Update 49 Release Notes

 

Here are the Release Notes for Update 49, released on Wednesday, April 21st, 2021.

 

Of Special Note:

 

Peril of the Planar Eyes

Help scholars from Morgrave University as they search Xen'drik for the Planar Eyes, mysterious artifacts tied to the power of Eberron's planes. But be careful - the Eyes are also sought by a new and mysterious cult known as the Hidden Hand!

• An Element of Chaos - Questgiver: Thaddeus Donbury
• Eye Know Whodunnit - Questgiver: Alban Kimble
• Seizing the Dawn - Questgiver: Fain d'Phiarlan
• Beautiful Nightmares - Questgiver: Electa Poole

All of the quests can be accessed from Lordsmarch Plaza in Stormreach. 

Changes focused on game performance

Update 49 includes significant adjustments to melee and missile combat to address long term concerns about game performance. One of the most frequent causes of lag happens when an Effects Queue forms, which means that players have applied a ton of on-hit effects to a monster and the game has reached a buffer and must clear its queue in order to continue processing new information. We are specifically targeting Server-based lag with this change. Behind the scenes, the server crunches damage, effects, and debuffs in a big queue. We can measure how efficient the server is at processing this queue by measuring the server frames. To begin researching and addressing the root cause we put together simulations of a standard large group and their on-hit profiles. What we found was that the amount of damage dealt didn't matter, it was about the frequency that effects were being applied. It didn't matter if a simulation was against one target or many - if the effects queue was in trouble the rest of the instance had its performance significantly impacted. That means lag for not just you and your group but for other people on the server.

What's Changing:

• Doublestrike and Doubleshot will no longer apply a full subsequent "attack" as part of your attack chain. Instead, when a player Doublestrikes or Doubleshots the game will instead multiply the base amount of damage dealt (first number and sneak attack) by the amount of Doublestrikes or Doubleshots generated. This means that a player who deals an average of 100 damage on their first hit will now deal 200, or 300 damage, or however many Doublestrikes or Doubleshots multiplied by their base damage, when their Doublestrikes or Doubleshots go off.
• When a Doublestrike or Doubleshot happens, you'll see an icon of two swords next to your damage in the floaty text, similar to how Point Blank Shot provides its feedback.
• Abilities that apply additional ranged projectiles (Shuriken Expertise and Advanced Ninja Training) no longer apply multiple hits or projectiles. Instead, just as if they had been purely Doubleshot scalars, they will simply be additional chances to Doubleshot.
• Effects that trigger on-hit will also have their damage multiplied comparatively. This means that if you deal 10 Law damage on each hit, on a Doublestrike, it will deal 20.
• Repeating Crossbows and the Dual Crossbow style still fire 3 or 2 full projectiles (so you'll still see 3 numbers or 2 numbers, respectively) and are still affected by their Doubleshot penalties of 66% and 50%, respectively.
• A player's 100% effective Doublestrike cap still applies in this system.
• Offhand strikes will still be a separate "hit" and will roll their own damage from their own weapon and can still Doublestrike. However, we have removed the stat Offhand Doublestrike from the game. Your offhand now Doublestrikes at 50% of the Doublestrike of your mainhand. This means that if you have a 50% chance to produce an offhand strike, and 100% Doublestrike, your offhand will hit 50% of the time for 50% Doublestrike (so a 50% chance to deal double damage). Abilities and enhancements that used to provide Offhand Doublestrike no longer do so. Your offhand can only doublestrike a maximum of 50% of the time.
• Shields still cannot Doublestrike.
• Strikethrough attacks still proc their own Doublestrike roll individually per target struck.
• The main reasoning behind these changes (letting repeaters and offhand strikes still proc rather than fully condensing) is that we want to keep our damage numbers appropriate to the amount of animations that a player actually produces.
• Adrenaline's damage multiplier has been reduced from 300/300/300/400% to 150/150/150/200%
• Fury Eternal's 33% chance to regain an Adrenaline charge on vorpal has been increased to 100%
• Hunt's End damage multiplier has been reduced from 400% to 300%
• Hunt's End cooldown has been reduced from 24sec to 18sec
• Aasimar Scourge has lost its 2% Offhand Doublestrike per copy (as that stat no longer exists) and has gained an additional 1% Doublestrike per copy in its place (It now grants a total of 2% per copy, because it gave +1% before)
• Fury Eternal and Fury Made Placid's tooltips no longer claim that the two abilities are antirequisites of each other; they aren't.
• Tempest Capstone (Dervish) has lost its 25% Offhand Doublestrike (as that stat no longer exists) and has gained +10% Doublestrike.
• Reformatted text on Tempest's other Core abilities to be closer to current standards. (No functional changes).

A major effect of this change is that you will see much spikier damage across the board. The Doublestrike or Doubleshot calculation takes the original roll into account when determining damage, which means that you'll see much higher highs and much lower lows. Attacks that crit will multiply that increased damage, so you'll see much higher numbers on those attacks. Attacks that miss will deal no damage, as before, but rather than a Doubleshot or Doublestrike giving a chance for a second strike to deal damage, they will still deal no damage, as the original strike has missed.
 

Bow Adjustments:

We are updating bow combat in Update 49 for better balance, bug fixing, and to make the combat style stronger and more enjoyable overall. Our goals:

1. Add an animation set to Bow combat that allows us to balance the Bow combat style without incredibly-high Base Attack Bonus values that break the speed cap.
   • Previous Bow animations were problematic to balance in addition to causing issues for DDO's game engine. They needed to be replaced. 
2. Buff bow builds in Heroic levels.
   • Bows attacked a lot slower than other weapons, and that's especially problematic in lower Heroics.
3. Buff bow builds in Epic by retaining the existing maximum attack speed but adding more power.
   • Conversely, for game performance reasons we don't want Bow builds shooting much (if any) faster than they currently do in Epic levels. However, we do want endgame bow builds to be stronger, so that means making each shot hit harder.
4. Remove the combat style's over-reliance on burst damage by eliminating Manyshot and adding most of that power back to bow stats in other places.
   • As we've said for years, Manyshot's design is one of the main sticking points in being able to increase overall Bow damage. Your damage is multiplied so much 1/6 of the time that it's difficult to buff the other 5/6 without ridiculous hoops, connected cooldowns, and weird clauses. It's time for it to go in favor of more overall power for bows. As you'll see detailed below, we've changed Manyshot to an attack, and added more stable Ranged Power and Doubleshot into Bow feats. Between those and the new Manyshot attack, you should be doing better damage overall than before, just distributed more evenly across your attacks.
5. Diversify the number of viable builds that can use Longbows and Shortbows.
   • The only builds that were really close to viable with Bows were Rangers and to a lesser extent Fighters. There are other trees that can make use of Bows, and we'd like those to be more viable than they currently are.
6. Don't significantly shift the role or strength of individual Enhancement Trees - Let the other features of the pass bring all of them up together.
   • We have a number of trees that support Bows, and we are not using this pass to shift their relative strength or focus.

 

Animation Adjustments:

The two most baseline elements in your attack speed are Animation Length and Base Attack Bonus. As your Base Attack Bonus goes up, we apply different multipliers to the animation speed. This isn't really displayed in-game anywhere, it's just considered to be your baseline attack speed and is also used to let us adjust for animations that may be faster or slower than we need them to be.The core of a lot of Bow attack issues is this:

1. The existing Bow animation is terribly, painfully slow. Much slower than you ever see in game.
2. This is fixed by using Base Attack Bonus' speed to make the animation much faster, but still slower than most other attacks in the game.
3. DDO's game engine does not let animations go beyond a certain level of speed, and this prior BAB-speed adjustment on Live brought Bow users most of the way to cap at level 1, and a Deepwood Stalker with Haste well over that cap with no other boosts.

So, we made a new animation set that does not have that issue:

• Level 1 Ranger with a Longbow using former Live Animations: Each shot took about 1.14 seconds.
• Level 1 Ranger with a Longbow using New Animations: Each shot takes about 1.11 seconds.

This isn't much faster! However, as we'll get into in the Attack Speed section below, attack speed bonuses are worth more in this new animation set than they were before - If you have the Haste spell applied, a Speed item, or a feat that boosts your Ranged attack speed (such as Rapid Shot), you'll be firing significantly faster than before at low levels.

As we said in Goal #3, however, we want you to fire at about the same speed you do on Live now at endgame. So, the amount of speed Bow users gain from BAB between level 1 and cap is a lot smaller than before. We are going to come back around to that, because even if the base fire rate is the same, some of your other bonuses to attack speed are going to count with Bows when they didn't before due to the engine cap.

Attack Speed adjustments:

The current animations cap firing speed with Bows at about 0.69 seconds per shot, or about 87 shots per minute. To get from the new endgame baseline speed to an attack speed of 0.69sec per shot, you only need 25% attack speed boost that will come from two sources:

• Enhancement Bonus: 15%
  • This is the most common bonus type for attack speed, found on the Haste spell, Speed items, and the Blinding Speed feat. In most cases, it caps at 15%, but there's a significant outlier that we're fixing in this patch; the Blinding Speed feat, which currently grants 22%.
  • Blinding Speed was meant to be a direct analogue of the Haste spell, permanently granting you the bonuses of that spell. However, around the same time the feat was created we reduced the Ranged Attack Speed the Haste spell gave from 22% to 15%, and the feat never followed suit. In this update, we're changing it 15% to match the Haste spell. Reconstruct's attack speed portion has this disparity also, and will also be changed in this patch.
  • We do understand that this affects other Ranged builds that do not use Bows, and are comfortable with that change; if they need buffing after this, we'll do it in ways that are better than having them rely on a single misaligned ability.
• Feat Bonus: 10%
  • The remaining 10% needed for Bows to reach 25% could have come from a number of sources, but we decided to keep it in place on one of the earliest sources available to most Bow users - the Rapid Shot feat.

This means that the following sources of Bow attack speed have been removed:

• Shot on the Run no longer gives 10% attack speed with Longbows and Shortbows; its Ranged Power grant has been improved from +3 to +6. (Note that the Ranged Power is not Bow-specific).
• Improved Archer's Focus (in Tier 5 Deepwood Stalker) no longer gives 10% attack speed with Longbows and Shortbows while Archer's Focus is active; it now also grants +10 Ranged Power.
• Primal Hymn (in Fatesinger) no longer gives 10% Attack Speed with Longbows and Shortbows. (It still gives it for Thrown Weapons, though most of the time Throwers were running into the same animation cap issue that Bows were before these changes.)
• All instances of 25% Ranged Alacrity have been reduced to 20%.

Better Scaling Damage

• Your character's Dexterity bonus is now applied to damage by default when wielding a shortbow or longbow. 
• Point Blank Shot now also adds "When using a Longbow or Shortbow, you gain +1 Critical Threat Range."
• Combat Archery now also grants +1 Critical Multiplier with Longbows and Shortbows.
• Combat Archery's Dexterity requirement is now 17, down from 21.

Manyshot

We want to take Manyshot's power and distribute it back into passive damage:

• The existing Manyshot ability is gone.
• The Manyshot feat has been changed to:
  • Manyshot: Bow Attack: Ranged Bow Attack: Expend one charge to fire three arrows in quick succession. You have +1 Critical Threat Range and Critical Multiplier with these shots. Each of these shots can Doubleshot. 2 second cooldown. This feat gives 3 charges, you regain 1 charge every 12 seconds you don't use Manyshot (Requires a Longbow or Shortbow to use). Passive: You gain Doubleshot equal to 1.5x your Base Attack Bonus with Longbows and Shortbows. (All prerequisites for it remain the same. Rangers still get it at level 6 automatically.)
• Rapid Shot now also adds " You gain Ranged Power equal to 1.5x your BAB with longbows and shortbows".

Miscellaneous other bow related changes:

• Knight of the Chalice's Tier 4 Knight's Training now also grants the Shot on the Run feat.
• Active Ranged attacks that have bonuses to Critical Threat Range no longer get double that range on those attacks.  
• Ranger: Deepwood Stalker: Heavy Draw's Crit Multiplier should now stay on the player more consistently.
• Paladin: Knight of the Chalice's Ranged Exalted Smite should now list its proper Critical bonuses.
• The Critical Threat Range on the following bows has been reduced by 1 to 19-20: Pinion, Cloud-Piercer, Sapphire Sting, Epic Sapphire Sting, Bow of the Elements (Air), Silver Longbow, Epic Thornlord, Unwavering Ardency, Bow of Sinew, Collapsible Shortbow. 
• Bow Strength has been rebuilt to work closer to other Ability-Score-To-Damage abilities in the game; you should now see it on examining bows you have equipped, and we fixed an issue where it would disappear if you had other Ability-Score-To-Damage abilities.
• Half Elf Dilettante: Ranger's "and can add up to 2 points of your Strength bonus to bow damage" portion now instead grants "+1 to Damage with Longbows and Shortbows". The feat otherwise remains the same, granting the other things that feat currently grants.
• Half Elf Improved Dilettante Ranger enhancements that granted additional points of strength to bow damage now grant +1 to Damage with Longbows and Shortbows instead; they otherwise remain the same, granting the other things they currently grant.
• Arcane Archer Final Strike now has its additional AOE damage scale with Ranged Power.
• The first hit of additional AOE damage from Arcane Archer Final Strike no longer scales with Ranger level, both on the Ranger and Elf versions; it is instead a static number of dice, scaling with Ranged Power, like the others. (It was the only effect on Final Strike using Ranger level to scale).
• Ranger Arcane Archer Final Strike no longer adds an erroneous extra +250 damage to its bow attack.
• Elven Arcane Archer Final Strike no longer adds an erroneous +10% Doubleshot.

 

Other News and Notes:

 

Classes

• Cleric SLAs and actives can now be used while moving.

Combat

• Fixed an issue that causes bear and wolf form to throw extra attack hooks with many active attacks
• Fixed an issue that caused Momentum Swing to hit more times than it should. The skill's animation has changed.
• Fixed an issue that caused Holy Retribution to hit more times than it should. The skill's animation has changed.

Enhancements

• Spellsinger - Maestro of Life and Death now provides its listed spell crit chance.
• Vistani Knife Fighter: Rapid Strike and Rapid Throw now have their Doublestrike bonus properly typed as Morale.
• Celestial Tutelage in Aasimar now works as a prerequisite for the Feydark Illusionist enhancement tree.

Epic Destinies

• Fatesinger's Greater Shout has had its tooltip corrected.

Feats

• Uncanny Dodge feats no longer causes a pause in auto attack.
• Offhand Versatility now functions with Orbs.

Items

• Glamered versions of Titania's Crown now show butterflies.
• Insightful and quality Resistance Items now provide the correct amount of bonuses.
• Eversight now functions as intended.
• The Changestone's raid rune turn-in now mentions that it is randomly rolled. 
• Shieldbreaker now provides its proper Sunder bonus.
• Feytwisted Raid Items are now able to be acquired by spending Raid Runes.
• The named loot from the Lordsmarch Plaza quests (Eyes of Stone, Assault on Summerfield, etc.) has been slightly updated to match modern scaling effects standards. They have not been redesigned but have instead had effects that were basic static stat boosts moved over to modern scaling effects on the Cannith Crafting iLevel standard. This only applies to newly created copies of these items.

Quest and Adventure Areas

• A stuck spot in Blown Deadline has been fixed. 
• You can now break the root walls in Combatting Corruption with ranged attacks.
• An error message now displays when a player attempts to summon a mount in a quest.
• The Grotto
  • Jeets now offers you a Longbow as a weapon choice before the Grotto.
  • Cellimas now offers you a Longbow as a weapon choice after completing the Grotto.

Races

• Shifter Howl abilities now trigger their effect at the appropriate point in their animation, which is slightly earlier than before.
• Shifter Howl abilities can now be cancelled into melee attacks or other skills at the 1.75 second mark instead of needing to wait the entire 2 seconds as before.
• Shifter Augment Summoning now works.

Spells

• Bard's Hold Monster, Mass now uses its correct spell components.
• Word of Balance's tooltip has been corrected.
• Chaos Hammer, Unholy Blight, and Order's Wrath now do their correct damage against all alignments.

Miscellaneous

• Corrected an issue with male and female Tiefling footfall sounds and Bloody Footprint display. 
• Unconsciousness Range bonuses now appear in the + stats tab of your Character Sheet. 
• Appearance fixes have been made to some NPCs who had recently stopped displaying correctly (Most notably some of the Masterminds of Sharn villains.)