Underdark Preview Patch Notes NW.55.20151123a.3

terramak · December 2015

Release Notes: NW.55.20151123a.3

Classes and Balance
Boons

Burning Guidance: This boon now triggers once per second at its fastest.

Class Powers

Hunter Ranger: Grasping Roots' duration now properly matches its tooltip.
Oathbound Paladin: Prism can now affect a maximum of 5 targets.
Oathbound Paladin: Sacred Weapon no longer triggers from Bond of Virtue heals.
Oathbound Paladin: Shield of Faith can now affect a maximum of 10 targets.

Companions

Grazilaxx now properly wields a standard Illithid staff rather than a Warlock pact blade.

Encounters

Balors that aren't wielding a whip will no longer perform whip attacks.
Demogorgon: In Phase 1 and 3, Demogorgon has a new ranged attack: Insanity Gaze.
- This attack targets Demogorgon's main aggro target and places one stack of Insanity on that target.
- Demogorgon will not use this power if the main aggro target is in melee range.

General

The debuff caused by the Spore Tower now has tooltip text.

Content and Environment

A new Double Refinement event has been added for this weekend.
Audio timing and voice-over quality has been improved and updated in various cutscenes.
Gift of Tymora: The description of this event has received minor updates.
Icewind Dale: The quests Needless Distractions and Safekeeping can no longer get into a state where they cannot be completed.
Prophecy of Madness: New Abyssal Tears no longer respawn early if all party members are killed before killing the demons they summoned.
Prophecy of Madness and Throne of the Dwarven Gods now have updated background art for their queue entries.
Prophecy of Madness and Throne of the Dwarven Gods now state in their queue text that the extra rewards are earned via a Legendary Dragon Key rather than an Epic Dungeon Chest Key.
Protector's Enclave: Many mounts from lockboxes old and new now show up on the mount vendor's podium.
Sergeant Knox now directs players to Sergeant Belgold if they are eligible to begin the featured quest series, "The Dwarven King."
The battle master in the Trade of Blades now has level 60-69 and level 70 queue options.
The Dwarven King, Chapter 2: Players now respawn at a closer campfire when defeated by the final boss.
The Dwarven King, Chapter 8: Enemies no longer appear to spawn in and immediately disappear after completing a certain stage of this quest.
The following Heroic Encounters now have a 25 minute cooldown: Cornered by Crabs, Feeding the Fire, Slaad Invasion.
Simril Festival event NPCs and decorations no longer show up in Protector's Enclave or the Stronghold while the event is inactive.

Items and Economy
Strongholds

Explorer's Charts are now available for purchase from the Stronghold Marketplace.
Explorer's Charts are now available at Stronghold Marketplace rank 6 and up and no longer require an Explorer's Guild rank 6 and up.
Explorer's Charts now cost 3000 guild marks, up from 2000 guild marks.
The Explorer's Guild utility boon "Gold Bonus" has been changed to "Treasure Hunter."
- In addition to existing bonuses earning gold, "Treasure Hunter" granted by an Explorer's Guild rank 6 and up now doubles the amount of items granted from explorer's charts.

Trade Bar Store

New items are available in the Trade Bar Store: Elemental Dowsing Rods. These rods increase the drop rate of Elemental Motes for a limited time, allowing players to boost their progress toward the Elemental Artifact Weapons.

General

Drop rates of Motes of Air, Earth, Fire, and Water have been increased from Heroic Encounters in Spinward Rise, Reclamation Rock, Fiery Pit, and Drowned Shore respectively.
Epic Demogorgon now properly drops Twisted Ichor from the final chest when players earn Silver or higher ranking. This chest is openable by Legendary Dragon Keys or Greater Demonic Keys.
For those with the proper promo codes, the Death Slaad is now available from the Reward Claims Agent.
Storm Front: This skirmish now awards 375 Astral Diamonds, up from 300.
Stronghold Guild Mask items no longer remove facial hair.
Stronghold Shield: This item is now held right-side-up by Paladins who wield it.
Superior Elemental Longsword now properly shows up as a Weaponsmithing profession rare task.
Valindra's Tower: This dungeon now awards 750 Astral Diamonds, down from 900.
When receiving a bonus reward after reaching the daily bonus cap, such as Astral Diamonds from the end of dungeons, the bonus no longer collects in the inventory.

User Interface
Alteration (Character Appearance)

"Purchase" now allows the player to purchase a Change Appearance Token even if they have made no changes.
Minor adjustments have been made to the text.

Auctions

When a player with a posted item on the Auction House deletes the character who posted it, outstanding bids are now refunded and the item is now removed.

Campaign

Sharandar now shows its proper completion percentage, rather than being locked at 67%.
The requirements to unlock the Underdark campaign are now more instructive.

Character Sheet

Minor improvements have been made to the layout.

Chat

Raid Chat now properly works for instances with multiple teams.

Collections

Dusk Armor boots now correctly state that they're available from the Zen Market.
Grazilaxx now appears in the Companions section of Collections.

HUD

Captain Belgold's name no longer appears to intersect his body.

Inventory and Item Tooltips

Clicking the button to empty the Overflow Bag now properly empties all it can, even if the destination bag is full.

Leaderboards

Leaderboards for the Underdark module are now running and viewable.

Queues

When the Demogorgon queue is filled, it no longer states that no more players will be sent to reinforce the team.

Scoreboard

In Throne of the Dwarven Gods, Prophecy of Madness, and the Demogorgon encounter, the scoreboard now allows the player to review the usual scoreboard values in addition to the team's overall performance.

Strongholds

The Tend button for Stronghold production structures now properly updates when space frees up in the Coffer.

Zen Market

The Purchase menu now defaults to selecting the best applicable coupon for a purchase, rather than defaulting to no coupon.
NOTE: Not visible on NeverwinterPreview! - The Zen Market reorganization is now in effect! Check out the Zen Market's new categories; it should be intuitive to find the items and services you care about.

Graphics and Visual Effects

Visual effects in the Demogorgon encounter have been optimized, which may result in performance improvements.

Stability and Performance

Certain combinations of weapons with visual effects, slotted with Enhancements with visual effects, no longer cause client locks or crashes.

Localization

German locale: Companion tooltips now properly display the companion's list of powers.
Various improvements have been made to the Underdark text and voice-over audio for the French, German, Italian, and Russian locales.
Various improvements have been made to text throughout the game for the French and German locales.

instynctive · December 2015

Great list! You guys have been busy!

I do wish that you'd go back to using BBCode on this forum.. it used to be so easy to copy and paste the patech notes to my guild's forum, but now I have to format them... took 15 minutes today!

terramak · December 2015

instynctive said:
Great list! You guys have been busy!

I do wish that you'd go back to using BBCode on this forum.. it used to be so easy to copy and paste the patech notes to my guild's forum, but now I have to format them... took 15 minutes today!

Hahah, I know how you feel, instynctive

Thanks, and thank you for the report streuner10000 - I know you're not the only person asking about this. The Dusk set bonus report is on our radar.

zeusom · December 2015

Nice set of fixes and improvement, nice changes to the mote farming process.. the trade bar rods are a reasonable solution.
But no notes about the Air weapon bonus from Spinward not activating at all for SW sprint (and GWF sprint?)

q.q

themoneymaker · December 2015

hahahahahaha SO glad I finished my motes already. I hope you guys who have yet to do them have good results, and that the increased chance isn't 2% up from 1% from the crab drops... So bad they made it 25 minutes, that just makes zero sense to me... but anyway, good luck with those!

Glad you guys finally fixed the insane market advantage from explorers guild after millions of AD were made on it. Ah well. I'm just glad we can get our drow weapons now! Not sure a mod can be released and the main fight of it not reward loot, but hey!

KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!

terramak · December 2015

zeusom said:
Nice set of fixes and improvement, nice changes to the mote farming process.. the trade bar rods are a reasonable solution.
But no notes about the Air weapon bonus from Spinward not activating at all for SW sprint (and GWF sprint?) q.q

Thanks for the report. It's now on our radar.

instynctive · December 2015

themoneymaker#4009 said:
hahahahahaha SO glad I finished my motes already. I hope you guys who have yet to do them have good results, and that the increased chance isn't 2% up from 1% from the crab drops... So bad they made it 25 minutes, that just makes zero sense to me... but anyway, good luck with those!

I get a 100% drop rate from the crab..

terramak · December 2015

Shard's up!

rinat114 · December 2015

Despite the patch notes being great, how is Unstoppable not fixed yet?! It's been months and you've acknowledged the bug already. This is getting ridiculous.

kreatyve · December 2015

Very good patch notes.

Thank you very much. Keep up the good work.

aleblain · December 2015

*Stronghold Guild Mask items no longe remove facial hair.
Great!! Including Lionsmane?? All though a cosmetic 'issue', was super annoying, jaja.
On the other hand, it's a bunch of good changes -a really good patch- will we soon see a fix for double and triple kills in GG?? When you fix the PvP status tab may be? Not the leaderboard, I mean, the player own records.
Thanks for the improvements people!

urabask · December 2015

Still no changes to the drop rate on +5 rings? Could we get some clarification on the drop rate? Or if there's somewhere they drop more often? Because it's seems almost like they just don't drop at all.

Also kind of dumb that the skirmishes don't let us use epic dungeon keys. It's not like the rewards actually justify using anything else.

At the current exchange rate a dragon key costs ~20665 AD and the rewards in the chest are worth usually around 4000-7000 AD.

foxxy · December 2015

Excuse me. u didnt fix the problem freeze caused by lightning effects, such as maelstrom of chaos and lighning powers from stormcallers and others...

mrvincent1959 · December 2015

Glad to see the drop rate change for motes. It might work out better if the drop rate is good. Form a party and just stay in one instance and do HEs. Lets see how it plays out.

zeusom · December 2015

terramak said:

Thanks for the report. It's now on our radar.

Great, thanks! For reference, here is a link to (in my opinion) the best succinct summary of the 4 elemental weapon sets that were released with mod8: http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1208739/3-of-4-weapon-bonuses-broken

hmdq · December 2015

"Scoreboard
In Throne of the Dwarven Gods, Prophecy of Madness, and the Demogorgon encounter, the scoreboard now allows the player to review the usual scoreboard values in addition to the team's overall performance."

So the dps contest is back now additively? That disappointing and that setback btw that next step to rename the game to "GWFwinter".

ghoulz66 · December 2015

increasing respawn rate for HEs dropping motes sounds like a horrible idea. It's already bad enough trying to jump to another instance. With fewer spawning in they'll be completely filled up and stay that way, causing even more people begging for invites and cluttering the chat.

hustin1 · December 2015

Very nice patch list. I'm not sure yet how I feel about the change to the respawn rates, but time will tell (I've already completed the grind on 4 of 9 characters anyway).

Could you make sure that these two artifacts are on your radar?

- Mythic Sigil of the Hunter: when activating, the brambles damage enemies, but the arrows do not (the DoT effect)
- Mythic Aurora's Catalogue: upgrading it to mythic doesn't unlock any new potions (e.g. Distilled Superior Healing). There is little point to upgrading it as it stands.

zacazu · December 2015

will be possible transmute armors using pieces of differents classes? my gwf looks so cool using a ranger chest...

lwedar · December 2015

some good notes. Would have been nice if you updated the events before they go live

http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/comment/12757176

zeusom · December 2015

terramak said:
Shard's up!

Seems preview chat and mail are offline.

androsha1forc · December 2015

any word on fixing that random patch of no color next to the stronghold mailbox and personal bank vendor?

mutjinninja · December 2015

While the 2x RP is greatly appreciated (my bags were getting a bit full), does this mean we lose the 2x RP scheduled for Dec 31st- jan 4th? Or do we get a double dip? (pun intended)

beckylunatic · December 2015

Is it normal for there to only be a single minor HE in a Drowned Shore instance up at a time? I don't remember it being like that.

I took my GWF to Drowned Shore on preview. Crabs and Merchant in Distress were up. I was only interested in looking at drop rates for not-Crabs, so I cleared the minor HE. Incidentally, Drowned Shore's Merchants in Distress *still* gives no HE reward at all (bug from possibly as long as this HE has been possible to complete), and may not be eligible for mote drops for that reason.

Anyway, new HEs didn't spawn until Crabs had timed out. Subterranean Surge and Aquatic Elf Abduction popped, so I did both those. Merchants came up again, then No Room at the Inn, Elves again, Merchant again, etc. There was never more than one minor HE active on the map at a time, like a new HE could only spawn as the prior one was cleared. I obtained one mote from Subterranean Surge, and none from the minor HEs (small sample though, less than ten, and many of them the Merchants). When Crabs came up again, I hadn't seen any of the medium-sized HEs come up since the initial Surge.

I visited the other adventure zones a few times to see if they had the same thing going on, and discovered that there are fixed patterns to HE spawns when a new instance is generated, since I was the only person nosing around tonight, apparently. Reclamation Rock spawns the same 5 HEs immediately. Firey Pit starts empty, gets a Rocks Fall after a minute or so, then Emberclaw after that's cleared. Not up for Emberclaw solo (died trying to get it under the geyser), but after hanging around on the map for a while, more Rocks Fall spawned while Emberclaw was still running*. Spinward Rise starts with Elemental Assault, then gets a different Elemental Assault, then fully populates the map with HEs. Eventually, each instance would look quite different based on different times of generation and what has and hasn't been cleared.

I'd expect Drowned Shore to behave more like Spinward or Reclamation Rock, where multiple HEs can be spawned concurrently, but from one Crab spawn to the next, they only came up sequentially. This seems a bit broken.

*I almost got to see if Feeding the Fire comes up immediately following Emberclaw, but the server went down.

terramak · December 2015

We still plan to run the 2x RP event currently scheduled for December 31st.

And yeah, the NeverwinterPreview shard is having a couple technical difficulties, it's going to be down for a bit while we investigate. At the moment, it doesn't appear to be related to this update.

Thanks again for the feedback, everyone!

scathias · December 2015

The Mythic Vanguard's Banner is also bugged, it's active ability is still only giving the legendary version of the bonus instead of the mythic version. If you search Vanguard's Banner and Vanguards Banner in the PC bugs section you will see a number of threads about this)

ghoulz66 · December 2015

terramak said:
We still plan to run the 2x RP event currently scheduled for December 31st.

Thanks for clearing that up.

cromejohnsen · December 2015

I keep having the gameclient.exe crash everytime the Dungeon and Dragons Loading Screen pops up after the Cryptic loading screen. It says there is a problem with the game and it doesn't work anymore. We will contact you if the problem is solved.
I did not have that issue before the new patch. Or is it related towards something else?
I am using the new Radeon Crimson Driver, maybe that could cause it?(although the game was running fine for the last week)

soriniakov · December 2015

I see no changes in Grasping Roots mechanics, what was fixed exactly?

thefabricant · December 2015

@terramak is there any possibility of raising the base damage of paladin encounter powers or raising the damage dealt by burning guidance. I understand the reason by putting a cooldown in place for it and it is definitely a good change, however, at the moment, burning guidance makes up roughly 93% of the damage dealt by a devotion paladin. That damage essentially matches the damage of a paladin to the damage of a CW however, once its taken away to such a large degree, the paladin is essentially left with no damage at all.

beckylunatic · December 2015

Raising the actual damage of Burning Guidance would help DCs who rely on it for a damage source as well.

Underdark Preview Patch Notes NW.55.20151123a.3

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