U42 Preview 3: 5/03-5/06

[Cocomajobo]

(EDIT: The third preview for U42 has ended. Thank you to all who came out to give it a look! Please inform us of any feedback or bugs found in the appropriate threads.)

Disclaimer

Everything seen on the preview server, Lamannia, is not final and is subject to change or removal before live release.

Hey, all! The pre-sale of our new Expansion (visit www.ddo.com/sharn) is available! The preview server will be opening up for a third (and final) preview of the contents of that expansion, which will be Update 42, on Friday May 6th and will be closing on Monday May 6th. This preview is expected to contain the following features:

• New Dungeons:
  
  • 9 Sharn Story Dungeons
  • 8 Cogs Explorer Dungeons
• The First Raid from the Masterminds of Sharn
• The Cogs Explorer Area
• New Named Loot (both Quest and Raid)
• Minor Artifacts
• New Filigree

In addition to those main features there are an assortment of smaller changes and/or bugfixes which are listed below

Character

• Favored Soul's Bonus Feats have much clearer and more concise wording
• Fixed Obscuring Mist doing Obscuring Darkness FX
• Fixed Obscuring Mist's effect having the name/description of "Obscuring Darkness"
• Fixed Fireball's/Domain Fireball's spell description (never got updated in U41)
• Fixed some animation issues on Male and Female Tieflings
• Tiefling's innate Fire Resistance and Infernal Resistance enhancements (acid/cold) now properly update their values when you level up without needing to relog
• (non-Scoundrel) Tieflings no longer innately use Fiddles for Bard songs
• Tiefling/Scoundrel players are now immune to fear, as they're supposed to be.
• The spell Spawn Screen no longer scales its number of targets (badly) via caster level, and instead affects all allies in the AOE.
• Druid: Tier 1 of "Force of Nature" (in Tier 5 of Nature's Protector) now grants the following in addition to its current effects: "Your attunement to Nature is emboldened - Your Druidic Oath is no longer broken by wearing metal armor or shields."
• Wail of the Banshee now has its signature Wail sound effect back!
• Tieflings, both male and female, now have a second dance.
• Tieflings now have their own taunt animations.
• Tieflings now have their own laugh emote.
• Sorcerer Savant's Air Elemental Form is now much less visually obscuring.
• All Sorcerer Savant Elemental Forms no longer erroneously drop on death.

Items

• The tooltip for the item effect "Ghostly" now correctly states that it grants a bonus to incorporeality, rather than concealment

Monsters

• N/A

Quests

• The Salve of Stone to Flesh in Eyes of Stone now has a cooldown of 5 seconds, rather than 30.
• Nudged a pair of hobgoblins in the quest Caverns of Shaagh to help them not become one with the stairs.

Misc

• Shield Guardian Hirelings have updated sounds
• The engine will no longer limit video/virtual memory usage as harshly on systems which have sufficient virtual memory. The game should properly take advantage of virtual memoryresources available to it.
• The character sheet UI now uses abbreviated class names, and has moved all four class fields onto the same line
• The character sheet UI now displays your Offhand Doublestrike underneath Doublestrike.
• Work has been done to eliminate various sources of server performance issues.