If you want to see the patch notes compared to the previous Preview build, check out this post instead: Swords of Chult Preview Patch Notes: NW.90.20171009a.3These patch notes are subject to change, as with anything in game development; they haven't seen a full edit pass and may have inaccuracies.
Patch Notes: NW.90.20171009a.3HighlightsNew Skirmish: The Merchant Prince's FollyMerchant Prince Wakanga O'tamu has recently acquired a treasure that others will stop at nothing to take for themselves. Protect Port Nyanzaru, build barricades, and repel the attack long enough to rebuild the gates, with improved rewards based on the speed of completion.
Check out the dev blog:
Developer Blog: The Merchant Prince's FollyInventory Quality of Life UpdateThe Inventory window's user experience has seen another pass. There is now an options button in the lower right of the menu, enabling access to certain features like collapsing all inventory slots into a single view, filtering the inventory to specific types of items, and sorting all bags together. There's also an "Identify All" option for quickly taking care of all that extra unidentified gear.
Items can now also be marked as "Protected," preventing them from being added in group / bulk actions such as the "Convert to Refinement Points" action in the new Refinement Streamlining feature.
Check out the dev blog:
Developer Blog: Updates to Inventory ManagementRefinement StreamliningWe've worked on streamlining the Refinement experience to significantly reduce the amount of inventory space required to engage in the system, and to significantly reduce the need to hoard refinement items for 2x Refinement weekends. In addition, Enchantments will receive two new tiers, and Enhancements (the special Weapon, Armor slots) will receive one new tier.
Information can be found here:
Refinement: Technical DetailsAnd here:
Official Feedback Thread: Refining RefinementBonding Runestones and Related ChangesBonding Runestones have seen some changes. While they'll still be the most powerful runestone in the game, they will no longer be as severely above the rest. The percentage of stats they share has been reduced, while Eldritch Runestones now give their stat sharing effect to Offense slots in addition to the Defense slot bonus that already existed.
Information can be found here:
Official Feedback Thread: Bonding Runestone ChangesCampaign Progression for AltsPlayers who complete a campaign will now have access to an item they can give to an alternate character on the same account. This item should significantly speed up that character's progression through the campaign, often through discounted currency costs or increased reputation gains.
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Developer Blog: Campaign Progression for AltsPvP UpdatesTenacity is no longer on items. Instead, all damage received in player-versus-player content (PvP) is reduced by a flat value of 40%, along with similar reductions to crit severity, healing received, and armor penetration. All Tenacity that was previously on items has since been replaced with other stats, and PvP-specific items now receive an Item Level boost and stat boost when joining PvP matches or in PvP areas.
In addition, crowd control (CC) powers now apply diminishing returns - for each CC attack, the target has the duration of future CC effects reduced by a stacking 25% for 15 seconds, and gains immunity at 4 stacks. These stacks are independent.
There are other changes to PvP, including the Solo PvP Queue being made a permanent fixture of the Queue list, a category update to buffs (this change is not restricted to PvP), and a new set of rewards sold by Kyrian Foss in the Trade of Blades.
Check out the dev blog:
Developer Blog: PvP UpdatesRandom QueuesA new "Random Queue" category has been added to the Queues UI. In addition to allowing queues for less-popular dungeons and skirmishes to pop, Astral Diamond rewards and bonus Seals will be granted for the first random run in a day. Under-represented roles will also stand a chance to gain bonus Astral Diamonds on the completion of a queue.
Information can be found here:
Official Feedback Thread: Random Queues
Comments
Content and Environment
Stronghold
- In accordance with the addition of random queues, the stronghold daily quests have been adjusted to require completion of random queues instead of a specific dungeon or skirmish.
- Players below level 70 will be tasked with completing a random dungeon and a random skirmish.
- Players at level 70 will be tasked with completing a random epic dungeon and a random skirmish.
- Any currently accepted daily dungeon quests for a specific dungeon will remain on your character and may still be completed but cannot be picked up again.
Events- Lillend in Profession Packs: This promotion no longer shows a blank box in its Home Page information.
- The Seals discount event now properly affects Seals of the Brave.
Player versus Player- PvP Solo Queue is now permanently available.
- Stronghold PvP no longer restricts players in the same guild from joining the opposite side of the match, though it will still prefer to keep them on the same side.
- When queuing for PvP Solo Queue, ratings are now more likely to be taken into account.
GeneralCombat and Powers
Artifacts
- Belial's Portal Stone now properly increases in damage (~16.5%) at Mythic quality.
- Token of Chromatic Storm now drops one additional meteor at Mythic quality.
Boons- The Stronghold boon for Critical Severity Bonus now properly calculates its strength from the Mercenary Outpost rank, rather than the Barracks.
Buff Categories- All long-term buffs in the game have been grouped into one of seven categories:
- Potion
- Elixir (eg, Wild Storm Elixir)
- Invocation
- Stronghold Food
- Event Food
- Event Item (eg, the Scrolls of Fate from Winter Event)
- Trinket (eg, Tymora's Lucky Coin)
- A player may now have at most one buff in each category active at one time.
- Developer Note: The reason for this change was that until now players could have over 25 long-term buffs active at once, which was too many to keep track of, and led to annoying gameplay as well as balance problems. There was also very little logic to the old system -- why could you only drink one potion, but you could read eight scrolls?
- Various names, icons, and tooltips have been cleaned up to match the new functionality.
- A small number of narrowly-focused buffs (eg, Potion of Dragon Slaying, Potion of Everfrost Resist) have been left outside the system since they are only used in special circumstances.
Classes and BalanceCompanions
- Mage Slayer and Stronghold Cleric: These companions no longer have Pact Blades item slots. Mage Slayer now has a Grimoire slot, and the Stronghold Cleric has an Icon slot.
- Illusionist's Gambit: Pact Blades of the Companion have been converted to Grimoires of the Companion.
- Pact Blades that are currently equipped by companions will remain in that slot. There's a known issue where these blades cannot be manually removed, but they will auto-unequip if the player swaps the companion to an Idle Companion slot.
- Mage Slayer: The Merciless End power no longer appears twice.
- Owlbear Cub: Infantile Compensation now has an internal cooldown of 1 second.
- Rimefire Golem: The Frost Fist power no longer appears twice.
- The Legendary companion bonus should no longer occasionally fall off.
Deflection and Dodge Procs- We've made a significant change in the back-end to how dodges and deflections occur. Now, feats and other effects that proc on Dodge or Deflect now only do so when affecting incoming damage.
- This should result in fewer occasions where the player character is suddenly put into combat, and as a result should also result in fewer cases where a Companion runs off to attack an enemy the player has not yet engaged.
Enchantments and Enhancements- Two new ranks have been added to standard enchantments, and one new rank has been added to weapon and armor enhancements.
- Bloodtheft: The damage and healing from this enhancement has been increased, and its tooltip has been updated to more accurately scale to its values.
- Feytouched
- The cooldown is no longer incorrectly procced multiple times from certain powers.
- The extra damage hit now fires when daily powers are used.
- Various other issues with this enchantment have been addressed. It should now adhere more closely to the tooltip description.
- Fireburst Enchantment (Armor enhancement) tooltips now read consistently throughout the ranks.
- Plague Fire: The Poison damage component in ranks 11-13 is now accurately specified in the tooltip. A minor punctuation fix was also made.
- Soulforged: The tooltip now correctly describes the amount of damage dealt.
- Thunderhead: This enchantment now properly procs as frequently as stated on the tooltip.
- Marks of Stamina Drain now have an internal cooldown of 0.5 seconds.
- Marks of AP Drain now have an internal cooldown of 5 seconds.
Mounts- Arcane Whirlwind: This mount's combat power now properly respects control resistance and immunity.
- Flail Snail: This mount's combat power now properly respects control resistance and immunity.
GeneralItems and Economy
Artifacts and Artifact Weapons
- Heart of the White Dragon: This artifact now gives Defense at all ranks, rather than switching to Deflection at Rare quality and above.
- Lathander, Valindra, and Tiamat's artifact equipment sets no longer display buff icons, and no longer stack twice every 6 seconds.
Campaigns- Each campaign now allows players to create Patronage Tokens. When consumed by another character on the account, many campaign tasks are permanently discounted for that character.
- When players unlock dungeons and trials via Campaigns, these unlocks are now applied to all characters on the account.
- In order to accommodate for account wide unlocks of queue content, it is no longer necessary to complete Fangbreaker Island in order to queue for Assault on Svardborg.
Character Sheet- The PvP Stat category no longer exists, as the relevant values are now consistent in all PvP content.
Companions- Various companion audio has been updated.
Enchantments, Enhancements, and Runestones- Bradda the Sage in Protector's Enclave now sells Rank 1 enchantments in exchange for copper / silver / gold, and Rank 2-5 enchantments in exchange for Astral Diamonds.
- Empowered Runestone: The hit points granted by this Runestone have been significantly increased.
- Marks of Power, Union, and Stability have been automatically converted to Enchanting Stones.
- Note that these will remain in the same stacks they were in before.
- Multi-stat enchantments now provide a more consistent percentage of single-stat enchantments.
- Tenebrous Enchantment no longer multi-procs if the player has multiple slotted.
- However, equipping multiple Tenebrous Enchantments now increases the proc chance of the highest equipped rank.
Professions- Leatherworking: Deep Wilderness Gathering now gives 300 profession XP for completion, in line with similar tasks in other professions.
PvP- PvP gear no longer has Tenacity. Its value has been distributed to other stats.
- PvP gear now has an increased item level in PvP content.
Queues- Daily Astral Diamond rewards are no longer granted from dungeons, and instead are granted by participating in Random Queues.
- Seal rewards have been updated across Skirmishes and Trials to mesh better with the Random Queues system.
- The daily bonus Cache of the Protector is no longer granted, as its bonus is provided by daily Random Queues.
- The "Neverwinter Legendary Hero Pack" now grants seals directly, rather than granting a cache.
Spellplague Caverns (Master)- A piece of Elven equipment is now guaranteed from both reward chests.
- Both chests in now have a chance of granting an Ostorian ring.
- The final boss now drops a Wicked Enchantment, Rank 8; as opposed to a chance of either a Rank 5, 6 or 7. (The chance of dropping a wicked enchantment has not been reduced.)
GeneralBoons
- The "You have unspent points!" notification now properly appears for Cloaked Ascendancy and Jungles of Chult.
Campaigns- Icewind Dale: The Kessell's Retreat clickable area no longer overlaps Frozen Treasures.
Character Select- When buttons are disabled, the font should now more clearly show that.
Character Sheet- Companions: Aranea's power icons are now consistently sepia toned.
- Companions: When swapping an equipped item onto an item in the Inventory, a binding prompt now properly appears.
Chat- Social chat messages should no longer be pushed out of the buffer by combat log entries.
Collections- Cult of the Dragon weapons are no longer in Collections, since they are no longer available.
- Eternal Armor now shows up in Location view.
HUD- Need or Greed loot results now show for 8 seconds if not dismissed, reduced from 12.
- The Quest Path now takes better account of clickable transitions to different locations in the same zone.
Inventory- Identified items no longer show "Identify" as an option in their context menu.
- It should now be a little more difficult to accidentally destroy Enchantments in the Manage Enchantments pane.
- Item tooltips now show the base RP values of items that can be converted to Refinement Points.
- Overload Enchantments no longer show the "+" icon in the lower-right, as they cannot be fed resources in order to recharge.
- The "Buy a Bag" button has been moved to the first empty bag slot, in order to make way for the new inventory options.
- When dragging and dropping an item from the Character Sheet onto an item of the same slot in the inventory, it will now warn the player if that item would bind, rather than binding without a warning.
- While at a vendor, disabled actions (e.g. Discard) are now properly grayed out in the context menu.
Loadouts- Players are no longer incorrectly restricted from swapping Loadouts when they're swapping out unique items.
- When replacing loadouts, the player must now type the word "loadout" in order to replace a loadout. This is intended to reduce cases of accidental replacements.
Mounts- The "Grid / List" selection now persists across gameplay sessions.
Queues- A "request reinforcements" option has been added to the Queue UI.
- All queues are now subject to a Leaver Penalty.
- A Leaver Penalty occurs when leaving queued content early.
- Vote Abandon enables after a certain amount of time attempting queued content, and allows a party to decide to leave without incurring this penalty.
- Players are now auto-removed from a Queue Group if they're disconnected for 5 minutes, rather than immediately upon disconnect.
- There is now a "Match Management" button at the bottom of the Queue UI, which allows the queue group to request reinforcements or initiate a vote to abandon the instance.
- Vote Kick now requires a selection between reasons rather than a player-input reason.
- Vote Kick no longer prevents players from pressing Alt to return to standard controls.
Refinement- Item to Refine: The "Clear Slot" button has been removed.
- The Item Progression window width can no longer change during use.
Scoreboards- In ranked content, the next rank's icon is now displayed on the right side of ranked scoreboard bars, to better illustrate that the bar shows progress to the next rank.
Zen MarketArt and Effects
Animation
- Batiri Darter no longer clips through its mask when using its dart gun.
- Certain Stronghold Hunter Ranger axes are no longer held backwards.
- Firebreathing: This emote now properly shows up in the emote list if the character qualifies to use it.
- Hunter Ranger: In character creation, the ranger no longer freezes once drawing her bow.
- Juggle: This emote now properly shows up in the emote list if the character qualifies to use it.
- Morlanth's Shroud now hides some of its cloth pieces while the player is on a mount.
- River Snipper Crab: This enemy no longer shrinks while using its Flurry power.
- Sun Bear's jaw no longer incorrectly stretches when using certain attacks.
- Various cutscenes have seen minor improvements.
- Various older companions now have appropriate animations for when they're affected by Crowd Control effects.
- Among these companions are the Hawk, Lillend, Gorgon, Bulette, and Rust Monster.
- Yuan-ti no longer casually stab themselves in the face while moving in combat.
Character ArtAudio
General
Graphics, Performance, and Stability
General
It is pretty traditional by now that your temporary changes (called experimental this time) end up staying in place for multiple mods rather than the 1-2 months they need for testing (which this has had on preview, pvpers more than any other group do significant testing).
We are searching for slave labor, will pay with food from our farm!
Vivified relic equipment still needs voninblood, a quite big amount indeed.
If you want to make augments and runestones stronger increase all stats on all runestones, not HP only.
Not only is this illogical by unbalancing the runestones stats but there also is only one augment in the game with 3 defensive runestone slots with which one could make good use of the increased HP.
This value is much too low and should be increased to at least 70-75%
Good job guys!
HP runstone was buffed way more because 8K was way to low for an HP increase value.
Azure: Critical Strike
Dark: Movement - Armor Penetration - Life Steal
Radiant: Power
Silvery: Recovery - Deflection
Arcane: Recovery - Deflection
Empowered: Power
Profane: Critical Strike - Defense
Twice the value of an enchantment of the same rank still is very little compared to a bonding runestone.
1: you needed power and recovery which means you didnt have critical.
2: Only sw could benefit from it on a critical build due the pillar cant critical. And here is the joke you make pilar critical and still you go on and give 1 sec cooldown on owlbear.
3: 50% of your power on encounter use. Yes it scaled true but still its not owlbear cub fault if you allow 340k power in game.
4:How fast and hard could hit a pillar of power an icy terrain a conduit of ice on power recovery build comparing to the power critical builds? The answer : no chance for power recovery build to outdps or come close to the power critical build.
5: sw temptation bothered you? for doing what? healing and give the only legit powershare ( only to player).
6: Why you take the opportunity from players to playing something different than copy paste?.
And
7: Not everyone interest to play power critical penetration by forcing it without reason.
Thanks.
They have been unavailable for 7 mods now and it would be really nice to have them back unless you are planning to use those visuals for some new artifact weapon sets. @terramak
THC
http://www.theholycrusaders.com/
To Hellbringer Warlocks, the sympathy of myself and many others goes out to you. SWs of all classes know what its like to be nerfed and have the rug torn out from under them. I'm sad to see that they not only killed the PoP damage build, but the templock to a fair degree as well. This change kills most build diversity and further punishes the SW class which is already in a terrible spot.
It would be fine if this could be clarified so we know if only the first restore is intended to no dot require voninblood.
https://www.theholycrusaders.com/
Because the devs have no idea how the classes are performing on the live server and they really just dont care about it. The preview server is just here to inform bugs, but any information provided from the players about the balance of different classes has been ignored since Amenar decided to quit this game. He was actually the only one who did tried to listen the people that play the game since the mod6 disaster and since he quit the game there is no chance that players opinion is going to be taken seriously.
And just as Issssssssho said, we want old transmutes. Shadow wolf pieces look just too good to pass. I'd kill to have some of those. HAMSTER, I'd moon the white house for that wolf head piece.
It seems u didnt take into account your players' feedbacks. The new empowered is beyond useless, since everyone is supported by their life steal and how it occurs. The way healers do now are more than enough to keeping incoming heals. You are destroying one of the few buffing powers a DC has.
Astral shield is now along worthless powers like warding flare, geas, exaltation, sacred flame, sooth. Add to this, the amount of useless features each paragon has.
But now the 1 second internal cooldown on the owlbear cub has me seriously worried if I´ll still be able to solo single player content on my DC once this goes live (OBC ultra low crit build).
Does it still work if an encounter power hits multiple targets at once, or is it literaly one proc per second at best?
Also I´m pretty sure its possible(and rather natural) to fire encounter powers at a rate higher than once per second...
I think it is/was great that builds not aiming at 100% crit chance were viable, at least for support chars.
Imho the low crit build needs more tools, not its one tool broken completely.
like something that does something similar for at-wills to what the owlbear cub does for encounter powers.