THE HERALD

Update 9:15 AM EST / 2:15 PM GMT: Ywain is now open to all players!

The Ywain server will be coming down tomorrow at 5:45 AM EST / 10:45 AM GMT for maintenance for Amazon server hosting.

Servers are expected back up by Noon EST / 5 PM GMT.

Welcome back to our regularly scheduled Grab Bag, hope you enjoyed the insight behind the scenes in our last one 🙂

Lots of unbelievable weather around the world right now, to everyone in any of the regions affected – stay safe! You and your families are in our thoughts.

Thanks as always to everyone for sending in your questions, keep ’em coming! 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.

Read on for this week’s Grab Bag!

Can you explain how exactly the kill counter for the daily quests works? We often had situations in keep fights when, for example, I did the death blow, but the kill did not count for us.

Kill Credit for the daily quests, excluding the solo-kill one which is based on the solo-kill rules, is entirely based on the character or character’s group obtaining the deathblow of an enemy player in RvR.

However, the siege-related daily quests require the relevant keep to be under siege (with the ‘flame’ icon showing on the /realmwar window) and require your character to be within the keep’s region. Most likely, any issue with getting credit for a kill on that daily quest means your character did not meet those 2 requirements.

Fortunately, we do have plans to increase the size of the keeps’ regions in version 1.124, which should alleviate the main issue with receiving credit on that quest.

The other daily kill quests have similar region requirements such as being in the ‘open’ and away from most structures like towers, keeps, and ruins or being within the Buggane’s Obelisk’s current region, respectively.

If you are not receiving credit for a kill, these region requirements are again most likely the culprit.

There appears to be a large number of inactive guilds that have guild houses. With the removal of house dues, is there a plan to repossess those houses to allow active players the opportunity to get a better house location?

We’ll look into how best tackle this with the housing update planned for late next year.

Big Stephen King fan here, was running with a prologue to chap5 BG on Alb and saw an NPC called Childe in the new Dartmoor dungeon. Then as we got to the chap5 part, Occultist Naxsomething (can’t remember the name) broadcasts something regarding a darkest tower in /region chat.

Was wondering if the King easter egg was actually a coincidence (the dark tower series of novels, for which S.K got his inspiration from a 19th century poem called “Childe Roland to the dark tower came”, Roland being one of the main characters in the books) or was it done on purpose (and if so, how come no one caught it yet?!) Highly recommend reading those books 😛

*Wink*

There are some other easter eggs in the Curse campaign that many avid readers or watchers of fantasy will surely pick up!

Somewhat recently changes were made to horse armor that increases mount speed. However, the Mythical horse armor received no such upgrade. Is there any chance to get this armor up to date? 

Correct. The Mythical Horse Armor was given as a reward to all accounts and characters who pre-ordered the Darkness Rising expansion. As such, several sub-level 50 characters have the Mythical Horse Armor and enjoy using it. Rather than limit lower levels from wearing their pre-ordered horse armor, that armor did not receive the speed bonus.

First off the 4.5 speed aurulite weapons are great! Is there any chance that we will see thrust/pierce and any other weapon type that has not been put in yet? I understand some specs will have weapons better than others, but they’re basically Pictslayers. Since there are all damage types for those will we see others in the future?

As the campaign continues, keep checking the aurulite merchants for additional weapon types!

Based on feedback from the 5v5 event, we’re going to hold off on introducing the character movement changes from the 1.123C Pendragon notes until we can make some adjustments to them. Since those changes require server downtime, we’re going to introduce the other fixes and changes from the 1.123C Pendragon notes in the form of a Hot Fix today and delay the character movement and +range% fix (which also requires server downtime) until the 1.124 version. We’re aiming to release version 1.124 prior to Dark Age of Camelot’s 16th anniversary.

Without further ado, the following notes are now live! 

World

• Buggane’s Obelisk will now rotate once every 4 hours instead of once every 24 hours.
• The portal ceremony to Ellan Vannin will now port once every 5 minutes instead of once every 10 minutes.
• The Triumphant Wristguard reward (called “Band of the Dream Conqueror”) from the Chapter 6 Dragon Curse campaign will now be tradable to other players.
• The Chapter 6 Dragon Curse campaign solo instance’s mobs have had their difficulty reduced slightly.
• The Chapter 5 Dragon Curse campaign Vulcan (Albion) and Darkspire Crystal (Midgard) bosses have had their difficulties reduced slightly. Hibernia’s boss is already at the correct difficulty.

Class Changes

Enchanter
Enchantment specialization

• The Enchantment of Mana’s proc rate has been reduced from a 50% to a 40% chance to proc.

Hunter
Beastcraft specialization

• The chance for the Hunter’s Avatar to land a rear stun has been removed entirely.
• The chance for the Hunter’s Avatar to proc disease has been reduced as follows:
  • Level 40 avatar: 10% down to 7% chance.
  • Level 50 avatar: 15% down to 10% chance.

Bug Fixes and Client Updates

• Players that are within 2000 units of the boss when it dies should consistently receive credit when completing Chapter 5 of the Dragon Curse campaign.
  • Please note that the previous step still requires characters to equip their Soul weapon prior to fighting the boss.
• The Chapter 5 Dragon Curse encounters should no longer despawn when the encounter is failed.
• The Chapter 6 Dragon Curse campaign’s Dream mobs should no longer respawn while the instance is underway.
• The plate armor Soul Infused Greaves should now equip to the right armor location.

Registration for this year’s 5v5 Tournament is now closed! The excitement is immense 🙂

We would ask those participating to please arrive on time and be ready to go (make your guilds beforehand!) around the porter’s area in Camelot at 1PM EST (6PM GMT/7PM CET).

In addition to the awesome fights we have to look forward to, we will also be giving away some spot prizes during the event! Shileah will be running contests for patterns and 1 month DAoC Timecodes for those joining the fun in Twitch chat, and our very chatty commentators will be awarding patterns to players for the following categories:
 

• Best Dressed through the use of patterns (free Mithril is available on all characters on Pendragon)
• Tournament MVP
• MVP outside of the top 3 teams (finalists, semi-finalists, and 3rd placed teams)
• Groups Stage MVP (per group category, not team)
• Most Memorable Play

Please note: Pendragon is down tomorrow for a patch (details here), but will be set as FFA ruleset when it returns, please wait until Pendragon is back online to copy over any toons from live. So get ready to make your guilds, copy your toons, and work your fashion magic for Saturday! #5v5hype

Full tournament details can be found here. The tournament will be streamed in full on our official Twitch channel, and groups randomised Friday evening. If you have a team but it does not appear on the fixture list, please contact Beibhinn asap via Discord or Postcount.

Excited for what Saturday brings!! See you there 🙂

It’s Grab Bag time!

Don’t forget to get your teams signed up for our 5v5 tournament! Registration closes Wednesday, August 23rd at 5PM EST/10PM GMT, so still plenty of time 🙂

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 this week’s questions…

Previously there was talk of a housing update, is this still in the works? Full consignment merchants, vault space, plat limit, better market search badly need looking at and improving.

Yes, we absolutely will follow-through with our earlier promises of a housing update. We have long-term plans for entirely new house art, house types, increased house vault space, a solution to full consignment merchants, and improvements to the market search usability and interface.

In the nearer term, we are focusing on the completion of our ongoing Dragon Curse campaign, RvR and class changes to address your ongoing feedback, the aforementioned MTX features like durability repair and race/gender/name respecs, as well as some soon to be announced initiatives! Once those near to mid-term goals are complete, we would love to return our attention to the much-needed housing updates!

As a cleric I wanted to change my small shield to Aten’s shield with the new Mithril system. But when I got the shield the scholar gave me a medium shield. Is there anyway broadsword is going to correct this so we can have a choice between small and medium?

This is something we can possibly look at in the future but it’s not technically a bug. One of the unique benefits of Clerics is that they have always been able to use medium shields whereas other non-melee healing classes have been limited to only small shields. This has meant that their rewards have been itemized with medium shields in lieu of small ones across most of the game’s content, with Aten’s shield included. Changing this item to allow Clerics to choose the shield size sounds like a logical enough idea on paper but of course there are many other examples of many other classes that will have similar requests. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but it’s not a priority at the moment and we would much rather tackle all of those changes in one fell swoop than do them piecemeal and have some classes feel left out.

Now that there is an official place for this question, I’ll ask something I’ve always wondered about. The game has every type of magic imaginable…except for water. As a Hib-only player, I’m seeing the nature connection in Hibernia with the naturalist classes, so if such a class or spec line were ever made, Hib would be the best place for it. Wizards have fire, Theurgs have wind, both have earth, Hibs have nature heals with vague names like “renascence” and “apotheosis”, thanes have lightning, and we even have magnetism and whatnot on the mauler, but why no water magic? I’ve always wondered why all the other magic types under the sun are available in one form or another, but this was the one that was left out. Why is that? I think it would be one of the coolest additions ever!

To be fair, Wizards and Theurgists do have Ice magic already! That said, Water magic would certainly be a great addition to the game and perhaps one day we can add it onto a relevant (or new!?) class.

Many feel that the current relic system is outdated with today’s game. They are only worth taking to annoy the other realms, but mostly not taken due to their slowness to run back. Does Broadsword have any plans to look into bringing relics in line with how RvR is today?

We have had some internal discussions as far back as patch 1.115 regarding relics and how they should be changed.

One of the larger ideas discussed was to institute a relic capture “ceremony” where the attacking realm must hold the relic temple or keep for X amount of time. Once the ceremony ended, the attacking realm would be teleported back to their realm’s relic temple along with the captured relic. Granted, that discussion revolved around the 1.115 rules where relics were stored in un-capturable keeps or the temples which kept them more open to attack by the defending realm.  The feedback at the time was to only tweak them slightly as many players enjoyed the opportunity to intercept relics on their way to a realm’s temple.

We are certainly open to the idea of upping the relic-carrier’s speed as well and are still open to any feedback on the relic bonuses themselves but have admittedly gotten very little feedback regarding relics over the past several months.

Is it true that every/certain armor and weapon pieces have different proc rates compared to others? I’ve heard that some meth fangs and timeless chest pieces have a much higher proc rate than others, or is it just RNG?

Offensive and reactive proc chances are set on each individual weapon or armor piece so it’s entirely possible that some items do have higher or lower chances to proc but as a general rule we use the following proc rates:

Reactive armor or shield procs: 10% chance
Offensive 2-handed or 1-handed weapon proc: 10-15% chance
Offensive dual-wielded weapon proc: 6-8% chance

Looking at the Timeless chest pieces and Astral Mephitic Fangs specifically, they each have proc rates in line with the values listed above.

With that in mind, if you do see an item that seems to have much higher or lower proc rates than what’s listed here, please report it as a bug and we’ll take a look.

Enjoy the weekend all 🙂

The downloadable Item Database has received the following updates and corrections:

• The database now includes items up to version 1.123B.
  • Fixed an issue where jewelry items were missing slot information.
  • Fixed an issue where some items had incorrect monster source information.
  • Fixed an issue preventing One-Time-Drop and certain store-based items from being included in the database.
• All metadata has been cleaned up and now correctly categorizes item bonus types and their ids.
  • The metadata has been removed from the database file and is now available as a separate file download.

Check out the database and metadata HERE!