The Guestlock security feature has been implemented! If you let other people play your characters, you'll probably want to see this thread for details. The relevant commands can also be found under /cm help normal. This is probably also a good time to say that guestlocking a character that doesn't belong to you is grounds for a banning, so exploiting the freshness of guestlocking to play a prank on someone is not a good idea. Other than that, bask in the theft security!

Other things of note:
*Fixed Permanent Illusions.
*Fixed a bug with the Reflect mob ability that allowed it to block spells even when did not trigger.
*Fixed a minor bug that was causing pets above level 44 not to set their delay properly; such pets should now have slightly more melee power as a result.
*Removed Haste penalties from Charmed pets. We hope to make a habit of making overpowered charm mobs immune rather than nerfing charm altogether in the future.
*Improved Ranger track at level 65.

On February 7th the boats shall open and Kaezul will know the wrath of Dalaya - 18 zones, hundreds of quests, thousands of monsters and a whole new continent to explore. The first installation of Ikisith is coming and will prove to be the greatest challenge Dalaya has known.

Hey Silvercrown folk. Tired of your Trader pips? Well openings are available to become a High Trader if you're industrious enough...

Attention raid-level Shamans and Enchanters and maybe some other people! The Charm Enhancement focus effect has been expanded and changed to Control Enhancement.

In addition to granting +1 tick to charm spell duration per rank, it now also adds 10% to mez duration and +2 to slow spell percentages (versus +5 from Swarm Mastery) per rank. To account for increased usefulness, Control Enhancement has been added to a few select items throughout the raid tiers.

Don't worry, high-end shamans! Your mask hasn't suddenly become completely redundant. In fact, you may find someone interested in your mask in a shamanly place...


In other news, procs on wrist items should no longer trigger from improper spells.

Just a nice heads up on the patches of the last couple days. Lots of backend stuff going in but two things of note

-Wiz's simple T-map fix is now live! http://forum.shardsofdalaya.com/showthread.php?t=19189

-The first of hopefully many tradeskill updates, headed up by our very busy GM-Tao, the hack of all tradeskills.

The latter has many 'minor' changes to Jewel Crafting, including
1) Minor grammar changes to Cat's Eye Jewelry
2) Adjusted trivials, specifically fixing the star ruby, regular ruby trivials
3) 96 new necklaces (48 enchanted, 48 non-enchanted) recipes, filling in all the holes where you used to be able to use a gem to make a ring, but not a necklace.

Jewel Crafting is the first of what should be many tradeskill adjustments. If you see GM-Tao thank him for the ludicrous amount of work it took to make this happen!

We have just finished a minor redesign of our website. Enjoy the new functionality and prettier package! Thanks go to our very own GM-Rari and Dev-Pugsley for this one.

About six months ago we found an exploit in one of the biggest cheating programs used on our server. We have been using this exploit for these past six months slowly detecting the cheaters who regularly play on SoD. Last Tuesday we went through the entire list of confirmed cases and banned their mains or any characters they played as their main for more than a few months. The evidence used is extremely specific and enough redundancy was used in each case for a beyond a reasonable doubt conclusion that the cheating program was used.

Now although we are almost completely sure that each and every one of those IPs caught were indeed running the cheating program (and the appeals process has only confirmed this so far) there may be some instances of somebody playing someone elses character and getting them banned (when IP addresses were muddy.) Because of this we are taking appeals *even though you are supposed to be responsible for your character* if this is the case with you. Keep in mind that there are many appeals pending and it may take some time to get to you - thats basically what you get for loaning your toon out to a cheater.

If you feel like you were banned wrongly for other reasons we are also accepting appeals. I will be happy to show you what evidence we have against you but understand that the chances of a successful appeal without an extremely good reason is low.

We had a lotto in celebration of the purge - if you were a winner be sure to check the forums for your reward! Also the entire server is on a 20% exp bonus for the next week. Enjoy!

In a fairly major itemization shift, knight-only 1-handed weapons have had their damage/delay ratios reduced to be on par with those of other 1-handed weapons throughout the game. This should have several effects:

- Creating a trade-off for knights to benefit from the enormous defensive bonuses of using a shield.
- Giving knights a reason to actually consider using 2-handed weapons in some situations, rather than doing effectively 2-handed- or dual wield-equivalent dps while benefiting from said enormous bonus of shields.
- Giving knights more weapon options. Knight-only 1-handed weapons will still tend to have superior defensive statistics, but some non-knight-only weapons here and there will be entirely valid tanking options in every sense, (Valor, Blade of Enthann comes to mind, among others!), and lower level knights will have far more good weapon options.
- Related to that, it will allow for some more flexibility in designing tank weapons in the future, with less pigeonholed "effectively warrior-only" tank weapons rotting after the first drop.


To make 2-handed weapons a little more attractive for knights, the 2 Handed Bash AA has been change to 2 Handed Mastery, offering a significant damage bonus while wielding 2-handed weapons along with the usual Bashing capabilities.

Also, some poor code ordering that was causing the universal 5% damage bonus to 2-handed weapons to be slightly less than 5% has been fixed, thereby giving 2-handed weapons a slight damage increase across the board.

-A new version of the patcher has been released. Windows 7 and Vista compatibility has been increased. The patcher auto updates when you run an older version. (XP users may find less bugs as well - so says the code team)

-Some SK recourse spells have been rebalanced to be more useful.

-Item prices in Eldenal's Castle have been rebalanced.


-The Halloween Masks no longer drop from ANY mob. You can no longer be more than 20 levels higher than your target to recieve a mask. Drop chance is otherwise the same.

-Part 2 of the quest most people have found people have found is live! The other holiday quest chain remains undone.

What nightmares haunt those who craft dreams? Only time will tell...

Reimburses Wizards 25% mana cost of the last spell they cast if they let it tick the duration. Woldo wants you to know it was his idea. Jerk.

Been a busy month. Alot of these bugs are things that we've heard for awhile and are finally fixing. See we do listen eventually.

*Fixed a bug concerning halfling death save racial not working ever
*Fixed a bug concerning codex of death save-ness not working ever
*Fixed a bug concerning /shield on targets not using shields and it not working ever
*Fixed a bug concerning Procs not occurring while casting when they should (a bard while twisting, anyone's BP proc going off while casting, etc)
*Fixed a related bug concerning Arcane Echo interrupting subsequent casts
*Fixed an unintentional nerf to Slaariel. The intentional nerfs are still in place however.
*Fixed a bug where +skill modifiers were not working if you didn't have the skill to begin with. This primarily affects tanks and +block skill.
*Tomes are now subject to the new area bonus system.
*AA's and Tomes old area penalty now reset after enough total exp is gained, post 65.
*Added a new system to allow us to properly award exp on an individual mob basis. Expect some of the tougher bosses, encounters, and wings to get a nice exp boost in the near future, to compensate for their challenge.

This patch is now live!