Announcement: Breath 3.5 "Final Patch"

[BobGeneric]

Below is a list of the items that are being patched and will be implemented in the "Final Patch" for Breath 3.5 - we anticipate there will be no future patches for Breath 3.5 because we will begin work on coding for the next breath (Breath 5) once this patch is pushed - if a game-breaking bug or issue is discovered, we will of course try to get a patch done for that but it is time for development and coding to focus on Breath 5 (development on Breath 5 is already moving along and there will be announcements in the future as we continue working on it; in addition, we will probably be soliciting feedback and/or suggestions for certain classes - if you've been thinking about making Suggestions, you are encouraged to submit them in the Suggestions forum).

This patch will be applied during scheduled maintenance soon - it is anticipated that this will occur late this week (Rincewind will be posting exact details of the maintenance window) and the game will be down during this window while we make the required back-end updates; however, we felt it would be a good idea to give everyone a heads-up of what is coming a little in advance of the actual changes being applied because there are some significant new features being added.

Without further ado, here are the changes to expect:

Heavy Items:
● Environmental Heavy Items will appear throughout the Nexus. They may be picked up and (depending on the item) used as melee or thrown weapons by characters with relevant skills. Heavy Items include telephone poles, ambulances, trees, boulders and much, much more. Heavy Items can be seen in the description of the locations in which they appear, and have several unique properties:
- Unlike other thrown items, they require 1 AP (not 0) to pick up.
- They cannot be repaired or enchanted.
- They cannot be stored or given away.
- They cannot be carried through doors or portals.
- Heavy Items do not have a weight in your inventory, but only one may be carried at a time.
- Heavy Items are considered Heavy Weapons and have the associated accuracy penalty.
- Martial Spellcraft does not work with Heavy Items.
- You cannot fly while carrying a Heavy Item.
- If you are killed, drop the item or lose the status effect allowing you to carry it (for classes that must toggle a Status Effect to use Heavy Items) it will fall to the ground in the location.
- A list of heavy items and where they may be found exists on the wiki here: http://wiki.nexuscla.sh/wiki/index.php?title=Heavy_Items

● The following classes and skills have gained the ability to use Heavy Items:
- Holy Champions with Cloak of Earth, while Cloak of Earth is active.
- Nexus Champions with Tattoo of Inner Strength, while Heavy Lifting is active.
- Dark Oppressors with Lord Over Domain, only while within the demonic plane of Stygia.
- Infernal Behemoths with Fiendish Bulk, at all times.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The development team is keeping an eye on the way Heavy Items affect gameplay; the statistics of heavy items, as well as the skills that grant access to them (and therefore the classes to which they are available), may be changed in this or future breaths.

Factional alignment overriding "normal" morality shifts
The effect of one's factional alignment overriding "normal" morality shifts outside of one's stronghold has been narrowed considerably. Below is the complete set of cases in which one's choice of faction has an affect on morality shifts.
● Inside one's own stronghold, actions taken inside a Good/Unaligned/Evil faction members may still only shift morality up/toward 0/down respectively (i.e., this is unchanged).
● Outside one's own stronghold, the individual morality score of the target and/or attacker is overridden when attacking (including pet attacks) only in the following circumstances:
- When an Angel attacks a member of an Evil faction inside that Evil faction’s stronghold, the target’s morality is treated as though it were -20 (“evil”) if its individual morality score is higher than -20 (i.e., “neutral” or “good”).
- When an Angel attacks a member of an Unaligned faction inside that Unaligned faction’s stronghold, the target’s morality is treated as though it were 0 (“neutral”) if its individual morality score is equal to or higher than 20 (i.e., “good”).

Credit Store:
● Custom clothing items are now available for purchase. For 200 credits, you may create one clothing item named whatever you wish (limit 75 characters). Custom clothing items can be made with any of these nine item slots: Belt, Eyes, Fists, Hat, Jacket, Neck, Pants, Shirt, or Shoes. Like renamed items, custom clothing items cannot be dropped.
● Custom prefixes, suffixes and domains may now be purchased directly via the credit store instead of needing to go through an admin. You may type in whatever you wish (limit 75 characters) as your prefix, suffix or domain. Custom titles continue to be priced at the cost of a regular title + 100 credits; this means custom prefixes and suffixes cost 250 credits and custom domains cost 350 credits.

Mechanics:
● All potions may now once again be set up as targets.
● Fraternity of Wondercraft bonuses for crafting have been halved (this should have been implemented with the last patch where crafting costs were reduced but was overlooked).
● Nether hounds now have a 5% chance to score critical hits (deal 1.5x damage) on a successful attack, similar to the Myrmidon's ability.

Interface and Quality of Life:
● Updated the pie-chart display of HP, AP and MP to run more smoothly. This may display incorrectly for people who used the game between the previous patch and this one; clearing browser-cache images (Ctrl+F5 with most desktop browsers) will correct this problem.
● The day/night icon has been made much more obvious in the description pane.
● Magic markers and chalk now come in different colors.
- 22 writing items have been added as opposed to just 2 (markers, chalk), all with their own unique colour/effect
- Innate writing implements (e.g., writing in blood or using an umbral sword/blood claws/blade of light) have their own unique effects as well
- Finding a piece of chalk or magic marker while searching grants you a random type of chalk/marker (at varying rates)
- Existing piece of chalk/magic marker items have a "use" function by which they can be converted to a random color of chalk/marker (at those same rates)
- All writing items (except one) are sold in credit store for varying costs
● Confirmation checks have been added to several actions:
- Choosing a character class.
- Leaving a faction.
- Kicking a character from a faction.
- Banning a character from a faction.
- Banning a user from a faction.
- Joining a guild.
● The confirmation check for revoking a stronghold now has a popup warning text that explains what revoking will do.
● Members of the Adamant Kinship guild now see fellow Adamant Kinship members as "allied" (green color).

Character Resets
● Character pages now include a Reset button (at the bottom of the page, next to the "Release" button). This means you no longer need to request administrative intervention. Clicking the reset button brings you to a page explaining what a reset will do and requires you to click a second time to confirm. Resetting a character may only be done once every 24 hours and follows the same cooldown timer as releasing a character. Resetting a character does the following:
- Removes all skills, spells, and other CP purchases the character has made.
- Character has current CP set to 10. You will need to purchase your first mortal skill through the "Purchase skills" screen.
- Sets the count for "current breath" statistics to zero. You will keep all your Career stats.
- Removes all current breath CP-granting badges for grinding.
- Removes all current breath exploration badges.
- Sets the character's level to 1, XP to 0, and class to Mortal.
- If the character's morality is less than -40 or greater than 40 it will be set to -40 or 40 respectively.
- Maximum AP and HP are set to 50. Maximum MP are set to 20 (30 if character has collected the whole of the Lore of Haldon).
- Current AP, HP, and MP are reduced to the maximum values set above if higher. (If lower, they are not increased).
- Removes membership in a guild (if any).
- You will receive a message in your message log that your character has been reset.
- Faction membership and rank and items in inventory are NOT lost during a reset.

Bugs:
● Fixed a bug whereby activating Flaming Weapons did not send an activation message.
● Fixed a bug that allowed text claiming that you lost Morality (from a Blood Ice, Soul Ice or Unholy Book) or gained Morality (from a Holy Book) to still appear when the morality shift was prevented by the alignment of your Stronghold.
● Fixed a bug that blocked faction leaders from kicking an initiate, which started the demotion dialogue instead.
● Fixed a bug that kept the name of a renamed item from being displayed when it is given or received.
● Corrected a bug that allowed Explosive Murder (and certain other skills), under certain circumstances, to kill characters that were already dead.
● Fixed a bug where Nether Hounds were doing incorrect secondary damage if the Wyrm Master also had Master of the Pack.
● Pattern Weaver now works on gems that contain Glyph Erasure spells.
● Extra HP (over max) granted by Adrenal Healing were not removed if Bloodlust was manually deactivated.

[Sweedee]

Hm! The demonic lifters have it passively. That's the perk of less AP to go and pick something up.
Though I suppose a Holy Champion would have turned on their Earth cloak for a raid setting anyway. (Maybe or maybe not for hunting.)
_________________
"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
Albert Einstein

[SkullFace]

Death by Portable Toilet!!! YES!

I now wish I hadn't bought Cloak of Magma on my Holy Champion because that is not where it's at

I'm very intrigued by the Nexus Champion synergy given their Melee and Thrown bias. Big possibilities. Teleporting with Heavy Item is a big plus. Just give the NC access to Nexal Return and you have the perfect killing machine

Infernal Behemoth is less of a thing. Bloodlust doesn't affect Thrown Weapons so that's a thumbs down. Melee maybe but needs more lol factor although the Telephone Pole looks like the weapon of choice. Not sure that intrinsic Heavy Item carrying offers any major advantage (doors and portals take care of that) except possibly...

Dark Oppressor? Glad someone figured out that enchantment loophole

Only one major query and one minor request. Does carrying huge objects prevent Flight (probably should)? And can we please have a 16 Ton Weight, right square frustrum, as a Heavy Item?
_________________
Cheers,

Skull Face

[BobGeneric]

Carrying a heavy item prevents flight.

[Sweedee]

Will Mischievous Imps be able to stop oversized items?
_________________
"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
Albert Einstein

[Rincewind]

The maintenance window for this patch will be as follows:

Noon Monday 17th September UTC.

[oath2order]

[Nayru]

[eris2323]

[elimyx]

[Dissident]

If it requires both then we would be alienating a few classes from ever having to toy with it if that's the intent of the suggestion.

[sohdbrimks]

I think only current classes should be able to use heavy items, if everyone could do it then it wouldn't be special anymore

[catvom]

[Kylinn]

What about letting folks with Potions of Strength lift Heavy items, but not throw them? That way they could have the fun of transporting and decorating places with odd cars, fridges, etc., but wouldn't be horning in on the combat aspects.

[GreatCatatonic]

As someone who uses Heavy Items on two (soon to be three) characters, I would appreciate not letting others move every heavy item to a remote corner of the map; they're sparse enough already.

Not that I'm complaining about their prevalence; I think they're plentiful enough to be able to find in a few AP, which is reasonable.

--Great