U51 Early Preview: Main Thread

[Cocomajobo]

Disclaimer

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

Hello, all! A special early preview of Update 51 is open! It is expected to remain open until sometime in the late afternoon (Eastern) of Thursday June 17th.

There will be a dev event on Wednesday June 16th from 8-10 PM Eastern where members of the DDO team will be available to collect feedback and answer questions in real time on Lamannia.

To be clear, you read that correctly, this is an early preview of Update 51. This is happening before we've even hosted a preview for Update 50 because of how large the Epic Destiny system is and how important it is that we take the time needed to iterate on it to get it right. We are months away from the Epic Destiny revamp being ready to go to the live servers (keep that in mind and especially make sure to take a look at the known issues list in the basic framework thread). For clarity, this is very likely to be the only Epic Destiny revamp preview until after the release of Update 50 (which we will begin previewing in the coming few weeks).

We would like to use this preview to gather impressions from the community at large and go through them before we are encroaching on the deadline for U51. We expect to be referring back to these threads over the next month plus while the U50 development cycle finishes up. Due to the nature of the U50 schedule, after this preview concludes we are likely to go a bit quiet on the Epic Destiny revamp for a while as we focus on finishing up U50. Once U50 is live, however, we will be holding atleast a couple more previews for the Epic Destiny revamp that will both showcase the Destinies that did not make it into this early preview and provide insight into how the system is shaping up after the first preview.

This preview contains one real feature: An early look at parts of the Epic Destiny Revamp.

The list of official feedback threads, in the order that I HIGHLY recommend reading them in is as follows:

1. Epic Destiny Revamp Core Framework
2. Epic Destiny Revamp Design Paradigm
3. Epic Feats, Destiny Feats, and Legendary Feats Changes
4. Individual Epic Destiny Tree threads (NOTE: Only 7 of the 12 Destinies are available in this early preview)
   
   • Fury of the Wild
   • Primal Avatar
   • Shiradi Champion
   • Legendary Dreadnought
   • Shadowdancer
   • Grandmaster of Flowers
   • Divine Crusader
5. And finally: U50 Changes Present in this Preview
6. In Progress Half Elf Cosmetic Revamp

Again, those posts are ordered in the recommended reading order to best understand what's planned to change and why. Please do let us know what you think!