Cobalt Arachne

Wednesday at 02:33 PM

We're planning to increase the chance that the ambushes are Circle of Thorn or Rikti by 400%, expect this to be a little easier next patch.

Tuesday at 08:49 PM

Figured this one out and fixed it; Should be good in an upcoming patch.

Thanks! 💙

April 15

This is a known issue on all existing Dual Pistols / Tactical Arrow Blaster characters.
Both weapon slots occupy Wep_L and overwrite the other in the editor, making it not possible to have both your left pistol and the bow selected at the same time, leaving one weapon missing.

Unfortunately this is not an easy fix, and is going to require non-trivial rewrites of the weapons costume handling system for the game, so we don't have any estimation on when this will be fixed, but we are at least aware of the issue.

March 31

Green warehouse had a beacon issue and should be fixed next build; With any luck that should be the last pathing beacon issue. 😞

The Minotaur when pathing to somebody's location is focused on getting to their target in 'find' mode and may zoom right past somebody if you're not their current target. As soon as they arrive at their destination they change into 'fight' mode, and anybody within their immediate vicinity will be targeted for moo introductions.

March 30

2 hours ago, KaizenSoze said:

DE in green portal are weirdly a bit easier now. As long as you can survive the foot stomp, a spawn has so many bosses than they aren't dropping many buff pets.

Nothing has been changed with Devouring Earth in any capacity since this feature was introduced, not sure how/what you're testing.

March 29

5 hours ago, Carnildo said:

Inevitable report of a geometry issue: In the lobby

This will be fixed next build.

March 27

43 minutes ago, Sakura Tenshi said:

So specific factions have unique AI that can be incompatible with certain maps? Today I learned.

I suspect it's something with their default team definition being Hero, and something going sideways with my trying to force set them to be hostile to everyone.
Typical Longbow scum, always impeding the way forward!

One of the other devs might take a deeper look, but if not, there are plenty of other places in this game where you can fight Longbow, it's not much of a loss to the content.

March 27

3 minutes ago, Lines said:

I did notice that longbow did not fight back.

Those Longbow will be replaced with high-level Snakes in a future build; Despite exhaustive troubleshooting efforts, Longbow's AI doesn't seem to function correctly in the labyrinth.

March 27

8 hours ago, Sakura Tenshi said:

Stumbled on one, I think, secret room but I didn't notice any badges. It looked a bit like a snowglobe interior given it was, well, a big dome with ice and snow.

Not a secret room, but close! Secret doors have a pop-up confirmation text to enter them, so you'll be sure you found one. Note that many of them are bugged right now and entering a secret door might kick you out of the zone; Fixed next build.

8 hours ago, Sakura Tenshi said:

I might also recommend NOT using Dream Doctor was the trainer in the Midnighter club as it's kind of a huge spoiler if you haven't done Dark Astoria stuff.

My take is that today the Dream Doctor's existence and identity is not really any more of a spoiler than Statesman's being dead.
I'd argue there's some degree of plot points that have been well established for over a decade now... Dream Doctor hasn't been that mysterious unseen actor in a long time, he's been around and used in-game for years.

March 27

Pretty much all the number tuning for this content has had absolutely zero work yet, so if anything is off with balancing (and it's gonna be off), assume I'm already aware that basically everything needs passes.

Most of my time in pre-test development is spent on mechanical implementation, functionality, and consistency, it's the time spent on the test server environment is where the numbers will see tuning.

March 27

19 minutes ago, KaizenSoze said:

Also, the insta spikes are very large potential grief problem. The others found you could fly over then and tele players onto the spikes.

I will probably turn it to a very deadly %-of-max-HP-per-tick based DoT; Either way, being thrown into them by the sand tornadoes will probably cost most your HP if not death.

The idea is that control ATs mez the sand tornadoes, but I think their natural mez protection is set a bit too high at the moment.

March 27

I've just confirmed about a third of the floors had broken NPC pathing beacon generation; Expect some odd things to be seen or some floors to be oddly empty; Should be fixed next build we take new beacons.

March 27

1 hour ago, Draeth Darkstar said:

If y'all are open to making changes to zones because they're used frequently as jumping points for group activity, could we please have a trainer added to Ouroboros?

I originally proposed this back in Page 7, but others on the team didn't agree and we eventually settled on it being a tailor, so that's what we got.

March 27

Will review the Time-Bound Artificier's dialog, it was written very early on, and a lot changed as design went on, figured some of the details would be outdated.

March 26

37 minutes ago, lemming said:

Minor quibble that the gate from the Colosseum that exits to the midnight club doesn't ask

I didn't think I put a door from the Colosseum that exits the zone...

Getting reports the beacon layer of the map might have gotten off-center somehow which could explain some oddities we're seeing; I'm looking into it.

March 22

Thanks!

Confirmed the sign texture is incorrect (Cygnus is in Galaxy City), and the correct texture does exist for Aquarius Medical Center; Will get that fixed.

March 7

Thanks for the report! Always on the look-out for bugs that sneak through...

Unfortunately, after a lot of attempting and testing those ambushes, we were unable to get even a single hostile mob to go outside the map, which should be theoretically impossible due to the lack of beacons outside of the map boundaries. This also means they cannot teleport out of bounds as there are no beacons for them to path through.

For tests, we even tried teleporting them directly outside the map, but the pathing beacons just moved them back in-bounds instantly.

Additionally, the ambushes were triggered and character left sitting out of bounds to see if they could theoretically find a way out, but they never were able to even with hours of time:

If we can't reproduce this locally even once, then unfortunately there's not much we can do to fix it.

I'd ask if you can do some more testing on Brainstorm and see if you can provide steps to reproduce the issue consistently, otherwise developer time is sadly a finite resource, and we could not find a way to trigger what you're describing with the time we spent looking into the bug.

EDIT: Worth mentioning that if either Infernia or Glacia are defeated after being rescued, it will stop any of their remaining ambushes from spawning.

February 21

This badge is bugged, an issue was identified when the script rolled onto the next mission; Will be fixed next patch.

Thanks for the report; Should be good soon!
💙

February 18

3 minutes ago, nExipnos said:

you are now directly forcing a particular playstyle.

If suggesting to a new player that a Blaster is a better pick than a Defender on teams for somebody who wants to be play Ranged Damage (which is an objective fact) is "forcing a particular plastyle" then there's not much room for discussion.

That's not us changing the game, that's just literally how the game works.

It's a rather odd take on the goal of trying to better passively educate players that certain ATs are better choices for specific team roles.

February 18

1 hour ago, nExipnos said:

Why are we trying to shove everyone back into a cookie cutter mold of AT's when the game and the devs originally broadened this archaic view in order to allow for more flexibility?

We're not, and many are looking at this the wrong way.

Also worth noting, as it's something many people are getting wrong in this discussion:

Your chosen playstyle is not the same thing as your AT's primary role on a team.

Because the game allows players to run anti-meta builds, like a Defender who's specced into a taunt and fights only in melee, but that is choosing a playstyle.
That does not make it that Defender's role on the team to tank enemy aggro.

If I invite a Tanker to my team completely blind without looking at their powersets at all, what should I expect them to be contributing to my team?
My answer would be that the expectation is that they are going to be the ones first into enemy groups and tanking their aggro alpha.

If the Tanker instead sits at the back of the team using only ranged attacks and never taunting, they're choosing a playstyle that does not suit their Archetype, which is allowed, but it does not mean their Tanker is fulfilling the role of Ranged Damage.

In-fact, by doing so they're contributing very little to their team, so even if it's technically allowed within the game, it's not behavior we are going to reward.
It would be more productive if that Tanker who loves playing Ranged Damage instead was on a Blaster, as they'll contribute far more to that role while retaining the same playstyle.

The distinction will hopefully lead players to play the ATs that are the strongest choices for the playstyle they enjoy, while also acknowledging the role they are expected to fulfill when on teams. This is the knowledge we're hoping to impart to new players with these more defined roles.

The character creator even refers to this selection as 'Playstyle':

February 13

3 hours ago, SteelRaines said:

When I started doing the arc... well I only got to the second mission of the Buried Secrets arc. The "Punish the Warriors" mission. It said to go to a warehouse. When I went there, it was an empty dock.

Hmm.

I'm gonna blame this one on the Rikti...

I'll look into recovering that building, Striga has enough problems as it is.
Thanks!

February 13

10 minutes ago, strix_ said:

Finally had a chance to run around the Vanguard base, and I've got some performance reports for how the level runs on lower-end hardware: on my Ryzen 2200g at 1080p windowless bordered with maxed out settings (& 200% char/world detail), there's a bit of noticeable performance hit as the level initially loads in around the Infirmary/Lady Grey area after teleporting in from Atlas Park (roughly consistent to framerate tanks on a heavily-decorated SG base) but it's manageable and after the initial bump the game runs smoothly. Similar results while having cel-shaded mode on. Not sure how having big leagues running around for MSR could affect performance, but it's difficult to test that on the beta server.

Overall, the redesign is awesome, and I really hope we can see other areas get similar treatment later down the line!

The new Vanguard compound was setup using vistrays so that if you're not currently inside of it, it doesn't render, so players doing Mothership Raids should not notice any performance impact.

However, as always, if anyone notices anything suspect, do let us know!

February 12

46 minutes ago, ZorkNemesis said:

A thought occured after seeing the screenshots on Reddit. Are the renovated Vanguard compounds going to be applied to mission map variants as well? I know at least three missions in RWZ that take place in the compound itself, along with the one in Dark Astoria. There's also a bunch of outdoor missions in RWZ, will the Architect building also be visible or gone from those too?

Probably not, instanced zone maps are taken as copies from the original zone at the time of their creation, all zone functions stripped out, and then modified into mission maps.

Adding the new sections to the instanced maps would essentially mean redoing them entirely from scratch.
It's too much effort for what would change almost nothing for the missions on those maps.

As for outdoor maps...
The AE building shouldn't exist in those old outdoor maps because Rikti War Zone content was from Issue 10 and the Architect system wasn't added until Issue 14.

February 9

On 1/31/2024 at 11:06 AM, Colette Valiant said:

On all models, if you choose holstered Dual Pistols/Tactical Arrow, the holstered bow vanishes and remains invisible.

We've investigated this issue, which is a result of Blasters having access to 5+ possible weapons from sets and players only having 4 total weapon slots on their costume's data format, so this has now become a hard-coded problem requiring some involved adjustments to resolve.

I can confirm it's on our radar, and we're looking into it, but this won't be fixed in time for Page 7 unfortunately, it's not possible to resolve with things setup as they are currently.

This issue is due to a weapon slot overlap, it wasn't caused by any recent sheathed/holstered changes, just made more visible.

February 8

55 minutes ago, Cyclone Jack said:

Why would they earn less? Every team that fulfills all 5 roles would gain the reward, no matter what ATs are in the group. Warshade, Stalker, Blaster, Scrapper, Defender: Fulfils all roles even though there are 3 Melee Damage ATs and 2 Ranged ATs listed. In fact, with ATs covering all the roles they are designed for, the specialized ATs would end up have a higher chance of getting rewards since more roles are covered by fewer ATs, leaving more room on the team for a wider variety of ATs in general. Going by the current list: Warshade, Peacebringer, Mastermind: Fulfils all roles. That leaves 5 more ATs that can join the team, all of which could be Stalkers.

Additionally, it is important to remember that Epic Archetypes aren't epic because of what they can or cannot do, they are Epic because they are tied to the storyline. Granted, Kheldians are an advanced AT, but that's more from the standpoint of building and slotting, whereas Arachnos are pretty generic but stack Leadership buffs.

They would have earned less Aether over time if we changed non-epic ATs to qualify for more than one role per the character creator.

Not every team is going to be lead by somebody who cares about getting the bonus, leaving more chances that could be swayed by the AT you yourself play which would lead to reward imbalances inherent to certain Archetypes.

Example: If you played a Warshade, you automatically fulfilled 3/5ths of the criteria by yourself and only needed two other roles on the team to qualify, making it easier to earn the bonus regularly without trying for it.

That being said this thread is about the current feature, so we'll let that get back on track.

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