Incoming Changes (Fan Faire 09 info)

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The panels from Fan Faire this year in a nutshell: this game, it is a changin'. I thought the spell revamp was bad enough... but they have far more in store for us. From a gameplay standpoint some of it could be nice... from the standpoint of the items and spells on the wiki, it means a lot of work. /rolleyes. So, what kind of things do we have coming our way between now and the expansion (or with the expansion)? Let me list some things (in no particular order, just as they come to mind)...

• First and foremost: There will be only one Crit. No more Spell crit vs melee crit vs heal crit vs taunt crit vs ranged crit. There will be only Critical Chance. That doesnt mean that it will be easy to have 100% crit in everything... instead your crit rate will be based by your class. IE as a healer a crit of 100 may mean 100% heal crit... but AFAIK it could mean 50 spell crit or 25 melee crit at the same time. They didn't have the idea very fleshed out beyond there being only one crit. The same with Ranged/Melee double attack. Spell double attack they said they will likely keep separate since its a special, rarely used kind of thing.
• Of course many of the spells and AAs are going to have to be modified to deal with this.
• Class revamps. Fighters will be getting a revamp. Rogues and summoners will be getting a revamp... rogues will be melee debuffers (with swashies getting some of the brigand-type duty) and necros/conjies doing spell debuffing. Priests will be looked at, specifically druids. HoT spells will have a HUGELY different mechanic:
  • The spell will try to heal instantly. Anything that isn't used gets saved to be applied on the next tick. Anything from that next tick that doesn't get used (including anything carried over from before) carries on again until the end. On termination, any unused healing potential goes out and gets spread over group members needing healing. In other words... druids just became a whole lot more valuable as healers. No longer will the heals go to waste because they're hiding behind the wards and reactives and can only apply a small portion on a few lucky ticks.
• Some of the stuff dealing with the expansion specifically is at its category page: Category:Sentinel's Fate
  • No more loams in T9, all spell rares will come from gem nodes which will spawn independent of ore nodes. Farm-ho!
  • Be a tinkerer and a transmuter at the same time! Adornments to be revamped to be more transmuter-made than various class-made like now.
• Buffs may be made to persist through death. Hallelujah (from a Warden with 16+ buffs to recast each death).
• Some buffs may actually be consolidated into 1, where it would make sense (IE self-buffs that you always cast).

More info to come when I can get to my pictures. -- lordebon 19:10, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

No pictures yet, but some more stuff that they talked about:

• "Auto-Mentoring": can be done in a city zone (by talking to an NPC, I think) and lets you set your level lower in 5 level increments without having to find someone to mentor. Make old zones and gray quests new again by making them con. You will be able to leave it and return to normal level any time you want, but will have to go back to a city to use it again (to prevent easy named farming with it).
• Quest journal will be changed to be a vertically-split design like several UI mods use now. Tabs will also be rearranged so that the top shows quests, collections, and the new achievements, tabs along the bottom will split the quests into active, completed, and group panes. Also, they're going to look into allowing multiple quests to be tracked simultaneously in the quest helper. There will NOT be an increase in the journal size, apparently its already responsible for quite a bit of lag.
• Halas will be returning in a new incarnation (Sorry folks, old Halas is gone for good!). It should land the same time as the expansion, but it won't be a part of it (it will be free content). Everyone's favorite little skiff will also be reincarnated. New Halas (I don't think thats the official name, but they only mentioned a different name once in passing) will be a Good-aligned city to bring back the balance and should include player housing. It was as-yet undetermined which races and classes will be permitted to start there.

Again, more info later. -- lordebon 12:38, 30 June 2009 (UTC)