Sindusk

Hey, sorry for the long timeout. I'm going to address the elephant in the room that's been mentioned off hand a few times. It's almost a month into the public testing, there's 13 pages worth of discussion, yet nothing has changed and there's only a few responses with promised changes but nothing has actually happened. What gives? I believe in transparency so the truth is I haven't coded almost anything for about a month now. In early October, I had to visit the ER for an illness and was diagnosed with an infection that lasted nearly a week. The testing opened up shortly afterwards. I kept up with the thread, but also knew that there was going to be a ton of bills I had to pay that I was not quite prepared for. I spent most of my month looking for work and moving assets around to get money to pay for them. However, due to a clerical error the bills were delayed heavily (until last week), insurance was less than helpful, and I was left with several thousands worth of bills to pay. It took the help of some friends and family to get everything organized in such a way that I could pay the bills and get back on track. I'm now stable and healthy and can continue working on things. I'm still unemployed (despite dozens of applications), but I'm at least still looking and have enough money to continue for a few more months. So to answer the question of when the changes come, the answer is soon. I'll be back to coding more changes as soon as I finish posting this response. Next up, I'm about 2 weeks behind on responses to comments in this thread. Again, I've read every post (and the developers discuss this thread in it's entirety), so don't think you're being ignored if I don't respond to it here. I'm simply selecting the ones that have good content and I have solid answers to. So, with that out of the way, let's dive right into it: QL affects the damage and protection enchants in the same way QL affects nolocate. This means it's averages the QL and the cast power and uses that as the "amount" being used. A 30QL ring with 70 power is the same as a 80QL ring with 20 power, since they both average to 50 "actual power." I've addressed LT in as many ways as I can but the long and the short of it is that there are abuse cases at play that not everyone can see. While it'd be nice to just ignore LT as a "working mechanic" and let it continue doing what it's doing for the vast majority of players, the fact that there are nasty abuse cases means that solving the problem remains a higher priority. So to answer "if it isn't broken don't fix it" - it is broken. We're fixing it. There's no plans to revert it back to the deity you follow being the reason that guards attack you. Kingdoms are at war with eachother, and there's no reason for guards to attack based on someone's religion. From a simulation standpoint, how would a guard know what religion you follow anyway? It's a much cleaner implementation to make it Kingdom vs Kingdom instead of being Kingdom + Religion vs Kingdom OR Religion OR Kingdom + Religion. It's just way too hard to convey what works and what doesn't to the player if the religion gets involved. So, for simplicity: Kingdoms will determine whether or not a guard attacks you. I really wish that Gary was on the test server so people could see what he does, but since it's been a while and he's still not, here's Gary's spell list: Do keep in mind that this is of course still subject to change. Gary's list was actually something identified early in testing as missing quite a bit (it rolled really awful). I'll be looking at ensuring a certain amount of passives are rolled as a guarantee for all deities to make him a bit more interesting. To follow up on that, Truehit being WL aside from Libila isn't entirely intentional and I'll be looking at a few of the spell rolls as well to see if something needs to change there. Truehit doesn't click to me as something that should be required to distinguish between WL and BL to roll... but perhaps we should make it more likely to roll on BL demigods. In short, I'll look into it. Finally, in regards to allowing priest restrictions, it's an ongoing discussion as to what else needs to change, but the feedback and opinion is valuable. Removing AoE healing from Nathan should solve a lot of the problems. I think he's still going to be a top choice, especially as a combat priest. The combination of a solid spell list and the damage bonus just makes him extremely appealing. This might end up being the new "Smeagain" if we're not careful and I believe you've identified that perfectly. However, due to the changes in QoL with healing, it's very possible we may need to remove some of the other healing spells as well (Focused Will, Cure Medium, and Cure Serious). Do you think moving Nathan away from being an all-purpose warrior and instead focusing him as an "aggressive all-in with no healing" fighter would be a good solution? Curious what you think of that. My current proposal would be to remove Focused Will, Cure Medium, and Scorn of Libila. Then re-buff with Frantic Charge. This leaves him with Cure Serious so he's at least got the most ineffective heal for combat, but can at least heal himself if played as a solo priest. Death item protection on Smeagain sounds fine by me. The fact that the current iteration of Smeagain currently has it means it shouldn't be a very big deal to leave it intact for the changes. Essence Drain currently has an issue where the healing is too low to pass the threshold. I've done some debugging based on your feedback and it's "calculated" correctly but doesn't apply on armoured targets because the healing is too low to actually register as healing. I'll be working on it, and I appreciate the testing! The unfortunate truth is that if we didn't allow full dispelling of buffs rather quickly during combat, players would run in as gods every single time. Players will use the system to their advantage by spamming "garbage" buffs on themselves before combat to "mask" the rest of their buffs. They cast Bearpaws, Oakshell, Truehit, Excel, Frantic Charge, and Truestrike in that order. Now you can get rid of Bearpaws and Oakshell easily, but then it starts to get harder as you hit Truehit. This leaves players the option of making sure that some of their buffs stay intact during combat by casting them last. I'm not overly familiar with the order in which dispel actually removes the effects, but I know that it does it based on what was casted first for the first round. When buffs are cast mid-combat... I'm not sure what happens. That's something that would need to be tested. The argument could be made that random dispels (dispel a random effect instead of in order) could be a good option. However, that's going to end up feeling bad since that literally injects RNG into the combat experience, which is bad. I'm aiming to move away from RNG during combat and allow a more cerebral combat between the individuals in battle. There is likely another alternative that would both make it so players could dispel the effects they want to get rid of using intelligence instead of RNG or allowing the opponent to dictate their buffs. If you have any ideas on how to combat this type of gameplay while keeping the combat loop intact, I'm very interested to hear them. Farming was a restriction from before the chopped veggies "meta" became ingrained for priests. The truth is, this restriction could probably be lifted universally because of how the game has shifted without issue. It'll have to be a decision made by the dev team, so I can't give a solid answer right now. However, priest restrictions are something that really needs a nice full-blown discussion about where the dev team really wants them to land. When we figure it out, we'll relay that vision. Disabling some spells on Freedom as a "quick fix" seems like an option, but again... it's a ton of tiny things piled on top. Again, it's just simply outside the scope of the changes we're attempting to do in this specific update. I can't give a full answer to the abuse cases since they are still available for use on the live server. The problem scenario isn't specific to rifts or anything, however most of the concerns here involve the effect of LT during rifts. It's unlikely we'll get a proper test of how a rift works using the new system on the test server. However, we can make adjustments similar to your "rift interference" if it causes problems on live when the priest rework goes live. You actually nailed a few spells that are still awaiting changes. I'm not going into detail because the reworks involve something we might end up scrapping (and they're not even done yet). When they're ready, Fo might become a more interesting choice. I'd love to see some more interactions with healing apparatus and Fo. It's a really weird situation where alchemy is seriously under-used, and seeing a link between alchemy and spellcasting to really embrace the full-fledged "druid" or "wizard" playstyle would be an interesting thing to delve into. A lot of the work I put into this update is behind the scenes, making the spell system more flexible to work into other gameplay mechanics. This means we could eventually see changes in the future where a full-blown alchemy update would have a link to spell casting. New spells are easier to make than ever, and could potentially be included. Again, that's mostly hypothetical... but perhaps. In terms of current buffs, we've already got a few changes in store. We'll see how those play out and if it's still not enough, we'll investigate options like linking Fo to healing covers, cotton, or what not. I responded in purple within the quote itself except for the final part. The truth is that we currently don't have any intention of giving players the ability to naturally improve items with their skills when playing as a priest. The intention is to allow priests to play solo with lower quality tools than normal. While we might not have hit this mark perfectly (not being able to cut/mine means you can't make the tools in the first place), it's a step in the right direction. Allowing improvement would break the core identity of a priest in Wurm and cause a great deal of players to forego being a follower and instead just priest all their characters. Even with other restrictions in place, having the ability to improve items (any items) would allow players to become too versatile. Priesting is viewed as a choice, not an upgrade. There was a suggestion about allowing players to improve items through spells which might become an option (as it avoids giving skill gain to the crafting profession). However, whether or not that happens and if so to what degree is still up in the air. As for the current time, the current mindset is that priests will not be allowed to improve items. Separation of restrictions between PvE and PvP is always an option. There has been some comments against allowing continue/repair on PvP servers and it's very possible that restriction will remain intact on PvP servers if necessary. I really like the comment about whether or not your are having fun playing your character. That's something that's so core to my view on the game. I'm enthralled by the depth of gameplay systems in Wurm and that's what I truly find fascinating. Interacting and experimenting with how all these systems interact is what I find enjoyment with. Changes should be made with the goal of making the game more enjoyable to play and removing some of the pain of interacting with these systems. The priest rework is a step in that direction, removing some of the pain of interacting with the game world while playing as a priest. However, we're trying to keep the identity of priests intact, as it's been core to the gameplay of Wurm since the very beginning. If priests were new and coming out today, I bet you'd see them with none of the restrictions they currently have. Truth is that it's an old gameplay system that was designed for a different time and hasn't aged well. We're tweaking it a bit and making it a bit more modern, while keeping true to the vision of the game that was made years ago. Armour DR will apply. For example, wearing Chain you would take 67.5% less damage (you missed the base 5% DR that naturally occurs in your statements) from Venom attacks. However, even if it's a maul, it would no longer be modified by the 110% effectiveness against Crushing attacks. Without venom, chain would reduce a maul/crushing attack by 72.19%. Chance to glance using crushing attacks against chain is 25%. This gives chain a rough effectiveness of ~80.53% against crushing attacks when you account for 25% of damage being 100% reduced. With venom, this would bypass the effectiveness and glance rate, giving the target a 0% chance to glance and would always calculate damage as being reduced by 67.5%. In this scenario, Venom is causing the maul to deal nearly 165% increased damage since it's bypassing the armour modifiers. However, on the flip side, this can be detrimental. If we change the armour type to plate, we're seeing a 70% effectiveness with Venom and 76.73% effectiveness without. This is a 111% increase in damage when using Venom. Then you consider that you're missing up to 33% fire damage from Flaming Aura and you're actually doing less damage with Venom in this situation. Depending on what you're aiming to accomplish, it should be interesting to see the results of the new Venom (when it's working properly). I can see why it came off this way and it was poorly relayed by me as to why we made the change. I didn't want to tip the hand too much as it involves exploitation and abuse. There's no easy way to discuss it because those abuse cases are still available on the live server and stating too much would give players the ability to do actions they otherwise shouldn't on live. That said, I'll try to do a better job as to relaying why things were changed in the future. Agreed on all fronts, really. I'll give Tosiek Bloodthirst instead of Life Transfer. He can also obtain Web Armour. The infidel error is something I have intimate experience with in my Wurm Unlimited modding ventures, as getting certain spells to interact properly under certain circumstances has been incredibly painful. I'll be looking at the logic for how that's determined and see if I can improve it to allow more interaction of priests in the same kingdom. I think I touched on Smeagain resurrection in a comment above I disagree on Nahjo. I believe he has some of the most unique and powerful abilities that every base deity has to offer. Cure Light is actually a crazy efficient PvE heal now that you can target-cast it on a creature instead of having to target the wound. I believe Frantic Charge is highly undervalued right now and is one of Magranon's best spells for combat. He also has Ice Pillar which is now a powerful AoE spell. Combine that with the utility of Genesis, WoA, and Essence Drain and I'm unsure what he's missing really. Perhaps I'm not viewing him in the same way, though. His passives are weak aside from the 10% skill gain... but when you combine that with his powerful spell list? I don't think he's that bad. Maybe I'm missing something, though. Agreed on Paaweelr. I think he's appealing enough that people would debate going between Vynora and him. Fo has changes coming as stated earlier in this post. I definitely agree that Fo and probably Libila should get something for being followers. It's something I keep thinking about, but relegating it to skill gain in nature or similar seems like a really cheap solution. I'd really like to add something more interesting so it's not just "have more skill" and instead "this is something cool you get." Yeah, sorry about that. I addressed this in the header of this post. Hopefully it serves as a sufficient explanation. Artifacts are still something I need to look into. It's a minor priority due to their lack of use right now, though. Artifacts are a topic unto themselves and may need to be touched later down the line outside the scope of this update. Current implementation, subject to change: Note that Hell Strength applies that curve to both Soul Strength and Body Strength. To the best of my knowledge, yes. Players without premium will still obtain the free faith switch. Unlocking the ability to improve is probably worse than just making it work from the start. While unlocking spells makes sense, putting the ability to perform a basic action behind a grind will be viewed quite negatively in implementation. It's something that sounds neat on paper, but in reality it leads players to look at the grind ahead of them to unlock the ability to do something simple and say "nah not worth" and leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Giving favor per hit is an interesting idea. If the implementation of Essence Drain doesn't work out how we intend it, this seems like a good buff to give it. For now, I think keeping on track with the current purpose of the spell (LT for Libila) without mucking it's identity with new mechanics out the gate is the way to go. Meditation linked to favor gain could be something interesting. I'm not sure how that would work out in reality but I'll play around with it a bit and see how it feels. I think there's an argument to be made that an entire sub-forum is warranted. That's just the scale of this rework and the amount of feedback is overwhelming. That said, I'd end up reading everything in either case. In hindsight, there probably should've been a sub-forum entirely dedicated to this priest rework and it's something to consider for future large-scale changes of a similar nature. ----- That only took 3 hours to write. I was intending to actually do something immediately after but 6 pages worth of comments and responses alongside checking data/code, creating charts, and quick testing to confirm theories has been more time-consuming than I thought. Again, huge thanks to everyone for their comments, feedback, and insight. However, I want to follow-up with a single question that should help any changes that need to be made immediately. If these changes were to go live, in their current form, on Monday. What change(s) would bother you most? Keep in mind this doesn't mean they're going live on Monday (they're not). I'm just trying to direct the conversation a bit and try and target the "sore points" of this patch so I can work them out a bit. Hope everyone had a good Halloween and I'll check back in the next few days (and hopefully with patch notes!).

Still reading through all the comments, but not enough time to write up a full response to everything. However, the back-and-forth over the LT change has spiraled out of control. While I appreciate the concern, the LT change was one that was hotly debated internally when the change was made. Many of the arguments stated here have been discussed among the dev team already months ago when we were first working through this change. I ended up making the decision to push the change, then requested testing of the change to determine whether or not it would stay. In the end, after testing, it was determined to have insignificant enough effect on normal play that we opted to continue along that development path. We even had questioned whether the resistance was being calculated correctly because the resistance time was so low after each hit. This is also an important note. The examples I presented are very weak examples of abuse cases for the current state of LT and that's on me for not making it clear. While I understand players seeking more logic behind the change than what's been given, doing so would simply be stating existing exploits that are present in the game that players could currently use on the live servers. All that said, if the change turns out to be impacting player's gameplay negatively, we can make changes such as increasing LT's healing done, reducing the healing resistance applied specifically by LT, or any number of other changes to make it better. However, those changes would be done in response to testing results. If you're concerned, then go give it a shot on the public test server and share your findings. That's what this thread is here for, after all!

I can't write a full response to everything right now but as a quick comment: @Oblivionnreaverhit the nail on the head with this. Basically, players were capable of using livestock as a "healing source" during unique fights and similar. Instead of using actual healing spells through a Fo priest or similar, I've seen situations where a group of players would have the player tanking the unique target nearby horses, pigs, or whatever that were brought along. Each time the player was hit by the unique, they would heal up through a big hit on a low-armour target. Personal experience says that an LT longsword hit on a pig can heal the player for upwards of 10-15 damage on a wound. Given proper armour, shield, and skill, a tank could effectively hold a unique indefinitely due to LT never having healing resistance, with the life pool of the neutral creatures becoming an extension of the player's HP. When I'm talking about abuse cases regarding LT, it's situations like that which I refer to. This is one example, but there's a few others that this change also shores up.

Lots of comments to read through. I'll be working on some changes next week based on feedback, so now seems like a good time to roll through some of the newer comments and respond to everything. However, to follow up on my post last week, we've discussed Bloodthirst internally and have some changes planned for it. Also, I appreciate the change in tone from the comments. This is feeling more like proper constructive criticism and discussion, which is highly productive. Let's get right into it. Confirmed through testing that the attuned isn't working. That was something that actually ended up happening on Emoo's stream which was a pretty funny moment. "Libila now makes monsters passive!" as he casually has his face torn off by a troll. I'll bring up the Libila farming restriction and see what the team thinks. The acid/frost/fire salves do change the glance rates of the weapon. For example, a weapon enchanted with the salve of frost will use the cold damage glance rate and damage effectiveness against the target's armour. Venom should never glance but judging from another comment it appears it may not be working as intended. I've got a note to investigate that interaction and ensure it's working properly. My work in several different versions of the combat system makes it really hard to keep track of what's doing what in the current iteration. Really interesting question. My current knowledge states that enemies for guards are determined by kingdom, not by religion. If there's a WL priest in a BL kingdom, the guards should not attack the WLer simply because it's a BL kingdom. Maybe I'm mistaken, but that should be how it currently works and if it doesn't, then it probably needs to be looked at changing. Agreed. I've got a note to bring this up. Seems reasonable enough, but I'll make sure to get it confirmed by the team and then implemented. In regards to the comment about Rebirth, while they share the same mechanic, they're actually fundamentally different in their use. Dominate can only be used on monsters. Charm can only be used on animals. Rebirth can be used on anything. Also, it can make for an interesting utility during combat whereas dominate and charm are more of a pre-planned function. I remember an encounter with a player in a 1 on 1 where we dehorsed eachother. The fight was looking pretty poor for myself, so I began to run away and formed a decent distance. Instead of chasing after me on foot, he resurrected his horse, equipped the gear, and ran me down. If rebirth is changed to auto-equip gear from the corpse, that changes a bit of the meta-game around rebirth being used where dead horses and players would have their gear remain inside of them instead of being extracted and the corpse being thrown on the ground again. There's probably some changes coming to Rebirth, but it's up to a discussion with the team to determine the direction it should go. This is something that's been mentioned many times. However as of the current situation I can't code this solution in. It requires a database change which is out of my hands directly. I'll poke again and see what we can do. Since I was the one who mentioned it in the video, I'll try to clarify my thoughts here. What's holding Libila back from being brought to Freedom isn't entirely down to the code, but there is some concern there. While you can look at Wurm Unlimited servers and say "hey look they can do it why can't we?" - it's not exactly that simple when it comes to Wurm Online. There's other factors at play that Wurm Unlimited servers can shrug off as being a "minor bug" which could cause major issues on the live realm. For example, most of the servers are using the public available fixes for Libila on Freedom. However, there's very rarely a case that they cast Zombie Infestation or Land of the Dead because the players don't actually use it. When they do, the server owner can step in and clean up the situation. Just as a reminder, I've personally coded some of the "fixes" that allow Libila to be played on Wurm Unlimited servers and been on the receiving end of some of those massive bugs that are caused when players start messing with things that weren't designed to function that way. You can always counter with "okay then just fix those spells too" - to which I would counter "what else is broken?" While I'd love to investigate that and potentially work towards this goal, the dev team has decided that it was outside the scope of what we want to accomplish with this specific update and that the option remains open for sometime in the future. Retrograde echos this statement in the video linked. Good question. I haven't actually looked at what would become of the Artifacts since their demise is essentially a hidden attribute. On first thought I imagine their functionality would change to the new demise instead, but it's a topic for conversation. Thanks for mentioning it. The jewelry buffs are planned to be added to spell effects. In fact, the visuals for them were already done a while ago but I entirely forgot to actually code it in for the public testing version. My bad. I'll get to it in the near future. I also am a firm believer that the spell effects window should show everything affecting you. It was mentioned that the way the jewelry stacks is kind of unintuitive. It was a solution I quickly thought of while piecing things together. To directly answer your question: Yes you would receive the full effect from each individual enchant. 7.5% from frost and fire in the 100 Blaze/Glacial scenario. The above rule also applies to the protection enchants. Your math is correct. It should be 133.3% effectiveness of the 7.5% (7.5 * 1.33... = 10) with two 100QL/100 cast items equipped, and 150% (7.5 * 1.5 = 11.25) with three 100QL/100 cast items equipped. The Life Transfer "nerf" is being terribly overstated. I'd like to see some actual testing done on the test server and tell me what's wrong with the current iteration of it. Give some details about how much damage your taking, what the buff is going up to each hit, how much health you're being healed. Give it an honest attempt on the public test server. This is one change that looks like a huge hit on paper but in reality is just shoring up some abuse cases. I touched on Rebirth in a previous response so I'm picking out Oakshell here. The oakshell change was worded weirdly. It's damage resistance got reduced, yes, but it is still equivalent to dragonscale with a 100 cast. Previously, it was better than dragonscale by a factor of 33%. You would take 33% less damage with a 100 cast oakshell than you would with dragonscale. Now, it's been brought in line with the best armour of the game to make combat more easily approachable. This change had to happen due to the difference in how dispelling creatures works now. Players will be able to potentially cast and keep an oakshell on themselves in PvP. This drifts over to "nerf" the PvE version of the spell, but calling a free dragonscale set useless seems a bit overboard. The wording of the oakshell change makes it seem like it's a PvP-only spell but it's been untouched on PvE. You can still cast it on both players and creatures in Freedom. It's just a really awkward phrasing for how the change was made because it was written hastily. I wrote it by the way, so don't flame Retrograde for copying over my horrible phrasing! That's a lot. I wrote my responses in bullet form as a response using purple text instead because trying to play "match the bullets" wasn't working for me on my initial draft. Again responded in the quote itself due to bullet matching problems. On my WU server I run mods that improve natural favor regeneration. I'm all for the change, so I'll spark a discussion about it in the dev chat and see what they think. Ouch, that's a pretty scathing review of Fo. Let me try and defend our nature-loving overlord. Fo has Cure Light, Cure Medium, and Cure Serious. The new spell rolling has guaranteed that Fo will be the only deity among all of them to obtain all three of these healing spells. This makes him uniquely attuned to be the most favor-efficient healer. Due to the QoL changes, you can now cast Cure spells directly on a target and it will auto-target the highest valid wound and heal it. No more opening someone's equipment, finding the wound, and casting the proper heal. Just point-click now. Cleanse was a requested spell due that has uses for changing dirt to grass. You can now force grass to grow after completing a construction project and wanting your lawn back on PvE. There was also no easy way to remove Mycelium from PvP servers, which this spell now does. With those points out of the way, I'm actually struggling to find other ways to defend Fo. So in essence, aside from the above, you're basically right. I will, however, mention that a spell or two is pending a rework that Fo has access to. Hopefully those reworks will make him more appealing. That said, what changes would you like to see that would bring Fo to the forefront? Do you think that allowing Fo to have a unique passive that reduces the healing resistance penalty might be a good idea? Just throwing out an example, maybe inflict only half the healing resistance penalty when the spell is cast from a Fo priest? In essence, you've hit the nail on the head. We've got the shape complete, but it's just a bit off. We're looking for player feedback to help finalize it's form before pushing it to live. What situations has the healing resistance from LT been impacting your play on the testing server? We don't want players to sit there healing their wounds with cotton. And the healing resistance on LT, as stated a million times already, is not as severe as everyone is painting it right now. When actually in use, the effects are hardly felt. Life Transfer is just as good as it's always been outside of abuse cases. Responded to the previous comment but I want to mention here that there is nothing the dev team is pushing as an agenda. There will be an offering of full faith switches to every player in the game when this update goes live. Nobody is aiming to make their priest better than the rest. I would mark success from this update being dependent on an equivalent ratio of players taking every god. With 10 deities in play, that'd be 10% of priests on each deity. It's probably not going to be perfect, but it's something we're aiming towards. Your concerns aren't falling on deaf ears, and as mentioned in my earlier post - I'm reading everything posted here.

That sounds like it's not working as intended. It should be removing 1% of your stamina per 1% of health healed. Looked briefly at it and it seems body stamina is affecting it in a weird way. I'll have to look further into it.

Late to the party. Unfortunately, my internet was out for most of yesterday and by the time I got it back, I was already ready to get to bed. There's common consensus about several of the changes, which I'll dive into shortly - but first I want to state two points. First, as mentioned, this is public testing and things are subject to change, especially regarding numeric adjustments. That also doesn't mean these changes are set in stone. One common topic is the Bloodthirst change. It's something we'll discuss based on feedback and review again. Secondly, why some of the changes seem weird, off balance, or not true to the identity of Wurm. For that, the simple answer is that there's just an outrageous amount of changes here and we were ambitious enough to try and tackle absolutely everything. It should be easy to connect the fact that the notes are almost 10 pages long (in the document we're using) and that there will likely be something we didn't get just right. That's literally why this public test is happening. Players will call us out on what we did wrong, and we'll pivot and adjust based on that feedback. That said, as my own personal comment, I'd like to request a bit more civility when criticizing the changes. It's easy to take constructive criticism and suggestions. It's hard to take outright flames with comments such as it being the worst change ever or that the devs have no clue what they're doing with this or that or the other thing. These changes are bound to cause some anxiety considering the gravity of what's changing. I encourage people to speak their mind, just remember manners when doing so. With that out of the way, I'll dive right into some responses to some of the comments here. If I missed a few, don't think it's ignored. There's just a lot and I'm picking out the ones with really focused points that I can address directly instead of ones with multiple thoughts. The spell rerolls are, in my eyes, a necessary evil. This is our one opportunity to change the spell lists of the demigods and get them correct. That's not to say they're now perfect. It's also not to say it's better than before, either. It might not be. But at the end of the day, this is the one and only opportunity we have to shift everything into a healthy game state through spell list changes to avoid a situation where a single one becomes the "best" under all circumstances. See Smeagain on the PvP servers as a good example of this. Since this is the time we'll be offering a full faith switch, it's the only proper time to adjust spell lists to ensure balance. That said, there's no reason the formula cannot be adjusted more than what it already has been. There's also logic behind making special cases for the existing gods and allowing them to retain what makes them unique. To do that, however, we would want a really good reason to do it. So, to anyone who would like to see a spell added or removed from a god list, answer these questions: Why does the god deserve the spell (or not)? Is it simply because they had it before? Does it allow them to fill a niche where the god would be capable of doing something unique instead of being bland and boring? What are the pros/cons compared to their base god? One of the major efforts was to balance them closer to the base gods while the base gods obtained unique benefits and spell combinations. Why would you choose X over Y, and why would you choose Y over X? There should never be a case where X is completely better than Y, or vice-versa. These are going to be some of the more deep conversations to have in the future. Spell list changes are likely to be a hot topic as people play with the changes and see how all the pieces fit together. In regards to disintegrate, it's actually on the list of things to touch on but haven't gotten around to it yet. I'd say about 90-95% of the priest rework "content" is complete. There's still a couple things on the list that still need to be done, and touching on disintegrate would be one of them that we still need to review. This is regarding the Bloodthirst change to now work identically on Freedom as it does on Epic. There's been a lot of comments directed at this change in specific, and even mention of players selling BT weapons for cheap because of these notes. In fairness, I believe the players are spot on about this, and Bloodthirst loses its identity and edge with the change. We'll have to have a discussion on what else we can do to adjust Bloodthirst to make it more unique. Can't really say what that might be, but don't get too up in arms about it. We hear you on it, we'll work on it, and get back to you when we have a plan. It's been mentioned many times before that the LT change integrated with the healing system doesn't have a huge amount of effect. The only suggestion I have is to actually try it before you knock it. Players who aren't being abusive with the system will hardly notice it. This comment is in regards to "damage ignores armour" on spells. By armour, we mean specifically item armour. For example, iron plate, dragonscale, studded leather, etc. I believe your question is whether or not the damage effectiveness on the piece of armour applies, such as casting a cold spell on someone wearing cloth would normally reduce damage taken. The simple answer to that question is that it will just simply ignore the cloth armour being equipped. The wound applied doesn't pass the "armour" itself and instead hits the target. Resistance from tomes, spell effects, and enchants would apply. Damage effectiveness from armour is ignored, as well as glance rate and DR. SotG still affects spells. Maybe it shouldn't. Probably a topic for discussion. AoE spells now deal very small wounds but more frequently. The calculation for interrupt is based on damage taken. Since each damage instance is very low, the calculation almost always favors the player getting attacked and makes it so they don't get interrupted. There's definitely a possibility to add an "interrupt" sequence when the cast initially goes down as a surprise factor for enemies caught off guard. That's something that could be worth investigating and trying out. Yes, resurrecting a troll will prevent it from being able to use its club since it cannot be equipped. There's a chance we could move the items from the corpse onto the resurrected unit instead (it actually makes sense now that I think about it). This would cause the rebirthed unit to drop the gear when it dies. This is something I could definitely see changing in the future, but I'm concerned about abuse cases (rebirthing someone you don't have permission to loot). We'll have to discuss it and see what happens. In regards to resurrecting players, the code for that is extremely old and has so many safeguards and checks for abuse that it's kind of hard to digest. I think there may be a situation where we could make some adjustments to make it a bit more viable to resurrect enemy combatants or fallen foes on the battlefield. How interesting it would be if a very strong player died in combat, his corpse was taken by an ally, then they resurrected him and had two of him for the next fight. Really curious what type of interesting interactions could happen there. Finally, the concern about the non-priest players being useless is a bit over-exaggerated, I believe. I don't think it's shifted to "priests are mains and crafters are alts" with the amount we reduced the restrictions by. Instead, I believe that it's shifted to "do I want my priest or non-priest to be my main." There's now a choice - a decision to make - about how you want to play the game. That type of decision is left completely up to the player. If you feel that the restrictions aren't limiting to the point where you'd like to play like that... by all means, do so! That's a good thing! You'll have more tools available to you and perks other players wont have. In my opinion, being able to choose how you play and decide what you're willing to sacrifice for further benefits is just outright better than before. However, that's only my opinion. If you still feel otherwise, go a bit deeper and explain the thought process. I'm interested to hear predictions of how these restrictions being reduced will change the atmosphere of the game. Yikes. Sorry about that phrasing. Sometimes I write notes quickly and don't articulate the change properly. As a clarification: Oakshell can still be cast on players and creatures on PvE servers. However, on PvP servers, you can no longer cast on creatures (horses etc). Hopefully that helps with the understanding of the change. Well, I guess this all boils back down to how the gods are viewed. Fo is considered a healer, and not a main damage threat. Venom has been changed to make it more viable not as a "damage" increase but instead as a different style of utility that could be useful in certain situations. This is because armour has no effectiveness, DR, or glance rate versus poison type wounds. Venom is now essentially the Wurm equivalent of "true" or "chaos" damage. Vynora is considered an enchanter. However, it was also balanced around being the highest top-end nuker in the game too. Her spells have the largest power scaling based on cast power. High channeling vynora priests will do more damage per spell cast than Magranon and Libila priests. This sets her into a unique role where she can be a useful backline nuker, supports with buffs such as Excel, yet doesn't heal. Then she's also extremely good in PvE and outside of combat. It's not going to float everyone's boat, but calling her useless in PvP is shortsighted. She also is the only god with two AoE nukes on separate cooldowns. Play around with her spells on the test server. Nuke some people and see how she really feels. The improve bonus is just a leftover from extremely old code. I'm not sure why it's there, but it is. Maybe we could do something more useful with it such as reduce the faith requirement to non-priests? Not sure here, would be something to discuss. Magranon was set to be the primary combat god against Libila. Since Libila received significant changes with Scorn of Libila and Essence Drain being applied, Magranon was left with no in-combat sustain. The decision was made to apply a healing spell with a significant downside (trading your favor and stamina for health). Players familiar with combat should know that stamina is crucial during combat and trading it for health can sometimes be worse than leaving your health as-is. That said, I don't personally have any issues with applying some form of healing spell to Vynora. Just not sure what that might look like. ----- That covers all the comments so far that I wanted to address directly. Keep posting your thoughts and discussing the changes. I'm personally checking in every few hours to see what else was posted and the team is also looking through the thread. Huge thanks to the people posting up spell lists and spreadsheets with comparisons (see @Oblivionnreaverimgur album here and @Wargasmspreadsheet here) I was going to post up all the spell lists once it went to public testing but unfortunately I got hit by a storm. So again, thanks for taking up the slack and making the effort to inform the community.

We've updated to 1.8.0.3. Furthermore, a minor patch is being deployed to solve a few issues: Miscellaneous Repaired and re-implemented Armoury, with armour changes removed. This will bring back material modifiers, weapon statistics, and similar. Added new Wiki/Documentation to the Server tab, created by our CM Mashhiven. Significantly reduced the XYZ dimensions of the Battle Yoyo. It should now fit into more containers. Kyklops now have 80 fighting skill to make them function properly with DUSKombat. Uniques have been slightly adjusted to make them a little more difficult. Eternal Orb price reduced from 20 silver to 10 silver. Affinity Orbs no longer restock on traders. This is a temporary bandaid solution to a problem until a proper fix can be created. Fixed a bug where eternal reservoirs would not keep their fuel after a server restart. Fixed an issue where some creatures were exceptionally difficult in combat due to DUSKombat. Fixed a bug where titans and rare spawns would sometimes not die properly.

Armoury - v3.0 - Download Removal of all Armour-related options. I'll try to get these working again in the future, but for now the update to WU 1.8 has broken them in a way that makes it incredibly hard to adapt without starting over. Effected options: Armour damage reduction Armour glance rates Armour effectiveness Armour reduction overrides Armour movement Material damage reduction Material movement modifiers Material effectiveness Material glance rates Armour limit factors Removed options for fixArmourLimitSpellEffect and fixArmourLimitBuffBug. These options have been fixed in vanilla Wurm Unlimited and are no longer necessary. Note: All configurations you previously had set in your Armoury.properties file should still be applicable in the same way, unless it was one of the properties listed above. There is no need to remove anything from the properties file, either. Any configurations set that no longer apply will simply be ignored with no harm done. If you are using your old configuration: Change the line "classname=mod.sin.armoury.ArmouryMod" to "classname=mod.sin.armoury.ArmouryModMain" - I had to change the class main to fix an issue I was having.

Server Tweaks v1.3 - Download Removed the option useEpicArmourValues that was causing a crash with WU 1.8. This can now be configured through the feature management in vanilla Wurm Unlimited. DUSKombat v1.2 - Download Removed the DUSKombatOld file to reduce jar size. Updated to WU 1.8 armour system. Armoury is not currently updated. Due to a very significant rewrite of the armour system in Wurm Unlimited, it will take some time to update Armoury to get it into a working state again. I will try to get a new release out that simply removes all the armour options within the next few days, followed by a version later on that re-enables that functionality. For the time being, I would recommend removing Armoury from your server. I've had to do this on my own server unfortunately, and it's sadly the best option for now. Also, as a side note, I want to thank those who donated to me over the past week to help me out. It's been deeply humbling to receive support from this community while in a time of need. Members of the community have gone out of their way to give advice and encouragement over the past few weeks. Sincerely, thank you. Many people have asked me directly how they could donate, so here's the paypal link that I have set up for my Revenant server: Paypal I'm setting a personal goal to have a working version of Armoury within the next two days. Check back at that time and hopefully I'll have some news. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The example I gave was specific to Cure Light because it's extremely easy to visualize. LT is affected because I've also seen it used to "cheese" combat in some situations. On my Wurm Unlimited server, I implemented mobs that were designed to be taken down by a group of 3-5 players. Instead of encouraging hunting parties (my intended design), the players instead opted to take an LT weapon to the fight. They'd combat with the mob for ~1-3 minutes until they were on low health. Afterwards, they would disengage the creature and begin healing by attacking nearby horses, cows, and similar to heal back up to full in a short time period. They'd then re-engage with the creature and take it down in 3-4 consecutive skirmishes, despite being no match for it individually. This extends to similar encounters such as uniques. I've witnessed players get hit by AoE attacks from uniques then disengage to heal on nearby cows & horses before rejoining the fight. In the end, the decision was made to apply the healing resistance to all sources of healing that were magic-related. The primary reason is that magic is essentially "free" - especially in the case of Life Transfer. When using first aid, you are consuming cotton, and are limited by how much cotton you bring along. By implementing a healing resistance to magic-related healing effects, it puts a cap on how rapidly you can accept combats. Again, I'll reiterate that if you're playing normally and not entirely outside the bounds of how you should be playing (fighting trolls with no armour equipped for example), you're very unlikely to notice the change to Life Transfer. It's honestly so negligible that during my own testing when I was coding it, I actually checked the math several times over and even wrote debugging messages to ensure it was actually applying the proper values because it was so unnoticeable. I ended up having to test against two trolls while wearing no armour to get the healing resistance to become noticeable enough for me to confirm through eye-test that it was functioning as intended. I understand the frustration that comes with changes that look bad on paper. It happens very frequently and players do a great job of calling out issues before they get implemented. These types of discussions are critical to ensuring that the game development proceeds in the right direction. However, Life Transfer feels just as good as it did before if you're using it as it was designed (preventing using cotton during hunting). If there really is something wrong with healing resistance being applied to Life Transfer, it will come out in public testing and be changed at that time. To those wondering when the public testing will begin: My estimate would be a couple of weeks before it's ready for public testing. My personal timeline was actually a few weeks ago but unfortunately real life kicked in and got me at a bad time. I'll be back to coding this week and going through all the bugs that have been found in the meantime. I know people are anxious to get hands on and see it all for themselves. Truthfully, I might even be more anxious to just get it up and running and out there. This will be the first major project that I've worked on as a developer, and I'm really excited to see what people do with it.

This is about as accurate as it gets. The simple truth is that combat, especially PvE combat, in Wurm is very one-dimensional. You walk up to a mob, target it, and proceed with waiting as dice roll and you watch the fight play out. Without LT, you end the fight at low health and need to perform maintenance (healing your wounds with cotton). Maintenance isn't fun. The current existence of LT makes it so you end the fight at near-full or full health. This removes the maintenance, and makes it less obnoxious to participate in combat. It was a very specific target to make the changes to healing only affect extreme healing scenarios. Furthermore, existing healing spells have been buffed (especially for high channeling and high casts) to make them more powerful and counteract the new healing resistance. It's pretty much fine for you to fight a troll over the course of a minute, take 30% damage, and heal it back up through Life Transfer. The healing resistance debuff isn't going to impact you that much (capping out at ~15% resistance, and dropping over ~3 minutes under those circumstances). However, if you are for example fighting a Goblin Leader and using LT and spamming Cure Light using your alt to ensure that the target of the goblin leader never dies... that's the targeted change. In the past, I've watched a player tank a dragon indefinitely through the use of a Fo alt constantly spamming Cure Light on every wound that was inflicted. Whenever the dragon would land a hit, the wound would be healed 10 seconds later without penalty. The new healing resistance system incurs exactly the penalty required to mitigate this case. This also has a profound effect on PvP combat and specialization, giving credence to utilizing Path of Love and a more healing-oriented priest rather than a fully-armoured frontline Path of Insanity SOTG priest. TLDR: If you're playing the game normally and not doing some silly strategy to make it so you're taking no damage in extremely short time frames, you're not going to notice the difference. This will come out more clearly during public testing.

Not really. I'm currently broke, unable to find employment, and losing mostly everything in my life. I no longer have car insurance, and the car itself is going to be sold just to keep me afloat for a brief while longer. Unless I can find a source of income within a month or two I will end up homeless.

I wont be updating my mods due to issues in my real life. If any other modders are willing to update them you have my full permission to do so.

Interesting thread. Brings up a lot of really interesting points. I'll try my best poking at issues that I believe I can touch on. Yikes. That's a rough one. So after reading this, I decided to do a bit of digging on Wyvern, the long-lasting Wurm Unlimited server with over 700,000 player hours played. Fun fact: there was someone who achieved 99.9999966521108 fishing skill! I decided to look up his achievements and found that he had caught 17,521 fish to achieve that (faster skill gain server, by the way). However, I then looked up the achievement for catching the big fish. Not to be found. In 17,500 fish, not a single one was over 175kg. His magic chest had 99.9QL and higher quality fish. It had rares over 95QL. It was quite a spectacle of fishing, but through the whole time, not a single fish was 175kg or higher. So, I dug a little deeper. I tried to figure out why this might be the case. The truth is that the fish must be a marlin or white shark of over 87.5QL in order to qualify for the achievement. This isn't easy to do, but it's still possible. However, now that I've fully investigated why that happens, perhaps it might be time to change the qualifications to be a little bit more relaxed. Obtaining such a high QL fish of such a specific type seems a bit overboard. Bugfixes are near and dear to me. In all my time playing, being interrupted by hitting a bug was some of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had in Wurm. In the case of PvP, it can cost you everything. They need to be addressed in a timely manner and I'm doing my best to ensure that happens. In the cases where they are not addressed, I try and give the explanation as to why it's so difficult to fix instead. PvP is a wild project to tackle. There's so many viewpoints on how PvP should be played and what should/shouldn't be allowed that it's really hard to iron out what PvP should actually look like. That said, I've had productive conversations with a lot of existing and former PvP players, and a plan is in place that should put us on track for PvP becoming easier to create and maintain. Can't really go into detail on the specifics yet, but there are indeed plans. A lot of the mentality for PvP players being so hostile tends to stem from the stakes. A death can be extremely costly, and that creates a pattern of behaviour similar to a blowfish where they puff up and make themselves look dangerous. In the case of the blowfish, it looks a little weird and is effective. In the case of human beings chatting online, it makes them looks like jerks. Reducing the stakes and giving more reason to play at low risk is something I'm working towards. While having expensive stuff should give you a significant upper hand, it shouldn't invalidate the rest of the players entirely. I've watched Deathangel's videos recently and really enjoy the amount of respectful combat that's seen there. Working towards encouraging more of that is a personal goal I've set. No comment on personal goals. A lot of this is the byproduct of shifting times and a code base that wasn't built for long-term maintenance. Ideas sometimes sound bad (or impossible) when first proposed. As time goes on, it starts to become more and more apparent that it's necessary to fix whatever the problem is. Work gets done to make it happen, and the change comes through despite all the previous opposition against it. For example, the armour changes recently were actually tooled as a "hot toggle" of sorts, where they can be turned off and on without a server restart. We now have the option, due to the code refactor, to implement more toggles like that and create changes that can be implemented to live with far less risk if something we didn't predict begins to happen. This type of long-term thinking will make it much easier to adjust how things work in the future. All of my work follows this guideline and is aimed at making it as flexible as possible to adjust to the new atmosphere as the game evolves. I understand the concerns behind map resets and legacy items. I'm unsure as to the philosophy on those items (I only joined recently, after all). Someone else would have to touch on that point. I once got hit with a filled boiling cauldron of water. I died instantly with 80QL glimmersteel plate. Good times. My comment above to whereami touches on player mentality. However, you mentioned time zones which has plagued me in the past. It's sometimes extremely impossible for European players have a difficult time handling an American assault because of the time zone difference. When Europeans' attack, the American players are generally at work and can at least do something, especially if they get off work quickly after the assault begins. In the reverse, however, the American group is attacking after midnight in European time, and the European group would need to make a choice between living a healthy life and getting some sleep or defending their deed from an attack. As an American player, I'm familiar with both sides of this and seen how it affects people. Europeans accused me of attacking at off times out of weakness, though we had all just eaten dinner and were at our peak time. I can't really think of anything off the top of my head that would be suitable to solve this problem. If you have any ideas, I urge you to post in the Suggestions & Ideas forum with whatever you can think of. I'd be interested to discuss potential solutions to the problem and, if all goes well, begin working on making it happen. My personal gripe So now it's my turn to answer the question at hand. What bothers me most about Wurm. It's not something specific, and it's not an idea either. It's a single system that has bothered me since I started playing, and I've actively made an absurd amount of changes to it including a full replacement for my WU server. Combat. The whole thing. I dislike the concept of CR as a whole. I dislike the amount of random elements during combat that you cannot control. I dislike the meta where 1/5th of the content in the game is considered viable for combat. I want to see more diversity in strategy and tactics beyond gate hopping and spamming heals & shield bash. I want to see special moves have an important place in combat both for PvE and PvP. I want to see mobs stronger than trolls on PvE servers, bridging the gap between trolls and uniques (allowing small hunting parties to be productive).

I really like the 1 handed spear idea, but I feel like that would just be more of the same. I would really rather see the "knife" class of weaponry be used for pierce damage. Items like the butcher knife and carving knife already exist, but currently have too low of damage output to be viable. They even have their own unique special moves! Seeing these weapons rebalanced to be viable in the current meta would probably be a better approach to introducing piercing weapons into the 1 handed class.

Ah sorry, I missed that question. Yes, the new jewelry enchants affects all outgoing or incoming damage while equipped. That includes damage from Frostbrand and Flaming Aura. The protection versions will reduce all incoming damage of that type. For example, with fire protection, it will reduce fire damage whether it's from another player's Fireheart spell, Flaming Aura enchant, or even just a Hell Horse kicking you in the face.

Stacking identical jewelry applies with diminishing returns. Wearing two identical ones will incur a 33% penalty to both pieces (~133% effectiveness total), and wearing three will incur a 50% penalty to all pieces (150% effectiveness total). Swapping the jewelry out during combat is possible (and probably efficient). However, the maintenance required to do so and the significant penalties towards effectiveness when stacking should push players more towards various jewelry being equipped. Beyond that, the power of the enchant works similar to Nolocate, where it takes the average of the cast and QL of the jewelry. This means that players are going to want high quality jewelry in order to be the most efficient. Welcome, jewelry smiths. You're now relevant.

The devil is in the extreme details. While you're not getting hit as often with studded due to high glance rates, you're actually taking the equivalent of wearing plate when you do get hit. When you're damaged in drake, you're actually taking 82.3% of the damage you would from studded. This concept applies across the board for dragonscale with the exception of crushing. It's really great that people are spending time thinking about the new possibilities, and I can't imagine it's going to be well understood overnight. The armour system is a complex beast that I've spent countless hours analyzing. All of the numbers that you see here are also assuming identical quality at 100QL. This is unrealistic, and taking into consideration the resources and skills required to improve certain items (moon metal especially), it's not quite as cut and dry as it's made out to be. It'll be a while before the meta truly settles down and people figure out the optimal strategies again. When that happens, we can make further tweaks to spice things up and solve any issues that arise.

Chain takes 3/5 of the damage from slashing compared to studded. Studded takes 3/5 of the damage from crushing compared to chain. Plate takes 1/3 of the damage from piercing compared to chain. These are not minor differences. The armours still have unique identities.

While studded and chain have the same base damage reduction now, there's a significant advantage to wearing chain: material. You can make chain and plate out of steel or moon metals to increase the DR further than what's presented here. If we were to keep leather and studded at lower DR values they would never be useful. It's also key to note that a 2.5% difference in DR is not "2.5% less damage taken" - these values need to be compared to eachother. 100 damage versus 62.5% DR is 37.5 damage. When it's 65% DR, it's 35 damage. You divide the two and end up with 37.5 / 35 = 1.07, or a 7% damage increase when going from plate to studded. What Retrograde mentions about the damage effectiveness, combined with glance, is exceptionally important now. Here's one of my spreadsheets (which was available from my datamining spreadsheet before i was a developer) that should demonstrate the difference rather clearly: The "Evaluated" section is the key point here, which demonstrates a full evaluation of each armour against all damage types, including the glance rates and damage effectiveness. It's also important to note that chain and plate are iron in this chart. Steel and moon metal materials will change them to potentially be better defensively than drake or dragonscale, but that's when the movement speed penalty kicks in. At the end of the day, every single armour that wasn't drake or scale got a buff. This means every player that doesn't own a set is going to be better off than before.

What

I understand now that a few lines isn't going to cut it. So let me get into the details here. Meditation In General Meditation as a whole has been one of those gigantic issues that plagues the game from every direction. Many of the changes made to the game affect some path in some way. Make stamina regeneration faster or give players a higher pool? Path of Power players are affected. Make it easier to feed animals or heal wounds? Path of Love players are affected. Change literally anything involving combat, DR, or similar? Path of Hate & Insanity are affected. It's actually hard to think of changes to mechanics that don't affect a path in some way. Now, I realize that this is well known, and the problem here is that it impacts the most useful part of Path of Knowledge. This is just a fact. I'm not denying it. As you said, I'm justifying it. It's clear that my justification so far was not enough, so I'll try again. My goal with development is simply to make the game better. Just pure, raw upgrades on existing mechanics. I'm not trying to "give the shaft" to any player base in specific. The goal here is to add QoL and make the game more enjoyable for the vast majority. Sometimes, these changes come with negative implications, such as this impact to Path of Knowledge players. It's just part of the gig. When you want to improve everyone's game, then others get affected negatively. If we added new armour above drake and scale, everyone who owned a set would have reason to be upset. If we implement upgraded versions of tools like a pickaxe, everyone who had bought a rare+ or highly enchanted pickaxe would have a reason to be upset. New content comes at a cost to the existing content. No new content leads to a drought which will chase more players away than what you're suggesting. Providing A Counterbalance So onto the point about providing a counterbalance to Path of Knowledge in return for this change. There's some merit there, and I wont deny that it'd be nice to see Path of Knowledge improved. However, the simple truth is that it's already planned. There's a meditation rework scheduled. It's not just going to be a couple number changes and a path switch like the SotG changes a while ago. It'll be tackling the issues that meditation currently has and fixing the design to be more versatile. If you don't like how Path of Knowledge looks after the rework, by all means switch at that point. The Can Of Worms To make a bandaid adjustment to Path of Knowledge in light of this very QoL change (which affects a very small portion of the community) opens up a can of worms. At the start of this post, I mention that it's hard to make a change without affecting some meditation path in some way. We adjust the Body Stamina calculations and we'll get demands to compensate Path of Power. We change combat so certain things apply in different order, we'll get demands for Path of Hate & Insanity to obtain compensation. In conclusion, Path of Knowledge is not being adjusted because of this change.

This only excludes fighting skill, as that could create an abusive skilling method by killing others in PvP. That fighting skill is also ignored by this new mechanic. 99 fighting will not be saved under any circumstance, PoK or otherwise. As for PoK, it prevents you from losing body stats on death. That's the major perk which this change does not cover. You can still lose 99+ body strength (even if someone had that much).

Code's done. ETA next patch.

DUSKombat Swing stamina cost has been doubled. Defensive stance now gives a higher reduction to the stamina cost of a swing. Aggressive now gives a higher increase to the stamina cost of a swing. Aggressive and Defensive stances have had multiple new bonuses and penalties applied. Dodge chance now has a penalty while you're in aggressive, and bonus while in defensive. This applies in the reverse for the attacker (defensive attackers will be dodged more frequently). Aggressive grants a 20% increase to critical hit chance. Critical strikes in defensive deal 140% damage instead of the full 150% damage. Shield blocks and parries now have a penalty if the attacker is in aggressive. Defensive now grants a bonus equivalent to double the effect of the attacker being aggressive. Difficulty to hit/miss has been increased very slightly. This should make defensive measures such as block/parry/dodge more effective, but should have little effect on ability to strike if you have sufficient skill. Block recovery when using a shield maximum debuff duration has been reduced to 5 seconds from 10 seconds. CR potions now grant an increase to hit chance. Arena The Arena host will now give GL-Freedom messages about HotA. Supply Depot enchant orb power rolls have been increased to 60-120 from 40-80. Since the server has advanced significantly, and players are able to cast better than before, it's time that these enchants started becoming more comparable. These enchants can still be the jewelry enchants (Acuity, Endurance, Industry, and Prowess). As of the time of this patch, there exists only two rings at 100+ power of these high difficulty enchants. Supply Depots now award 3-4 caches, increased from 2-3. Chance of crystal cache has been increased slightly. Supply Depot cache quality rolls have been increased from 20-80 to 40-90. HotA statues won from HotA now come in highly various colors. HotA now awards 4-6 lumps of seryll, increased from 3-5. HotA now awards 3-6 silver, up from 2-4 silver. Weapons and Armour Balance Every now and then, we adjust the balance of weapons and armour in minor ways to try and shift the meta a bit and give more options to players. Buffs to underused weaponry: Large Axe damage increased from 6.5 to 6.7. Longsword damage increased from 5.7 to 5.9. Longsword swing speed improved from 3.8 to 3.75. Knuckles damage increased from 3.6 to 3.7. While knuckles used to be highly favored due to their speed, their current damage is very poor with the changes to bloodthirst. This change is meant to try and counterbalance recent changes without making them broken. Short sword damage increased from 4.4 to 4.5. Scythe damage increased from 9.1 to 9.25. Staff swing speed improved from 4.0 to 3.9 Buffs to weaker armour types: Cloth base damage reduction increased from 55% to 61%. Cloth effectiveness versus pierce increased from 100% to 110%. Leather base damage reduction increased from 65% to 67%. Leather effectiveness versus crush increased from 105% to 107.5%. Leather effectiveness versus slash increased from 110% to 112.5%. Studded base damage reduction increased from 67.5% to 69%. Studded effectiveness versus crush increased from 107.5% to 110%. Chain base damage reduction increased from 67.5% to 69%. Chain effectiveness versus bite increased from 107.5% to 109%. Chain effectiveness versus crush increased from 105% to 107%. Plate base damage reduction increased from 70% to 71%. Plate effectiveness versus crush reduced from 95% to 93%. Plate effectiveness versus slash increased from 105% to 107.5%. Drake base damage reduction increased from 70% to 71%. Drake effectiveness versus crush increased from 105% to 108%. Drake effectiveness versus cold increased from 110% to 115%. Dragonscale effectiveness versus bite increased from 105% to 106%. Dragonscale effectiveness versus burn increased from 105% to 110%. All armour has had their glance rates halved. While glancing doesn't feel anywhere near as bad as it did when all damage was blocked, it still doesn't feel good. Removing glancing entirely would dramatically shift the identity of armour. Most likely in a negative way. For this reason, halving all the rates keeps them with their identity, but should help avoid situations where most attacks are glances. Miscellaneous Wisdom of Vynora has been removed from all deities. On Revenant, we use a system that prevents actions from using the fatigue system, since it negatively impacts legitimate players. However, this created a system where Wisdom of Vynora could be cast on cooldown to grant sleep bonus without penalty. This was unintentional. Options such as ticking down the fatigue timer were considered, but the amount of work required to get that functional seemed higher than the potential gain. In the end, Wisdom of Vynora as a spell doesn't fit the server philosophy and will be disabled until a new iteration can be created. I'm interested to hear suggestions about how to tweak its functionality and make it a proper addition to the server. Enchanter Crystals difficulty now scales with the total combined power of enchants that you're using it on. Scaling per enchant has been removed completely. Resurrection Stone price has been reduced from 5 silver to 2 silver. Fixed a bug where death tabs would show being slain by nothing when killed in PvP.