AVWW Beta 0.517, "Primary Inversion," Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2011/10/avww-beta-0517-primary-inversion.html

This one is a smaller bugfix/balance release, but it's got a lot of really important stuff in there.  For one thing, there was a gaffe in the prior version that had monster health scaling the opposite of what it should have been.  For another, the MP costs of spells were still scaling in the old style, making many of them un-castable past a certain civ level.

Those, plus other tweaks and fixes, are now ready for your downloading pleasure.  More coming tonight.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.  If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

[orzelek]

Do you have any plan to make lower level items useful in any way?

Even nice trash can in settlements would be an option.

[x4000]

We do aim to make those something you can give to NPCs for use in the strategic mode, or something like that.  But no plans for them to be useful on the adventure side, and I think the strategic mode stuff is a ways off because it requires a number of features to be implemented first... including a secret one we haven't talked about yet.

[orzelek]

That was short reflection after looking at commodities inventory of my lvl 33 character... and realizing that there is significant amount of literal trash there... and it will increase with levels linearly. This also gives me another feature idea but that goes to mantis.

[FallingStar]

I do think finding uses for old "stuff" will be nice other than trashing it.  Makes me sad to see all those hundreds of old potions and scrolls get tossed.

I though that this version between the last few rebalances / spell adjustments made fighting the average trash mob the most interesting so far.  Damages are pretty high, but once the occasionally mentioned shield spells come into play should help a lot.  But going through houses to try to grab new health pots to replace the junk ones was a real trial in finding two and using one.

I did hit on the thought that I should just go find a tunnel with some jade and ended up making about 80x new scrolls while using about 7 potions.  Probably needs a bit of a tweak there in scroll creation to dust used ratio.

I also liked some of the main spell power tweaks, since ball lightning and energy pulse were overused by a lot of people.  I started using a wider variety again, and swapping out for boss fights, always good.  Even found some fun combos, like tidal pulse + fireball can knock an enemy back into the same pulse a second time. Fun.

Do think that the MP costs need more tweaking and the like, but I'm sure all sorts of balancing will be done, especially when more things are added.

As I throw out a few more thoughts, perhaps not so related to the patch itself generally adding more health or reducing EXP for mini bosses / maruders/ etc might be good.  Seem to 3-4 shot most of them, and the exp gain means I level up quick, making the cache of items I got go obsolete pretty quickly.

Anyways, it may be more ideas than general feedback, but overall I did want to give props for all the changes and work that has gone into it.  Been enjoying seeing how everything changes as time goes on.

[BobTheJanitor]

It would be nice for things to not become completely worthless. I don't know, perhaps some way to convert old stuff into a handful of consciousness shards? That's the only sort of generic currency that the game has at the moment, imitating the standard game convention of dumping all your old gear off on a merchant.

[x4000]

I think that you'll be very happy with the new version.  Stuff isn't becoming nearly so worthless so fast (about 20 levels instead of 10), and in general spell balance is really being changed all over the place based on feedback from you guys, Toll, and others.

One step at a time, of course, so I wouldn't be surprised if you and others have more thoughts after this new version is out, but for now I think it's hitting the right notes to put us some giant steps in the right direction.

[x4000]

And here ya go: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9285.0.html