Hello, my wife is under the weather, meaning she has left for her sister's house during this Spring weather. She asked me to take a look at Preview and put together a visual reference guide for those not on Preview. A lot of you are under the assumption that the rules will suddenly change between now and the 23rd of April. I assure you they will not, also there are still a lot of bugs and visuals that need work before the 23rd. I honestly don't see how this will ship out on release without some major issues. Without further ado, I present my guide;
What to Know About Mod 16 on Day One
You will get online and they will basically reset or clear your character. While it sounds like you hit the jackpot, they are just pulling stuff off you and placing it in your inventory. This brings me to my first point.
Clean out your inventory before Mod 16 goes live.If you have a lot of items on your companions they get stuffed into inventory. This can quickly fill you bags with 3 items and 3 runestones per companion. There doesn't appear to be any idle companion slots either. Assuming you own 10 fully loaded companions, you will end up getting 60 slots full of junk that was on them. They can no longer wear common level 70 adventure items, be sure to buy some replacement companion only gear but you will only need 1 set as they share the 3 items now.
Head over to the Antique Scholar, It's a quest!Talking to the store allows you to exchange the
now worthless junk you have for new items at the same rank. Here you will want to inspect all the panes to make certain you don't have old items to exchange.
These claim boxes hand out whatever you want to exchange the item for as long as they rank the same. Which means you could show up with Eclipse and exchange it for Barkshield. It will however be
bound to account. Also note the stats are not as robust as they once were before.
Rebuilding Your Character
Time now to roll up those sleeves and rework your new build. The developers removed rolling dice for random stats here so this is what every Cleric gets for the start up stats. You still get to spend 22 points at level 70 and 2 more points at level 80. Since this is blank, once you get here, you might want a
screen shot of your old stats for some comparison.
Check the skills on each path as the powers have changed. For this example, you will notice the Lance of Faith is now bound to the Arbiter (DPS) and not available for the healer.
I chose Arbiter, this is his Powers and Feats page. Both Powers and Feats are all on one page. Feats are reduced from 33 down to 10 to choose from, but you can only select five.
Here are ALL the boons. They have one page, and since I have no boon points, I cannot buy any of them.
You start at the bottom spending your first 10 points there, once you have 11 points you can continue to spend on the lower tier or move up. Master boons are at the top and you must only pick 1 to spend 3 points on while climbing up the page. The lowest (Tier 1) seems to be directed to boons dealing with cultists and gold gain. Tier 2 is demon focused, Tier 3 is Dinosaur, Tier 4 is Undead, etc.. which seems to follow some of the campaigns. However campaigns will no longer generate boons but boon points instead.
Companions have changed a little as I said above. You need 3 Bonding Runestones of any rank in the Runestone Slots on the left, your companions will now share them, you only need the 3 and no more. On the right is any 3 companion only items and they will share those too. The type of item no longer matters, such as rings, necklaces, icons, belts, are all the same now. Only the prefix (Heroic, Obedient, Sturdy) and the rank will matter. The enchantments will no longer fit into these items and you will need other runestones (empowered, profane, etc) to replace them.
You will notice powers below that area, some of mine are blank. This is because I don't own a utility companion. I also don't know what a
utility companion is at this point. Apparently they redefined many of the companions as offense, defense, and utility. I am making a personal note; Buy more companions.
The mount section hasn't changed but you need to come here and remove the vigor and leeching insignia. Exchange them or they just will not produce any stats for you.
That is what everyone will be doing on Day One. This guide should be 99% accurate for quite a few months. They cannot afford to be making vast changes this late in the game. There are only a dozen working days left between now and the launch date. The more characters you have, the more work there is ahead of you.
Good luck to everyone!
Comments
Other stuff you might want to add:
Companions change a lot - you might want to get a decent augment if you do not have one already. Also, if you can get cheap epic companions in the same groups as your summoned ones, it might be worth it for the bolster bonus.
You also want to save any green/blue insignia you have to be able to upgrade matching epic insignia.
As you can exchange Seals of the Brave for Seals of the Crown, you might want to have 1200 seals ready on the 23rd, exchange them and buy armor from from the Crown Seals vendor in Barovia.
Oh! @hotfrostworm, thank you for the information. Very helpful.
That being said, this is a huge help and thank you for taking the time to post!
I cannot wait for Module 16 to go LIVE now, because of all the fun I will have giving players directions to the Yawning Portal.
Fresh Player: Excuse me, how do I get to the Yawning Portal?
Reverend Mr. Black: You must perform the goat blood sacrifice at the Altar of Thoo.
Fresh Player: Uh ok, how?
Reverend Mr. Black: You will find a goat tied up in the basement of the Driftwood Tavern, kill it and drain the blood. The Altar is in back of Lord Neverember's House.
Fresh Player: Lord Neverember has a house?
Reverend Mr. Black: You will find the map to his house on the table behind Sergeant Knox.
Do you know how stupid hard it is to find this without help? I was looking in my mail, I was looking for it with Knox, and I went to several random NPCs.
At least that will give us something to do on Day One while we are working on our characters. Right @autumnwitch ? I only have the 4 characters, my wife has eight on her account.
PSN Zen AD Exchange - Forecasting Spreadsheet
My character Tsin'xing
wtf? Make stuff you own bind?
lol.. They already stole Millions AD from your gear now worthless and builds, now they want your stuff bound too.
Ahaha
> what's the letter for?
>
> It;s how you pick up the quest. I suspect they no longer have access to the VA who did Knox's voice and needed a way to get the quest in indirectly through him.
I'm fairly certain there have been at least 3 voice actors for Knox since Beta.
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@hotfrostworm, Neverember now gives a set of Companion gear as well, so no need to go buy some.
Obsidian Oath - Warlock
A whole lot of other Obsidian toons as well.
Vistani and Undermountain gear is entry-level gear, really only suitable for brand new lvl 70 players. Primal (IL 700) is better and requires only a tiny bit of farming. Vivified Primal (IL 749) is the tier above that, but Barovian Lord armor is IL 770 - it is the best gear you can get with minimal effort once Mod 16 arrives. (Gallant has even higher stat, but requires more work).
So, my recommendation stands...if you have nothing better, collect Seals of the Brave, and exchange them for Seals of the Crown amd buy Barovian lord gear on Tuesday.
That will do nicely for a a few days, until you reach level 80 and can get something better.
You’re trying to assert that the Vistani Armor is better than the stuff earns by running CR.
Obsidian Oath - Warlock
A whole lot of other Obsidian toons as well.