Elphames Arena Changes - Changes (Jan 7th)

Itemization
Troll Leather, Mythril, Obsidianite and Admantium armor now has rarity values applied to it in descending order. In addition, any dropped item that has rarity may go through a randomization algorithm that will:

1. Randomize Damage, Weight and Armor ratings.
2. Apply an enchantment or permanence.
   Weapon perms may be any of: Fire, Lightning, Cold, Poison or Acid damage.
    
   Armor enchantments may be: Improve Armor, Regeneration, Immolation (Any of fire, cold, lightning or acid), as well as Elemental shields>
    
   This list is intentionally omitting adding enchantments for base stats such as strength, dexterity, endurance or intelligence.

Items with higher base rarity have a higher chance of receiving good "rolls" on stats and enchantments.

 
Misc Changes

• Properly applied rarity to magic items that were missing them (e.g. Boots of Nimbleness)
• Upgraded rarity of many items to compensate for new randomization logic
• Lower out of combat animation speed
• Show mana bar as a resource that regenerates in UI
• Lower charge count on shift from 25 to 10
• Change rings and amulets that drop around the havenwood area
• Increase damage mitigation of plate armor from 65% to 75%
• Lower damage of multiblade to be more proportional to its mana cost
• "Plugging" in pvp combat will instantly kill the player instead of decreasing health by half
• Updated randomized NPC placement in open world dungeons to be in better locations
• NPC spawning in open world dungeons will now automatically group with any other NPC on the same screen
• Removed Master and GM spells from stores. They are find-only now
• Tweaked drop rates all around

Happy New Years!

Happy New Years from The Realm Online staff. We have added new event items to usher in the new year. As a reminder, fireworks are available for purchase from your local Pyromancer in town. Also for today only, we will be increasing the bonus experience rate to 200% and bonus loot rate to 100%.

Changes

• Added new event items for New Years 2020
• Increased SDM bonus for Archmage blade from 75% to 100%
• Removed screen shake from earthquake animation
• Increased drop rate of level 900 weapons
• Decrease animation cap out of combat. Animation speed in-combat is unchanged.

Why change animation speed?

When we first introduced the "F12" animation speed changes, it was intended to level the playing field with players who predominately used "speed files." Our observation at the time was that these players had a competitive advantage by essentially sideloading altered game files into the game directory. This meant a tradeoff between equity of competition versus graphical fidelity and art direction. It was a tradeoff we accepted although no one on the team was happy about warp-speed animations especially on things that our team has spent a lot of time crafting.

 
Since then, we have plugged the hole that allowed altered game assets to be loaded which means we can revisit the compromise between speed and graphical fidelity. As a result, we are lowering the maximum animation speed out of combat.

 
If you want to provide feedback on this change I'd encourage you to do so on our forums to ensure that staff has time to read it.
https://realmserver.com/forum/feedback

Edit: Thank you for the candid player feedback on the animation changes. We have rolled back these changes in response to the feedback.

Elphame's Arena - Changes (Dec 21)

• Fixed bug where Imp City was not being treated as an open world dungeon properly.
• Increased drop rate of rare items on miscellaneous dungeon mobs
• Lowered level of dungeon bosses to be more in line with the monster level of the dungeon itself
• Increased density of monsters inside of dungeons

Changes for Dec 22nd

• Moved Targoth to correct dungeon
• Significantly lowered repair and insurance costs
• Added better debugging to trace down pesky content bugs
• Fixed unintentionally locked door in Ogre Caves