v0.2.6

Echoes of Creation — v0.2.6: Shoulder to Shoulder

This one is about the people you fight beside. Clerics can finally hold a friend and heal them, the Warrior gets the weapon line its calling was always missing, and the Sundering gives up its armour far more willingly than it used to.

You can select the people you fight beside

Click another player and you now hold them. A ring marks them on the ground, and their name, level and health appear on a card beneath your party frames — green for an ally, red for a rival faction. You can also click a party card directly, which is what everyone reached for in the first place.

• Clerics heal the player they are holding. With an ally selected and within 20 metres, Heal lands on them instead of you. If they drift too far, the cast falls back to you and says why — "Ally out of range" — rather than quietly healing the wrong person. It no longer fails in silence.
• The ally you hold is separate from the monster you are killing. Selecting a friend does not interrupt your attack, TAB still cycles enemies only, and the enemy bar at the top belongs to whatever you are actually fighting. Only ESC lets your ally go.
• Your Combat Power now announces itself. Every change counts up on screen with the gain or loss beside it — green up, red down — so you can see whether that upgrade was worth it without opening the stat screen.

The Warrior finally has a weapon line

Gareth can now forge the Steel Greatsword (Lv10) and the Berserker's Greatsword (Lv20). Until now the Warrior's path ran from the practice blade it starts with straight to Worldrender at Lv28, with nothing at all in between — every other calling had two steps on that road and the Warrior had none.

While we were there: greatswords were missing from the Warrior filter in Gareth's craft list entirely, Worldrender included. They are all there now.

The Sundering gives up its armour

• Boss weave armour is twenty times more likely. This is a boss drop change only. Every piece the nine faction bosses carry went from half a percent to a full 10%, and each piece rolls separately, so walking away with two from one kill is ordinary rather than a story. Ordinary monsters still drop weave at their old, very rare rate — nothing about farming trash has changed. The Exalted versions are unchanged and remain the rare prize.
• Ore comes in handfuls now. Bosses drop 1-5 Elorite and 1-3 Sunderite at a time instead of one apiece. And the Dark faction's own bosses — Nightmaw, Dreadplate and the Umbral Dreadlord — now drop both, where before they gave neither and their followers had to look elsewhere.
• Bosses take longer to return. Field bosses now rise again after 3 hours, and those in the Scar after 6, instead of a quarter of an hour. They are worth waiting for now.
• The hunting fields are fuller. Hollow Blades, Elder Treants and Ruin Colossi stand 40 to a field, half again as many as before — and all three factions now match, which they quietly did not.
• The Corrupted stand half again as tall, and the Corrupted Warrior has taken the field in the Corrupted Hollow and the Defiled Sanctum.

Collection relics no longer punish you for out-growing them

Drops from a creature far beneath you are deliberately thinned, which is fair when you choose an easy field to farm — but the collection book names one creature per set, so you have no choice at all. It was the players who had finished the content who could no longer collect it.

Collection materials now ignore that penalty entirely and fall at their full rate whatever level you are. This is not one relic — 24 of the 34 collection materials were affected, and the further beneath you the creature stands, the more it changes:

• Relics from the Nightmote, Feral Stalker and Dominion Warden (level 31) — about twelve times more common at the cap. Emberglass Shard was arriving once in five thousand kills while the book asks for two hundred and fifty of them.
• Relics from the Emberbound Warden, Verdant Warden, Gilded Revenant, Dread Thrall, Grove Defiler and Sunmote (levels 33-36) — about five times more common.
• Relics from the Hollow Blade, Elder Treant and Ruin Colossus (level 39) — about twice as common.

Anything from level 42 upward was never thinned and is unchanged. If you had given up on a set because the numbers looked impossible, they were.

The Marketplace opens to the Corrupted

Void-Husks and Void-Shards can be sold. The materials the Corrupted leave behind were yours to hoard and nothing else. They now trade like any other material, with a price band to keep the market honest. The weapons and off-hands they forge still bind to you, so this buys you a shorter road, not a resale.

Balance

• Your class buff now stacks with your potions. Berserker's Warcry, Killing Intent, Guardian's Roar and Hunter's Boon were being swallowed whole by a potion strengthening the same thing. Drink a Damage Boost Potion and the Warrior's Warcry simply stopped counting — you got the potion's 25% and nothing more, however well you played around the cooldown. A skill buff and a potion now add together: Warcry over a Damage Boost Potion is 37% instead of 25%, Killing Intent 35%, and the same holds for Guardian's Roar over a Defense Potion and Hunter's Boon over Accuracy or Evasion.
• Different shouts stack with each other too. A Warrior's Berserker's Warcry and an Assassin's Killing Intent were erasing one another — a party carrying both got the louder of the two, not the sum. Both now count.
• Berserker's Warcry is now a melee roar. It strengthened every kind of damage, which meant an archer at the back of the party collected a Warrior's fury on every arrow. It now adds its 12% to melee hits only, where the roar was always meant to land. Killing Intent and the Damage Boost Potion are unchanged and still help everyone.
• Two of a kind still do not stack. Re-casting your own buff refreshes it, and a second party member casting the same shout does not double it — that was never the intent, and it stays as it was.
• Monsters answer for what you do to them. A monster you strike now comes for you no matter how far away you were standing. Attacking something from beyond its notice used to cost you nothing at all.
• Eagle Eye reaches further than it did. Its extra range applied only to ordinary attacks, never to skills. It applies to both now, which is what it always claimed.
• The Assassin's attack returns to standard. Both damage classes have carried a make-up buff since a weapon-upgrade correction last cycle; the Ranger's was retired earlier, and the Assassin's now follows. This is a real reduction and Assassins will feel it in a fight.
• Assassin and Ranger Combat Power can now be compared. The two were scored against different yardsticks — an Assassin and a Ranger in the same armour, the same Genesis weapons and the same gems came out thousands of points apart on attack alone, for no reason you could see or play around. They now use the same one. Assassin CP drops by roughly 3%; Ranger CP is unchanged. Nothing about your gear or your progress has been taken away — the number simply means the same thing for both callings now.
• Gems in an empty slot no longer count. Gems left behind by an item you are no longer wearing were still granting their full bonus. If your character was affected, some stats will read lower — what you are actually wearing is untouched, and the gems themselves went back to your bag when the item came off.

Quality of life

• Gold reads as 72.3M once it passes a million, with the exact figure in the tooltip
• Sunderite and Elorite counts sit at the top of Gareth's panel, beside your Scrolls of Protection
• Marketplace Bookmarks — star up to 10 items, watch their price, and open the listings to choose the one you want rather than being handed the cheapest
• The world map tells you that you can drop your own markers, and right-click clears one again
• Scenery between the camera and your character fades, so the capital plazas no longer swallow you
• Balances now appear on the panels where you actually spend them

Fixes

• Faction bosses that never appeared. One boss in each faction's zone could not spawn at all — you could take damage from something you could not see or strike.
• Bosses that would not lie down. A boss you had killed stayed standing, health bar and all, until you left the area.
• The Creation Gem the Sundering bosses carry could not be spent. The forge insisted you had none, however many you were holding — the redemption has never once worked since the gem was introduced. It now buys a Genesis weapon exactly as its Primordius counterpart does, and a gem won from a boss arrives in your bag instead of nowhere at all.
• Ashcantor's shuriken storm hung motionless in the air and never faded.
• Wings were about twice their intended size on the default body.
• Party members vanishing from the roster while still in the party and still talking.
• Claiming a Creation Gem could close the whole panel with an error.
• Locked items could still be spent into a gear collection.
• Registering the first tier of a collection hid the second one, leaving it unfindable.
• Loot on the floor. Ordinary monsters were scattering their drops. Only Sundering bosses do that now — everything else goes to your bag.
• Depositing a gem you had just found reported that you had none.
• The Crit Damage tooltip credited your collection and enchantment bonuses to "Gems", which made an empty character look like it was wearing something.
• The bestiary listed six creatures that cannot be found anywhere, and its discovery count could never reach the full number no matter how much you hunted. Both are corrected — the Verdant Titan has left the Nascent Wilds along with them.

A note on character slots

Extra character slots have been retired in favour of Multiclass — one hero can now train in several callings, which is the better answer to the problem the slot was solving. Everyone who bought one has already been refunded in full.

— Tipreth