U56 Preview 3 Release Notes

[Tolero]

Disclaimer

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

Greetings! Preview 3 of Update 56 is opening with The Temple of Elemental Evil improvements, as well as any bug fixes and changes to features based on the last rounds of Lamannia feedback, today as of 2pm EDT on Tuesday, August 23rd! It is expected to remain open into the afternoon (EDT) of Thursday, August 25th.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


During this third preview we are offering a first look at the content improvements to The Temple of Elemental Evil adventure pack. You can continue to try out the new Archetypes as well as fixes to the updated Character Bank and the new treasure for Temple of Elemental Evil. To see the updated Temple of Elemental Evil adventure pack. From the Harbor, visit the Gatekeeper's Grove and once in the Grove speak with Bagnam the Gatekeeper on the east side of the Grove, then enter the gateway behind him. Note that you must own Temple of Elemental Evil to enter, and it is available in the Store on Lamannia for Points. If you need Points you may speak with Lord Poincelot in the Test Dojo.

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


Big Picture Notes

• Temple of Elemental Evil
  
  • The Temple of Elemental Evil improvements are ready to try on Lamannia! It now supports Legendary levels, and has been divided into multiple quests, among other changes. For full details of what has changed about Temple please visit the Lamannia 3 Temple of Elemental Evil Thread
  • The rewards for Temple of Elemental evil have been updated.LAMANNIA NOTE:You may visit the Test Dojo and speak with The Loot Guy to view the Temple's new treasure directly. (Updated Thread)
  
  
• Archetypes - (Overview thread)
  
  • Dark Apostate Preview 3[/COLOR] (Updated Thread)
  • Sacred Fist Preview 3[/COLOR] (Updated Thread)
  • Stormsinger Preview 3[/COLOR] (Updated 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. (Updated Thread)
  • 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 Note: Fixed a display issue where the TR cache would not display if the main tab didn't have any items in it even though other tabs still did.
  • Lamannia Note: Fixed an issue where it was not possible to remove the very last custom tab.
  • Lamannia Note: Character Bank upgrades 1 and 2 have been added back to the Lamannia Store and should now behave correctly. The "unlock" button on the Bank should now correctly appear/disappear when there is more Character Bank space available for your character to purchase in the DDO Store.
  • Lamannia Note: Character Bank Upgrade 3 has been added to the DDO Store on Lamannia.

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.
• monsters will no longer randomly gain stone prison on-hit effects due to your own gear
  
• Sonic blast is now properly single target (note: it will still continue to hit breakables in an AOE)

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)
    • Elemental Forms (Both Sorcerer and Druid)
  
  
• 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.
• Swords to Plowshares now grants Handwraps a +1 Morale bonus to Critical Threat Range

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.
• HP and SP tooltips on the character sheet now do math correctly

[Caarb]

[COLOR=#ff0000]Sonic blast is now properly single target (note: it will still continue to hit breakables in an AOE)

Wow this is a horrible change. You are are removing fun for the sake of balance. If anything you should be offering other casters low level aoe spells than removing the only good one.

[merridyan]

Wow this is a horrible change. You are are removing fun for the sake of balance. If anything you should be offering other casters low level aoe spells than removing the only good one.

The spell was overpowered (but there is no good bard ranged AoE to replace it though), so this is understandable. Plus it now matches the actual description of the spell. Will make leveling a bard a lot slower early on.

[mikarddo]

The spell was overpowered, so this is understandable. Plus it now matches the actual description of the spell. Will make leveling a bard a bit slower early on.

Sorcs as well. It was the #1 low level sorc damage spell.

[droid327]

The spell was overpowered, so this is understandable. Plus it now matches the actual description of the spell. Will make leveling a bard a bit slower early on.

It really wasnt. Its the same damage as Burning Hands or Acid Spray, which are also AOE. The only difference is it scales to L8 (L10 for the SLA) instead of L5, and its a target-centered circular AOE instead of a cone.

And, unlike those spells, its actually supposed to stay relevant into Epics. It has a Master feat to boost it to CL20, and it has major bonuses in Fatesinger. The loss of AOE is going to affect Bards from 1-32. I dont think you can overstate the impact of this single line-item change snuck into the last preview...

I'd much rather it lose the CC effect than the AOE.

[merridyan]

snuck

Snuck? lol

[Zarick]

Snuck? lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=990BSql7bnk

This might help.

[cru121]

The spell was overpowered, so this is understandable. Plus it now matches the actual description of the spell. Will make leveling a bard a bit slower early on.

I'd very much prefer going back low damage and AoE. It will ruin bards because they don't have other spells to fall back to. Here's the full list of bard's DPS spells:
- level 1 - Sonic Blast
- level 2 - Sound Burst
- level 3 - none
- level 4 - Shout
- level 5 - none
- level 6 - Greater Shout

A grand total of 4 spells.

Another problem is that all the other spells are also dramatically more expensive (spell point cost). Bards have a tiny spell point bar.

This change also nerfs Fatesinger, with Sonic Blast probably no longer worth hotbarring.

The Holy Smite story is completely different, divines have a number of other spells.


TLDR: Return Sonic Blast to its low DPS AoE daze. Give us Sonic Bolt (1), Sonic Ball (3), Arcane Tempest (Sonic) (5). Give Greater Shout its proper damage dice. Move some spell points from Spellsinger tree as autogranted to all bards.

[merridyan]

I'd very much prefer going back low damage and AoE. It will ruin bards because they don't have other spells to fall back to. Here's the full list of bard's DPS spells:
- level 1 - Sonic Blast
- level 2 - Sound Burst
- level 3 - none
- level 4 - Shout
- level 5 - none
- level 6 - Greater Shout

A grand total of 4 spells.

Another problem is that all the other spells are also dramatically more expensive (spell point cost). Bards have a tiny spell point bar.

This change also nerfs Fatesinger, with Sonic Blast probably no longer worth hotbarring.

The Holy Smite story is completely different, divines have a number of other spells.


TLDR: Return Sonic Blast to its low DPS AoE daze. Give us Sonic Bolt (1), Sonic Ball (3), Arcane Tempest (Sonic) (5). Give Greater Shout its proper damage dice. Move some spell points from Spellsinger tree as autogranted to all bards.

I agree that bard spell DPS will now suck. I agree they need more spells, shout and sound bursts targeting is ****. But this still doesn't mean that sonic blast wasn't overpowered for spells of that level.

[Talnar00]

Not sure if this is a place to report this, or elsewhere, if elsewhere please inform me.

So I'm still getting the Isle of Dread sound crash, at least when fighting most of the dinosaurs. Note this also applies to Raptor like enemies outside of IoD, like the Raptors in many Sharn quests. Not getting a crash anymore from the ambient sounds, so that seems to be fixed for me at least. Crash does not happen when I check the "Disable Game Sounds" option in Audio options.

Most recent crash info:

Character: Shieldbert
Time: 12:49 PM PST
What were you doing: Fighting a Triceratops in the Isle of Dread Wilderness

Computer Info:

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
Sound Device: NVidia High Definition Audio (at least that is what my system tells me, unsure how to find a sound card make/model etc)

If you would like/need more info, please let me know.

[Caarb]

The spell was overpowered, so this is understandable. Plus it now matches the actual description of the spell. Will make leveling a bard a bit slower early on.

Even if I agreed that Sonic blast is too strong there is a number of ways it could have been nerfed. The devs chose the one that hurts gameplay the most which will result in making low levels more of chore than they need to be. Not having aoe feels really bad when levelling especially with modern dungeon design. They should be adding more aoe options (for melee as well) rather than taking away existing ones.

[jackatthekilns]

I realize that you (the Devs) have a reason for making the change to Sonic Blast. I hope you are seeing from the posts here that it is not being received very well. I have been playing a stormsinger on Lam for the last few hours and the change does in fact feel very bad. I think it would help us, the players, to know as fully as possible what the end goal of this change is so that our feedback is as relevant as possible.

IN the absence of that information, please understand that this change feels very very bad. I was so excited to play Stormsinger and this change pulls the rug out of that. If sonic blast needs to be changed, this should not be the change. Please find a better way to fix this or leave it alone. Please. You put these changes on Lamania and you say you want us to give feedback. My feedback is that this is too much. If you are thinking "We'll do this now and tweak in the future" figure out what you want to tweak and wait until you can make the full change. Bard is one of the most fun classes to play and this will undercut that fun significantly.

[QuantumFX]

Did you guys fix the TR cache bug? Or do we get to look forward to a hotfix and a patch to resolve the inevitable issues when it goes live?

[HumbleFriar]

QuantumFX, which TR cache bug are you referencing? We do have a thread specific for bank testing for this Lamannia 3 build. I would ask that any feedback be posted there after testing.

Thanks!

[GoldyGopher]

QuantumFX, which TR cache bug are you referencing? We do have a thread specific for bank testing for this Lamannia 3 build. I would ask that any feedback be posted there after testing.

Thanks!

As a new developer and poster you are required to explain why or why not Oatmeal Raisin Cookies are the best kind of cookies. No talking to steelstar until after you post.

[QuantumFX]

QuantumFX, which TR cache bug are you referencing? We do have a thread specific for bank testing for this Lamannia 3 build. I would ask that any feedback be posted there after testing.

Thanks!

It was fixed!

[VinoeWhines]

Are they going to look at adjusting the Epic Destiny Trees in any of these updates in groups or one by one, to fix the things that were not able to get fixed on release?

[Karthunk]

Sonic blast is now properly single target (note: it will still continue to hit breakables in an AOE)

Properly? For real guys, can you not do this? This is going to make lvling a bard absolutely dreadful.

[Evendor]

Any plans to fix greater shout so it can actually be saved against? (For both players and mobs).

[Question2005]

Sonic blast is now properly single target (note: it will still continue to hit breakables in an AOE)

I strongly advise the devs to do some indepth testing on how this affects low level casters before making any changes like this. The main reason why arcane casters are able to level effectively at low levels is due to sonic blast having an AOE, without any effective AOE spells, they simply do not have the SP to clear low level quests effectively.

A simple solution would be to nerf the damage to 1d6+1 and give it a max caster level of 5, but keep the standard AOE.

Acid spray and burning hands should also be given standard conal AOE (same as cone of cold for example). This would give arcane casters 3 decent AOE spells for low level quests. Their AOE is currently too small to be effective.

Shocking grasp also needs to be buffed, shocking bolt has more range, more damage and a higher max caster level, effectively rendering it obsolete.

Once again, please test big gameplay changes like this before making it go live, removing the AOE from sonic blast would make it extremely hard for arcane casters to clear low level quests on elite/r1, especially if they do not have access to stat tomes.

Another problem with nerfing sonic blast is that there are very limited options for AOE in level 2 spells. There are no lightning, sonic or acid AOE spells in level 2, so any casters specializing in those will be stuck using level 1 spells for a long time, and being unable to scale their damage properly runs the risk of running out of SP when trying to solo quests. Players currently use sonic blast because there are no decent alternatives before they can access level 3 and level 4 spells.

Seriously, just try soloing a few harbor quests on r1 without AOE sonic blast, you will realise quickly why this is a bad idea.