Once Over Lightly

Big patch today, with lots of bug fixing. Here's the really notable highlights.

- Stay in touch with your friends with our in-game mail system!

"Staying in touch" is really handy, but you can also send money and an item, enabling trade by mail between trusted parties. But not between Freeport and Qeynos. Mailboxes are in Qeynos Harbor and East Freeport. Guild level 15 allows purchase of mailbox for the home. Here's some headlines.

- Share house rent among multiple characters and pay rent in advance!

Great for couples who both play. Also, can you say guild hall? I knew you could. The UI will tell you who has paid how much and when.

- Crafters can use new recipes to make enchanted weapons, armor, and items!

Most effects are damage procs, but jewelers can also add specific activated short-duration stat buffs. It's a great day to be a jeweler!

- Understand your defenses better with separate Avoidance and Mitigation ratings!

AC is a thing of the past. Maybe this will clarify things.

- The fifth stage of the Glowing Black Stone quest should now properly take the Palladium Torque.

I think this means that the Palladium Torque goes away. It didn't before. Ouch!

- Guild leaders and officers can promote and demote members if they are in another zone or not currently online.

This will certainly simplify life for the guild leader.

- The number of slots in the Maintained window has been increased to 30.
- You can now recast/refresh a spell that uses concentration without needing to cancel it first.

After Breezing and Hasting a full party, I couldn't tell which of my dots or stifles or stuns had landed or see their timer. Refreshing the group buffs was also an annoyance.

- Toggleable maintained spells will now begin their reuse timer when cancelled. They should block any other spells that are upgrades/downgrades of the same line while active, and should begin the reuse timers on those upgrades/downgrades when the blocking spell is cancelled.

I'm not entirely sure what this means, but I think it means that stacking certain types of group buffs wasn't intended, and now won't work. For example, I bet that I can no longer have both Signet of Intuition and Rune of Understanding active.

- Ward spells will now work properly against the damage of DoT effects.

This was a big problem for shamans, and for some other classes that had wards. Wards did not absorb damage from DOTs at all. Apparently this was an oversight, not a design choice. It did seem a bit bizzare...

Many, many, MANY tradeskill reaction arts have been tinkered with!

Ok, that wasn't in the patch notes as such. But they've been tinkered with. You should assume that numerical values of the changes to progress, durability, success chance and power have all been changed. Proceed with caution until you understand the changes. Most changes seem beneficial to the player, but not all of them do.

The missing recipes for symbols have been added to the Jeweler books.

I was wondering where these had gone. At tier 1 and 2 I could make items for the "shield" slot that could give a nice addition to ac and some stats. They didn't exist for tiers 3, 4, and 5. Now I've got work to do!

- Pursuit rules that NPCs follow have been changed:
- If you break an encounter and try to flee from an opponent, it will now follow you a set distance regardless of whether it was a stationary encounter or a wanderer.
- When the opponent reaches that set distance, it will immediately stop following you and return, at run speed, back to the point where it was aggroed.
- As the opponent runs back to its point of aggro, it will be invulnerable to attack and will not add any other player to its hate list.


The old system offered too much opportunity for griefing and training. But if you don't know what's going on, this is going to seem wierd, especially when you can't engage due to the lock. It's nice for those of us that do a lot of running away, though.

There are many other goodies in today's patch. The change to the Glowing Black Stone quest is the biggest gotcha that I can see. Ah, yes. One other important change.

- When harvesting from stones at all levels, rare clusters and gemstones will now be found about twice as often.

Ok, so maybe the price of palladium won't go through the roof, after all...