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!

[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.

[AbyssalMage]

So another update where nerfs are a direct result of HCL under the guise of "balance?" So glad I am playing the game less and less.

[Syrophir]

As a long time FvS player I would like to ask:

1) Please remove the Angel of Vengeance tier 5 Zealous Fath and tier 4 Intense Faith enhancements, but keep some (2-5) CL and MCL on the cores.
2) Add Flame Strike SLA to tier 4 and please lower cooldown on Comet SLA, or replace it with Firestorm SLA, since the current tier 5 feels useless compared to Beacon's tier 5.

With these the nerf/changes wouldn't feel too bad and having some of these spells as an SLA would help to mitigate the lost burst damage without burning too many spell points and still having fun as a nuker.

Edit:
Without additional caster levels, AoV core 6: Ascendancy, could use a change from MCL 10 Searing SLA to Divine Wrath or Sun Burst, that would spice things up too.

[Loromir]

These Archetypes are free!

Key word "These"....does that mean future Archetypes won't be free?

[ShifterThePirate]

Key word "These"....does that mean future Archetypes won't be free?

Of course they won't be free.. they have to sell things just like Classes and Enhancement trees. Probably added to new (mini) Expansion packs on DDO Market also. I'm already surprised these are free.

[Epzilon123]

While the archetypes look cool (I'm very worried about Sacred Fist not being amazing, especially since it's replacing KOTC, a good tree overall, and not benefiting from PDK as hard as regular paladins do.), I think the nerfs were a bit heavy-handed. The wolf howl is pretty dumb in retrospect and was never really intended to be used out of wolf form, but you're kinda not compensating wolves for losing something from cold druid abuse.

Although the real loser is FVS. I feel like you should start with lowering the MCL bonus from +2 to +1 on the cores while maintaining everything else. Or, you could just put those bonuses on the 2nd, 4th, and 6th cores only. I doubt if the nerf is too heavy-handed, you'll go back and quickly rectify it, so it'd be better for the class to be okay for a while instead of potentially just crushed. Mind you, they still have the best base saves in the game (same as monk) and 300 bonus hp as well as free Wings. This feels like a hardcore change that doesn't make as much sense on softcore.

Never played a tiefling, but those nerfs make the race a hard sell. Also, not quite sure about the aasimar. It's been an incredibly strong race, especially for martial, for a long time. However, I think a lot of that comes from the disparity in how good some racial trees are compared to others. I think many races, such as Drow, could use a tune-up. Regenerating Healing hands is a hard-to-balance mechanism, though, you could have considered just increasing the regen time a bit at first before removing it entirely.

Lastly, I don't think the reaper fragment changes go far enough. It does feel like a "make it a bit easier overall but remove the cheese" fix. Maybe something like 65/60 would make it a more realistic long-term goal, as it could take months to craft a single item, especially if you're picky and want a mythic +1/3 to craft on. Mind you, there's nothing wrong with a long-term grind, but when you don't expect a gear set to even last two years as BiS if we're going to be getting level increases fairly often compared to before. P.S: Rework the bonuses on goggles because the disparity between them and other named bonuses is weird. Also, it's weird weapons/orbs don't have named reaper bonuses.

[Tanky]

Key word "These"....does that mean future Archetypes won't be free?

Instead of Universal Trees included in expansion packs like Ravenloft, Sharn and Feywild, expect Archetypes to be included in future expansions instead.

[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.

[drathdragon]

FVS nerfing as expected hehe

next season of HCL will be very interesting

[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

[Dark_Lord_Mary]

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.

I agree with this bc the event is active and there are people on the leader boards who achieved very high numbers early and those competing to catch them would be doing so under changed rules - bad form for a competative event; never happens in the real world in any competative event;

should be delayed till october, or not affect hcl server till the event is done; or all the rewards and favor and leaderboard should be reset to 0 and everyone start again on the same playing field - HCL is a competition after all.

[Blastyswa]

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

Right now Divine Disciple get +1/+1 Caster Level and Max Caster Level at core 6, and +1/+1 in tier 3. With the Divine Disciple adjustments they'll get +1/+1 at core 5 and core 6, still the same +2/+2 total as before for a Divine Disciple.

Favored Soul right now gets +3/+3 in their tiers, and +6/+12 additional for a lot of their spells, putting them at +9/+15. Cleric getting +2/+2 isn't particularly impressive when Favored Soul was sitting at that very ridiculous +9/+15, you know it was busted before when even with all of the cores gutted FvS will still outnuke cleric.

[Matuse]

Favored Soul right now gets +3/+3 in their tiers, and +6/+12 additional for a lot of their spells, putting them at +9/+15. Cleric getting +2/+2 isn't particularly impressive when Favored Soul was sitting at that very ridiculous +9/+15, you know it was busted before when even with all of the cores gutted FvS will still outnuke cleric.

But I don't know that, and it is only relevant in low Heroics. They could remove the caster levels from cores 1-3 to balance that, and leave it alone for higher levels where it matters far less. The higher you get, the worse pew pew laser nuking is. The extra caster levels allowed a FvS to stay only somewhat behind. Now they're in the dust.