paladins who wish to increase their Aura of Good bonuses will need to buy enhancements to do so.

Enhancements

• Many enhancements now have more informative descriptions, including barbarian Powerattack, Divine Healing, Divine Vitality, Improved Empower Heal, Dwarven Shield Mastery, Fighter's Mobility, halfling Heroic Companion, rogue's Haste Action Boost, Improved Empowering, Improved Heightening, and Improved Maximizing.
• Class trainers now all offer the option to reset enhancements.
• Divine Cleansing has been updated so that in addition to giving a minute long bonus to fortitude saves, it also dispels a series of effects depending on tier:
  • Divine Cleansing 1: +4 bonus on Fort Saves, dispels poison and disease
  • Divine Cleansing 2: +6 bonus on Fort Saves, dispels poison, disease, blindness, and curses
  • Divine Cleansing 3: +8 bonus on Fort Saves, dispels poison, disease, blindness, curses, paralysis, and petrification
• The Divine Light cleric enhancement, rather than being a single target damage to undead, is now a AOE damage to undead centered on the caster. In addition, we increased the amount of damage done to be more in-line with the optional turn-undead variant rule.
  • Divine Light 1: 4d6 light damage, will dc 14+charisma mod half
  • Divine Light 2: 8d6 light damage, will dc 18+charisma mod half
  • Divine Light 3: 14d6 light damage, will dc 24+charisma mod half
• The dwarven spell resistance enhancement is now known as "spell defense", to differentiate it from actual spell resistance.
• Halfling Heroic Companion has undergone some major updates, and is now awesome. It has 5 uses a day with a 30 second cooldown and a 20 second duration, but increases attack and damage rolls, armor class, and saves of a friend.

Items

• Due to popular demand the alchemists in Stormreach now supply a funnel with all Potions of Remove Paralysis and Lesser Restoration. Henceforth, these potions will now be used on the player's current target. Place the Remove Paralysis or Lesser Restoration potion in a hotbar. Select your target, and then activate the potion on your hotbar. All other potions retain their original functionality.
• Items with bane effects on them will once again be properly named.
• The Grammarian Union has decreed a change to the plural form of Calliphor's Philactery: the archaic plural form, Siberys Dragonshards, should no longer be used in formal settings and should now be called Calliphor's Phylacteries instead. (This should clear up some confusion in the Auction House.)
• The Righteous effect will now do its additional +2 damage versus all Evil creatures.
• "Universal" damage amplification effects such as Efficacy and Potency items will now work on spells with unusual damage types (Blade Barrier, Cometfall, Icestorm, Flamestrike etc.).
• Items must now be fully repaired in order to be posted in the Auction House.
• If you threw your Nightforged item away or sold it to an NPC merchant, Galrias in the Black Anvil Mines will now begrudgingly be willing to forge you a new one, but he won't be happy about it. He will send his apprentice to check with House Kundarak to verify that items are not being stored in bank accounts and he is not being cheated.
• Dragonshards now properly show up in the trade window. This was a display issue only: they could always be traded, but it was confusing since they didn't show up in the trade window.
• Penny Whistles now look like whistles not necklaces.
• The Mummified Bat trinket now more batlike in appearance.

NPCs

• Guard Killmarten is no longer a pushover: when he asks for the 20 gold bribe to enter the marketplace, he will now actually collect it instead of giving you a free pass.

PVP

• The regen effect in PvP arenas no longer goes away on death.
• Column headers will now be correct when going from a Deathmatch to Capture the Flag arena.

Quests

• Adjusted the disable and detection DCs of most traps in the game. Disable DCs have been adjusted downwards due to the enhancement updates. This is much more noticeable at low levels. Search and Spot DCs have been adjusted slightly updwards. This is more noticeable on higher difficulty settings at high levels.
• Arzag-Khor Sewers
  • Prantag will no longer respawn.
• Menechtarun
  • Chamber of Raiyum will now correctly have a mapnote.
• The Necropolis
  • All quest tombs should now be appropriately marked.
  • Loremistress Jinna is now clear in her text if repeating the crypt quest will reset the entire quest chain or not.
  • The Shadow Crypt
    • Dame Calla will now only speak to one player at a time.
    • The Shadow Altar will now give you an upgraded amulet even if you are overencumbered or have a full inventory.
  • Tomb of the Shadow King
    • The DM Text now indicates which direction you need to lure Nsu.
• Parthilcar Tower Crypt - The Enemy Within
  • You will no longer be able to block Lord Ymemrish's path (thereby breaking the quest).
• Twilight Forge
  • Pillars in the titan fight will no longer knock each other over.
• The Vulkoor Spiral
  • Several adventuring parties from Stormreach report sightings of heavily laden parties of Drow entering the Vulkoor Spiral.

Under Development

These items are currently in development and are scheduled for Module 4: Reaver's Bane.

General

• You can no longer bid or place auctions if your mailbox is sufficiently overflowing.
• The elven female avatar now has the braided hairstyle available.
• Fixed the paladin and ranger class descriptions in character generation to give the correct level that spells are bestowed (no functional change has been made to these classes).

UI Improvements

• NEW - The "Anonymous" checkbox will now properly toggle your anonymous status.
• NEW - The "delete mail" dialog will now close when you walk away from the Mailbox.
• NEW - The character sheet will now display all of a players class name.
• Auctions
  • NEW - Great Crossbows now have a category under Weapons->Exotic.
  • NEW - Throwing weapons will now appear in the Weapons->Missile subcategories.
• The icon for Summon Monster has been changed to better reflect what the spell does.
• The Raise Dead confirmation box has been edited for grammar and conciseness.

Monsters

• NEW - Fire reavers, fleshrenders, and ice flensers that had hard and elite versions with damage reduction which could be bypassed by cold iron weapons (DR/Cold Iron) now have a very small amount of the same on the normal setting. This is in addition to the DR/Good that they already had. This brings them in line with the hard and elite versions, many of which have always had both of these types of damage reduction. Keep a good-aligned cold iron weapon handy to dispatch these creatures as quick as possible.
• The Hobgoblins have finally gotten their long-delayed and much-needed shipments of bows. Now, wherever hobgoblins live, there is a chance they will have some archers amongst their ranks.

Combat

• NEW - Many rogue and ranger type enemies have gained the evasion and/or improved evasion feats and now have the benefits of these feats.
• NEW - Enemy spell casters are now starting to use metamagic feats to improve their spells. These include but are not limited to feats like Empower Spell and Enlarge Spell.

Spells

• The saving throw interval for the Flesh To Stone spell has been increased to 1 minute.
• Nimbus of Light no longer erroneously caps out at caster level 5.
• Acid Fog no longer consumes additional spellpoints when the Heighten Spell metamagic feat is active.
• The Symbol spells originally introduced in Module 3 (Fear, Persuasion, and Flame) now have a persistent "ring" FX that indicate the spell's area.
• NEW - Symbol of Flame now correctly bypasses Spell Resistance.
• Longstrider, Expeditious Retreat, Haste, and See Invisibility all have new FX.
• Fixed Burning Blood description to indicate that a save only occurs on application, not each round, as it previously stated.

Skills, Feats, & Abilities

• NEW - The hamstring, slicing blow, and sap feats no longer require a fortitude save DC. If the attack hits, the effect is automatically applied with no additional save required. The hamstring and slicing blow feats also now use their own FX.
• NEW - Updated descriptions for sunder, improved sunder, stunning blow, trip, improved trip to better describe what the feats do.
• Invisibility and stealth now break on the use of offensive skills such as intimidate or diplomacy.
• Turn undead will no longer nuke friendly undead (i.e. those from the "Create Undead" spell, or on your side due to the "Command Undead" spell).
• Rolls of a one on a balance check to stand up after a knockdown are no longer auto-failures; 20s are no longer auto-successes.

Items

• NEW - Due to the changes in the Hamstring and Sap feat several weapon treasure effects have been changed.
  • All weapons with Tendon Slice treasure effects will now have a small chance of Hamstringing their target each time they do damage. This replaces the previous effect that gave a DC bonus to the Hamstring feat.
  • All weapons with Weighted treasure effects will now have a small chance of Stunning their target each time they do damage. This replaces the previous effect that gave a DC bonus to the Sap feat. The bonus DC to the Stunning Blow feat is still in effect.
• NEW - There is now a small chance to find randomly generated thrown returning weapons in treasure
• The Torc of Prince Raiymude will now grant you spell points only when an attack actually damages you; it will do nothing if an attack is reduced to zero by your DR.
• When equipped with a shield with 0 ACP, the attack bonus shown in your inventory display will now be properly updated (this was just a visual bug, you have always been getting the correct bonus when attacking).
• NEW - Ivory Scorpion collectables now look like Ivory Scorpions.

PVP

• Players who have been bluffed in PvP will no longer see a placeholder icon for their bluffed state.
• It was intermittently possible to see your foes location on your map when in a PvP arena. This should no longer happen.