Citadel Studios have released a substantial update for Legends of Aria, the Ultima Online-inspired MMORPG formerly known as Shards Online. The main focus of this update is combat in the game, and it introduces a significant shift thereto:

From Agility to Stamina

Stamina now takes the place of Agility in combat calculations for swing speed and movement speed. As Stamina is inherited from Agility, this is a like for like switch in some respects; however, things start to change as player characters become exhausted during combat.

Stamina now regenerates extremely slowly and is regained by consuming stamina potions and resting at a campfire. Primary and secondary weapon abilities now cost substantially less

to use, and Bleed, Stun, Mortal Strike and other powerful abilities now leave the victim immune to that attack for a 12 seconds.The large Stamina pool available and relatively low cost of weapon abilities allows players to be situational in how and when they spend their Stamina. In many ways, this is comparable to how a Mage relies upon mana. The crucial difference is that a warrior is far from useless when his stamina is exhausted, but instead operates at a reduced capacity.

Swing speed has a fairly straightforward translation. 50 Agility grants 100 Stamina and offers the same swing speed bonus as prepatch. Reducing your stamina to 0 will result in a swing speed equal to that of a 10 Agility character. Similarly, players at 100 Stamina will experience a maximum runspeed of 120%, whilst a player with exhausted Stamina will receive only 90% runspeed.

Critical Hits

Critical hits were implemented to tackle one problem: The need for spell interruptions. Going into our combat design, we knew we wanted a high hit rate and thus could not rely upon standard hits to cause spell fizzles, as this would make casting spells virtually impossible. Critical hits were born and naturally took on a higher damage output, reducing regular hit damage to compensate.

What we have found both in our testing and in feedback from players is that weapon damage has suffered from its wide distribution, critical hits have failed to have the intended interrupt impact due to their random nature, and melee characters themselves find the reliability of damage too low and the spikes too random.

For these reasons, critical hits have been removed and standard weapon damage has been raised to a competitive level.

Spell interruptions now occur in the following situations:
– Spell damage inflicted on the caster
– Damage ticks from the ‘Bleed’ weapon ability
– When stunned
– When silenced

The result of these changes are that combat between warriors and mages becomes much less random, damage is predictable and the dynamics between spell interruptions and a warrior’s special abilities feature strongly in the ebb and flow of combat. Warriors can prevent a mage from casting, but doing so will come at the cost of his/her stamina and combat efficiency.

In addition to the above, the patch introduces several new skills to the different character classes in the game, and also brings with it the start of the final implementation of fast travel.