Ausgabe #4 ist auf dem Testserver

Auf dem Testserver wurde soeben Ausgabe #4 aufgespielt, hier die dazugehörigen Patchnotes:

Update version 1.4 Notes

**These notes do not necessarily reflect the final version that will be deployed on Live**

NEW!

These new features are now ready for general testing on Testlive :

* New Auxiliary weapon : Chainsaws! Pick up the mission from Dr. Aldini in New York to begin!

* The Albion Theatre in London is now open for players to express themselves!

* Starter Decks - Nine decks have been added for players who finish the inner ring of combat abilities.

* Character size slider has been added to character creation and the plastic surgeon!

* Reticule targeting mode is now available (in a beta stage). Toggle this mode on and off via the T key.

* Slaughterhouse Nightmare mode is now officially open!

* New Missions! Pick up the following missions :

All Roads Lead to Rome - from Mama Abena in London

To Sir with Love - from Hayden Montag in The Savage Coast

From Carthage with Love - from Tanis in The Scorched Desert

The Red Thread - from Callisto in Carpathian Fangs

GENERAL

* When equipping a weapon which has a weapon skin applied, the weapon skin will now show correctly to observers. Previously it would only show up correctly if you zoned in with the weapon already equipped.

* The Master Planner achievement will now give out a costume.

* The I Am Legend achievement will now give out an item.

* London: Dancers in the Horned God will now leave the floor to give groups of players more space.

* Text should no longer show up in the chat window for long-winded civilians

* Fixed a clipping issue with the female Preacher outfit.

* Male eyebrows no longer clip through the glasses on the Grifter outfit.

* Movement speed while dead will now scale with the player's current rank of Sprinting.

* Seoul: the Fight Club in Seoul is now open to Illuminati and Templar participation.

* Fixed stat modifications that did not revert when items were unequipped.

* Raid chat is available (except in Fusang Projects).

* Fixed shadows at the Old Asylum Approach anima well in Blue Mountain.

* Fixed the intensity of the moon in Shadowy Forest.

* Adjusted chair height and brightness in the Horned God pub.

COMBAT

* Increased the damage dealt by all Rocket Launcher abilities.

* Increased the damage dealt by the See Red ability.

* Healing friendly NPCs with the Adrenalise passive equipped will no longer cause them to attack you.

* Assault Rifle - Improved Bursts passive will now properly increase the healing done by the Anima Burst ability.

* Blade ability Sixth Sense will now build a counter for each received glancing hit instead of having a delay between counters to keep in line with other defensive effects.

* Added a tooltip description to the Two Cuts Blade skill.

* The Blood Spike DoT effect now has the correct icon.

* Added tooltip description to the Elemental Skill "Fury".

* Hammer ability Grip Whip will now display the correct damage value in the tooltip. This is only a tooltip change. The ability itself has not been changed.

* Hammers - Reduced the overall damage dealt by Epicentre.

* Breakdown no longer requires Impaired state to apply the Exposed debuff.

* Breakdown will only apply 1 stack of Exposed per hit.

* Increased the damage dealt by Escalation.

* Escalation will no longer apply the Exposed debuff.

* Intensity has been changed to no longer grant Minor Ward when hitting Weakened targets with Escalation. It will now improve Escalation to apply the Exposed debuff.

DUNGEONS

* Lairs : Vulkan's persistent area effects will disappear after the encounter ends.

* Lairs : Nobel Calling - Blueprint rewards changed for a different lair boss.

* Hell Eternal - Piston Predators should no longer stack in the encounter with the Flagellatrix Superior.

* Hell Eternal - The "Enflamed" environmental debuff in Hell Eternal now stacks up to 10. At 10 stacks, it kills the affected player. Don't stand in the fire!

* Hell Eternal - Eblis will no longer cast Solar Collapse twice in a row if interrupted.

* Hell Eternal - Eblis's life drain, Consummation, can no longer be interrupted.

* Hell Eternal - All players should now be able to see damage dealt by Eblis's spell Consummation.

* Hell Eternal - Eblis should now be more consistent about stunning his target during Consummation.

* Hell Eternal - Eblis's spell Cast Out can no longer be interrupted.

* Hell Eternal - Eblis's vortexes should now appear more quickly on phase transition.

* Hell Eternal - Particles have been adjusted in the fight with Eblis to more accurately reflect damage areas.

* Hell Eternal - Corrected several locations where players could become stuck. Fixed several world design issues.

GUI

* Increased the maximum purchasable inventory size to 250.

* Increased the maximum purchasable bank size to 300.

* Changed Enemy Evade Chance in the character sheet to Enemy Evade Penalty.

* Changed Enemy Crit Chance in the character sheet to Enemy Crit Penalty.

* Auxiliary Blueprints and the Moulds they create are now Green quality items instead of White to facilitate Need/Greed rolling.

* Made improvements to the Raid menu.

* Added an icon for Raid missions.

* Fixed a problem when player was seeing a highlighted gear mouse cursor but received a "Too far away" message.

* Resource bars for Fist and Hammers no longer stay at 0/5.

* Stats should now update correctly on your Character sheet.

ITEMS

* Energy Drink - Leech consumables will now give a leech effect equal to the power listed in the item tooltip.

* Fixed an issue that created bald spots on hairstyles when wearing the female Pirate Hat.

* All Male Templar uniforms have been dyed to a nice deep red, to match the female outfits.

* Pure Anima - Max Health, Attack Rating, and Heal Rating will now stack with Anima - Block Rating, Crit Rating, Crit Damage Rating, Defense Rating, Evade Rating, Hit Rating, Penetration Rating, Physical Protection Rating, and Magical Protection Rating. You will now be able to have one Pure and one normal Anima buff active at the same time.

* Sov-Tech auxiliary weapon moulds now transform auxiliary weapons into the correct Soviet look and not Orochi.

* Signet of Corruption should now display the proper rarity color when attached to an item.

* Signet of Thirst will no longer cause friendly targets to gain hate towards the user.

* Internal cooldown on Signet of Thirst was updated to match the displayed value on the item tooltip.

* Signet of Serenity should no longer cause friendly targets to gain hate towards the user.

* Signet of Temperance should no longer cause friendly targets to gain hate towards the user.

* Signet of Fury will now gain stacks for each successful hit rather than each successful attack.

* Rocket Launchers will now display that they require 10 skill to equip when equip requirements are not met.

* The male Snakeskin outfit now looks more like snakeskin.

* Signet of Obedience will no longer stack higher than intended. This is a visual change only and does not affect the damage bonus.

* Blue and Purple versions of Signet of Obedience will now properly provide the damage bonus.

* The rifle Crushed Will is now worn like other rifles on the back.

* Black Mark of the Morrigan proc effect will no longer trigger passives.

* Black Mark of the Morrigan proc effect will only gain 1 stack per second.

MISSIONS

New York

* Questions and Answers - Leah's arms no longer clip through the desk during the cinematic for tier 5.

Kingsmouth

* The Pick-Up - Cassandra should no longer respawn twice or more.

The Savage Coast

* Crime and Punishment - Feedback is provided when the player fails 3 times at entering the code.

* The Black House - Strange candle will provide the achievement each time it is used, but will only trigger the fire every 5 minutes.

* The Black House - Tier 3 urn screen effect will no longer play on other players' game clients.

* Hell and Bach - Wicker will now spawn in the middle of the circle in Tier 2.

* Theme Part Tycoon - Angry Clown should spawn as normal.

The Blue Mountain

* Ami Legend - Ami now has subtitles when she speaks during the mission.

The Scorched Desert

* The Living Oil - The letter will no longer remain stuck to your character's foot after finishing the mission.

* Fixed an issue that would sometimes make the crystals unresponsive during the mission The Big Terrible Picture.

City of the Sun God

* The Prompt for the Pinnacle will no longer say that it is a solo instance (since it can be joined in groups).

The Besieged Farmlands

* Mortal Sins - Cucuvea now holds an object in her hand during the cinematic.

* Examining the drawing in Tier 1 of 'The Kindly Ones' will no longer provide group credit.

The Shadowy Forest

* Mortal Sins - Fixed an issue with the tier 10 puzzle that prevented some instances of it from thinking they were solved properly.

* Singing Stones - Corrected an issue where players could not interact with rocks during different tiers of the mission.

The Carpathian Fangs

* They Mostly Come at Night - Mr. Ruffles will now be worn properly on your character's body.

Ausgabe #4 und neues im PvP:

Hello fellow PvPers

So I thought I would go over the PvP updates we are doing for patch 1.4. Most of this stuff is on Testlive for you to try out now. So now is the time to explain the 1.4 changes. There will also be a more official blog post about the PvP updates later, so consider this a more lenghty in-depth message for the PvP enthusiasts.

There is a lot of stuff, so I will go through it in headings:

Fusang has been merged into battlegroups
While this is obviously not something you can test on Testlive it is still good news!

We have looked on the playing statistics for Fusang, and used that information to try to balance the factions as good as possible, and we ended with these 3 battlegroups:

* Group A: Cerberus, Arcadia, Leviathan
* Group B: Drac, Kobold
* Group C: Daemon, Grim, Huldra

The battlegroup system allows us to split or merge battlegroups on a per-patch basis if we need to, and we will be monitoring PvP activity in Fusang to see if further battlegroup tweaks are needed.

Much more on Fusang later, but first, lets talk about:

PvP Minigame Queuing tweaks
We have been monitoring the amount of PvP minigames being played, and we have seen that after patch 1.2 when the black mark rewards were increased for doing missions in Fusang, the activity in the minigames dropped. So we have done two things to fix this:

1: The matchmaking system has been tweaked to be a lot less fine-grained. To do this change properly we have had to wipe the games player skill ranking on each player, which means that after patch 1.4 when you start PvPing, you can be matched up against anyone. As you win and lose minigames, you build your rank, and you will get matched against players of the same rank as yourself. Also we are applying the Equal Footing buff in minigames now to alleviate this initial issue.

2: The rewards for doing minigames have been tweaked so that on average you should get the same amount of rewards for spending time doing minigames as you get from doing Fusang. With the caveat that El Dorado gives slightly more than Stonehenge and Fusang.

We are also looking into making it possible for signing up for both minigame types at the same time, and for signing up to minigames from Fusang, and for deciding your own group in Fusang. We know we want to do it, and we are currently looking into how we could do it, but we do not have an ETA yet, as this is a bigger change.

10.4 PvP Gear!
Yes. As of patch 1.4.

PvP Economy Update
We have taken a good look at this and changed the pricing of PvP items. One of the major things we have worked on is to make sure that the effort required to get a full set of 10.4 PvP gear is on par with the effort required to get the 10.4 Nightwatch gear from Nightmare dungeons.

Balancing this is of course tricky, since just getting a full group together with the right gear who can play well enough to do a Nightmare dungeon is quite a tough entry level to reach compared to PvP which you can enter very early on. On the other hand, once you get a good nightmare group going and learn the dungeons you can do them fairly quickly. So rest assured that lots of excel sheets, math, and furrowing of brows went into deciding on this balance.

Fusang Update
This is the big one. We have done quite a few changes to Fusang. We call it Fusang 2.0 internally.

Our goals were to make sure that players are not incentivized to do facility trading, that you care about the objectives you own, and that outmatched factions in Fusang can still have fun PvPing there.

We have done 3 major changes.
1: Fusang now has a tick-based reward scheme
2: A new special mission becomes available for underdog factions
3: You will now find new PvP vendors inside Fusang that you can use to upgrade turrets and custodians belonging to your faction.

1: The tick-based reward scheme
Missions are no longer the primary source of rewards in Fusang, instead, every 3 minutes everyone in the contested area in Fusang gets rewarded based on the amount of objectives their faction currently holds as follows (values subject to change):

* 63 white marks for an outer facility
* 126 white marks for a center facility
* 7 white marks for an anima well

People outside of Fusang no longer get any white marks. Only people who are in the contested area (outside of their faction home base) in Fusang get these rewards.

Also, at any PvP vendor in the game you can now convert 100 white marks into 1 black mark, and no PvP items in the game cost white marks any more. Everything costs black marks instead.

AND: For patch 1.4 we are wiping all existing white marks in the game.

This is a big change, so it deserves a brief comment: We never felt the white marks worked well as a currency. Many players were walking around with hundreds of thousands of them, never spending them. So we felt they would be better used in this tick-based reward scheme where we needed a high granularity of rewards, given that you are rewarded every 3 minutes. So we decided to make 100 white marks convertible into 1 black mark at any PvP-vendor.

As a consequence, PvP-missions in Fusang no longer give Black or White marks of Venice as rewards, instead they only give XP.

These reward mechanics are currently on Testlive, so you can go in and try it out.

Currently on testlive you have the very first version of the UI of the PvP window to reflect these reward changes, a better version is currently being tested internally, and will make it out to patch 1.4. So for patch 1.4 you will be able to see how much each faction gets per 3 minute tick, and how long there is until the next tick, even if that functionality is not currently there on testlive.

2: The new Underdog mission
If a faction has not received a certain minimum amount of rewards within a certain period of time in Fusang, The Council of Venice will intervene and help out this faction. This means that all players of that faction get access to a new PvP mission called The Underdogs.

In this mission you must collect anima shards all over Fusang and use them on a shut down custodian near your faction HQ. These anima shards will recharge the custodian, and eventually bring it to life. Once the custodian is recharged, it will activate and help your faction against enemy players and enemy NPCs inside Fusang. This type of custodian is a much more powerful entity than the custodians you find defending the facilities. Also, it has a healing aura around it that heals the 10 nearest friendly players towards it. And it has powerful ranged and melee attacks that it uses against enemy players and NPCs.

The custodians on Testlive are currently a little bit more active than they will be in the patch, since they will normally have stationary combat. The custodians on Testlive will move during combat which the final versions in the patch wont.

Any feedback on the balance of the custodians are welcome. We have made them... very tough. Remember it is there to help a cornered faction in Fusang get an edge.

As part of the new PvP window you will be able to see whether any faction has access to do The Underdogs mission (indicated by a Council Support icon) or whether any faction has in fact managed to recharge a custodian, that is now spreading havoc in Fusang (March of the Custodian icon). The GUI is still being worked on for the patch, but the first version is on Testlive now.

3: New Fusang PvP Vendors
Inside Fusang you will now find PvP vendors inside each faction home base. At these vendors you can exchange your White Marks of Venice into Black Marks, and as something new you can buy various upgrades for turrets and custodians belonging to your faction.

-------

That’s it for this patch, except for:
We also have a bunch of code fixes that we are still working on, that we hope make it to the patch, (pvp raid frame for one). We still hope to get these fixes out if we get them done and tested in time. If they don’t make it to the patch, they will get out soon after.

During the week we will try and arrange some tests of the new Fusang, to see how the custodian/turret upgrades are working, if there are any bugs we missed, if balancing is outrageous etc. However, already now, you are welcome to go on Testlive and create a character using FATE and try out the changes in Fusang, and provide feedback here on the testlive forums.

One known issue on Testlive is that you can pull the underdog custodians around in combat, in patch 1.4 you won’t be able to, so have fun with that while it lasts

That’s all for now. Have fun in The Secret World.

And don't hesitate to give feedback to this PvP Update. We are always watching...

- Bjorndal

Ich hoffe, dass man jetzt wieder öfter Eldorado wird spielen können, da ich das eines der besten PvP-Minispiele finde, die ich bisher gesehen habe (nicht nur in TSW).

Wie ja bereits angekündigt worden ist wurde damit begonnen, Bänke und Stühle so zu modifizieren, dass man sich darauf hinsetzen kann.

Dazu gibt es auch Emotes, die man im sitzen ausführen kann, um z.B. die Pose in der man sitzt zu ändern.

Man beachte, dass es auf dem Testserver noch einen Bug diesbezüglich gibt, wodurch man bei den Emotes nicht mehr direkt auf der Sitzgelegenheit sitzt.

Aufgrund eines Fehlers werden die Sitz-Emotes bis Ausgabe #5 verschoben.