Patch Notes - The Duel, Rebuilt (and Your Gems Changed Meaning)

Three days of work, and one of them changes something you already own: every gem socketed in your gear now does a different job. Read that part first.

Your gems changed meaning

There are eight kinds of gem, and until now most of them did something we had invented. They now do what the original game gave them - which for several of them is a different thing entirely:

Exactly two gems raise attack: Dragon for a fighter, Phoenix for a caster. If you socketed Rainbow for magic attack, it now buys you experience instead; Fury buys accuracy rather than damage. Nothing was taken away - every gem is worth socketing, they simply do different things, and a Tortoise suit is now a real defensive build.

The duel, rebuilt

PvP was measured this week rather than guessed at: four level-130 characters, one per class, read through every enhancement level and every gem tier - 72 readings of the game's own numbers - and the rules searched against them. Five things turned out to be plainly wrong, and each of them made something impossible:

• Attack speed was the sum over every worn item. Every helmet, necklace, ring and pair of boots carries a filler speed value, so a fully geared player swung once every 1.4 seconds while a naked one swung three times as fast. Gear made you slower. Only the weapon in your right hand decides your speed now - and hunting got a great deal faster as a result.
• A blow had no reach. A dagger could hit someone across the screen. A weapon now reaches as far as it should, and nothing with less than five cells of reach can touch a flying Archer - which is what Fly is for.
• A spell had no range and no cast time. Both are in the client's own data and we had never imported them. Tornado reaches 21 cells - the longest reach in the game and the Fire Taoist's real weapon; Fire 14; Thunder 11. Cast beyond that and nothing happens.
• Skills and buffs multiplied without limit. Hercules, RapidFire and Dash are worth 300% of a swing, Intensify doubles, Superman triples - together, six times the damage the balance was built around, which is why two players in good gear killed each other in a single hit. Against a player a skill is capped at one and a half blows and buffs at double. Against monsters nothing is capped: Superman still multiplies your hunting damage by ten.
• Magic arrived unmitigated. Worn magic defence is a fraction of worn armour, so a spell landed almost whole. Spells are now measured against magic defence and a per-level ward, and the Shield buff wards spells too - the client calls it a magic shield and until now it stopped only swords.

The result, in fully enhanced gear: Trojan > Warrior > Fire Taoist > Water Taoist > Archer in raw blows - but that is a ranking of damage, not of who wins. A Trojan who reaches a Fire Taoist ends him in two blows; the Taoist needs four the other way, and has 21 cells in which to make sure the Trojan never arrives. Nobody in matching gear dies to a single blow, a +12 still executes a +8, and a +6 has no business in a +12's fight.

Battle power decides a fifth of a blow, and no more. Your weapon and your stats are the other four fifths, so the widest gap two players can have is one and a half times - whatever their gear score.

There is a guide for all of it: Fighting other players, and How PvP is balanced for the numbers behind it.

What your gear carries, a duel now carries too

Everything your equipment does to a monster, it now does to a person:

• A freezing arrow freezes a player. For up to two seconds they cannot step, jump, swing or cast. You cannot be frozen twice in a row - there are four seconds of immunity afterwards, or a fast bow would simply hold you still until you died.
• Poison and fire burn for five seconds. If the burn finishes someone, the kill belongs to whoever laid it.
• Reflect turns a player's blow around exactly as it turns a monster's - the whole blow goes back, and the defender takes nothing.
• Dash charges a player, stuns them and shoves them a step back.
• A poisoned weapon poisons a person. Life, Mana and Shield weapons already worked in a duel; poison was the one that did nothing.
• An Archer pays for every shot at a player - one arrow, three for a Scatter - and a Penetrating arrow ignores armour there too. Carry spare quivers.

Chat

• Your letters survive. Anything outside plain English was being destroyed on its way through the server - Polish, accents, anything. The wire is bytes now, and they arrive exactly as they were typed.
• Team chat works. It had no handler at all, so every line vanished.
• The broadcast channel works and costs 5 CP a line - charged only when the message actually goes out.
• /gm <your message> files a ticket with the staff from anywhere. You get the answer as a whisper, or at your next login if you have logged off by then.
• A star over whoever founded the party, so you can see who to ask to join.
• Whispers carry the speaker's face again, and staff can be whispered by their plain name.

The world

• The Water Lord is a boss again. The real quest boss had no spawn anywhere, which quietly made Clean Water impossible to obtain and the first rebirth impossible without a GM. He now stands alone on each of the eleven islets of his map, respawns every fifteen minutes, and drops Clean Water three times in ten.
• The Adventure Zone gathers into four camps - one species each, dense inside a camp and empty between them, so you always know whose ground you are standing on.
• Every guide now ends with a table of where to find the people it mentions - map and coordinates, generated from the world itself, so it cannot drift.
• The player market is on the website. Every open booth's goods, searchable, at /market.
• A prayer is something you do together. Anyone standing within eight cells of a praying player banks lucky time at the same rate - no skill and no rebirth needed - and the whole circle follows the leader's pose.
• A siege gate that looks smashed open is smashed open. The fourth bomb opens it for everyone.

Small things

• Your potion shortcut survives the stack. The client binds an F-key to one particular potion, so the server now drinks a spare from your bag and leaves that one alone - the slot works down to your last potion.
• Clicking someone out of reach tells you once, not once per click.
• The three-button strip under the top icons follows the rest of the interface at high resolutions (this one arrives with the next launcher update).