New garment design (work in progress, may be tweaked further)
I'm pretty proud of this. Both the weapon and the garment effects go together nicely. Weapons/garments with styles you can customize on the fly are something relatively unique to our server and I'm pretty damn happy with how far I've come in regards to creating client mods. Sure, it's not anything THAT impressive but I'm still pleased with the results :)
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Outside of that I've spent much of today re-writing boss logic, tweaking damage values and other boring stuff. The goal with this weeks patch is to focus on re-vamping under utilized content in Apex. Primarily our city war system which is getting a fairly major overhaul in regards to how it functions and our Sands of time raid which is primarily just getting a slew of quality of life changes.
City War
The main concern right now is that it's too easy for a large guild to smash and dominate their way through the cities. Yes large guilds should (and still will) have an advantage but they shouldn't be so confident in their absolute ability to win. Here's the list of what we're changing and why.
No more City under attack message.
This makes it harder for large guilds to hulk up as a big group and swarm cities. Instead each city you control will have a small icon on the mini map. The color of that icon will change color based on the health of each of the cities. It will go from green orange, yellow and then red at 75+, 50+, 25+ and 0+ percent health accordingly. This means it's easier to see at a glance the state of what your guild holds but requires more teamwork and organization to properly secure cities if you take more than 1 at a time.
Superman Shrines
We already have cyclone shrines spread around the map to help with moving between cities quickly. This update will include a superman shrine outside the walls of each city. These shrines will grant 20 seconds of superman and respawn after 30 seconds (so only 1 person at most can claim a shrine at any given time. It lasts less time than it takes to respawn). This will help small guilds have a extra bit of power when attacking cities and gives the strategic decision of "should I go take the shrine as it spawns to keep them from getting it, or stay inside the walls". Obviously this will be something for us to keep an eye on and is a fairly small decision but it undoubtedly does give a small advantage to guilds with less members and makes collapsing and taking cities a bit easier.
Point Distribution
Generally what happens in city war is that when you control a city (have taken its pole), your guild will get some points every minute towards controlling that city. With the change, it will also REDUCE the points of enemy guilds. This balances out to be the same thing but makes it harder to be sure that your guild has truly secured a city (we were seeing ppl hold a city for 20-30 min then leaving the event because it was then impossible to lose). This change pushes that 'fully secured' limit much further into the event and keeps things more volatile. It also punishes the strategy of pole swapping as those points will quickly be cleared away by those who hold the pole for longer periods of time.
Treasure Chests
Every 10 minutes during the city war, a treasure chest will spawn at a random location on the map and will be added to your mini map. it will take 100 hits to kill regardless of gear/stats and will drop either a handful of +1 stones, or a db scroll. This will give a small window where guilds can choose to either
A: Use the distraction to try to collapse and take a city (using the superman shrine as a boost to do it quickly)
B: Give up on taking a city they can't capture and instead get some smaller rewards for themselves
C: Use it as a way to split the enemy forces and punish poor communication (catch them doing it, kill, take reward, swap numbers advantage to taking the castle)
It's a shit ton of dialogs. My new source at least designed with proper inheritance for NPCs. No one on apex would want to bother with 'classic' sky pass because the rewards suck. In newer conquer though TQ revamped it to give things like study points which will make it actually useful.