Maze Engine Preview Patch Notes: NW.62.20160613a.4

terramak

Cyan: New to NW.62.20160613a.4 (added after NW.62.20160613a.3)

Content and Environment
Elemental Evil

• Seeds for Everyone: Crabs in this quest no longer respawn.

Sword Coast Chronicle

• Benign Order of the Third Eye campaign: This campaign now shows a more accurate percentage of completion.
  
• Minor typos have been addressed.
  
• Various voice-over lines have been reviewed for consistency.

General

• Captain Dunmish no longer claims incorrect criteria to get to Icewind Dale.
  
• Epic Artifact Equipment: This quest has been temporarily removed in preparation for a later update.
  • This quest was just a tutorial, and was not required in order actually earn epic artifact equipment. No potential rewards are lost as a result of this quest being removed.
• Grazilaxx's dialog audio now more closely matches the text.
  
• Master of the Hunt: This Skirmish now properly scales players and enemies to level 64.
  
• Prophecy of Madness: The timer to defeat the boss no longer loops.
  
• Prophecy of Madness: Small Abyssal Tears now give 50% more progress toward Silver / Gold rewards when closed.
  
• Prophecy of Madness: In the variant where players defeat demons instead of close Abyssal Tears, weaker enemies now count for twice as much progress toward Silver / Gold rewards.
  
• Several visual improvements have been made to the environment in several maps.
  
• Throne of the Dwarven Gods (Skirmish): There is no longer crowd audio in the gameplay area.
  
• Throne of the Dwarven Gods (Quest): Pwent's dialog now properly matches his voice-over.

Future Events

• Challenge of the Gods: When in a party, Challenges now drop more consistently for all party members.
  
• Siege of Neverwinter: Medals of Heroism are now Bind on Pickup. The purchased versions now grant unbound packs that can be traded to other players, and these packs will give bound Medals when opened.
  
• Siege of Neverwinter: Send Aid to Neverwinter: The guard hiding behind an invisible wall has overcome their shyness and is now willing to interact with players.

Combat and Powers
Classes and Balance

• A potential case that could rarely cause certain powers not to slot, such as Divine powers for the Devoted Cleric and At-Will powers while blocking for Guardian Fighter, has been addressed.

Companions

• Helmite Paladin: The tooltip for Shield Bash now explains what it does, rather than the Helmite Seal tooltip displaying that information.

Mounts

• The Champion's Armored Bulette has hit the gym, and has now returned to its previous size.
  
• The Golden Lion mount now has armor during its spawn-in animation.

Items and Economy
General

• Castle Never now awards more Astral Diamonds on completion.
  
• Dagger of the Apocalypse: The cooldown of this artifact's power now properly reduces at higher ranks.
  
• Portable Altars now require Line of Sight to affect players.
  
• Quartermaster Enchantment: Refinement items dropped via this enchantment are now Bound to Account. This brings the enchantment in line with the Dragon Hoard enchantment.
  
• Vouchers obtained from Regal Stronghold Packs, found in the Firemane Lockbox, are now unbound. They may be freely traded and sold on the auction house.

Mounts

• Enchanted Courser: This horse no longer masquerades as a Nightmare in its flavor text.

Zen Market

• Class packs now properly state that they bind to the character who purchases them.

User Interface
Collections

• If there isn't a new Collection entry to snap to, it now opens to the most recent entry the player had selected in the same play session.

Guilds and Alliances

• If a player (or a player's guild) is removed from an Alliance, that player is now removed from the Alliance Stronghold map.
  
• Players can no longer be prevented from donating resources to their own guild's coffer.
  
• The "Send Invite" button for Alliances can no longer be pressed without a player name in the relevant field.
  
• When a player chooses "Later" on an Alliance invitation, that invitation no longer pops up every time that player moves to a different map.

Inventory

• Tooltips on Bonding Runestones no longer claim their powers are used in Insignia Slots.

Party

• The default loot threshold for Need / Greed is now Rare (Blue), increased from Uncommon (Green). The threshold can still be manually changed by the party leader.

Queues

• Declining queue popups no longer results in unpredictable queue behavior in future queue attempts.
  
• In PvP matches, while the player is waiting to respawn, they can now properly open the scoreboard, map, and other windows more than once.
  
• The Stronghold PvP queue will now fire more consistently when over 40 players are in the queue.

Sword Coast Chronicle

• A campaign's border art now properly changes when that campaign is complete.

Localization
General

• Several general fixes have been made to localized text in all supported languages.

Edits: 6/24 - Added PoM skirmish note in Content/Environment.
6/24 - Improved the Vouchers note to be less redundant.
6/27 - Added enemies to Master of the Hunt note. (That one was a misread on my part.)
6/28 - Added patch notes for .4 build.

hustin1

Excellent list, @terramak.

I don't expect you to be able to answer this on your own, but would you mind forwarding this question along? Is the Foundry being worked on or is it going to be removed?

ereeeec

Please fix Trans briartwine

sorce

Okay gang, let's talk about the abysmal rate the quartermasters now seem to drop. Currently the drop rate is significantly less per day compared to the Dragon Hoards. And now you want to also make the drops account bound?

This was helping your actual player base, it was allowing us to start fixing the outrageous prices. And now you've gone and enacted a change that makes zero sense.

@StrumSlinger - whoever is the person deciding things by picking notes out of a hat, needs to stop. The community has said what we want, when are you going to start listening?

gankdalf

@terramak Very important question.

Will bags from Quartermaster that you already have in your inventory today start dropping bound RP after the patch or not?

Can we still wait for the patch and x2 Enchant weekend or will we end up with bound RP from these bags?

urabask

confusedpoof said:

Okay gang, let's talk about the abysmal rate the quartermasters now seem to drop. Currently the drop rate is significantly less per day compared to the Dragon Hoards. And now you want to also make the drops account bound?



This was helping your actual player base, it was allowing us to start fixing the outrageous prices. And now you've gone and enacted a change that makes zero sense.



@StrumSlinger - whoever is the person deciding things by picking notes out of a hat, needs to stop. The community has said what we want, when are you going to start listening?

I'd really like to see them put a number on RP/per hour they'd find acceptable because it's really starting to feel like they're deliberately trying to slow player progression by making RP more difficult to acquire.

defiantone99 said:

What about the rest of Prophecy of Madness? It is impossible to get Triple Gold.

Starting to wonder if they even playtest this stuff at all. I mean I've been avoiding PoM since they "fixed" it but the I've never seen gold in the first phase even when we're killing monsters as fast as the come out of the portals.

terramak

Foundry: Still trying out some things. Made some progress on the publishing side, now investigating the search side. I still don't have an ETA though.
PoM: I actually missed part of the note, which I'll edit in shortly: Small Abyssal Tears are now worth 50% more toward higher ranks in the Prophecy of Madness skirmish. This should be a step toward Gold feasibility, if you get a chance to play it I'd love to see how things go with a skilled group of players.
Quartermaster's Enchantment: Existing bags will indeed start dropping BoA refinement once this change goes live. As far as comparing to Dragon's Hoard Enchantment goes, the expectation is that both drop similar RP values on average before slowing down. If that's not happening, or if it's great at 3xR12 but not so great at 1xR10 (for example), that's some data that can prompt further discussion.

Edit: Has anyone seen the Great Weapon Fighter Unstoppable issue (in which they cannot use Unstoppable even when the Determination meter is full) since last week's patch? That build has back-end fix to how certain powers work which could hypothetically have addressed the issue, but given our history with that bug, I'd like to confirm before giving the all-clear.

terramak

ereeeec7 said:

Please fix Trans briartwine

Could I please get a refresher on the symptoms / effects of this issue? I've missed the specifics on any major Transcendent Briartwine enchantment issues.

beckylunatic

terramak said:

Future Events

Siege of Neverwinter: Medals of Heroism are now Bind on Pickup. The purchased versions now grant unbound packs that can be traded to other players, and these packs will give bound Medals when opened.

What on earth is the point of this change as binding goes? BtA medals made managing event purchases much easier, because you could consolidate any singles from HEs (everything requires 2+). Add the packaging to make the Zen ones tradeable, but kindly keep the medals themselves BtA like they were.

bitt3rnightmar3

terramak said:

The default loot threshold for Need / Greed is now Rare (Blue), increased from Uncommon (Green). The threshold can still be manually changed by the party leader.

Thanks! Does this mean I don't have to roll on every green piece that someone wants to pick up? If so that is awesome.

melinden

Thank you very much for the update on the foundry. It is heartening news to hear you are working on it.

terramak

defiantone99 said:

Both variants of PoM are broken. In the other version the mobs do not spawn fast enough, just like the tears don't. A fix to the tear one is great though.

Thanks for calling that out, will verify that the "mobs spawn" variant gets tweaked too.

beckylunatic said:

terramak said:

Future Events

Siege of Neverwinter: Medals of Heroism are now Bind on Pickup. The purchased versions now grant unbound packs that can be traded to other players, and these packs will give bound Medals when opened.

What on earth is the point of this change as binding goes? BtA medals made managing event purchases much easier, because you could consolidate any singles from HEs (everything requires 2+). Add the packaging to make the Zen ones tradeable, but kindly keep the medals themselves BtA like they were.

Making this one BoP brings it in line with other similar event currencies, so if there's another issue that makes this change more frustrating than other event currencies being BoP, I'd like to weigh the potential avenues toward improving the experience. For example:

• Is it frustrating to have a single Medal at the end of the event, since there's nothing to spend it on?
  
• Does it take a prohibitive (or impossible) amount of gameplay to earn the event rewards on a single character?

bitt3rnightmar3 said:

terramak said:

The default loot threshold for Need / Greed is now Rare (Blue), increased from Uncommon (Green). The threshold can still be manually changed by the party leader.

Thanks! Does this mean I don't have to roll on every green piece that someone wants to pick up? If so that is awesome.

That's the intent, yup!

melinden said:

Thank you very much for the update on the foundry. It is heartening news to hear you are working on it.

And thanks for your (and the rest of the community's) incredible patience on the issue.



Edit: Wording improvement in Medal of Heroism response.

scathias

terramak said:

Making this one BoP brings it in line with other similar event currencies, so if there's another issue that makes this change more frustrating than other event currencies being BoP, I'd like to weigh the potential avenues toward improving the experience. For example:

• Is it frustrating to have a single Medal at the end of the event, since there's nothing to spend it on?
  
• Does it take a prohibitive (or impossible) amount of gameplay to earn the event rewards on a single character?

Other event currencies (like favors of Sune) are available via a daily quest and as such you can get a fair number of them on one alt without a lot of trouble. In addition Favors of Sune (and most other event currencies) are placed in your currency bag which eliminates them as an issue for inventory management.

The current way to earn Medals of Heroism (MoH) is getting an exceedingly rare drop from HEs, or building them out of Defense supplies which also very rarely drop or you can craft defense supplies with rather expensive crafting demands (50 alters at a time? 50 injury kits? it is nuts) or this year you could run alts though the SH quest to get 5 supplies per alt, mail them to your main to trade in so the main could buy what they wanted.

In short, yes, it takes a ton of gameplay to get MoH for even 1 character. So when you were on an alt and were lucky enough to get a MoH drop you could send it to your main so they would be 1 step closer to getting a box that probably wouldn't drop the epic pet. Making them BoP now will just make things very frustrating as it will lock up an inventory space on a alt, and if you get enough MoH on the alt to buy something, many of those rewards were BoP as well, which is also really frustrating since it is an alt, you probably want to have the good things on your main, and then alts get left overs.

Default behavior for most event currencies should be BoA unless they are very plentiful. Right now MoH and defense supplies are not

beckylunatic

Scathias wrote it up very well. I'll add that the Medals being an inventory item rather than an actual currency indicated that the ability to move them around your account was by design. Binding them to character means that if you can't spend one in a given year, you're stuck with it taking up a bag slot. I guess you could discard it, but I think you can see how that's not going to make us any happier either.

The writs and cult insignia in Siege are both quite easy to get anything you want with them, because they're reliably obtained from a daily and from running HEs. Medals? Good luck with that. They're hard/costly to get and the "best" reward you can buy with them is an exercise in cruddy RNG anyway.

On the subject of event currencies, please for gawd's sake update the Ancient Curio somehow. And put the Commemorative Figurine on the global reset time, not personal cooldowns. Personal cooldowns are bad. We hates them. We hates needing a spreadsheet to track when we opened a box on this character or that one, or not being able to do a thing on Saturday morning when we last did it Friday evening, when this is extremely representative of how people use their leisure time. We don't play every 24 hours like clockwork.

scathias

Yep, the 20h cooldown on things is bad. And it is bad every time it shows up in the game. You removed it from invoking and that was great, it got added to influence at the start of mod 7 and that was terrible, so you removed it there as well. It doesn't need to keep showing up as there is no place in the game for 20h cooldowns (campaigns tasks are excluded from this even though those are just annoying, time wasting things as well).

tinh0304

terramak said:

Edit: Has anyone seen the Great Weapon Fighter Unstoppable issue (in which they cannot use Unstoppable even when the Determination meter is full) since last week's patch? That build has back-end fix to how certain powers work which could hypothetically have addressed the issue, but given our history with that bug, I'd like to confirm before giving the all-clear.

Still getting this bug at least once every dungeon run today

scathias

terramak said:

Quartermaster's Enchantment: Existing bags will indeed start dropping BoA refinement once this change goes live. As far as comparing to Dragon's Hoard Enchantment goes, the expectation is that both drop similar RP values on average before slowing down. If that's not happening, or if it's great at 3xR12 but not so great at 1xR10 (for example), that's some data that can prompt further discussion.

Would it be possible to shed some light on why the DHEs and now Quartermasters give such low RP values? The RP required for a character is incredibly high, and yet every time you guys release a new way for players to get themselves RP it is almost always nerfed soon after. If you want to prevent bots from taking advantage of these items you simply need to make the drops BoA from the start. That way each player still has to farm RP for themselves, but it is no longer an exercise in watching your items tick up by .01% after farming for 12 hours (except you can't since quartermasters and DHEs quit working after like 2h (probably being generous here).

Regular double RP events are nice things, but you have seen the many many threads complaining about bags being completely filled with RP and not daring to spend it until a 2x RP event because it is such a precious commodity. The fact that there are so many varieties of RP just compounds the problem. BoP and BoA and BoE items, and then white, green, blue and purple versions of everything. There are over 38 different items in the game (ignoring enchants and runestones) that can be used for refining different things. And every single one of them comes in a BoE, BoA and BoP version. So 120 possible different things. I can totally see the value in having BoA versions, this helps to stop bots, BoA is just fine, it makes things managable. But BoP RP is foolish. Any RP that is BoP can be made BoA with absolutely no game breaking ramifications that I can think of. Now there would be just 80 different items but at least you could move those around.

scathias

And since it was pointed out, thank you for a number of very good fixes that have sorely been needed. They are very much appreciated

lwedar

nice patch. First, thanks so much for the bulette fix. Been waiting on this forever

take another look at the quartermaster drop rate. it is way less than dragon's hoard. rank9/10s

It would be super helpful if you could release actual information on those. All we ever got was they should continuing dropping for the duration of average play. If it is only suppose to drop a set amount just tell us so we can decide what to equip.

kreatyve

@terramak Had that issue with Unstoppable come up while fighting dragons today. It didn't seem to be happening as often as it used to, but it is still happening.

Can someone change the tooltip on the insignia to remove the references to them being upgradable? The "Double Click to improve"? Would appreciate that, as it's confusing and I really wish we could improve them, but it's not currently possible.

beckylunatic

scathias said:

(campaigns tasks are excluded from this even though those are just annoying, time wasting things as well).

I can deal with it on the campaign tasks because you can actually see them. You know exactly how long it has to run and when you can start it again.

scathias said:

And since it was pointed out, thank you for a number of very good fixes that have sorely been needed. They are very much appreciated

Yes, we do appreciate the work.

guarrrrrrrd

@terramak has ever bronzewood enchantment will be fixed? The Pure and Transcendent versions not giving their bonuses, they work same as Perfect.

adinosii

Some good fixes in there...appreciated...but I agree with a comment above that BoP refinement stones and such are not needed or wanted. Yes, they may increase bag sales, but they create a lot of frustration - and making them BtA instead would probably be a good idea in the long run.

On a different subject...can you please look into the "Demon prince of being dead" achievement? As it is, it is extremely unfair to support classes. As a buff/debuff DC I feel I contribute my share to every successful CN run by doubling the damage of the DPSers but I never get credit towards this achievement as I just don't do enough damage myself. Not fair...not fun.

imperiousshini

Hello , @terramak
Could you make it so that when a task in one of the campaigns is completed the window of it will get a gold glow?

So if you finish one of the tasks in Tyranny of Dragons the Tyranny of Dragons icon in campaign window will glow.
If you finished making a key in the Underdark campaign that would get a glow as well.. Or when war effort in Sharandar is completed Sharandar icon in the campaign window could glow as well.

That'd be the more helping than a general glow in the campaign button in the tray.

Thank you very much for all the work you are doing. Now I can start playing POM again xD

archangelzorak01

@terramak, @strumslinger

First I just want to say that nerfing the Quartermaster enchants (even more) just as a 2x Enchants event is starting is pretty damn insulting.

Second since this nonsense is going to be acct bound now, why not let me get more than 20 bags a day? As it is right now I get 8-12 bags at the normal rate then another 8-12 bags trickles in over the course of a few hours.

When the QM's were released they were pretty nice, you got rewarded based on how much time you invested in farming mobs. If I wanted to farm for 30 minutes, I'd get 30 minutes worth of RP. If I wanted to farm for 8 hours straight, I got 8 hours straight worth of RP. Now, since your company is unable to police its own game to prevent bots, no matter how long I play I'm being given 30 minutes worth of RP.

By the way Strum, you remember that mail I sent you where I showed that 20% of all Stronghold instances were comprised entirely of bot guilds? Yea... thats still a thing.