U56 Preview 1 - Archetypes

[Tolero]

Disclaimer

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

Greetings! Preview 1 of Update 56 is now open with a first look at Archetypes as well as the updated Character Bank as of 2pm EDT on Tuesday, August 9th! It is expected to remain open into the afternoon (EDT) of Thursday, August 11th.

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During this first preview we would like you to try out the new Archetypes (more info about them in the Producer's Letter by clicking here) as well as the updated Character Bank. You can access Archetypes from the Character Creation flow or by talking to trainers in game.

To provide a little more detail on what you can expect to see in this preview, please review the items below:


Big Picture Notes

• Archetypes - Read more in its own thread on Lamannia.
  
  • Dark Apostate Specific Thread
  • Sacred Fist Specific Thread
  • Stormsinger Specific Thread
  
  
• Character Bank Update
  
  • Character Bank UI has been updated with new functionality and performance improvements! You will begin with the same amount of Character Bank space that you had on your account before the release
  • LAMANNIA NOTE: Remember that Lamannia doesn't always remember your favor or purchase history from the Live servers and is based on what you've done or purchased on Lamannia. A Character Copy may not be fully sufficient to replicate your Live favor or Store state on Lamannia.
  • LAMANNIA KNOWN ISSUE: For this first Lamannia, attempting to purchase the existing DDO Store extra Character Bank space might not function correctly. This will be fixed for an upcoming Lamannia preview.

Bugfixes

• Familiars from Feydark Illusionist and Falcons from Falconry now remain active while you are dead
• Feydark Illusionist Familiars no longer fall through the world
• Feydark Illusionist Familiars no longer spawn twice and then one explodes
• Familiars and Falcons no longer block mouse selection
• Single Weapon Specialty now correctly applies in all situations.
• Fury of the Wild's Destiny Mantle now persists correctly through logout.
• The Shadow debuff from Shadowdancer now properly drops 1 stack at a time
• Unyielding's Lay on Hands no longer prevents you from using it based on your Charisma score if your Con score is higher
• Warchanter's Iced Edges no longer drops on logout.
• Nerve Venom in Shiradi no longer has an erroneous DC
• Sunblades should now respect two-handed fighting rules more accurately
• US' resurrection no longer erroneously requires 20 levels, is now 30 as intended
• Tabaxi's Dex to Damage now works correctly in Animal Form.
• Weapons without an ability score modifier to damage no longer show a negative base damage rating.
• Perfected Darkstorm Helm now has a caster level
• The camera has been adjusted such that mouse look will no longer occasionally turn your character 180 degrees and make you look up or down.
• Party and Guild chat disconnects should no longer take as long to reconnect.
• A large variety of text bugs and inconsistencies have been fixed.

Gameplay Changes

• Great Weapon Aptitude (ability found in many racial trees) now allows Natural Fighting as one of its prerequisites instead of just Two Handed Fighting
• Khyber Dragonshards no longer drop. Recipes that use Khyber Dragonshards now use Siberys Dragonshards instead.
• Eldritch Knight dice now work on Shields
• All level versions of the Abishai set is now profane instead of artifact bonus
• There are 3 new Gameplay options:
  
  • Gather Trap Parts: (default True) while true, disabling traps will cause you to gather Trap Parts from them. Turn this off to stop gathering trap parts from traps you disable.
  • Experimental Tumble Controls: (default False) while true, pressing Block while moving will cause you to Tumble instead of causing you to Block. If you continue to hold Block, you will end the tumble in the blocking state.
  • Disable Full Character Effect Overlays: (default False) while true, full character effect overlays on your character will be disabled. Affected visuals:
    
    • Stoneskin
    • Barkskin
    • Goldskin
    • Fire Shield (Cold)
    • Fire Shield (Hot)
  
  
• There are two new spells:
  
  • True Seeing, Mass: Cast True Seeing on yourself and your allies. Clr/Fvs 8
  • Freedom of Movement, Mass: Cast Freedom of Movement on yourself and your nearby allies. Clr/Fvs/Drd 7
  
  
• Reaper Crafting's cost has been reduced to 75 Reaper Fragments.
• You may now dissolve Reaper items at the second Reaper NPC at any amount of reaper points (note: crafting using these ingredients still requires 50 Reaper points)
• Reaper crafting no longer accepts level 1 or 2 items
• Warchanter iced edges now scales with spellpower
• House J Favor buffs now have a "give me the works" option that charges the total plat you'd get from just clicking them all individually.'
• House P Favor buffs now last 60 minutes.
• Fred can now combine Dragonshards for you.
• Spells that may target undead friends (aka Inflict spells) can now validate the caster as a redirected target (aka be cast targeting the caster implicitly) as long as the caster is undead.
• The spells Bless, Prayer, and Bane all now have a cooldown of 10 seconds.
• The Winter Hunt buff from Nature's Warrior core 5 now grants +5 Cold Spell Crit Chance and +15% Cold Spell Crit Damage
• Aasimar and Scourge core 3 no longer provides a bonus to Healing Hands charges
• Aasimar and Scourge core 5 no longer provides a recharge ability to Healing Hands charges, and also now provides +2 healing hands charges
• Angel of Vengeance core abilities no longer provide bonuses to caster level and max caster level
• Base Attack Bonus is now capped at 25.
• Tiefling's Incinerations are now: +2% and +3% Fire Spell Critical Damage.
• Holy Smite, Order's Wrath, Chaos Hammer, and Unholy Blight now deal 1d6+4 damage per caster level.
• Completionist is now automatically granted upon reaching level 3. Current characters with Completionist have been given a free feat respec token.

UI Changes

• The XP Bar on the character sheet has been removed to facilitate Archetype and Class Displays. If you would like to view your character's total level progress, you may rotate through available XP bars by pressing the XP Bar Toggle at the bottom left hand corner of your screen, next to the & symbol.

[Synthetic]

Decreasing the power level of some enhancement trees while adding new trees, which cost how much exactly?

Warchanter is alright and got a small buff but could have used more help. Could you also reduce the cost of the ice attacks they are very expensive in AP for what you get even with the small buff.

Need to check the warchanter capstone it sounds very weak on paper.

AoV got hit pretty hard - probably fairly since it was definitely an outlier, but it feels lousy to see this type of action taken when you add a new shiny.

Cold druids got hit hard and I think they were probably a real edge case, and they aren't even getting an archetype near as I can tell.

Level 7 cleric definitely got tougher to play but it's fair IMO. Those spells are a bit out of hand to bad I didn't get my cleric PL done.

Looking forward to seeing the bank changes as bank/storage is one of my bigger issues with the game.

Thanks for the hard work. The archetypes do sounds interesting.

[Lynnabel]

Decreasing the power level of some enhancement trees while adding new trees, which cost how much exactly?

These Archetypes are free!

[droid327]

Feydark Illusionist Familiars no longer spawn twice and then one explodes

I think you meant to file this under "Known Issues"

Experimental Tumble Controls: (default False) while true, pressing Block while moving will cause you to Tumble instead of causing you to Block. If you continue to hold Block, you will end the tumble in the blocking state.

While you have the hood open on Tumble controls...how about double-click a movement direction key to tumble? I feel that's pretty standard "FPS style" gameplay, and would make tumbling in combat a lot more accessible than block+direction, I think. Plus, there are a few cases where blocking is penalized, too. It'd make it more fluid for "tumble into a run" maneuvers too after a fight.

[Gregen]

• Completionist is now automatically granted upon reaching level 3. Current characters with Completionist have been given a free feat respec token.

Quick question. If you had at least one of each heroic past life but did not take the Completionist feat, will this be granted automatically after the update?

[Matuse]

Angel of Vengeance core abilities no longer provide bonuses to caster level and max caster level

This seems a fair bit extreme. FvS nuking is crushed. It also makes no sense since the cleric cores DO get caster levels.

[Tanky]

Pretty significant changes to a handful of classes and races that will negatively affect people who have already made hardcore server choices. I don't disagree with the changes (notably FvS, Tiefling and Aasimar). But the timing sucks and feels bad. This is the kind of thing to release at the beginning of the hardcore season, not in the middle of it when players are locked into characters.

[CSQ]

[*]Completionist is now automatically granted upon reaching level 3. Current characters with Completionist have been given a free feat respec token.

This is great. I have literally changed builds because I wanted the Completionist feat or alternatively just given up on it in order to get other feats I need. This makes playing vanilla human for an extra feat pick much less of a necessity for completionists (who have already invested a lot of time on it).

[Synthetic]

These Archetypes are free!

Great.

Any chance you can help out the warchanter capstone? A 2 minute cool down on a 6 second freeze is bad. Damage doesn't scale with spell power, the animation is super long and is a cone rather than a point blank AOE as the description suggests. It also takes a song so it's not even free to use.

The warchanter tree could also use some cost reductions and maybe a knights training or some other feat boosts to help out the enhancement tree.

[drathdragon]

FVS nerfing as expected hehe

next season of HCL will be very interesting

[DeltaBravo]

Disclaimer

• Aasimar and Scourge core 3 no longer provides a bonus to Healing Hands charges
• Aasimar and Scourge core 5 no longer provides a recharge ability to Healing Hands charges, and also now provides +2 healing hands charges

UI Changes

Could we find a middle way here rather then totally destroy the healing hands ?


Give 5 uses toally and a 5 mins recharge time ?

[rabidfox]

FVS nerfing as expected hehe

next season of HCL will be very interesting

This season of HCL will be very sad when mid-season metas and classes get broken. Unless they're going to delay release until after Oct 24(?); which seems unlikely.

[Sholvah]

Wtb Mass Bard Songs

[Ghustor]

[*]Tiefling's Incinerations are now: +2% and +3% Fire Spell Critical Damage.

WOW, big nerf on Tiefling, they will lost 8% fire critical chance and 4% for all others spells critical chances.

Now definily there is no reason to not go Dragonborn and get +2 Max CL and +3 DC

And definilly no more reason to not go Ice, since its the only element with +5 critical chance with filigree.

Big buff on ice druid. prob they DPS will overcome the sorc/alchemist. Now maybe a class with high HP and so good heals will be the main DPS caster... something dosent looks right

[Zuldar]

Big buff on ice druid. prob they DPS will overcome the sorc/alchemist. Now maybe a class with high HP and so good heals will be the main DPS caster... something dosent looks right

Right now it actually provides 25% crit chance and 50% crit damage, so it's a pretty big nerf.

[Baahb3]

Thank you for fixing the camera bug, this has been a bane for this game for a long time.

With the good comes the bad. Kick in the nuts for AoV casting (alignment spell damage and caster levels) and for Healing Hands.

And still no mention of the Pin bug for repeaters. Please look at this. It is a crime that the attack and thus the 4th core of the tree do not work for a whole class of ranged weapons.

https://forums.ddo.com/forums/showth...ating-crossbow

[Zitaloc]

Bug Report
SLA:"Horn of thunder" in Stormsinger rank one counts for both trees and locks you out of putting anymore points in the stormbringer tree tier 5, it also displays as 1 point in both Trees Tier 5.

[Pandjed]

What exactly are the thoughts of the Healing Hands nerf (taking away the recharges)? At this point, it may make more sense to make everything work via Lay on Hands instead.

[Ghustor]

Right now it actually provides 25% crit chance and 50% crit damage, so it's a pretty big nerf.

oh, yes, the buff is nerfed, but I wasnt saying about that, I expressed wrong. I was saying about the Tiefling critical chence nerfs will let the Ice spells more criticable over all in any class, since only cold can get more critical chance from specific filigree, with only 2 pieces of Frozen Wanderer. That with the druid buff (even nerfed) and the high dmg cold spells prob will definily do the cold druid the top Caster DPS, what is a quite incoerent for a versatible class.

IMO, its a huge mistake take off the tiefling bonus to critical chance, mainly for fire. Ice Dragonborm now has too mutch advantage for any caster, with +2 CL, +3 DC and +HP bonus. Maybe Wis based get shifter for rage bonus HP with filigree, but anyway, Druid will get most advantage over all. And druids already are tier 1 DPS wile they are good healers and has more survivalbility

[Krell]

Being able to at least crunch reaper items for fragments before reaching 50 reaper points is good. Not being able to crunch level 1-2 items is understandable. But there are players that are under 50 that have been saving level 1-2 items. I think there should be a window where under 50 point players can turn in level 1-2 items. Maybe add the under 50 point feature with the update, then add the level 1-2 turn in restriction with the subsequent patch to allow a turn in window for items players have been saving up.