Blog Post #107 Release Notes for Alpha 10.0

Pexxx · October 2014

Release Notes for Alpha 10.0

Today we deployed Alpha 10. The critical feature of this deployment is the first iteration of War of Towers - read more about it!

Doubled the rate at which creatures gain threat from damage, reduced the rate that threat decays by 20%, and lowered the initial "on notice" threat by 20%. This means creatures should take much longer to return home if they're actually fighting you, but should give up chasing you in a similar amount of time if you never hit them and they never hit you.

Major changes to the advancement math:
- Removed Shield Expert requirement from shield attacks since it cannot be gotten in game currently.
- Refigured ability score advancement math so everything you train gives you some ability score points. The numbers are very small on the low end to avoid players just buying lots of low end skills to boost their ability scores too much. This change will automatically updated your ability scores in game.
- Increased ability score requirements on top end skills and feats.
- Reduced achievement category points on the low end and increased them on the high end across the board.
- Rearranged crafting achievements so they should be easier to get. "
- Increased the XP cost and ability score bonus to all crafting and refining skills. It now requires more XP to advance crafting and refining skills but it is easier to do so without purchasing other feats or skills.
Added great club attacks to Dreadnaught trainer.
Changed cleric achievements to reduce the number of levels of Fortitude needed to advance.
Corrected ability score requirements in tool tips.
Added Commoner and Expert trainers to starting towns, crafting towns, and Thornkeep. Currently they only train the armor feats related to Commoners and Experts.
All critical feats are available at the Dreadnaught, Skirmisher, Seminary, Occutlist, and War Wizard training facilities now.

Substantial environmental fixes throughout the world, fixing floating buildings, encounters, etc.
Changed Ogres to range from levels 3-11 instead of 3-9. This means that most ogres increased in level by 2 except at the low end, where a new ogre stat set was added. Effectively, large groups of ogres and ogre escalations will probably be two levels harder on average, but single ogres, particularly in lower level escalations, will remain the same difficulty.

Escalation bosses will once again appear in monster hexes when escalation strength drops below 500, allowing escalations to be cleared out by defeating the boss before the strength rises back above 500.

Changed all fighter armor feats to be Strength or Dexterity based primarily with a secondary Constitution requirement.
Added Commoner armor feats Guide, Pioneer, and Rambler
Added Expert armor feats Outfitter, Artisan, and Wright.
Adjusted some math for attacks (increased the cost for high amounts of additional base damage, added a small exponent to deviating from average damage for an attack, slightly increased the cost of Interrupt). This should, in general, lower the amount of damage on the slow Exploits, slightly increase the damage on attacks that were doing less than average damage, and slightly decrease the damage on attacks that were doing more than average damage.
Modified effects on Wraith's Cry to be automatic rather than conditional; lowered overall damage.

Changed Humanoid Salvage "Nonstandard [Metal] Coins" to "Nonstandard [Metal] Bits" to clear up confusion (they're meant to be refined into [Metal] not meant to be spent).