Greetings, dear readers, it is I, Black Phoenix, again. This time I've come along to let just a tiny bit more out of Design's bag of tricks, and fill you in on some upcoming events.
Retirement
There comes a time in every hero's journey when you're just too tired to continue. Maybe your group's been level 40 for a few months, and you've finally finished farming out Wolferod. Or maybe your group is one of those less fortunate, and started losing heroes sometime around level 35.
This is the reason that retirement exists. It's a way you can gracefully retire your characters, but still maintain some benefits for all the work you did over the last year and a half. Essentially you retire to Xenarthra to rest your share and duel other heroes who have ended their journeys as well. While a nice little world, there isn't much to do here, so you might have some trouble finding an active opponent. You can send me a message on Zion if you feel up for a spar, though, and I'll try to find the time to indulge you.
But of course, after some time, you'll start feeling that urge to get back into the game. In order to keep your hard work from going to waste, we have the mechanic of...
Rebirth
You can rebirth each of your retired heroes once into a player realm, thereby gaining certain bonuses (the amount of which depends on what level the retired hero is). You get to choose from several strengths and weaknesses, buy extra reset points, and even get a cool medal to let everyone know you're nowhere near new to the game.
One of the issues with rebirth, though, is that retirement is usually not available until just before....
A World Reset
This is it, the end of a world, and the start of a new one. This is arguably the biggest recurring event in World of Dungeons. Just before a world resets, retirement and rebirth are opened to all heroes on the world above a certain level.
The real fun of a world reset comes after it, once groups have invaded the server with the intention of becoming the top group. The last few times around the block, that group has been Warriors, who, coincidentally, have been top dog in almost all events. I wonder if that will change, this go around?
This time, the fun won't be limited to the competition for top groups, though. The Design team is working on a bunch of new things that will be implemented with the new Baradar.
Redesign
We don't just have a new world to explore this time around, we've got new everything (well, almost). While there are a lot of minor changes, some of the major changes could be game breaking/making. Don't worry, we're 82.31% certain that they'll make your day when you eventually get to see them.
One of the highest items on our list this reset is the change to the grafting system, two years after we started talking about it. The changes were necessary due to the imbalanced nature of the +2 will/agi 3 slot grafts. Rest assured, of course, that we haven't simply gotten rid of the old +2's and left you with a gutted grafting system. There will be all kinds of new grafts out there to find for the inquisitively minded.
Also, we're rebalancing experience across the same level dungeons, so that they all give the same experience (roughly). Appointments currently look like they'll give more ep than normal dungeons, so that the more exploratory groups will have a bit of an advantage in the long run.
We're also doing a complete race overhaul this time around, getting rid of the bland feel of races. Our goal with this overhaul is to make the races impact the playstyle of the character more. It's too early in the design process for that for me to give too many details, but I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy the changes.
There's a general overhaul of mana and hp as well. All classes will be generally receiving more hp so there's less one-shotting of mages in dungeons. The mana changes are designed to make mass attackers have to choose what levels they want to use mass attacks in, thereby somewhat allowing those classes that use single attacks to keep up with RH-barbs.
Yet another upcoming change is some small tweaks to the new Priest. General improvement of some of the more useless skills, changes to how incense works, and general rebalancing of the class.
Achievements get some love this reset as well, with more interesting and rewarding achievements being added into the system.
And one of the largest, most encompassing changes is the complete overhaul of the armor generators and armor uniques. We've redesigned these from the ground up, adding new prefixes, suffixes, and base items that have drastically changed how you will see armor.
How does this affect you?
It's a lot of content, a lot of work, and we hope, a lot of fun. As designers, we strive to keep the game interesting, challenging, balanced, and fun to play. It's not often we get to make big changes like this, so we try to make the most of it when the time comes.
Well, hope you enjoyed reading this, cause I enjoyed writing it.
This is Black Phoenix, signing off to go slave over the armor generators.
