Announcements - 2008/12 - Sins of the Fathers
December 2008 - Patch Page
Original Link - http://ac.turbine.com/index.php?view=article&id=425
Sins of the Fathers
On a strangely warm late fall afternoon, Ardry opened the door to his uncle’s cottage and recoiled from the smell and the gust of roiling green vapor that greeted him. It was a sharp, overwhelming reek, redolent of rotten eggs and burned hair. Trying not to gag, he called out to the cabin’s inhabitant.
“Uncle Aliester! What’s going on in here?”
Aliester the Loquacious, pre-eminent Isparian sage of Dereth, came out of his workshop and into the cottage’s front room, trailing a cloud of fumes behind him. The old sage was dressed outlandishly: an oversized heavy leather apron and hood covered his entire body, with thick leather gloves and a mask made of wet cloth wound tightly about his nose and mouth.
“Armmph mph bmph!” he called out excitedly. After a few seconds of Ardry’s uncomprehending stare, Aliester realized his mistake and unwound the thick mask from around his face.
“Sorry, Ardry my boy. I’ve been experimenting with some new formulae, ever since the alchemists’ guild published their findings on new techniques for throwing phials…” His eyes went wide and he crinkled his nose in disgust. “My heavens, is that how it smells in here? I just put this mask on when I started working with the rock sulfur, I hadn’t thought the extra variables I introduced would be quite so pungent. You have my most sincere and fulsome apologies…”
Aliester rushed around the cottage opening windows and lighting candles as Ardry trudged to the table in the middle of the room and set down his pack. The young explorer rummaged among his things and withdrew a pile of heavily marked-up papers and maps and laid them on the table. A moment later he added to the pile a bewildering contraption made of Drudge-gut twine, pyreal rods, finely crafted gears, silver mirrors, and long shards of deep blue crystal.
Aliester returned from his fumigation and exclaimed with delight when he saw the items Ardry had laid out. “Ah, wonderful, my experimental theodolite! Did it function as efficaciously as I had predicted?”
Ardry grimaced. “If by ‘work’, you mean, did it give me numbers that I wrote down at every point on the map you asked me to visit, then yes, it worked. If you are asking whether or not this contraption you rigged together actually gives geomantically accurate readings of nodes and ley lines… Well, you’re going to have to ask someone better trained than me, like that nice girl Hoshino Kei or Prince Borelean or Harlune himself.”
Aliester’s normally cheerful face turned ugly for a moment when Harlune’s name was mentioned. “That pompous and anti-intellectual curmudgeon! He sent me the most unnecessarily rude response when I inquired about the possibility of using Empyrean blood as a medium for certain mana-culturing experiments I had in mind…”
Ardry sighed. “I remember, Uncle. Maybe you’ve forgotten that I was the one who had to disarm the device he’d attached to the note. Or, rather, tried to disarm, only to have it literally blow up in my face.”
“Hmph. Yes, well, suffice it to say, we shall not be employing him as a technical or philosophical consultant on further refinements to the experimental theodolite. We have other resources, among my academic peers as well as your colleagues in the exploratory and military occupations, who would be much more suitable, not to mention more cooperative…”
“I’m quite sure, Uncle. But look…” Ardry picked up the sheaf of notes off the table and waved them under his uncle’s nose. “Did you need these or not? Because I could just as easily have spent the last week at the new monster fight arena, watching someone else suffer for a change. You know, taking that vacation you promised I could go on after—“
“Of course, my boy, and you are certainly free to appropriate the next two or three weeks of the festive season for your leisure time, as I promised you. You have more than earned it, of course.” Aliester eagerly took the papers from Ardry’s hand and spread the maps out on the table. “Please, help yourself to some mulled wine while I examine the notes…” He gestured vaguely at a kettle by the fire.
While Ardry fixed himself a cup of mulled wine that tasted only faintly of the sulfur-and-burned-hair fumes that had previously filled the room, Aliester compared Ardry’s pages of recorded readings to the spots on the map where they’d been taken. After a few minutes of muttering to himself as he analyzed the data, he shuffled excitedly into his workshop and returned with another pile of papers filled with figures and diagrams. These looked to Ardry’s untrained eye like star charts. He watched his uncle compare and cross-check a few dozen numbers as he sipped his mulled wine.
Finally, Aliester looked up from his work. “It is as we feared,” the elderly sage announced gravely. “The uncharacteristic warmth of the weather is tied into the geomantic anomalies of recent months, which are in turn influenced by the astrological convergence that the council of sages and I have observed… Indeed, if the accuracy of the experimental theodolite can be verified, then the readings you have taken for me would go a long way towards validating the Theory of Geomantic Subterranean Influence and Interior Metaphysical Sympathies that we’ve worked so long and hard to propound…”
“Huh? Layman’s terms, Uncle,” Ardry said. “This has something to do with that Falatacot demon that’s been trying to bust out of its prison, right?”
“Ah, sorry, lad. What I mean to say is that the stars are aligning to make it easier for those terrible Patriarchs to break their master’s ancient bonds… And that because he is so close to freedom, his nearness to the surface and influence on the ley lines is actually affecting our weather.”
“And that means…”
“Well, that means that our traditional winter may never come and the demon’s due to breach the surface any day,” Aliester announced, seeming to surprise himself with his own directness.
“That’s terrible,” Ardry groaned, as he set down his mug of mulled wine. “What can we do about it?”
Aliester gave him a regretful smile. “Well, Ardry, to answer that question, I’d need you to travel to a few more spots and take some more readings…”
Rollout Article
Original Link - http://ac.turbine.com/index.php?view=article&id=427
December 2008 Rollout Article
The Summoner hissed and lashed out his serpentine tongue to taste the air. It was a delicious smell, ripe with the rich scent of the Blood of the World. In the weeks since his Master had first raised him and sent him to this world, he had been almost drunk with the saturated power of this island that the human cultists had once named Killiakta. He could taste his own Master’s influence upon this world, could almost see the dark streams of power flowing into the world from the fonts that T’thuun’s other servants had consecrated. He could tell from the taste of the air that this world’s cold season was upon it, and only his Master’s considerable influence kept the hated snow and ice from encroaching upon the land.
He looked over his armored shoulder at the half-Moar beasts milling around behind him. They were clustered fearfully about the ziggurat as they watched him. These things had been raised as beasts of war, fearless and brutal fodder for the Master’s coming conquest, but even these creatures feared to come close to him. No doubt his presence evoked several thousand years’ worth of racial memories for the brutes, memories of their kin and fellow spawnlings being hunted and enslaved by the snake-man servants of the Falatacot Matriarchs. In the long memories of his own kind, these Moarsmen were nothing more than smelly beasts that were only suitable as victims for warrior training or experimental subjects for students of magic. No matter. Such divisions were the Old Way, a way that led only to obscurity and irrelevance and powerlessness, before the Master had stirred himself from his dark dreams of eternal eclipse and upraised the new Patriarchs to remake the world.
The Summoner looked up into the night sky and saw that the stars had reached the proper position. Realms that were far distant had come closer in this convergence, and the time was right to rip away the barrier between this realm and the hateful prison where his Master howled and thrashed against the bonds of the Light.
The Summoner turned around to face the Moarsmen, grunting fearfully at each other, and approached them. He took sadistic pleasure in their fear. It filled him with a sense of rightness and propriety that these creatures would cower from him. After millennia of desperate obscurity under the weak and vacillating Matriarchs that were loyal to a timid god, the Patriarchs and the servants of T’thuun would reclaim their sacred island from the servants of the Yalain, these humans who were nothing more than softer, feebler versions of their own war beasts.
He hissed an order in the harsh tongue of the Moarsmen. They took up their proper positions around him, forming a circle with him at the center. He inspected each of the Moarsmen as they stood there, relishing their tremors as he confronted each of them, and corrected the positioning of their feet to make sure they made a properly spaced circle.
Finally, the motley spell circle was prepared. He drew his casting sickle from his side and held it aloft in the cool night air. One of the Moarsmen in the circle cried out in fear and retreated a couple of steps. The Summoner turned and fixed his cold gaze upon the fool. He stepped towards the cowering brute and hissed in displeasure. “You stay here,” he told the thing in its beastly tongue, pointing at the spot where he’d previously positioned it. He waited for the Moarsman to sheepishly take his position again before elaborating. “Blade not for you. Blade for song to Master. But if you displease Master’s Summoner again, Master’s Summoner will feed you to the black fires forever.”
A shiver went around the circle as he said that. The message delivered, and with no further signs of Moarsmen breaking out of formation, he stalked back to the center and began his chants, gesticulating at the stars, the moon, and the land all around as he danced to summon his Master’s totem.
Soon enough, as he weaved the dark tendrils of T’thuun’s power around this consecrated font of the Blood of the World, he felt the rumbling beneath the earth that meant the summoning had been successful.
The Summoner cut his own palm with the blade and let his dark blood drip onto the ground at the center of the circle. The blood formed a black stain on the sand, bubbling and swirling like something alive. The world around them dimmed as the light of the stars and the moon seemed flow into the swirling vortex of blood and dirt. Finally, with a deafening roar and a shaking of the earth that knocked most of the Moarsmen to the ground, the ground split open and a giant black pillar, inscribed with the mark of T’thuun, began to rise from underground.
The Summoner managed to stay on his feet as the totem burst from the surface. He called out the blessings and invocations of T’thuun, and marveled as the totem grew to a height many times that of a Moarsman or a Sclavus. When the shaking subsided, the Moarsmen in the circle fell to their knees and began to worship the totem in their guttural tongue. The same old prayers, dedicated to a new god and to new patriarchs…
Release Notes
Original Link - http://ac.turbine.com/index.php?view=article&id=424
December 2008 Release Notes
Hello there and welcome to the December Release Notes. It is the winter once again in Dereth. And of course the town of Frosthaven is once again full of activity. It is however strange that the snow is not coating the ground like it has in previous years...
Lets see what is new in Dereth this month!
- Live events are coming this month. Stay tuned to the official Asheron’s Call Forums for more details!
- Monster fights are now up and live! Make sure you go check them out and pick your favorite today!
- Level eight spell components now can be stacked up to 1000.
- Dark Isle Mukkir, Ruschk, Remoran and Sleech have had a rebalance. Mukkir Ruschk and Remorans should be friendlier to melee and archer characters now.
- A Mana Forge Key has been added to the hero token vendor.
- Presents have been placed around Dereth, with an extra special reward for finding them all.
- Using our previously introduced rare monster spawn tech, new rare monsters are spawning around Moarsman City and Freebooter Keep.
- Society armor has had its base Armor Level increased.
- The drop rate on Horrid Remoran has been readjusted to be more in line with the way we had intended it to be.
- Xana Bin-Xara in Wai Jhou has had a typo fixed.
- The Siraluun Feather Bag's description has been changed to reflect the updates that were made to the quest.
- The Sawato Bandit Mask has been changed to start with 300 mana.
- A new tier of Grenades have been added to the game.
- Several more spell fixes have been made to fix issues with some spells overriding other more powerful ones.
Developer Comments
Level VIII War Spell Damage
I've double and triple-checked the numbers now. The spells are correctly set to have a base damage, as listed in their descriptions.
Without going into the actual numbers in the code, there is a modifier to your spell damage based on the difficulty of the spell vs. your skill in the school of magic. The greater your skill over the spell's difficulty, the more damage you do with the spell. In our tests, this is the factor that's giving you less damage than expected.
That being said, the spells will not be changing for the [Sins of the Fathers] update. I will be running further tests to see if the actual damages need to be updated in January's update.
My apologies to those of you who have been waiting for information on this, the testing and datamining for it isn't a short process. As soon as I know more, I'll post again.
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Kintani AC Content Designer |
Alchemy Grenades
The new tier of Alchemy Grenades have a spellcraft as high as they do because they pose several other disadvantages to use. High cost, chance to fail when crafting, time to target missile, chance to miss when thrown (yes, I know the miss chance is very small), smaller spell effect, and the need to swap weapons.
Also, the difficulty in using the final tier of grenades is designed to be similar to the difficulty for a mage to cast level 8 spells. You need maxed skills and an extreme template to be able to use them.
Lastly, in the projected max spellcasting skill, you are factoring in level 8 spells and Epic cantrips, but there's something, rather substantial, that you are missing in your math.
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Kintani AC Content Designer |