Patch Notes - 5th April

[Rincewind]

Your late easter Nexal update:

Game Mechanics
* New enchant type: Concealment. Requires the enchanter to know the Shadow Wrap spell and consumes a Potion of Invisibility. Concealment enchants can only be put on clothes and armor. For each concealment enchant on an item you are wearing, you get a 2% per enchant (max 12%) bonus to hiding.
* Characters APed out on water should now always automatically start the drown cycle on an AP tick even if they have powerful Tier 3 travel skills (some of which required admin intervention or a mercy kill before), unless those skills confer unlimited water movement in the case of Cloak of the Relentless Sea.
* Shotguns now load all loadable shells in one click for 1 AP.
* Malls have new clothing categories: Thigh High Boots, Hair Bows, Leggings, and Pencil Skirts.
* Revenants in Wolf form may devour bones in their mighty wolf jaws as a Food item.
* Revenants in Bat form have a 3% defense bonus if they have a Bat Swarm summoned at the same time, since it's hard for attackers to tell which bat in the swarm is you.
* Fiendish Bulk grants +10 to carrying capacity.
* Having the skills Heal Others or Absolve Suffering extends the duration of the Advocate's Healing Aura by 10 points each.
* Energize now grants 50% of the healing amount as XP instead of 10%, and grants healing stats equal to the XP it grants. Our main concern in the past was the possibility of two Shepherds farming XP by tossing the same bundle of MP back and forth at each other; a different countermeasure to this has been added.
* Arcane Channel now grants 5 XP per use. The Energize farming countermeasure applies to it as well.
* Biting a Doom Howler or Lich with Feeding Fangs now has possible effects, if the correct circumstances are met.
* Rather than disappearing on ticks, items that are dropped will now disappear based on time since they were dropped. Most items will disappear after two hours. Thrown weapons will disappear after 24 hours rather than persisting indefinitely.
* You may opt to Reject certain classes of item on searches:
- If an item is in your inventory, in your character page there will be an option to add it to a reject list of item types.
- If an item type is on your reject list, if you find one while searching you will put it back instead of adding it to your inventory. This search action will still cost 1 AP the same as any other search action, but should avoid a situation where your inventory is filled with things you would deem to be clutter.
- Next to this tool there is another tool to view this list and remove items from it at any time.
- Adding or removing items from your reject list costs no AP, triggers no ticks, and does not require you to be alive. Rejecting an item does not drop items of that type that you already possess, it simply means you won't pick up more while searching.
- Reject lists are per character, not per user, since different characters may want very different things and one Nexal's trash is another Nexal's treasure.
- Unfortunately, due to how finding potions is handled under the hood you cannot add Potions to a reject list. We doubt many characters would want to.

Factions
* If you are a Veteran or above in a faction, your stronghold has been recently destroyed, and no one has recaptured your flag, your faction page now has a timer showing the minutes remaining until you can reset without a recapture.
* Lieutenants may now send faction Announcements.
* Faction leaders are now notified when a member of your faction leaves the faction via becoming an Angel or a Demon, including the Fallen or Redeemed.
* When your faction stronghold is destroyed by a raid, the notification reminds you where your stronghold was before it was destroyed.
* If you join a faction as the character that founded that faction, and it has no current active Leader, you join as a Leader instead of an Initiate. Under these circumstances you will be able to join even if the Faction is closed or you are banned. This should head off situations where players need admin intervention to revive dead factions they founded.

Quality of Life and Inferface
* Blood Frenzy no longer makes every character display as hostile. This wasn't fooling people, no one liked it, and it presented an accessibility issue for colorblind players.
* Enchantment decay on death, like item decay, is now displayed in red text.
* When your pets attack renamed pets, it tells you what kind of pet they attacked now.
* A bunch of clothing items that logically aren't clothing per se (Bionic Eyes, Pair of Bare Feet, etc) have aura-like custom descriptions now instead of being stacked onto the list of clothing worn. This is by no means a complete run-through of every clothing item where this sort of thing would make sense, but we have expanded on a whole lot of them.
* Drowning sends a notification to others in the vicinity.
* Anointing Healing potions onto someone now tells you how much you healed and how much XP you gained. It also now contributes to the HP Healed stat.
* Casting AOE spells with Deep Spellcraft locks that spell in as your selected weapon for subsequent AOEs or regular attacks.
* If you have Sense Magic, the Repair dropdown mentions if items to be repaired are Enchanted.
* Using a custom spell with a Spellwand now uses the custom spell's custom text instead of the Spellwand default text.

Major Bugs
* Good characters defending Unaligned strongholds are now considered to be of Neutral morality for purposes of Angelic pet and AOE targeting. This was applied to direct attacks in late 2018 but these aspects of the change were not fully implemented at the time.
* Non-Evil characters defending Evil strongholds are now considered to be of Evil morality for purposes of Angelic pet and AOE targeting. This was applied to direct attacks in late 2018 but these aspects of the change were not fully implemented at the time.
* Fixed an issue which, as far as we can tell, meant that Radiant Storm has never worked. Reduced the MO cost of Radiant Storm from 10 to 5 and made the cost display more clearly.
* Fixed an issue where many (mostly demon) innate attacks didn't tell the attacker or defender about aura damage rolls.
* Fixed a bug where Air Cloak negated all auras.
* When you are fighting wandering masterless pets with no player characters (that you know of...) in the area, you will no longer see a useless attack dropdown button to attack the wandering pets' nonexistant master.
* Petmasters now get a previously-absent notification when a pet attacked one of their pets and missed.
* Harvest actions now allow spending into negative AP like other AP-using actions. You should now only be stopped from Harvesting for AP reasons if you are literally out of AP.
* Setting up items no longer takes a status tick to go with it not taking an AP. This was being misused to run down detrimental status effects and activate passive heals.
* Fixed a bug that is the most likely suspect to have caused an issue where factions had their stronghold locations visible at different times than the wiki (and intent) says. Let us know if you run into this issue again.

Minor Bugs
* Moved the icon for Glyphs of Sapping so they no longer conflict with the Stronghold icon.
* Made a change that should hopefully address the issue of people getting poison removal messages when they weren't actually poisoned.
* Acid Blood now correctly prevents the Acid Burn status effect.
* Fixed an issue where Eye of Judgment didn't appear in the attack dropdown at 2 MP with Dread Gaze.
* Fixed an issue where it was possible to lose HP by self-healing when your HP is over maximum.
* Slings now correctly drop rocks when attacking structures.
* Fixed an issue where it was sometimes possible to broadcast to the room that you disappeared from view when you were hidden or invisible already.
* Resolved an issue where you couldn't Harvest an item if you had exactly the same AP as the Harvest cost.
* Corrected an issue where the Ziggurat wasn't counting score on kills that don't leave a corpse.
* Posting to a Faction Chatbox now correctly works at 0 AP (since it costs 0 AP).
* Fixed an issue where Heal Others potentially took much more MP than it should if it cured Sorcerers Might.

[Goliath]

Hooray for reject lists

[Kallas]

Good stuff, some solid QoL!

[AmIaGhost]

[Saint_Jimmy]