U57 Grip of the Hidden Hand - Preview 1 Overview

[Tolero]

Disclaimer

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

Preview 1 of Update 57: Grip of the Hidden Hand will be open today as of 1pm EDT on Wednesday, October 12th! It is expected to remain open into the afternoon (EDT) of Friday, October 14th.

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Update 57 contains a quest pack for levels 16/33, along with balance changes and bugfixes.

To access new content during the preview, speak to Lord Poincelot in the Test Dojo to be granted preview server specific DDO points and then "purchase" the content pack in the "New to DDO" category of the DDO Preview Store. You can then speak to The Questgiver nearby to be teleported directly into the quests available in this preview.

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

New Quests & Treasure

The first three quests of the new Adventure Pack are available for preview 1! Try them out and let us know what you think in their respective feedback threads:
Order in the Court
Growing Pains
The Hand and the Eyes

NOTE: If The Questgiver offers you treasure when you talk to him instead of sending you into a quest, then just accept the treasure and talk to him again.

The Loot Guy in the Test Dojo has been updated with treasure that will appear in the U57 Adventure Pack. Visit the Loot thread for feedback by clicking here.

Hit-Point Pass

Changes have been made to hitpoints, read the details in Developer Torc's thread here

Imbue System

Changes have been made to damage dealing in DDO, read the details in Developer Lynnabel's thread here

Bug Fixes

• Several Stances such as Power Attack and Combat Expertise no longer put all spells on cooldown for no reason
• The Path of Light feat is now properly awarded to Bladeforged (although the Lord of Blades will be very sad if you choose to forsake him)
• Force in Tandem from Feydark Illusionist now correctly lasts through death
• Primal Avatar's Spells are now appropriately leveled and therefore some of them work vs liches
• Certain XP elixirs now function more reliably and no longer have a min level of 20 erroneously
• Razorclaw Shifters using Smite Evil will use better animations
• Players will no longer see "an invalid item has been removed from your inventory" when receiving an auto-consume item like Astral Shards.
• Items can now be organized within the tabs of the Reincarnation Bank.
• Items can now be moved from the Reincarnation Bank to the Personal and Shared bank. If a bound to character item is moved to the shared bank, the transfer will fail and the item will be placed at the top of the Main tab of the Reincarnation Bank.
• A variety of typos and text errors have been corrected.

Gameplay Changes

• Wading through shallow water is now a bit faster when moving forward (about the speed it would be if you jump skipped)
• The spell long strider now makes you ignore the effects of shallow water.
• Scorpions will no longer burrow unless they are bosses or mini bosses and will only due so to close the distance (not do it in melee generally)
• Phase spiders will no longer phase as much when going toe to toe in melee
• Monsters will now cast Tactical Detonation on a longer cooldown

UI Changes

• Feats with skill requirements now display those requirements better in their tooltips
• Players will no longer be given a confirm dialog when looting an item that is bind on acquire when in a party with only henchmen.
• The Bank system's tab rename button has been updated and is now a button labeled "Rename".
• When closing a Bank panel other than the Shared Bank, remaining panels will remain active. When the Shared Bank is closed all other bank windows are closed. If the player does not have the Shared Bank enabled, the shared bank can be closed, but any other bank panel being closed, will close the rest.

[Dreppo]

The fully patched Lamannia DNDLauncher.exe is crashing with an unhandled exception every time I run it.

[Firebreed]

The fully patched Lamannia DNDLauncher.exe is crashing with an unhandled exception every time I run it.

Same here.

Edit: Has been resolved.

[rabidfox]

It would nice if I didn't error out (on an update file) every time I try to update/run the launcher.

[Lynnabel]

The fully patched Lamannia DNDLauncher.exe is crashing with an unhandled exception every time I run it.

We're looking at this right now.

[Xgya]

Not having to bunny hop through shallow water is a huge boon for sure.

I actually like the change to Longstrider! Some extra utility to a spell that quickly becomes lackluster is neat, if not amazing.

Any chance we can get the effect on an item in the future, like we already can Freedom of Movement?
Or maybe a Legendary-only affix that can grant both the Freedom and new Longstrider perk?

[Firebreed]

Bug Fixes

• Several Stances such as Power Attack and Combat Expertise no longer put all spells on cooldown for no reason
• The Path of Light feat is now properly awarded to Bladeforged (although the Lord of Blades will be very sad if you choose to forsake him)
• Force in Tandem from Feydark Illusionist now correctly lasts through death
• Primal Avatar's Spells are now appropriately leveled and therefore some of them work vs liches
• Certain XP elixirs now function more reliably and no longer have a min level of 20 erroneously
• Razorclaw Shifters using Smite Evil will use better animations
• Players will no longer see "an invalid item has been removed from your inventory" when receiving an auto-consume item like Astral Shards.
• Items can now be organized within the tabs of the Reincarnation Bank.
• Items can now be moved from the Reincarnation Bank to the Personal and Shared bank. If a bound to character item is moved to the shared bank, the transfer will fail and the item will be placed at the top of the Main tab of the Reincarnation Bank.
• A variety of typos and text errors have been corrected.

Gameplay Changes

• Wading through shallow water is now a bit faster when moving forward (about the speed it would be if you jump skipped)
• The spell long strider now makes you ignore the effects of shallow water.
• Scorpions will no longer burrow unless they are bosses or mini bosses and will only due so to close the distance (not do it in melee generally)
• Phase spiders will no longer phase as much when going toe to toe in melee
• Monsters will now cast Tactical Detonation on a longer cooldown

Great changes.

[TitusOvid]

Quite a workload. Some nice things. I wish you all the best for this Update.


Cheers,
Titus.

[Wizard1406]

That are some great fixes and QoL updates, thanks! No more bunny hopping through water, and forever waiting for phase spiders and scorps to appear.

Monsters will now cast Tactical Detonation on a longer cooldown

[/LIST]

That's great! Maybe take a look at some other overpowered monster spells too: cyclonic blast, divine wrath and horrid wilting.

[MaeveTuohy]

U57 already gold status for these updates alone:

Gameplay Changes

Wading through shallow water is now a bit faster when moving forward (about the speed it would be if you jump skipped)
The spell long strider now makes you ignore the effects of shallow water.
Scorpions will no longer burrow unless they are bosses or mini bosses and will only due so to close the distance (not do it in melee generally)
Phase spiders will no longer phase as much when going toe to toe in melee
Monsters will now cast Tactical Detonation on a longer cooldown

[LeoLionxxx]

Or maybe a Legendary-only affix that can grant both the Freedom and new Longstrider perk?

Ooh, that does sound nice!

[SpardaX]

Hey Lyn if you're reading this, I saw in a recent video that you were looking at lowering the costs of some stuff in Swashbuckler, costing 2 points per rank for 3 rank things, and I think you said you were going to look into it and consider lowering it to 1 point per rank. I was just wondering if that got ditched or not?

[rabidfox]

It feels like this update is making setups a bit generic in some regards. Hit points are being regressed to the mean with outliers being brought in. And everyone is getting imbues; which in-turn makes having toggles on certain stuff not feel so special or unique- it's just which damage type is your build's toggle, not if a build does or doesn't have one. Not having huge outliers with super high or low HP is probably good on the development side for not worrying about something being too strong or too squishy (when designing quests or raid fights) and the imbues being all inclusive with imbue dice being a system-wide design is likely easy to implement and add-to down the line, but it does feel a bit like things are being made a bit more generic at some level too (where an EK or AA is just the same as anybody else's build now having an imbue toggle too).

[Seph1roth5]

1: Shallow water: Just remove the movement penalty completely, since you have the technology. It's annoying and does nothing but slow the player down for no reason.

2: Loot confirmation. Please just add a setting to require confirmation for looting bound items, or NOT NEED TO CONFIRM AT ALL. There is so much bound **** that needs confirmation, and 99% of the time you just want to loot all. Maybe you want to be more careful in a raid or when helping someone hunt something specific (but then why are you hitting loot all anyways?). So if it were a setting you could just toggle that real quick while doing something like that.

[Sqrlmonger]

Disclaimer

Gameplay Changes

• Wading through shallow water is now a bit faster when moving forward (about the speed it would be if you jump skipped)
• The spell long strider now makes you ignore the effects of shallow water.
  
• Scorpions will no longer burrow unless they are bosses or mini bosses and will only due so to close the distance (not do it in melee generally)
• Phase spiders will no longer phase as much when going toe to toe in melee
• Monsters will now cast Tactical Detonation on a longer cooldown

So long overdue....but still some of the best changes ever made to the game. These behaviors were truly awful.


edit: While I'm thinking about it here is two extra credit annoyances that are AWFUL:

1) Mobs running to stand on top of you so they can be in melee, often resulting in them being behind you.
2) Kiting ranged mobs who are 5 feet in front of you while you run backwards and all of your bolts/arrows just vanish into the void.

[droid327]

We're looking at this right now.

I'm still crashing out at client_map_2.dat-36987 every time. That's the first dat file in the list, so I'm guessing its not the file itself but something procedural when the loader gets to that step....

[WarDestroyer]

> Items can now be organized within the tabs of the Reincarnation Bank.

Lovely, thanks.

[Cashiry]

We're looking at this right now.

So I downloaded the patch, got an error message while downloading the iterations.

Did a repair, got another error message while downloading the iterations.

Did a complete uninstall from computer for the lamania server. Redownloaded from the website. Still got an error message while downloading the iterations.

Completed downloading 19751 files.

The error was happening at "client_map_2.dat-36987" I'm not sure if this is accurate, because when i reload the program it disappears so quick....


I would love to give feedback on this update as my main is a tank build.. the hit point loss for tanks is currently a terrible idea just by reading it.. I need to test it out to verify how i feel about it and to give feedback.

[Itchybeard]

When I use the launcher, I get a popup in my browser which sends me here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-US/cp...?view=msvc-170

It has the following title: Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable latest supported downloads

The Launcher then says: Game Launcher Errors. Please note any specific errors below for troubleshooting or technical support. There is a huge white space and a continue button.

Any ideas?

[dkyle]

Bug Fixes

Any chance Legendary Brightbane Emerald could get fixed? It says it grants Insight bonuses, but it's actually Competence bonuses. This makes it overpowered for UMD, but vastly underpowered for everything else.