THE HERALD

If you’re like me and trapped by the weather (snow is great and all but not this much of it) then settle down for the evening with this week’s Grab Bag!

February’s newsletter also went out during the week and includes a new monthly poll. If you aren’t signed up, you can do so here. In the meantime, you can view the full newsletter by clicking this link.

As always, thanks for all your questions! If you have any game related questions for our DAoC Devs, please send them in through our Grab Bag submission form. Please note this is for game questions, feedback should be sent in through our feedback form.

On to the questions! 🙂

Since curse 7 went in and we kill the dragon it doesn’t count towards the title, can you put this back in?

The dragons from Chapter 7 should once again count towards the dragon-titles when defeated. Thanks!

Did the drop rate for alchemy items get nerfed? Before this last patch I was able to gather quite a few when I farmed for them. The last few times it seems the drop rate was cut around 75%.

Please include the exact area you are farming in so that we can investigate this better but the general rare alchemy component drop rate has not been changed.

With Endless Conquest on the horizon (somewhere), wouldn’t it make more sense that PvE was more streamlined/not require battlegroups to complete, the game is built upon the foundation of RvR – it makes little sense to prolong the PvE experience just to be able to viably compete in RvR with people in top-end templates.

Some of the end-game PvE still requiring battlegroups, is perfectly fine in our eyes. Some players enjoy that sort of thing. Additionally, it can be argued that progressing to the end-game is already too quick for new players, such that newer players are quickly out of their depth. With the upcoming Endless Conquest and the ability to play for free, we would likely increase the time it takes to reach max level to help alleviate that and allow newer players a better chance to learn the game as their characters grow.

We’ll still, of course, be updating and streamlining the Dragon’s Curse campaign as needed (remember, it only ended a few short months ago!) and potentially fleshing out some more ways to spend Aurulite for its rewards. Further, with the introduction of the alternative currency merchants, a great number of encounters and end-game loot is easier to obtain than ever.

Patch 1.125, which is focused on general Realm vs Realm improvements, will also improve on this by streamlining the myriad RvR-related quests and objectives into one holistic system. This system will, in addition to RvR-related rewards, allow players who perhaps don’t have time to join PvE raids an avenue to earn end-game loot through RvR-related tasks. While a PvE raid may only take several hours to complete, those hours are required as one solid block of time, and many players may not have the time to participate. Earning those same rewards via the new RvR system may still take more total time than joining a given PvE raid but will allow players to do so in bite-size chunks of time, over the course of several play sessions.

Do you have plans to update the crafting system to include information about what items do in the item information window in addition to what supplies you need to craft them? It would make crafting easier if you knew what items can do without having to go outside of the game or to the housing market to find out for what they would be used.

We agree that this would be a great improvement and it’s on our list! We will likely tackle this shortly after the release of the Endless Conquest later this year.

Obligatory update on Race/Gender/Name respecs launch date?

Patch 1.125!

A lot to digest this week, indeed!

Stay warm, and see you in the frontiers! 🙂

Grab a cuppa and take a minute out for this week’s Grab Bag!

As always, thanks for all your questions! If you have any game related questions for our DAoC Devs, please send them in through our Grab Bag submission form. Please note this is for game questions, feedback should be sent in through our feedback form.

Click ‘more’ to continue on to the questions! 🙂

What was the reasoning on changing the Mercenary RR5 away from a weaponskill buff to a straight damage buff?

There were several reasons for this change:

A straight damage buff better accomplishes the goal of the original RR5 change to increase their damage burst. The original weaponskill buff did increase their damage too, but it also increased their defensive abilities too much. Secondly, the weaponskill’s damage increase wasn’t as much as we wanted by itself and then was too much when stacked with banespike or the Sorcerer’s Suggested Rage buffs.  Finally, at the time of the introduction of the weaponskill boost, Light Tank stances (since removed) were giving a damage boost that prevented our use of one for the RR5.

The new RR5’s straight boost to damage solves these issues by being strong enough on its own that we can warrant preventing the stacking of the other damage boosts and by better penalizing their defensive abilities when it is active.

How does the Cleric loyalty cloak /use2 (10% Heal efficiency increase) interact with the Cursed Life gloves 25% heal bonus charge? Do they stack or coexist?

These two effects stack because they provide a bonus to heal effectiveness in different ways:

• The Cloak of the Loyal Cleric grants a buff that increases the effectiveness of any heals cast *on* each member of the group.
  • This bonus would not apply to heals cast by a group member onto a non-group member target.
• The Cursed Life Gauntlets grant a self-buff that increases the effectiveness of all heals cast *by* the user.
  • This bonus would apply to any target that the user heals, regardless of whether or not the target is in their group.

The Silver “surprise” boxes we received for Midwinter gave me a surfeit of Pictslayer weapons. I can salvage these on Hib, but not Mid.
What gives?

After double-checking each item, Pictslayer weapons are not set as salvageable on any realm, including Hibernia. As these weapons are still desired by many players, especially in the battlegrounds, we have no plans to make them salvageable at this time.

Our best guess here is that you may have salvaged some Pictish weapons on Hibernia that were already in your pack.

We also double-checked the silver-bound chests and verified that they were giving Pictslayer weapons to each realm.

In the newsletter you mentioned more frequent RvR events…my question is actual new events or just rotating between Ghost Keep/BG/DF? Any teaser if they are new?

It will be a combination of existing and new events.

We aren’t ready to start talking about the details of the new events quite yet, but the big picture idea is a system that utilizes in-game leaderboards. These events would likely run for 1-2 weeks on a rotating schedule and would incentivize various aspects of the game (mostly relating to RvR).

In a previous grab bag you talked about the realm section button for switching realms but what about making a server select button. So that way we don’t have to log out completely to select a different server Like Ywain1 or Ywain2?

Re-working our login and server-select flow has been on our list for quite a while! The reason it hasn’t happened yet is a simple one: it’s quite involved. Luckily, we’ve been making head-way on this and hope to have a new flow around the release of the Endless Conquest this fall!

[Insert question about Assassin and pet-class adjustments here]

Based on the feedback coming in, it seems like we’ve hit the mark on the latest round of changes to pets and assassins. While we understand that some who play those classes think some of the adjustments went too far, we’re still seeing those classes perform well in RvR and PvE. Of course, we’ll continue to monitor things and make further tweaks if necessary. Thank you all for your feedback!

And keep sending that feedback in!

Enjoy the weekend, all 🙂

Welcome to the first Grab Bag of 2018, and what an exciting year ahead we have planned!

Our first newsletter of the year went out earlier in the week, so make sure to check your emails. If you are not signed up, you can do so by entering your email address on this sign up page. In the meantime, you can view the complete newsletter in your browser here.

Thanks to everyone for your questions! If you have any game related questions for our DAoC Devs, please send them in through our Grab Bag submission form. Please note this is for game questions, feedback should be sent in through our feedback form.

On to the questions! 🙂

Does mastery of focus affect the chance of proc styles to land? If so how is it calculated?

Yes. Mastery of Focus effectively raises the level of the spell by its listed amount for all spells cast (including style procs). Style procs have their resistances calculated based on the level of the style, so a level 39 style has a level 39 spell’s resist rate vs level X targets. The Mastery of Focus realm ability can raise that style’s spell level, depending on the amount of MoF trained, up to a maximum of a level 50 spell.

All spells have a base chance of 10% to be resisted, so a level 50 style proc will still get resisted at around that 10% rate, on average. However, a level 12 style proc with no Mastery of Focus will see around a 30-35% resist rate vs a level 50 target and a level 34 style proc without MoF would have a 15-20% resist rate, on average.

Hi, is there a reason why, in the Enchanter’s enchantment line, the spells Enchantment of Ice, Stone, Fire and Mana cancels my Maddening Scalars wolf shape-shift, while Enchantment of Truth and Zeal do not? Is this by design or a bug? If it is by design, what is the purpose?

Thanks!

The Enchantment of Ice, Stone, Fire, and Mana are offensive proc buffs while the Enchantment of Truth and Zeal are not. Since Maddening Scalars’ shapeshift is connected to an offensive proc as well, it gets overwritten by the more powerful enchantment procs. This same behaviour can be found with the Champion’s Call of the Champion buff or any other group-targeted class-based offensive proc.

One potential solution to this is looking at Maddening Scalars itself (as well as other item-based proc/shapeshift combos like Atlantis Tablet where the proc is rather weak/negligible). The offensive proc (a small Damage-over-time) involved with this shapeshift is fairly outdated now and not really the main reason for using the item – the shapeshift. So we could simply remove the proc aspect from Maddening Scalars and alleviate this issue without too much negative impact or overall change to class abilities.

Why are the procs on the warrior blood seal two-handed weapons damage to power rather than damage to health or damage to endurance?

The short answer is that technically, there are no damage-to-health or damage-to-endurance functions. The longer answer is that even though it’s damage-to-power, the main function of the proc is to reduce damage taken by the warrior and their group as well as restore power to their group.

It’s been awhile since you opened up races for some classes to use like luri bm, are you planning to open more races and when if yes.

Yes, we are planning to open up a few more pairings when the new race respec feature is in. The recent server and client stability issues have pushed back that feature a bit, but it’s still on track for the first half of this year.

We’ve noticed that the drop rate on Frozen Weapons appears lower than last year’s Frozen Caverns event. What gives?

This is correct and a mistake on our part. The reward chance was set so that on average 1 weapon dropped per group, per run through the Challenge mode. That is unintentionally lower than last year and so we’ve upped the chance so that on average 3-4 weapons will drop per group, per run. We’ve lowered the overall chance to get a potion to help compensate the other item drop chances as well. This is live as of this posting. Happy hunting!

Here’s to the year ahead 🙂

See you in the frontiers!

As a token of our appreciation to each and every one of you, all Midwinter festivities (including bonuses and merchants) will be extended until the morning of Monday, January 22nd.

Thank you for playing Dark Age of Camelot and enjoy!

A few hot and ready bug fixes and adjustments, mostly involving A Dragon’s Curse campaign, are below! We’ll have some more class-centric changes coming in the next week or two, so stay tuned and keep sending in your feedback!

Items

• Doppelganger Shards and Magic Orbs can now be used anywhere, including the capital cities and housing zones.
  • This fix should also address the issue with stealth classes that could sometimes /use these shards or orbs and then stealth and not receive their items.
• Nearsight cures will now only remove the nearsight aspect of the Golden Scarab’s Vest proc and not the snare and shapeshift too.
• The following Curse Chapter 9 set bonuses should now properly apply their respective ability upgrades (many of these have been fixed since before the new year but are being retroactively noted):
  • Bainshee
  • Eldritch
  • Spiritmaster
  • Sorcerer
  • Valkyrie
  • Wizard
  • Healer
  • Scout
  • Minstrel
  • Reaver
• Several Curse Chapter 9 chestpiece and leggings icons have been corrected to display the appropriate armor slot.
• Heal procs on Curse Chapter 9 armors should now all fire properly.
• Necromancer Bloodlord’s Armor should no longer drop as “tattered” from the Curse Chapter 9 instance.
• Valewalker’s set bonus has been increased from +33% to +66% additional absorption.

A Dragon’s Curse Campaign 

• All realms Chapter 10:
  • Encounters now award area credit.
    • Please note that to receive area credit, players must be within the magical barriers that are active during the encounters.
    • These encounters will no longer grant credit to any battlegroups that are setup.
  • It is no longer possible to receive the glove reward without first completing Chapter 6’s quest.
• All realms Chapter 8:
  • Encounters now award area credit.
  • The countdowns between attack waves have been reduced from 30-300 seconds down to 30-60 seconds.
• Albion Chapter 9:
  • Janus should always reset his encounter properly now.
  • Some of the normal mobs and Albion’s 9.3 encounter have had their difficulties reduced to better align their difficulty with the Midgard and Hibernia versions.
• All realms Chapter 7:
  • Encounters now all award area credit.
    • Please note that to receive area credit, players must be within the magical barriers that are active during the encounters.
• Albion Chapter 7:
  • The barrier will now properly reset when the encounter is completed.
• Albion Chapter 6:
  • Morella’s ability to mesmerize has been removed.
• Midgard Chapter 6:
  • The Dark Oracle and Dark Drakulv will no longer aggro as a group.
• Hibernia Chapter 6:
  • The Glimmer Ghoul and Dark Glimmer have been relocated to alleviate line-of-sight issues.
  • Additional instructions have been added to direct players to the proper pathway upon clearing the second area in Aerus City.
  • Avriels have had their difficulty reduced slightly.

Update 12:40 PM EST / 5:40 PM GMT: Ywain is once again open and available to all players!

The Ywain server will be coming down today (11:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM GMT) to perform some additional maintenance to address the in-game delays with gameplay and chat.

Servers are expected back up within 2 hours.

We also want to provide a bit more context for these in-game delays that many players are experiencing. All of our servers and services are hosted on the cloud and are affected by the recent software updates required to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerability. We heavily rely on these cloud services to run the game as smoothly as possible.

For more information on the recently discovered CPU vulnerability issues, please check out this article.

Unfortunately, the New Frontiers region on the Ywain server was only temporarily fixed by our configuration change last Friday. We started noticing more delays on Saturday afternoon and have been trying some behind-the-scenes fixes that don’t involve downtime since then; none of which have fully resolved the issues. Fortunately, all other servers and services were fixed by that Friday downtime and are still looking good and performing better than ever.

With this downtime today, we will be trying a more robust configuration change to Ywain that we are hopeful will fix its remaining issues as well. Thank you all for your patience and understanding!

Update 1:04 PM EST / 5:04 PM GMT: Ywain is back online and available to all players. Thank you for your patience!

The Ywain server will be coming down today (11:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM GMT) to perform maintenance intended to address some in-game delays with gameplay and chat.

Servers are expected back up within 4 hours.

We’ve noticed some poorer performance than normal in New Frontiers and want to make a configuration change to our server hosting to try and address it prior to the weekend.

We appreciate your patience and understanding as we perform this downtime.

All servers are online and open to players!

Update: Ywain, Gaheris, and Pendragon are now online and open to players! Archived servers are still undergoing maintenance and will be up within the next couple of hours.

The Ywain, Gaheris, Pendragon and all archived servers will be coming down tomorrow, January 3rd (5:45 AM EST / 10:45 AM GMT) to perform an Amazon server hosting security update.

Due to the amount of servers and background-processes under maintenance, servers are expected back up within 10 hours. Intermittent downtime may be noticed with the Account Center and the Herald websites but any issues reaching those sites should clear up within a few minutes.

We appreciate your patience and understanding as we perform this extended downtime.