We wanted to give you a sneak peek of what the team has planned for our February patch, currently scheduled to go live to players later this month.

In this patch, we’ll have updates for taunt, pet aggro, getting around in Plane of Hate/Fear, and MORE!

"You Have Failed to Taunt Your Target"

We looked into the success rate of the taunt skill and decided this ability could use some improvements.

The success rate of this ability will now be more closely correlated to your taunt skill where previously it was rather arcane in its chance to succeed based on particular level thresholds. The overall success rate for characters with Taunt (200) and higher should be noticeably better.

"Taunting Attacker, Master"

While looking into the functionality of player taunt we took the opportunity to fix some glaring issues with how pets taunt their targets.

We've corrected a problem that prevented pets from being able to taunt their target and we've adjusted pet taunt to function more similarly to players using the taunt skill.

"But What About My Rampaging Servant?"

With the last few patches we've been adjusting the amount of hatred that pets generate with each melee swing. Coinciding with those changes were the release of AA abilities to reduce your primary pet's aggro multiplier.

After reviewing the gameplay impact of these changes we're going to make adjustments to how pets generate melee aggro.

The AA abilities Companion's Calm Demeanor and Companion's Provocative Demeanor are being removed. These abilities are clunky and were more of a bandage than a solution to the issue.

The aggro a pet generates with its melee swings will now be higher in the following cases:

  • The pet has taunt enabled
  • The pet is a charmed NPC
  • The pet is a swarm pet

 

The design team has been poking at the aggro generated by NPC melee swings in an effort to better balance the hatred generated by pets in both raid and group situations. After this patch pet taunt functionality will determine if a pet owner wants their primary pet to gain the attention of their target while also increasing the aggro generated by pets that cannot have taunt enabled.

We will continue monitoring the gameplay impact of this next round of changes to see if pet aggro generation is closer to where we want it to be.

"Anything Else About Aggro?"

Actually, yes! While we were reviewing hate generation code we discovered and fixed a rather strange bug with how mad NPCs get about spells that hit them.

We've fixed a problem with some direct damage spells that were generating either too much or too little aggro and adjusted the data to ensure that classes who wanted the extra aggro for their spells will continue generating the same amount.

TLDR: After this patch tanks will continue to generate as much aggro as they did prior to the fix while other classes may generate less aggro when using damaging spells that have a hate override.

"Some Words About Planes"

We've made another pass at the aggro-pathing in the Plane of Hate to clean up some of the more ... 'interesting'... ways that NPCs attempt to reach their targets. This will hopefully address some of the more glaring issues such as Innoruuk deciding to leave the building depending on where his most hated target chooses to run.

As an issue of convenience we've updated both Plane of Hate and Fear: Revisited to allow guild banners to be placed and teleported to and fellowship fires to be placed but not teleported to, as is the standard for the majority of raid zones.

And… MORE?

Yes, and more! This is only the highlights from February’s patch, and we’ll have more coming up for our live and progression servers.

Just some of the additional things in February’s patch are:

  • Quality of life updates for Weapon Proficiency AAs.
  • Additional TBM itemization fixes.
  • Improvements for Knights mitigation after level 85 (and after Underfoot releases on progression servers).

 

Our goal each month is to continue to improve the quality of the game we all love! As always, we appreciate your feedback, but please wait until you see these changes on the test server before passing judgment.

We’re grateful for your continued support!

Want to discuss this with other players on the forums? See the thread here!