Rise of the Supers

True believers it is time for another issue of the World's Greatest Superadventure Blog!

This week, our Heroes in Alpha are TRANSFORMED! Rays of power from some unknown source have infused the lands of the Crusader Road, and overnight the peoples of that land have become SUPERIOR!

When our Alpha Testers log in to the system this week, they'll discover that they've received a gigantic bonus of XP. And the Trainers have decided that Achievement requirements for training are so last week! Who needs 'em? If you've got the XP, they've got the feats you want!

We want to test a higher level of power in the game so we are promoting all characters to approximately the amount of XP they would have accumulated in two months of play. We don't want to gate the abilities available to the characters behind achievement requirements so we've disabled them.

Word has also started to circulate that there has been an eruption of iron and coal resource nodes across the region making it easier to obtain the necessary materials to craft armor and weapons to augment these upgraded adventurers. So no more haunting "the Honeyhole" for coal!

Adventure Time with Bonny

On Friday at 6pm (Pacific) the heroes of the River Kingdoms will assemble at the market in Sotterhill to venture forth. Reports have been received that at least one Escalation has morphed into a new, much more powerful configuration. It's a good thing our Heroes have been pumped up - they'll need all the strength they can marshall to confront this accelerated menace.

Remember you can follow the exploits of Adventure Time with Bonny on twitch.tv/goblinworks. If more than 100 people are watching the stream, Bonny gives away Alpha access to one lucky winner!

The Darksiders

Last week we had the first planned PvP encounter. The Darksiders joined the fray a few Hexes from Sotterhill, conducting a running series of ambushes and battles with the Adventure Time heroes. We learned a lot about how PvP is working in the current build and took a lot of notes on things we need to improve with respect to the user interface. Overall it was very good to see that the server took everything we threw at it and remained solid. Even fighting right at the edge of a segment boundary didn't break anything.

Because Ryan will be in Indianapolis this week for GenCon, there won't be an organized Darksiders team this week (and the Escalation should be plenty tough without us!) but the Darksiders will return next week for more mayhem!

GenCon 2014

Ryan, Lee, Lisa and a whole lot of Paizo staffers are in Indianapolis this week for the Best Four Days in Gaming, aka GenCon. If you will be at the show, please come to ICC 231 at 5pm (Eastern) for our annual Goblinworks / Pathfinder Online presentation. We will try to keep our talk down to about 30 minutes to leave plenty of time for Q&A.

Release Notes

This week we are shipping a new build. These are the release notes for this version of the game, Alpha 6:

Audio

Added sliders for music volume.

Characters

Swapped starter Cleric offhand feat from a Mace feat (which shouldn't work because the offhand is a shield) to Shield Block.

Fixed cases where players were losing advancement upon logout.

Combat

Extensive combat experiment including:

Dropped maximum Stamina from 200 to 100

Removed Fatigue from running to compensate for lowered Stamina

Removed cooldowns for Secondary attacks (they still cost a lot of Stamina to use)

Combined States to provide fewer that are easier to capitalize on. They will likely get renamed to a more appropriate term if this change persists, but in the short term: All effects that applied or used Unbalanced now apply or use Opportunity. All effects that applied or used Distressed now apply or use Flat-Footed. All effects that applied or used Dazed now apply or use Disrupted

Tweaked balance on most attacks to fit the changes

Damage over Time effects now apply towards kills and achievements.

Players can no longer make any alterations to equipped gear during combat.

Crafting

Lowered the required rank for Azure Crystal and Golden Crystal (Sage Refining Recipes) so it's possible to get the achievement needed to continue leveling up Sage.

The tannery in Sotterhill is fixed.

Death

Added a guard next to the Sotterhill res point. If you have low Reputation, dying near Sotterhill is not recommended.

(If you have low Reputation from PvP You will have to run out of town immediately on respawn. You will likely be killed by the guard on first respawn. It's stun effect will be recharging when you respawn a second time. Keep running.

We did this because someone thought it would be fun to camp the respawn point and kill people as they respawned, knowing that the nearest guard wouldn't detect them and react.

Griefing will not be tolerated.)

Death now causes a character to stop targetting their most recently targeted enemy.

Environment

It is no longer possible to walk through the leatherworking station in Osterburg.

Smoke and fire have been added to encounter campfires.

The sun and moon have both returned, after a brief, inadvertent absence.

Escalations

Bonedancer Forbidden Onyx event now explicitly calls for stealing Bags of Onyx Gems.

Bonedancer Stolen Words event now uses the Map model for the spellbooks, instead of the Supply Bags.

Multiple changes to the Razmiran Holy Text event to make its instructions clearer.

Fixed interactivity problems with the Bonedancer Skull Stump and the Broken Men Weapon Supplies.

Adjusted the strength ramps for the Ripping Chains, Skeletal Uprising and Skull-Basher Ogres escalations.

Added the Ustalav Invaders escalation. Will these highly-trained knights bring order to the River Kingdoms?

Added achievements for participating in escalation events, and fixed a problem where events weren't granting interaction achievements properly.

The minimap event marker can more easily be moused over to get information, without being hidden by enemy indicators.

Stumped, the third step in the bonedancers escalation, now spawns a Skull Stump to be destroyed by the player, which allows this portion of the event to be completed.

Feats

Added the following feats to trainers. This list has the following format: <name of feat> (<feat type>, <role>, <trainer of feat>)

Evangelist (Armor, Cleric, Cleric)

Healer (Armor, Cleric, Cleric)

Cut (Attack, General, Dreadnaught)

Impale (Attack, General, Dreadnaught)

Iron Gate Ward (Attack, General, Dreadnaught)

Lunge (Attack, General, Dreadnaught)

Mangle (Attack, General, Dreadnaught)

Penetrate (Attack, General, Dreadnaught)

Shield Charge (Attack, General, Dreadnaught)

Transfix (Attack, General, Dreadnaught)

Archer (Armor, Fighter, Fighter)

One-Handed Melee Specialization (Feature, Fighter, Fighter)

Strength Surge (Attack, General, Seminary)

Balestra (Attack, General, Skirmisher)

Fan (Attack, General, Skirmisher)

Followthrough Foresight (Attack, General, Skirmisher)

Forehand (Attack, General, Skirmisher)

Overdraw (Attack, General, Skirmisher)

Point Blank Shot (Attack, General, Skirmisher)

Prime (Attack, General, Skirmisher)

Shiv (Attack, General, Skirmisher)

Force Hail (Attack, General, Skirmisher)

Invisible Torrent (Attack, General, Skirmisher)

Understrike 2 no longer requires Polearm achievements.

Gathering

Reduced the skill level required for most tier 1 resources to 0, so you should be able to find iron, gems, etc, more easily.

Doubled the number of resources gained from a single node.

Decreased the base harvesting time by roughly half.

Changed the resource ratings for various hexes. Now coal, iron, silver, and wood should be much more common. The changes from here on out will likely be more minimal and less large scale overhaul changes.

Fixed scavenging nodes so they will correctly drop Leather and Cloth, and no longer drop Chemicals.

Receiving beneficial spells no longer interrupts gathering.

Items

Added informative descriptions for all items that summarize vital stats and keywords. (THAT'S CRAZY TALK! -RSD)

Temporarily removed speed penalty from medium and heavy armor. This is likely not a permanent change, but run like a gazelle for now.

Items offered up in a trade window can now be removed from that trade by double clicking or by dragging back into a player's inventory from the trade window.

Stylish Padded Armor is now available in game.

180 new weapon models are now in game - when crafted, many weapons no longer have a placeholder or missing model. However, none of these new weapons have icons - these will be added at a later date.

(Shout-out to Dakcenturi, who pointed us towards a weapon package that we incorporated into the game. Thanks!)

Loot

Tailor recipes should now drop as loot.

Movement

Keyboard controls for turning while backing up have been reversed.

NPCs

Tweaked several creature attacks based on player feedback (primary to make it harder to kite).

Added new Ogres with Javelin attacks.

Thornguards are now an even mix of male and female.

Parties

Issue with creating and joining parties has been resolved.

Crafting

Removed Meteoric Iron requirement for Tier 1 cold iron components.

Reputation

Reputation now regenerates at more than 100x its previous rate (to base rate of 100/hour).

The regeneration bonus per hour has been increased to 25/hour.

The max cap on bonus regeneration rate has been raised to 300/hour.

The new player bonus (x20 regen rate) has been turned off for now.

Reputation now shows up on character sheet.

User Interface

Fixed various errors regarding window scrolling.

You can discuss this weeks blog here.