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2012 Patch Notes

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Archived patch notes from 2012.

Patch Notes - 12/04/201

We now have customizable in-game chat channels, a long requested feature. For more information, see this thread

- Jumbers

Patch Notes - 11/13/2012

  • Halloween is OVER. If you didn't manage to finish the quest, there's always next year!
  • For all of you who use dyes and don't want to wait for them to wear off normally, /cm purgedye is my gift to you.
  • Force eating/drinking food has changed a bit. You can force eat/drink 1 time for the nutritional value, but subsequent forced food/drink won't satisfy you until some time passes.
  • Monk kick damage scales differently now.
- Jumbers

Patch Notes - 10/16/2012

  • Since our client doesn't support buff timers in the UI, the /char command will now show buff timers for all of your buffs!!! Everybody celebrate!!!
  • The Zealot's Strike line of spells has been tweaked a bit to make the spells more usable.
  • The Bard tome line Quiet Reflection now does what it says, whereas previously it did nothing.
- Jumbers

Patch Notes -10/15/2012

Bonus Exp Period!

The second stage of the account drive has started - the bonus exp stage! There is now a global experience modifier of 212% throughout the game. This staggeringly high number was reached completely through the efforts of the playerbase in promoting the server.
So enjoy! You have earned it. And if you are new - Welcome!
The bonus ends in the morning of 10/22/12.
- Woldaff

Patch Notes - 10/09/2012

  • Augs are once again removable from items. (Sorry about that!)
  • The warrior AA, Resilience, now displays a message to those nearby when it activates and deactivates.
- Jumbers

Patch Notes - 10/04/2012

HALLOWEEN - PATCH - ACCOUNT DRIVE!

The 2012 Account Drive has started!
Check out this thread for details including rewards for participating!
If you are new to the server - welcome! Be sure to post here to introduce yourself to our community.
Second - It's HALLOWEEN!
You know what that means! And if you don't, maybe strike up a conversation with a certain sleepless vagabond.
OTHER CHANGES:
  • Monk Combos? They start and end with a kick! Have fun exploring / discovering and report if anything feels weird or dumb. And if you are kicking for like 10,000 damage please let someone in charge know about it and don't just run around kicking dragons to death, okay?
  • Area Bonus Exp now affects tomes as it should have for the past 3 years yeehaw that's some good code fixing.
  • Zealot's Strike changed a little to make it not the only spell a Cleric needs to cast for most of his life, etc.
  • Account Drive Global EXP Bonus is in partial effect go get levels!
  • Bug reporting is now more effective (to us, the bug handlers). Please continue to /bug things that seem like bugs.
- Slaariel

Patch Notes - 09/20/2012

Quick and classic patch to the patch with exciting bonuses thrown in the mix:

Pristine Weapons should work again as well as glove procs.
Several items adjusted in accordance with principles outlined in this thread. Most of the items were adjusted... upward?
A bag that sold for 157kpp and then 4kpp is now refundable (petition for a refund if you desire).
The cap on SPELL WARD has been raised to 20 and many many items now have a chunk of spell ward on them. Remember this item attribute only works for int/wis casters so don't give it all to your guild's tank! (Or do!)
Lastly, augments with the [LORE] tag will now properly prevent you from looting them if you already have one augged into a piece of gear. If you have more than one in your gear or inventory, please delete the extras.
Enjoy your day!
- Slaariel

Patch Notes - 09/18/2012

Items:

Back-end code for handling item stats was given a major overhaul this patch. If all went well, you shouldn't notice any difference at all. However, if you do see anything clearly wrong with any of your items, whether in their stats or behavior, please report it.

Rogues:

Rogues were given two small additions in this patch.
  • Sneak Attack: when a rogue has no aggro, sneaks up on a target, and opens with a Backstab, that Backstab is flagged as a Sneak Attack. Sneak Attacks cannot miss, deal 25% bonus damage, give a nifty message, and generate only 1 point of aggro.
  • Openings: an experimental new system for rogues. When a rogue is in melee range of their target, they will automatically watch that target for "openings." When they see an opening, they will have 1 second to hit Backstab to take advantage of it. A Backstab during an opening cannot miss, and the rogue's non-Backstab melee attacks will gain a small accuracy bonus that grows with each opening so exploited on the same target, as the rogue gets used to the target's "rhythm."
Openings are caused by observable, and in some case deliberately-triggerable, events:
  • the target misses a kick or bash (exposure)
  • the target is hit by a bash (distraction)
  • the target is stunned (exposure)
  • the target begins casting a spell (exposure)
  • the target suddenly switches targets, i.e. someone steals aggro (distraction)
  • the target is hit with a big critical hit/spell (distraction); what counts as 'big' is semi-randomized and semi-adjusted based on the target's max HP
This system is highly experimental and so subject to change and balancing. This is basically an open testing period to see if such a system would be viable in practice.
- Zaela

Patch Notes - 09/11/2012

BOUNTY ITEMS:

  • Many prices have changed (most downward)
  • The number of bounties required to reach Rank 2 has gone up slightly
  • The number of bounties required to reach Rank 3 has gone down slightly
  • A couple items endured minor changes

MONSTER:

  • Many, many monsters are now the correct "type" (for instance: plant or animal or elemental).

ITEMS:

  • I changed mossy clockwork cane to be more interesting and less tier 3 ratio droppable at level 35.

OTHER STUFF:

  • So many things you cannot see.
- Slaariel

Patch Notes - 08/29/2012

Small patch with some fixes for us and some fixes for you hooray!

  • Elemental Embodiment now does what it says on the tin and not some made-up fairy math not explainable by mortals.
  • Spell Ward now does %-reduction as explained on the wiki but no longer figures in mana ratio and also does not work if you are the primary target of the mob (that is to say, it is meant for fending off AEs).
  • Clockwork (the mob) should no longer crash the zone upon spawning.
- Slaariel

Patch Notes - 08/22/2012

Archery procs change

Archery proc buffs (such as the Quiver line of ranger spells) now have their chance to proc scaled to the delay of the bow, whereas previously the proc was a flat chance regardless of delay.
This will allow slower bows to perform similarly to faster bows. Also, this chance is now affected by the Emberflow proc rate increase tome.
- Jumbers

Patch Notes - 07/18/2012

Hardcore Character Mode

New characters (LEVEL 1 ONLY) now have the ability to opt in to the most manly available challenge: Hardcore Mode: Where Your Next Death Is Also Your Last.
Make a new character and get to a Priest of War before you hit level 2 and you, too, can learn to fear in-game death again.
See this cool thread for details.
- Slaariel

Patch Notes - 06/12/2012

Blessed Zones:

  • In an effort to make some less traveled zones more appealing, Jayla has blessed certain zones, granting additional experience while it remains blessed.
  • Blessed zones will be granted a flat +50% experience bonus while active and will regularly changed for variety.

Necro Runic 1 change:

  • The Necro Runic 1 has been changed to a new pet with advanced casting AI, details of which can be found here

The Overgrowth: New zone located off of Underhill with content ranging from level 65 to tier 13.

- Jumbers

Patch Notes - 05/25/2012

Arena Game

There shall be an Arena Game this Sunday (the 27th of May, 2012) starting at 2:30 PST. I shall open the gates to the Plane of War at ~2ish PST. We may have to close attendance at some point but we are hoping that the new powerful server will be able to handle a large single zone load. We shall see!
Hope to see everyone there.
- Woldaff

Patch Notes - 05/14/2012

Item Reimbursement Policy

We have decided to begin reimbursing people for items lost due to accidental deletion. This is partially in response to player request and partially because we now have better ways for GMs to be able to check when an item has been accidentally deleted.
There will be no retroactive reimburses. This policy will go into effect on Sunday, May 20th, 2012 (coinciding with a patch to put the new logs in place). This will also allow the new GM-Trainees that are being hired on to learn the ropes before petitions start coming in. The item in question will have to be deleted after that time to be eligible for the new policy! So do not go deleting items all willy nilly.
We will also be logging all reimbursements. We reserve the right to cut off reimbursements to a character who constantly deletes his or her own items.
- Woldaff

Patch Notes - 04/29/2012

Dead Bug Storage

  • Trade bug defeated, if you don't know what this was, you're lucky!
  • Rangers rejoice, the tracking Sort By Distance filter works now. (Finally)
  • Some measures have been taken to try to get rid of the tell bug once and for all.
  • Death loops from war events will no longer occur. The Seekers of Erimal are doing their job properly now evacuating people trapped in war zones.

New stuff

  • /random and loot messages are now zone-wide for members of the same group and/or raid.
  • Those same messages are also zone-wide for everybody in war zones to make it easier for war raids to manage loot.
  • We have a BUNCH of new fame rewards, check out /cm pointbuy list
- Jumbers

Patch Notes - 03/26/2012

New Server - Io

We are now fully migrated to our new zone server Io. If you are having any trouble getting into the game be sure to run the game through the patcher!
Enjoy the new server! There should be much less lag and things should feel much smoother.
- Woldaff

Patch Notes - 03/20/2012

Downtime: March 20th, 2012

Tonight SoD will be down while we retire our two current zoneservers (Callisto and Europa) and bring online one much more powerful superserver (Io). This should reduce lag in a pretty drastic way.
We expect the downtime to start around 8-9 EST and last between 1 and 3 hours.
Feel free to come hang out with us while the server is down in the IRC channel! If you do not have an IRC client you can use the web version here.
- Woldaff

Patch Notes - 03/14/2012

A Few Things

We decided to try out a new style of interaction between damaging spells and resistances this patch. The short version is that they'll never be fully resisted any more; instead they will be scaled. For example, if your Ice Comet spell would have had a 10% chance to be resisted by your target, it will now instead land every time you cast it, but only do 90% damage. More detailed info and discussion can be found here.
Other miscellaneous changes:
  • Rogue Backstab now gains bonus damage to correct for the fact the client caps the reuse of the button at 100% haste. If you have less than 100% haste Backstab will be no different, but if you have more it will deal extra damage in proportion to it.
  • Raid-level Necromancer spells have been rebalanced somewhat. Additionally, the Insidious Infection Necromancer tome has been changed to Insidious Elements, which allows their Damage over Time spells to pierce their target's resistances to an increasing degree as more different elemental types of DoTs are piled on. See here for slightly more detail.
  • Enchanter's Somatic Bond and Avatar of Destruction spells have had their illusion portions changed. Instead of turning into Invisible Men or Giants or Imps, they now cause the target to turn into whatever the caster currently is, basically a reverse Shapeshift. This will allow the Enchanter to turn them into whatever they want with these spells, mostly just for fun.
  • Made a fairly significant change to standard Charm spells: when an Enchanter dies while in control of a Charm pet, or within a minute or so of their pet going loose, their pet will give an emote, become inactive and unaggroable for around 30 seconds, and will attempt to walk back to their spawn point, if applicable. In other words, they won't go on a rampage against the Enchanter's remaining group or raid members, either immediately or, hopefully, at all. The idea here is to make long-duration Charm more palatable to an Enchanter's allies, particularly on difficult content or on raids. There will still be risk, of course--it will just primarily be to the Enchanter, rather than the Enchanter and everyone with them. Of course, this won't prevent you from trying to save an Enchanter when their pet goes loose, but if you do you will obviously need to deal with their pet one way or another.
  • Made it so magic resist debuffs like Tashania aren't removed along with magic resist buffs like Shiritri's Ward and Psalm of the Four whenever a Charm spell fades.
- Zaela

Patch Notes - 03/07/2012

Spells:

  • The Druid spell Runic: Cataclysm has had its AE range reduced to make it less likely to hit the druid. The direct damage portion of the spell has also gotten a small increase.
  • The Druid spell Circle of Vitality has had its cast time reduced slightly.

Enchanter Changes:

  • The Enchanter spells "Gift of the Giantkin" and "Aura of Destruction" have been changed. The efficacy of both spells replacements remain the same (if not slightly higher) as the previous incarnations yet the way they work is much different.
  • "Gift of the Giantkin" is now "Somatic Bond". Somatic Bond does the *exact* same damage increase as Gift of the Giantkin did except now the damage is channeled through the Enchanter. In other words, the Enchanter becomes a conduit and mirrors part of the damage caused by the castee onto the target of the castee as his or her own melee damage. It should be noted that the damage the Enchanter is now mirroring is aggro free and is equal to the damage that Gift of the Giantkin used to add to the buffed melee.
  • "Aura of Destruction" is now "Avatar of Destruction". Avatar of Destruction binds the Enchanter's mind to his or her target's and allows the Enchanter to mimic mitigated versions of all spells the buffed character casts. These mimicked spells are mana free for the Enchanter, utilize all of the Enchanters focus effects and spell modifiers, and do not interrupt the Enchanters normal casting in any way. We have balanced this spell to do near the same damage as the old AoD and will continue to tweak it as needed to attain that goal.
  • The Tome "True Giant" has been renamed to "Cascading Bond". It does exactly the same thing as "True Giant". We understand the name is not near as cool in any way but "True Giant" stopped making sense the moment "Gift of the Giantkin" went away.

The overall purpose of these changes is two-fold: first, to make the active DPS contribution from Enchanters much easier to gauge; second, and reciprocally, to make non-Enchanter DPS much clearer and easier to compare by removing the uneven muddling on their numbers from Giantkin and Aura of Destruction.

- Woldaff

Patch Notes - 03/04/2012

Spells:

  • The Runic pets for both Beastlords and Mages have had their HP reduced significantly. There was a bug in how HP was calculated for pets with levels above 58 that made them have around 4-5x of their previous incarnations.
  • The Druid runic spell Cataclysm has been changed from a PBAE reciprocal to a Targetted AE one. The spell is supposed to stack its 800 damage component per mob casted on up to 3 while it was allowing it up to 6. This also means the druid can cast the spell at range while still doing damage.
  • The Cleric runic spell Celestial Well no longer overwrites the Beastlord spell Spiritual Bliss. The cast time on Celestial Well has also been cut in half.

Tomes:

  • The Necromancer tome "Insidious Decay" has been fixed to prevent a chain reapplication of area effect diseases.
  • The Necromancer tome Strands of Life has been changed so that the amount of mana/hp given to the group of the necromancer per kill scales with the level and power of the mob killed.
  • The Wizard tome Forbidden Harvest no longer activates on green or low blue npcs.
  • The Cleric tome Tool of the Divine is no longer activated by complete heals.

Items:

  • Numerous items with very high Double Attack and Duel Wield modifiers that were overlooked when changed the modifier effect of each have been adjusted downward.

Ranger Birds:

  • Rangers have received a new line of pet spells - The Rangefinders. Rangefinders are not like other pets in that they do not attack the mob in a traditional sense. Instead, whatever mob the Rangefinder is on increases all ranged accuracy and damage against it while slightly lowering the mobs armor class. This allows rangers to spot a single target with their rangefinder to increase their ranged DPS against it.
  • Spells in the line have been added to levels 30, 50, 63 and as the second Ranger Runic Spell. We hope that this should put single target ranger DPS a bit closer to the other pure melees.
- Woldaff

Patch Notes - 02/28/2012

More neat changes!

  • Spells have a small variance in numbers (purely cosmetic, no real change in dps or what-have-you).
  • Loading a spellset no longer requires you to de-mem all your spells first.
  • Worn Damage Shields now function properly.
  • Harmony is now AE and other similar spells have better functionality.
  • You can use /target on invis players if you have a see invis spell.
  • More usability changes in the same vein.
  • Several tradeskill recipes fixed.

HOORAY!

- Slaariel

Patch Notes - 02/21/2012

Instrumentality

Bards can now attack with a weapon in their Primary hand while holding a true Instrument in their Secondary hand, rather than having the Instrument take up both slots.
Some adjustments or additions may follow in the future, but for now try it out and report any bugs etc!
- Zaela

Patch Notes - 02/10/2012

Pets

Few pet-related changes as of a few days ago:
  • Changed how pets benefit from equipping weapons. In the past a weapon's DMG could replace a pet's maximum per-hit damage, but only if the weapon DMG was higher than the pet's natural damage after Focus Effects and whatnot. At higher levels, this basically meant that pets only benefited from procs and stats on weapons. Now, in the new system, a pet's per-hit melee damage will ALWAYS benefit from having a weapon equipped, gaining a bonus to their final maximum damage based on the weapon's ratio. Higher weapon damage/delay ratios give higher damage bonuses. So a pet will always be better off even with a no stats, no proc, low damage rusty dagger than with no weapon at all, no matter what level they are.
  • Changed pet follow behavior somewhat; they now follow their owner on a leash rather than automatically taking a position to the south-west of their owner. Thanks to Dev-Jumbers for this one.
  • Added two new level 65 pet procs for Beastlords: Spirit of Tearing and Spirit of Soothing. Tearing is a new damaging proc which lowers the target's AC and resistances for a short time, providing a small boost to the offense of the Beastlord and his allies. Soothing grants a small group heal proc, benefiting from the Beastlord's Focus Effects. But only one of these procs can be run at a time, so you'll have to decide which is best for your situation!
- Zaela

Patch Notes - 02/09/2012

Downtime

Late last night our hosting service experienced some major difficulties and the Shards of Dalaya webpage, forums, IRC and login were taken offline.
Our host has reestablished connection and we are back in action. We apologize for any inconvenience.
We do not expect this to happen again anytime soon but for future reference if the patcher ever tells you that login is down you can still see if the game servers are up by clicking directly on "eqw.exe" in the patcher folder. Please only use this when login is down - you may experience problems in game otherwise.
- Woldaff

Patch Notes - 01/30/2012

A plethora of usability improvements and crash fixes courtesy of Devs Jumbers and Zae:

  • Added message to experience when a codex is full
  • Changed /random to be zone wide in war zones
  • Changed pet attack to cancel pet hold when commanded
  • Changed memblur modifier to -10% per level (as intended)
  • Suppressed buff fade messages on bard songs
  • Fixed autofire bug
  • Fixed several crashes - which ones you will never know!
  • Fixed fights where pets would become unresponsive
  • Other miscellaneous fixes
- Slaariel

Patch Notes - 01/18/2012

SOPA and PIPA

Although we are not participating in the widespread internet protest against PIPA and SOPA today directly I wanted to take a moment to make sure all our players have read about it and understand how aversely our game would be impacted by its passing.
If you would like to continue to see SoD being developed and supported I would ask that you contact your local representatives and ask them not to support SOPA or PIPA in their current states.
Read more here.
- Woldaff

Patch Notes - 01/17/2012

Autofire part 2

Autofire is now toggled with /cm autofire while the Ranged Attack button retains its original functionality, assuming you aren't autofiring.
Several little bug fixes and additions were made this patch thanks to our web dev as well!
- Zaela

Patch Notes - 01/10/2012

Quick patch includes the normal fixes and adds along with the addition of autofire range attack for rangers! Just target a mob and click range attack! Like auto-attack only from far away! NOTE: The targeting cone gets less forgiving the further away you are!

- Slaariel

Patch Notes - 01/06/2012

Flash Map Beta

After months of work on the part of GM-Nwaij the SoD flash map is ready to be released to the public. This version is still a bit rough but is very near to being ready to sit on the front page.
Please take a couple minutes and look the map over. We need both bug reports and also spelling/grammar/consistency problem reports on all the zone lore (as it was written by various volunteer players.)
You can find the MAP here.
You can find the BUG THREAD here.
- Woldaff