This change does not go live until late tonight! You can preflag but will not see the pets correctly until the patch.

We have been looking into fun ways to make beastlords closer to their warders as partners instead of just being a spell they cast like a magician or necromancer pet. After all, they are called "Warders" and not "pets" for a reason. While we are still working on some aspects of this, we have a fun aesthetic change that happened to be completed early.


When a Beastlord hits level 9, they will now be able to choose the beast they will bind with. Each Beastlord race now has three warder options that, once chosen, stick with the beastlord throughout their entire career.

The idea is that a beastlord's warder is not a collared beast, but instead an expression of the beastlords inner self channeled symbiotically into the beast and vice versa. This means synergistic abilities involving shared health and abilities between the beastlord and their warder make sense. It also means that there should be some sort of connection between the personality and strengths of the beastlord and the choice of pet. How can you feel like you and your warder buddy are special teammates when every other Iksar has the same scaled wolf as you.

Ever see a Barbarian beastlord and think to yourself, "His inner spirit is really a snow bunny, not a wolf"? This has been remedied.

Ever wonder how some dumb ogre is able to control a grizzly bear that is actually smarter then he is? Well, skunks are pretty dumb, right?

Beastlords, ever want to ride your best warder buddy around East Badlands? Well, you still can't. You will just have to pretend.

If you are already above level 9, then you will be summoning a temporary pet until you pay a visit to your starting city guild master. We are undecided regarding whether the temporary pet is going to be permenent, or if at some point we will switch all old beastlords to the "No pet till you decide" system.

The cool down on rogue traps have been lowered substantially. The preparation time has also been lowered on the second tier trap kit. A third tier trap kit with very low preparation time is being planned for an upcoming patch.

In addition to the Bodytype changes of a few patches ago, we have now added worn Bane damage to around 175 items throughout the game.

A few things still need to be done, and will happen next patch. We will be removing all bounty augs and reimbursing with tokens so that they can buy a new one of their choice.

A few items that had bane damage prior to the patch still need to maneuvered over. If you have an item that used to have bane, hold tight for now.

Do you hate buffs? YEAH ME TOO!!! They said it couldn't be done, but it has been done!!! Well now there's a solution for you to block those buffs you really can't stand. Just type /cm blockbuff and all your dreams will come true. All you need to know is the spell ID of the spell which you're looking to block, which can be found in your current buffs list with the /char command.

Rejoice for never having to get Call of the Predator ever again.

The Tar`Loc tribe in Tur`Ruj is no longer a complete pushover. At the same time, the Ju`Bor tribe is no longer nigh impossible.

Hurray for balance!

EDIT: April Fools! This was our 2013 April Fools prank. The staff went out onto the interwebs, and found the worst advertisements we could get our hands on. Then we went and put those advertisements into all the game music and spell effects. I also made a flock of birds that spelled out "Folgers Coffee" in the sky in Athica.

On the bright side the playerbase of SoD has many, many less worms.

Until next year, folks.



Due to the recent widespread item, class, archetype, tome, spell, stance, experience and money drop nerfs we have had a hard time keeping donators. In fact, so many donators have dropped out that we have had to take drastic measures.

We have decided to implement short and barely noticeable audio advertisements throughout the game. We ask that you please keep your game sound on in order to support the server, and allow us to continue to bring you the excellent lag and bug free game play everyone has come to expect.

We hope to soon implement more advertisements throughout different parts of the game. Also, within the next few days we will be editing the client files to make playing without sound impossible.

We appreciate everyone's understanding and hope you all had a great Easter.

Traps:
Traps are still not ready! We hope to finish this up later in the week.

Rogue Hide:
We have made about 4,500 less NPCs see Rogue invisible. Sneaky sneaky!

Bodytypes:
The new Bodytypes have been distributed throughout the game. Read the previous post for more information! Unfortunately, the Bane damage changes are not yet in. We are being very methodical in adding Bane to items throughout the game, and have not yet finished. Expect the new Bane system to go live later in the week.

Fletching:
Arrows have been changed to reflect the new Bodytypes. Be sure to check your quiver before plinking away!

Bonus Encounter Experience:
As of this patch, whenever you kill a difficult monster or encounter for the first time you will receive an experience boost. As of first implementation, this will add around 65 million bonus experience throughout 6, 12 and 18 man encounters. Just a quick and fun little bonus!

Mansion of Portals:
The Crags of Tarhyl now has its own shiny new Travel Portal. Also, wisps in the Mansion of Portals will no longer cast Portal Contagion on players under level 20.

Jayla's Insight:
The bard ability "Jayla's Insight" has been changed slightly. Hopefully it should be more legible. As well as the format change it will now filter under "skills" in your chat window. This will allow players to change the color of the text.

Thazeran's Tower:
The person who began each Deacon event may now manually reset the timer/event by interacting with the Deacon at the beginning of the event. This should allow guilds who have had a bad start to reset the encounter instead of having the timer make the encounter undoable. This option goes away after a boss in the wing dies.

We have also moved the tome drop chance from the first to the second boss of each wing. Both used to have a chance, but now only the boss has a (much greater than before) chance. We have left archaic fragment pieces on both.

Bane:

In the next (hopefully!) patch, the following Bane changes shall go live.

First off, we have consolidated the old body type categories, and updated around 11,000 NPCs to the following:

Humanoid Monster: Unintelligent things in a generally humanoid shape. Examples: Sivakians and Paw Cats

Humans/Orcs/Ancients (These are the ancient races of Dalaya. This includes Humans, Orcs, Lodrish and any other race that has been on Dalaya since soon after the Great War. The one exception being Iksar.)

Undead: All undead, including sentient undead like vampires

Giant/Trolls/Ogres: Giants...trolls.... and ogres. Also cyclops!

Construct/Clockwork: Constructs like golems and clockworks.

Chaotic/Corrupted: Chaotic beings like Akhevan and Earth Terror and corrupted creatures like Badland's animals.

The Young Races: Elves, Erudite, Barbarian, Halfling, Gnome. All races that came from Humans.

Lesser Elemental: Lesser world elementals, and trash in the elemental planes.

Reptiles/Amphibeans: Iksars, Frogloks, Basalisks, Snakes, tadpoles, etc.

Magical: Wisps, torrents, other things obviously held together by magic.

Sylvan/Animal: Pumas, Flowers, Fungus men, Tigers, Bats, Birds, Fairies Etc

Insect/Arachnid: All insects like mosquitos and spiders!

Monster: Monsterous beasts like griffons, manticores, centaurs. Anything half animal, half
something else.

Planar Elemental/Elemental Gods: Bosses in the planes, and other elementals tied directly to the gods.

Dragons/Dragonkin: Dragons, Wyverns, Wurms, etc.


We are hoping that this consolidation will help make each bane type relatively useful instead of having one or two bane types rule the roost.

Be sure to read the post below to find out about the new way non-primary/secondary worn bane will work. We are going to be putting much more worn bane on thematically and balance appropriate gear throughout the game. Expect the majority of this to be in next patch, and more to go in shortly after! (Thats a lot of items for us to go through!)

Expect possible slight changes to these groups in the next few months. We are doing our best to get it perfect the first time, but we all know how that goes.


Traps:
Next patch (hopefully) will bring about a revamp of the trap system.

First, we have gone through and changed about 2300 NPCs to not see rogue invisibility.

Second, we have split the sense trap skill into two parts. First, a general sense trap that is available to all classes. Second, a specific sense trap that is available to Rogues and Bards.

When any player walks near a trap that is within their sense skill, the trap will appear as a visible model. The size of that model will depend on your sense trap as related to the skill trivial of the trap. This should allow any class to, when paying attention, identify and avoid traps throughout the game world - most specifically when dungeon crawling.

Since a trap will appear larger in size relative to your sense trap skill, rogues, bards and rangers will allow for much more ease of trap identification. The sense trap caps are tentatively set as follows: Rogues 250, Bards 120, Rangers 100, Other Melees 75, Casters 50.

Rogues and Bards will also be able to specifically sense traps. Using the sense button forces the trap model larger, and keeps it from dissappearing again for many minutes. We have drastically lowered the chance of a critical trap failure, and are possibly planning to add beneficial effects when certain traps are disarmed. Rangers will also be able to sense outdoor traps and disarm them from afar with their bows. We are also considering to give rangers some limited ability to disarm indoor traps.

A sprung trap will respawn in about 20 minutes. A disarmed trap will stay down for an hour or more - depending how much higher your skill is as compared to the traps trivial. Most raid or group traps will be down for a period of time that one disarm of each trap should be efficient.

We have removed some trash from most raid zones where we have implemented the new traps. You should, on average, have shorter clears with smart rogues and bards, but longer clears if you just blindly run into all the traps.

Of course, we will be monitoring this change and tweaking as needed!