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Explore with player titles

May 11, 2021
Background game scene

Features include

New expeditions, titles, and more

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Spotlight

New Expedition: Shattered Obelisk

Journey further into the depths of Amrine temple to unlock the ancient secrets the obelisk holds. The Shattered Obelisk expedition is intended for level 35 players and is found in the Everfall territory.

Shattered Obelisk Boss Encounters

  • Alectos the Relentless: This powerful mage has stood guard for untold eons, focusing intense arcane energies from the resonate structure of the obelisk to lay waste to intruders.

  • Greundgul the Regent: Towering above her armies and adorned in brilliant golden armor, this eternal protector of the obelisk’s treasures guards it from thieves and foolish trespassers alike.

An elite Ancient enemy covered in gold ornaments holds a spear and points menacingly at the camera.
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An elite Ancient enemy covered in gold ornaments holds a spear and points menacingly at the camera.
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An empty stone hallway with part of its roof caved in to show the bright light of the sun falling in through the dusty space.
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An empty stone hallway with part of its roof caved in to show the bright light of the sun falling in through the dusty space.
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Two adventurers in medium and heavy armor face an Ancient Guardian in a blue-lit hallway.
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Two adventurers in medium and heavy armor face an Ancient Guardian in a blue-lit hallway.
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A puzzle room. Several stone towers have beams of light shooting out from one or more of their faces, creating a maze.
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A puzzle room. Several stone towers have beams of light shooting out from one or more of their faces, creating a maze.
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New Expedition: the Depths

Captain Thorpe returns! His Corrupted army has made the ancient ruins below a storm tower on the peninsula of the Restless Shores their base of operation. He now styles himself the Master of the Tempest, the King of Corruption. From this base, he terrorizes the countryside. Can you thwart his plans?

This expedition is intended for level 45 players and is found in Restless Shores.

The Depths boss encounters

  • Archdeacon Azamela: A servant of Thorpe and leader of his armies, Azamela is a fanatical adherent of the twisted corrupted doctrine and a conduit for its destructive energies.

  • Commander Thorpe: Having further embraced corruption, Thorpe’s attacks and abilities have significantly grown, making him a powerful agent of corruption and a deadly threat to Aeternum that must be stopped.

An adventurer in elaborate gear fights the Corrupted Captain Thorpe in a room red and rotting with Corruption.
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An adventurer in elaborate gear fights the Corrupted Captain Thorpe in a room red and rotting with Corruption.
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Characters holding blue-flame torches stand on each face of a towering stone obelisk inside a dark arena.
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Characters holding blue-flame torches stand on each face of a towering stone obelisk inside a dark arena.
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A group of adventurers with their weapons draw race up a flight of ancient stone stairs. The stairway is dimly lit with blue and orange flame sconces.
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A group of adventurers with their weapons draw race up a flight of ancient stone stairs. The stairway is dimly lit with blue and orange flame sconces.
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A dark room inside the depths. The room is full of evidence of Corruption. From an opening to another room, a red light is shining.
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A dark room inside the depths. The room is full of evidence of Corruption. From an opening to another room, a red light is shining.
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Player Titles

Certain activities, such as completing specific achievements, will now award displayable titles. Thre are well over 100 titles, and players can choose display any one unlocked title or choose to not display a title.

  • When equipped, titles appear above your character in the world, incorporating your character’s name in the title.

  • A title will fall into one of two categories:

    • Account-wide: The title works on any character associated with the account.

    • Character-bound: The title only works on the Character who unlocked it.


Discoverable Fast Travel Points

Distributed throughout Aeternum, Fast Travel Points are locations that allow players to fast travel from location to location at the cost of Azoth.

  • The farther the distance and the heavier load you are carrying, the higher the cost for travel.

  • Once a player discovers a point, they can travel to that location from outposts and settlements.

General

  • Elite points of interest (POI) have been updated with new enemy encounters and have revised loot placements.

  • Resources and the distribution of resources have been remapped in each territory to pair better with player progression.

  • Corruption Breaches have been converted to Elite content, with Elite affixes now applied to key enemies in the encounter.

Quest Updates

  • Added new territory quests in Brightwood, Cutlass Keys, and Weaver’s Fen.

  • Added 2 new quests to the Main Story Questline to take players into The Depths Expedition to face Commander Thorpe.

Faction Control Points

  • Increased the time required to capture a fort.

    • Solo player capture times have been increased from 1m to 5m. The required time will decrease with each additional player present up to a full group of 5. With 5 players, a capture will now take 2m 30s.

  • Added participation limits to the area near forts to ensure battles over faction control points don’t hurt server performance. These limits ensure that only 25 people per faction may be near the same fort.


Housing

Houses in settlements now have tiers. Each tier of houses comes with a different cost and a different set of benefits, with the most expensive houses conferring the greatest benefits.

Tier 1 (Least expensive)

  • House fast travel cooldown: 4h

  • Max pieces of storage furniture allowed: 1

  • Max number of pets: 5

  • Max number of lights: 4

  • Territory standing required to purchase: Level 10

Tier 2

  • House fast travel cooldown: 3h

  • Max pieces of storage furniture allowed: 2

  • Max number of pets: 6

  • Max number of lights: 6

  • Territory standing required to purchase: Level 15

Tier 3

  • House fast travel cooldown: 2.5h

  • Max pieces of storage furniture allowed: 3

  • Max number of pets: 7

  • Max number of lights: 8

  • Territory standing required to purchase: Level 20

Tier 4 (Most expensive)

  • House fast travel cooldown: 2h

  • Max pieces of storage furniture allowed: 4

  • Max number of pets: 8

  • Max number of lights: 10

  • Territory standing required to purchase: Level 20


Faction Missions

  • Removed gathering and crafting missions.

  • Reduced chest and kill count requirements to ensure players can find all targets and aren’t required to wait on respawns.

  • Removed mission board access in territories where the player has not reached the minimum level.

  • Optimized placements of mission POI target locations.

  • Daily bonuses added for the first 3 faction missions completed each day.

  • Faction missions rewards have been rebalanced and focused more around gaining faction tokens.

Faction Rank Changes

  • Faction missions now award reputation and faction tokens.

  • Players will automatically be granted quests that encourage them to earn enough reputation to achieve their next rank, at which point they’ll be directed to a specific faction representative who will offer a “Trial” quest.

  • Trial quests are now the key to unlock the next faction rank. Faction tokens are no longer required for ranking up; players can instead spend them exclusively on faction gear and items.

XP & Leveling

We’ve adjusted our leveling curves and rest experience to speed up leveling for casual players and to introduce new ways of gaining XP.

  • The XP per level curve has been adjusted to increase the rewards of doing quests lower than your level.

  • XP for killing monsters has been adjusted.

    • Gold- and silver-border monsters now grant more XP when killed.

  • Expedition quests now grant significantly more XP.

  • Territory standing levels now grant experience when acquired.

  • The number of XP bonus cards that a territory can grant when leveling up has been limited and capped to provide a maximum bonus of 10.3%.

  • Faction missions have had their experience rebalanced to match the new leveling curve.

    • Added a new daily bonus of 200% XP for the first 3 faction missions completed.

  • Unique POI now grant more experience when revealed.

  • Gathering trade skills now grant experience per level gained.

  • Smelting trade skills now grant experience per level gained.

  • Crafting trade skills now grant experience per level gained.

  • Journal pages now give increasing experience based on the total number found.

Rest XP

  • Reduced wait time before beginning to generate rest XP from 12h to 8h.

  • Raised the cap for total rest XP from 100% of a level to 150% of a level.

  • Decreased the rate at which rest XP is gained from 2% per hour to 1% per hour.

  • Rest XP now works on all sources of XP.

Leveling Milestones

  • Bag Slot #1 is now unlocked at level 10 instead of level 1.

  • The Ring slot is now unlocked at level 20 instead of level 10.

  • The Earring slot is now unlocked at level 40 instead of level 20.

Quests & Projects

  • We’ve adjusted PvP flagging rewards to incentivize PvP activity and provide a more meaningful reward for end-game players

    • You will now gain experience, faction tokens, and item rewards when you kill a player. The rewards are based on how long the player has been alive while flagged. Players only drop rewards after a minimum threshold.

      • Removed the 10% experience increase given while being flagged.

    • Darkness events no longer give faction tokens.

  • Updated Town Projects to add a Town Maintenance category that ensures there are always some projects available to players

    • Town Maintenance missions are always available and giving normal rewards with no Project Points.

    • Town Maintenance has some unique missions requesting various cooking and potion ingredients, as well as more extensive fishing-related ingredient requests

    • All other projects have added a smaller set of food- and potion-related missions


Gold Rebalance

We’ve adjusted the way players earn coin to make quests and other one-time activities big sources of wealth, while reducing coin from other sources.

  • Decreased the gap in earning gold from lower levels to higher levels.

  • Added a maximum gold cap for players of 500,000.

  • Added a maximum gold cap for Companies of 5,000,000.

Gold sources

  • Players will earn a larger percentage of gold from quests, expeditions, wars, invasions and the daily 3 bonus rewards from faction missions.

  • Players will earn a smaller percentage of gold from killing creatures, faction missions, and corrupted breaches.

  • Creatures now have a chance to drop coin instead of a guaranteed drop.

Gold costs

  • Houses no longer increase in cost based on first/second/third house. They now increase in cost based on the quality of the house with prices of 5k/10k/15k/20k based on the tier of the house.

  • Base housing tax has increased from 5% to 10%.

  • Coin costs for repair has been reduced by roughly 50%.

Loot & Gear

  • Increased cooldowns for large chests in Elite POI from 1h to 24h.

  • Added more named weapon drops to discover throughout Aeternum, including 260 weapons and trinkets on 130 named monsters in the open world.

  • Weapon rewards and drops have been rebalanced to more closely align with player progression. Players will be able to find a new weapon of their favorite type every few levels.

  • Added new visual variety to weapon and armor sets throughout the game. This includes many of the armors dropped by open world enemies and Elites at POI.

  • Changed the specific weapon rewards for quests in starting zones to ensure new players get a chance to try a wider variety of weapons early on.

Dropping items

When players drop items from their inventory, the contents are now visible only to that player. The items will stay in the world for 3 minutes to help give players a way to organize their backpack, and after 3 minutes, the items will disappear forever.

  • Players who previously relied on dropping items for trading can use the secure player-to-player trading system instead.

Tuning Orbs

To increase the rewards of expeditions, we have gated entrance to expeditions on one party member having a Tuning Orb. Turning orbs will be given for each expedition quest and can be crafted from materials found around Aeternum.

  • Tuning Orbs can be crafted with the stonemasonry skill.

  • Tuning Orbs have a limited number that can be crafted per week. Tuning Orbs for higher level expeditions have lower amounts of crafts per week.

  • Experience for one time and repeatable expedition have been greatly increased.

  • High level Tuning Orbs will require more resources, including drops from high-level Elite POI chests.

Maximum Gear Score

  • Gear Score is now capped at 600. We have adjusted our top end enemies slightly to ensure that endgame content provides a real challenge while accommodating this change.

  • Crafting resources, consumable buffs, trophies, armor buffs, and lifestyle buffs have all been re-tuned to accommodate this change.

  • In order to craft items at the highest quality, players must combine bonuses from a variety of sources: trophies, armor, consumables, advanced crafting resources such as Asmodeum, and the relevant Lifestyle Bonus from a Town Project.

Crafting & Gathering

  • Crafting armors are now rare drops from containers in Elite POI. Crafting armors have crafting bonuses and are not intended to be the best armor for combat.

  • Adjusted skinning XP values to align progression more with other gathering progression rates. We found that the relative difference in value between a small/medium/large skinning actions (e.g. rabbits/wolves/bears) wasn’t great enough, which was causing the progression rate to misalign significantly over time with the tanning skill.

  • Reduced the overall gather speed bonus gained from progressing in a gathering skill so we could move it to the potential speed bonus range on gathering tools. Because of this, the tier and gear score of a tool is more impactful, especially when gathering higher-tier resources.

  • Equipment sets (such as Forsaken or Ancient equipment) now has a chance to drop from creature kills as the base equipment style, which should create more visual variety in player armor and weapons earlier in the game.

  • Adjusted rarity values on some food ingredients. Poultry breasts are no longer legendary, even though they’re delicious.

  • Adjusted perk roll odds on dropped items at all tiers, specifically to balance the number of Epics dropping. Crafting odds are tuned separately and have not been changed.

  • Azoths Vial now provide 50 Azoth instead of 13.

Dyes

  • Increased the number of craftable dyes and added more dye pigments to find in the world.

  • Dye pigments now come from a special type of plant called Prismabloom.

  • Faction-specific dyes can now be purchased from each faction’s store.

Furnishings

While the furnishing system was functional, we weren’t happy with the play trends we were seeing due to a few issues. As such, we have changed our approach to furnishing to focus on recipe acquisition.

  • A limited number of recipes are available to craft by default. The rest are available as either finished pieces or as unlockable recipe schematics found in large chests around the world.

    • These recipes have a minimum level restriction to avoid overwhelming players early in the game, so players can expect to start finding them after the minimum house ownership level.

    • Schematics and completed furniture can be traded at the trading post.

  • Players can craft the base version of a trophy, but now must upgrade trophies by combining that base version with special items found elsewhere in the game.

  • The most potent trophies can only be crafted by finding special artifacts as rare drops.

  • There is a much wider variety of furniture available both as drops and schematics, and more will be added in future updates.


UX/UI

Social Actions Menu - Quick Access

To provide easier access to social tools, we replaced the wave [H] shortcut with a quick shortcut to the Social Actions menu for any nearby player. When aiming at a player, a small [H] hint is shown in the nameplate, which if pressed, brings up the Social Actions menu along with mouse control for quickly choosing an option or dismissing the menu.

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Group Kick

The addition of Expeditions to New World has made it clear that players needed more control over groups, so we added a vote-based kick mechanic. At any time, any group member can initiate a Vote To Kick via the Social Actions menu, which creates a 1m voting window for the rest of the group to answer. There is a personal cooldown of 10 minutes between kicks, and some additional restrictions may be added in the future.

Combat

Enemy AI

  • This update completes our initial AI update pass on all characters for core combat mechanics. We will be closely monitoring the effects of these updates and evaluating more ways to improve.

  • Updated the Isabella’s Pets boss encounter in the Dynasty Shipyard Expedition. Isabella now leads her forces on the field of battle to confront those who have dared vandalize her fleet of ships.


Balance

  • Adjusted block stamina damage to better align with skill and playstyle usage.

  • Adjusted the base damage, critical hit chance, and critical damage multiplier of all weapons to make them have a more notable differences on a base stat level.

  • Adjusted the value of perks granted by gems to better fit with the other changes made to consumables, armor, and weapons.

Armor & Block Stability

  • Reduced equip load block stability bonus when in heavy equip load from 25% to 15%.

  • Disabled the Sturdy perk from being able to be placed on swords. Now it will only be available on shields and all other melee weapons. This will prevent it from stacking with itself on a sword and shield build.

  • Reduced heavy armor damage mitigation by 5%, and increased light armor damage mitigation by 5%.

Attributes

  • Increased the rate at which attributes are earned to help with combat balance in early levels. Each level grants 2 attribute points in the early levels and later levels grant fewer attributes per level, requiring players to utilize attributes on equipment.

    • The total amount of attributes granted from leveling up remains at 190.

  • Reduced the effects of several attribute threshold bonuses to balance out power of bonuses with various weapon mastery abilities and perks:

    • Reduced STR 50 melee light attack damage bonus from 15% to 5%.

    • Reduced STR 100 melee heavy attack damage bonus from 20% to 10%.

    • Reduced STR 200 damage against stunned, slowed, and rooted enemies from 20% to 10%.

    • Reduced DEX 50 critical hit damage bonus from 10% to 5%.

    • Reduced DEX 200 backstab and headshot damage bonus from 20% to 10%.

    • Reduced DEX 250 critical damage bonus against stunned, slowed, and rooted enemies from 30% to 10%.

    • Reduced INT 100 critical damage bonus from 20% to 10%.

    • Reduced INT 150 elemental damage bonus from 20% to 15%.

    • Reduced CON 150 reduction in critical damage bonus from 20% to 10%.

    • Reduced CON 300 duration extension bonus of stun, slow, and root effects from 30% to 20%.

Mana

  • Base mana regeneration increased. It now takes 50s to fully regenerate mana instead of 57s.

  • Removed increase in mana regeneration rate from the Focus attribute. Regeneration rate stays consistent at all levels and can only be modified by abilities, consumables, and perks.

Consumables

  • Reduced damage bonus from honing stones from 5-15% to 4-7%.

  • Decreased mana granted per second from Regeneration Potions.

  • Stacking T5 Food and Focus potions will now cause mana to fully regen in roughly 30 seconds, opposed to previously where mana would be infinite while the consumables are active.

  • Mana Potions:

    • Increased mana granted from 30-80 mana to 40-100 Mana based on tier.

    • Increased Cooldown from 10s to 15s.

  • Mana Food:

    • Extended duration of the food from 10m to 20m - 40m based on tier to match other food items.

    • Changed Mana Food to increase mana regen rate instead of giving flat mana increases every second

    • Instead of granting mana every second for the duration of the status effects, Mana Food now increases mana regen rate by based on tier.

  • Focus Potions:

    • Decreased additional mana granted per second from focus potions. Previously, focus potions were too strong and would negate all mana loss.

    • Extended duration from 30s to 60s.

Straight Sword & Shield

  • Increased attack damage for basic attacks and multiple abilities.

  • Reduced base block stability range for Round, Kite, and Tower shields by 10-25% depending on shield type and tier.

  • Reduced the damage bonus of several passive abilities that were causing light attack spam to be too powerful.

  • Reduced stamina reduction for several abilities when blocking ranged and melee attacks

Hatchet

  • Increased attack damage for basic attacks and multiple abilities.

  • Reduced block stability by 10%.

  • Adjusted damage and cooldowns of several weapon mastery abilities

Rapier

  • Increased base attack damage for light and heavy attacks.

  • Increased block stability by 13%.

Spear

  • Adjusted attack damage for basic attacks and several Spear abilities.

  • Reduced block stability by 8%.

War Hammer

  • Adjusted attack damage for basic attacks and several abilities.

Great Axe

  • Adjusted attack damage for basic attacks and several abilities.

Bow

  • Increased Bow heavy attack damage.

Musket

  • Adjusted damage for multiple abilities.

Life Staff

  • Increased heavy attack damage.

  • Increased block stability by 33%.

  • Reduced mana cost of many abilities due to Focus no longer increasing mana regeneration rate.

Fire Staff

  • Increased attack damage for heavy attacks and several abilities.

  • Adjusted the mana cost and cooldown of several abilities.

Ice Gauntlet

  • Increased attack damage from heavy attack damage and the Entombed Break ability.

  • Set block stability to a flat 30% instead of scaling off of tiers.

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