Death has come to take its toll... Be wary Etherborn.
February has been a busy month and there is a lot of new updates to share with you all. This release brings major gameplay and balance adjustments, some added challenge for end game players and new multiverse items. Read on to learn the details!
Risk and Reward ⚔️
As the player base continues to grow, we have a higher concentration of elite players who are pushing their builds to the limits. As a result, many players have a full set of Etherbound (on chain) items which cannot be lost with death. This is awesome, but it does have a side of effect of significantly reducing the sting of death and as a result making high level gameplay less risky. To make sure that risk is intact at high level gameplay, we are adding the "Item Stasis" system.
With the Item Stasis system, when a player dies, all of their equipped Etherbound items will be put into stasis. When items are in stasis they cannot be equipped. The length of time they will be in stasis depends on the level and rarity of the item. This system will increase the loss during death of well-equipped players while maintaining the permanence of their on-chain Etherbound items.
Trapped Soul at the New Town Mausoleum
Of course, there may be times when you simply cannot wait for your perfect rolled legendary item to finish its stasis cycle. For that case, there is a new merchant in town called the Trapped Soul who is an Underworld Dealer. The Underworld Dealer can unlock your items from stasis if you are willing to furnish him with a payment of gems.
Underworld Dealer Unlocks
The Great Balance ⚖️
As mentioned above, players are getting more advanced and finding the most effective ways to play the game. This has uncovered a few critical balance issues allowing players to complete very high-level content with lower quality gear than intended. Furthermore, it has shown that there are some issues where higher level content is not always the most profitable. As a result, we have taken a holistic look at the game systems and adjusted them where necessary.
The first changes are to make sure that the highest levels provide the best rewards. The most dramatic issue here was with XP rewards. At high levels, enemies take much longer to kill but do not provide proportionally higher XP. To fix this, we have made XP rewarded be proportional to enemy life. This is tuned to not dramatically change the time it takes to level up, but to make sure that higher levels are more rewarding. Beyond that, item drop rates have been adjusted slightly to ensure the highest levels are providing the best item rewards.
New War Cry with Cooldown
The next major change is in the skills. With the existing system it is possible to keep your character in permanent invulnerable or stealth state with a steady supply of orbs which breaks the intended design. To handle this, we are bringing back skill cooldowns. Skills have been adjusted to either use energy, a cooldown or a combination of both. This increases the utility of slotting a variety of skills for your character and prevents abuse of some specific techniques.
Brutal Slash with Energy Only
As an example, War Cry now has a 120 second cooldown but no energy cost. You can mix this will an ability like Brutal Slash which has an energy cost but no cooldown.
Enemy Tactics 😈
In order to keep the challenge level high enemies have also received a boost to their tactics. Some enemy types have new movement patterns making them circle, dash or even teleport around. This makes combat significantly more dynamic and increases players skill requirement.
Beyond that, some enemy factions were not diverse enough. As a result, we have merged a few of them together. Fishmen and Golems have been merged together to create the new Cursed Tide faction. Redhorns and Demons have been merged together to create the new Demonic Horde faction.
Check Out the New Loot 👀
This release also brings a set of new affixes for you to find on loot. Check them out below...
Cooldown Reduce - reduce the length of cooldown for your skills
+X Class Abilities - increase the level of all your class abilities by X
+X Attack Skills - increase the level of all your class attack skills by X
+X Defense Skills - increase the level of all your class defense skills by X
+X Utility Skills - increase the level of all your class utility skills by X
These new affixes will expand the number of viable builds and also increase the importance of your class selection.
Item Rolled with +4 Defense Skills
Multiverse Advancements 🌐
As always, we are pushing the multiverse forward and this release is no different. Earlier in the release we shipped support for Multiverse Brotherhood Clan Tags. You can down sport your [MvB] membership in game as a title. Keep your eyes open for upcoming chances to earn your Etherscape themed tag in game soon.
New Multiverse Items
Beyond that, our support for the Enjin Multiverse expands. A few weeks ago we added support for the Aeonclipse Key and Oindrasdain. With this release we have added support for Starbow and the Wanderer's Elixer!
Imperial Sovereign Utility 🪙
This new build brings new challenges for all players. However, Governors holding Imperial Sovereigns can soften the blow. Imperial Sovereigns now have new bonuses to reduce the cost of removing stasis from items as well as reducing the cost to use the skill trainer. You can see the full list of bonuses here.
Skill Trainer UI
The skill trainer has been able to reset your skill tree for gems since the past release. He can now also boost your level to 10 for a cost in gems. This will allow motivated players to jump back into the end game as fast as possible.
Imperial Sovereigns on the Market
Gem Exchange 💎
Etherscape is the first Enjin adopter to successfully ship integration of the Enjin Platform with Wallet Connect. As a result, the Gem Exchange is now live in game. You can now seamlessly purchase gems to speed up your process of minting items. Furthermore, you can sell you gems to convert them back into Enjin. This will allow players to cash out if they win a large Heroic Cache or Arena Weekly Round.
Gem Market is Live
Wrapping it Up ✅
As The Etherscape advances forward everything evolves to find the perfect balanced of risk and reward. We are excited to get feedback from you all in game. There were a bunch of changes and bug fixes not covered in this write up. So, you can check the full release notes here. If you want to jump into the Alpha and play, then learn how here.