We've extended holy light and wither's casting time from original 3 casting to 5 casting on Test Sosaria (extended by half a second). We'll be looking at how well this balance tweak affects these spells today.

Faster casting cap of 2 and spell damage increase tweaks will be removed from publish 24, but stay on Test Sosaria until it is republished.

Swamp dragon armor, house fighting, a bola balance change, and holy light/wither tweaks will be in publish 24, though.

Thanks!

Edited by Designer_Hanse (03/23/04 01:36 PM)

Myself and a few others may not be available to QA while we're moving. PvP balance changes are much more complex than the bugfix list we have and some of the smaller balance changes, such as swamp dragon armor. Although, we're pulling the swamp dragon armor change from publish 24.

So, the publish will go forward with bug fixes and small tweaks.

Ah, I knew there was a reason why I had mount delays as part of the bola fix, originally.

Thank you for the information, Jason. I'll look at putting a test version of this on Test Sosaria tomorrow.

Resist on SP is fixed in publish 24.

We're still debating the spell damage increase change. Oaks and I debated on this yesterday. We've been looking at spreadsheets and do not like the comprimises we've made, so far.

We expect we'll look at SDI more once we're in California.

We're looking at putting the suite of PvP balance changes in publish 25, but we're not final on that yet. We didn't have enough time to properly program and test all the tweaks and fixes for publish 24.

No changes for archery in this publish...

I'm sorry, I meant no balance or feature changes for archery. I believe Speedman is looking into the archery crash fix. I don't know what kind of progress he's made.

Edited by Designer_Hanse (03/23/04 03:14 PM)

We're not giving up on the faster casting caps. You're right on guessing that it's being pushed for more testing. Publish 24 is going to be published earlier than we originally planned, so we removed many changes that would have taken longer than this week to complete and test.

Bolas are currently able to be scripted around by dismounting and remounting. We're going to change it so the message of swinging the bola happens prior to targeting a person rather than after. This way the script can not time itself to dismount and avoid the bola.

Wither and holy light had their spell casting delay extended from 3 to 5.

Yes, faster casting 2 cap has been decided as what we're going with for publish 25. Testing showed it was just right, as we had originally designed it for AoS and tested back then.

We definitely will not be taking 5-6 months for publish 25.

Publish 24 goes to QA next week and will be in testing while we are moving. Once tested (2-3 weeks) it will be published probably around late April. While that is going on, we will be looking over fixes on Test Sosaria for publish 25, which should include faster casting, spell damage increase, dex/stamina increase, and many other balancing and fixes that we've discussed on here.

Publish 25 should take, hopefully, two weeks to iron out...maybe three. These weeks will probably be going on while QA is testing Publish 24. This means there is an overlap in the time spent developing and QA'ing. So, you'll see development in April. We've already seen a lot of good feedback on many balance changes on Test Sosaria, so I'm hoping it does not take a month. Although, there are so many dependencies (mage effectiveness versus paladins, dexers, etc) that it will require a great deal of testing and balancing.

I expect you'll see publish 25 two to three weeks after publish 24. That's my personal opinion. So, we're looking at two months (April and May), not 5-6. I'd definitely like to see balance changes to PvP for summer (north hemisphere).

I've talked with many people here at Origin about luck and looting.

The best response I've seen so far is the lack of even knowing if your luck worked or not.

Also, MrTact outlined some luck improvements to me, but it was a quick outline and I didn't get the gist of all his comments as I was intent on getting a tweak on Test Sosaria, at the time. I do know he's looking into the issue, though.

We're also looking into some loot changes for publish 25 that you'll be interested in, but we have not finalized what we're going to do. I can discuss those once development on publish 25 begins and we have a better picture of how large the publish will be.

We fundamentally changed the way people's names and titles are stored in the server and client for display. Using an old backup wouldn't solve the problem.

We'll look at it in a future publish when we're looking over guildstones, though.

I meant the casting times for only holy light and wither, not all spells. Sorry about that... I had the spells in the title, but then changed the title of the post.

参照：　UO Stratics