This new patch brings with it the final major piece of content from our initial game development sprints: 10-player raids! We're very excited to bring this type of content to VR and we think you're going to have a blast playing it.

The Waystation Crypt Raid is a full-blown MMO raid set in a new location. It features 5 unique bosses, each with a series of mechanics that will need to be mastered for your party to overcome the challenge and defeat them.

Raid Parties

Beginning with this patch, you can now invite up to 10 players to your party in-game. However, once the party reaches 6 players, you will receive a notification that you are now in a "Raid Party", and as such you are no longer eligible to receive XP or loot from any source other than raid boss drops. You can go into the Wilds as a party of 10, but you will only be able to pick up tradable loot that has dropped, and not be able to get drops from Aberrations or collect resources using your Harvestable tool.

To go back to a regular party, just reduce the number of members in the party to five or fewer. Also note that non-Raid dungeons have a hard cap of five players, and if you are in a raid group and all try to enter the instance you will end up split between two different instances of the dungeon, so that won't work.

Raid Difficulty

The initial release of the Waystation Crypt Raid is tuned to be about as hard as Tier 1 through Tier 5 Shard Dungeon content. As such, our hope is that most everyone who reaches level 20 in the game will have the opportunity to do at least the first few bosses successfully.

For those looking for a much greater challenge, the Hard Mode of the Raids will be released a few weeks from now, and will be tuned to a T6 - T10+ difficulty.

Raid Loot System

Loot from the Raids will work as follows. The loot drops are personal, so your chance of getting loot is unaffected by anyone else's. When you kill a boss for the first time in a lockout period, you will have a natural chance to get a gear drop from that boss for a random slot at the set level for that raid type (e.g. 20.5 for Normal Mode Raids). Regardless of whether or not you receive a drop, you will also always receive a Raid Token. These tokens can be exchanged at a special vendor for gear at the same level as the boss drops. There are separate tokens for Normal Mode and Hard Mode Raids.

The loot lockout will reset every week on Tuesday morning. Therefore, the optimal way to get gear drops is to run the raid and kill every boss at least once per week.

Raid Progress Saving

In addition to the Loot Lockout, there is a mechanism by which we will note the progress your group makes in the Raid based on your Party Leader. If for example you kill the 1st and 2nd boss, when you return in the same lockout period with the same Party Leader, you will not have to kill those bosses (or their trash) over again. As with the loot lockout, this will reset on Tuesday morning.

Raid Gear

We have a new set of gear for the raid with a new epic design from our art team (pictured above for Ranger, Runemage, Musketeer, and Warrior). Raid loot from the initial release will be Level 20.5, and Raid loot from the Hard Mode will be Level 21.

In addition to gear, there will be additional dye drops, and potentially another fun surprise which we'll reveal as we get closer if we're able to get it implemented in time.

The Tagger

We're also introducing a handy new tool that should make the life of every Raid (and Dungeon leader) easier, and that's the tagger. This tool allows you to assign custom markers above monsters so you can better coordinate your strategies with your team mates. It's only usable inside of Dungeons and Raids by the Party Leader.

Bonus XP Week

In order to celebrate the launch of the new raids, and to help players who aren't yet max level get there so they can try them too, we'll be doing a Bonus XP Week starting tomorrow, Wednesday May 30th, and lasting for 7 days. During this time we'll be giving an additional 50% Bonus XP on top of all other bonuses to help you level up even faster.

We're looking forward to launching this content for everyone to enjoy this Friday, June 1st, at 12 PM US Central Time. See you then!