Elphame's Arena BETA Changes (February 6th)

Greetings Realmers! We are back with another set of ruleset tweaks to test leading up to the formal launch of Elphame's Arena. This round of changes is meant to be the last of the major mechanics changes - and hopefully the last testing cycle before we launch.

 
As always we would love to hear your feedback to ensure when we formally launch the season we have the best experience possible.

• Duration on tempoary weapon enchantment spells have been drastically reduced (E.g. Cold Steel, Venom).
• The max monster group size in a dungeon has been increased from 3 to 4.
• Rebalanced loot tables into four tiers of items. Tier one items will drop from lower level areas and tier 4 will drop exclusively in the hardest areas.
• Tweaked world boss respawn rate. Boss spawns will now be announced in the bosses tab.
• Increased base in-combat movement rate to compensate for lower overall strength on characters.
• Changed calculation for in-combat movement rate to be exclusively based on acrobatics instead of a mixture of stats
• Lowered cost of learning Theurgism. Cost should be more consistent across all classes.
• Lowered hotzone bonus experience from 100% to 50%.
• Removed magic longsword/shields from loot table.
• Adjusted bell-curved experience rates to be less severe on either end of level cap.
• Updated description for level caps on items: Wrath, Bonecrusher and Executioner's Axe.
• Added Fuloran's Abode and Tulor's Cavern as open world dungeons. Fuloran and Tulor are now open world bosses that spawn in these shared dungeons.
• Disabled NPCs jumping players in open world to be consistent with NPC behaviour in dungeons.
• Changed baldric reward increments to reflect early 3.x days.
• Adjusted spell mana cost and spell strength across the board. Spell costs are now determined based on the usefulness of the spell.
• Added Mana Points and Hit Points as a randomized stat to magic items. The amount of mana or hit points granted increases with tier.
• Lowered base mana pool to compensate for mana points on equipped items.
• Change mana regeneration calculation. It is now a percentage determined by your meditation skill and your max mana pool.
• Increased mana regeneration rate. In general you will regenerate quickly out of combat to compensate for spending more mana in combat.
• Added new tiers to caster gear: Troll Skin -> Imp Skin -> Daemon Skin. Higher tiers award more mana points needed to cast powerful spells.
• Removed potions of shift and greater invisibility. These spells must be learned in order to be used now.
• Orb of Healing and Orb of Greater Healing are now targeted-spell heals. They can also be used in combat now.
• Changed Myticism success chance to be a challenge of your mysticism skill versus your target's

 
Please post any feedback about these latest changes to our feedback forum!
https://realmserver.com/forum/feedback

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.