Point Release 8 will be a major addition to Legends of Aria and Citadel first feature release post Steam launch. Goal with the point release is to tackle three core areas: to expand the depth of core skills and associated gameplay and features, to grow content and complete and expand the Profession system, and finally to continue to bring polish to our product, quality of life to our experience, and to work on areas in need of improvement.
Today we bring you the first installment, concerned with our new Martial Abilities, big changes coming to Craft Orders and the availability of Essences, and our upcoming in-game Macro System. There’s also something about Runebooks at the end.
Martial Abilities
We are introducing 9 new Martial abilities for the Martial Prowess skill, obtained and usable from the Martial Tome.
Martial abilities adopt many of the characteristics of mage casting, but unlike spells, martial abilities consume a new resource called Bloodlust. Bloodlust is generated through the use of Martial Shouts which operate similarly to a battle stance. An offensive shout allows for the generation of Bloodlust through damaging and killing opponents, whilst defensive shouts generate Bloodlust through damage taken. Only one shout may be in effect at any time.
These new abilities will bring a wealth of options to PvE and PvP combat. Chief amongst these with respect to PvE is the introduction of Threat. Attacks and damage done now generate accurate threat levels which will bring fresh and strategic dynamics to PvE combat. When used in synergy with some other exciting abilities we’ll be revealing soon, martial warriors possess the unique capability of controlling encounters.
Defiance is an area of effect taunt, generating a high level of threat over a medium range:
Intimidation is another area of effect ability, generating a moderate amount of threat whilst applying a debuff to the damage of nearby opponents over a short range.
Rage is a self buff with a short duration which substantially increases damage at the cost of becoming mortally wounded for the duration of the effect.
A great deal of work has gone into ensuring that warrior type characters perform and feel a step above anything we’ve seen before. Paired with the work we’ve done on monster AI and threat generation, we’re confident that warriors are going to take control of the battlefield in PvE and scare the daylights out of mages in PvP. We look forward to inviting you all onto Experimental to experiences these changes very soon!
Craft Order Reward / Enchantment
Crafting orders are a huge part of Legends of Aria and its economy. In a game where almost everything is either a crafting ingredient or a crafted item, crafters are meant to play an integral role. Crafting orders are intended to add variation and reward to crafting in a way that adapts to the changing requirements of the crafter.
The crafting order system has given its challenges due to the fact that it is one of the most complicated systems in the game to balance. This means that, historically, things have not always been where we want them in terms of distribution of rewards and the types of orders themselves. The system needs to account for a list of variables such as player skill levels, known recipes, and a fluctuating economy, to name a few, and the end result involves an ambitious balance between all of the moving parts.
Goals of the newest iteration include:
- Rewards should feel more appropriate to the difficulty and material investment of the order being filled.
- Crafting orders and rewards can be fine tuned to adjust to the in-game economy with a greater level of control and detail.
- Distribution of crafting orders should be more consistent and evenly balanced for skill level, recipe, and material types.
- Loot tables for CO rewards have been completely rebalanced. Essences rewarded have been significantly increased.
In addition to the benefits to the CO system, we expect these changes will “take the brakes off” of the enchanting system. Increased availability of essences should lower the cost of enchants and make them more practical to use with our durability system. Lower level enchants should also be much more attainable compared to before, which gives flexibility to newer players, shop owners, or players that simply don’t want to invest greater essences into all of their items across all of their characters.
These changes are also scheduled to hit Experimental ahead of their release to live official servers for Point Release 8. Be sure to take advantage and test them yourself!
Macro System
The new macro system we’ve built allow players to quickly and easily create macros to execute in game. The macro system can be accessed by typing /macro into the chat window.
The macro interface has three sections, one for your saved macros, another for creating your macros, and the last listing all the macro specific conditions you can use.
Saved Macros
This section lists all the macros you have created. From here you can load them or remove them. Loading a macro allows you to review and modify the steps it processes. Removing the macro does simply that, removes it from your list. You can trigger the macro by clicking on the macro button within the list or by dragging the button to your hotbar and triggering it from there.
Macro Sequence
This section allows you to create customized macros by dragging and dropping your abilities, spells, actions and macro conditions onto it. The New button saves your current macro sequence as a new macro. Save will save an existing macro that you have “loaded”. While Clear will remove all entries from the macro sequence and allow you to start fresh.
Conditions
This section holds all the conditions that you can place in your macro. These conditions are divided into 4 basic groups currently; targeting, waiting, weapon abilities, and repeating. These conditions can be used in your macros to accomplish customized functionality.
Adding it Up
The above macro is very simple, it creates a wooden board, which was dragged from the carpentry interface, then says “Another one bites the dust.”, sleeps for 3 seconds, and finally repeats 5 times.
Dragging the macro to my hotbar allows me to trigger it more easily. Once played the macro will pop up a window that allows you to easily track what step it is on and how many times it has repeated. Closing the window or pressing the “Stop” button will end the macro even if it hasn’t been completed.
Runebooks
Runebooks are finally arriving and will allow players to store runes. Runebooks can be charged with ‘Recall Charges’ which each provide a single person teleport. The new Manifestation spell ‘Charge Runebook’ is a difficulty 5 spell and requires new exclusive reagents. Runebooks are blessed items and will not be dropped on death.
Runebooks offer players the opportunity to catalogue world locations for fast travel, to create rune libraries and serve as a safe place to store marked runes.
There’s More
Like we said, there is so much coming in Point Release 8 we can’t fit it all into one post! Next one will talk about what Citadel have planned for both PvE and PvP content.
Now that the majority of game breaking bugs are knocked out and premium features are live, we have focused the majority of our development on getting PR8 out the door. Expect to see the first few features hitting the experimental server soon.