Greetings Avatars,

Please read this entire message, as well as the linked instructionsand known issues.

Thank you for being a loyal backer and follower of Shroud of the Avatar. Release 34 access for all backers begins this Thursday, September 29, at 10:30 AM US Central Daylight Time (15:30 UTC).

Combat and Economic Polish and Balance:

Release 34 is our first chance since persistence to really analyze our current set of data and begin to execute major steps towards balancing and polishing Combat and the Economy.

As described in my forum post, we are making several changes to provide more gold to casual players. Those changes include Daily Oracle Confessions (500 gold), increased experience and gold rewards for Path of Love Quests, Outlander Tracking Program (100 gold per town), Mail Quests expansion, and First Bind Point reward.

Combat also received a lot of attention, with over 20 balance changes related to skills, taming, health / focus regen rates, and critical hits. We also added several new skills including new healing skills outside of Life Magic and new reactive skills.

Crafting, Cooking, and Food:

Crafting got a major expansion with 45 new recipes, including our first recipe built from difficult to obtain rares (Bone Armor) and a refactor of how food works that makes it much more relevant to game play.

Bone Armor, a new type of armor, is crafted at a Tailoring table from bones refined at a Carpentry station (the first armor to involve Carpentry). It has the attributes of Heavy Armor (high Damage Avoidance) but it is actually classified as Light Armor, so when Masterworked, your modifiers will be Light Armor modifiers and your skills used with it will be Light Armor skills. It also has very high durability, making it ideal for Enchanting and Masterworking. However, the bones needed to craft it are exceedingly difficult to acquire. In addition to the normal Tailoring, Carpentry, and Smithing ingredients (leather, cloth, thread, wax, metal etc.) Bone Armor requires parts from Dragons, Phoenixes, Demons, and Tier 5 Skeletons.

We are finally making the eating of Food relevant to gameplay. Health and Focus regeneration have been slowed down (see Combat section below) and now eating Food is the primary way to increase those rates. We have also made it so food (and other consumables like Potions) can be used from inventory via double-click or right-click while you are not in combat. They no longer have to be used from the shortcut bar. In fact, food is no longer part of the deck system at all. We have also expanded the types of foods you can eat to include raw foods like fruit, not just prepared foods. These raw foods will offer very small, short buffs. Finally, foods will now be tiered in their effects based on the amount and types of ingredients. There are 6 tiers. In Release 34, we still only have Tiers 0–2, but we are planning to expand into the higher tiers in future releases. Normal Food will affect Health and Focus Regen rates while Fantastical and Special Foods will give more magical effects (but may also have negative effects).

Path of Love Polish:

We continue to polish the Path of Love to bring it up to the level of a Lord British experience. In Release 34, our main focus was on the Necropolis where we added an NPC at the entrance of the Necropolis Barrens to warn newer players to keep to the road. Said road now goes from the entrance of the Necropolis Barrens to the Necropolis itself and is properly marked, and safer than traveling through the other parts of the Barrens. We also added a new spirit named Lacey (after our fallen community member) to the entrance of the Necropolis. The spirit talker you hired in Ardoris will now accompany you through the Necropolis and fight alongside you (note: not all spirit talkers are created equal) and warn you if you veer into dangerous areas. The difficulty of some of the monsters has been toned down (the terror of the poison spiders will live on in memory). Additionally, the ending is clearer as to what is expected to happen next, and the player can exit if they wish directly into the next part of the story. We also continued polishing Ardoris as well.

Halloween:

Of course I have to mention our favorite time of the year: Halloween! We had to make sure that the game was filled with enough spooky content this year so we went over the top! The scary items range from ghostly pets to gross emotes, to ghastly costumes, all the way up to a Gothic (aka Haunted) Mansion!

Yet again, I want to express a huge amount of gratitude to our Dev+ backers who tested all of the items below on the QA server and uncovered lots of bugs. They also provided editorial feedback on this post. So, they are a big reason that this post actually matches what is in the game, and that it is easy to read.

While we are getting closer to launch, we are still in a constant state of change, and we do not yet have all the in-game systems to inform players of these changes, or to share ways to help them to explore new content and systems. This means we rely mostly on this message, and the linked instructionsand known issues to convey the current game state. We regularly have to answer questions or filter bug reports because some players elect not to read this valuable information.

By taking a few moments to read through this information, a great deal of our time and efforts can be redirected to focus on new “unanswered” questions, and addressing critical issues impacting each release. We greatly appreciate you taking the time to review this post, and for all the truly valuable feedback you continue to provide.

Also, remember that while we are providing new content with each release, our community is working overtime to make new events for you to enjoy. Be sure to check out a couple of the event calendars run by our community members (via in-game book or the player run websites: Avatars Circle and Events of the Avatars). You can also get the latest official events on the Main Website.

Without further ado, here is a list of what you can expect to see in Release 34.

Is it just me, or are these updates from Portalarium getting unreasonably lengthy?