Update Notes: October 31, 2017

Note: There are some bugs in this update due to the old UI commingling with the upcoming new UI. Most notably, some icons are much larger than they should be, and the loadouts tab of the Personal panel is slow to load. These will be fixed in a future update. In the meantime, you can also close and re-open the Persona screen to force your loadouts to load immediately.


It's time for the Halloween Event! This year's event features a series of branching quests. You should receive a quest when you log in to help get you started! This is a brand new event, so please report any bugs.

This is not the long-awaited "new UI" update, but that update is coming very soon. In addition to Halloween content, this update synchs the server with the new UI features so that we can test it internally on the live server. We expect to roll out the new UI for optional testing (as we talked about in the most recent dev blog) in another update early next week.

Giant Bat Changes

The Giant Bat abilities that are learned from scrolls can be found in the special loot dropped by undead and other monsters during the Halloween event. Unlike in years past, higher-level abilities are only dropped by higher-level monsters, to prevent people from killing newbie monsters by the hundreds to get high-level skill scrolls. However (and also unlike in years past), if you are a Giant Bat with the Giant Bat skill active, you have a MUCH higher chance of finding these scrolls than other players do.

• Screech 1-4 is now learned automatically up to level 50, then Screech 5-6 is taught by Yavazek in Animal Town. This ability used to be learned from Halloween scrolls; those old scrolls were repurposed to teach other Giant Bat abilities (see below). Screech 7 was already available from Yavazek.
• Smoldering Gaze 5 is now learned from a Halloween scroll like the earlier levels are.
• Bat Stability 1-3 is now learned from Halloween scrolls.
• Confusing Double 1-3 is now learned from Halloween scrolls. Confusing Double 4 (a new tier) is also available on a scroll.
• A new version of Echolocation can be learned from a Halloween scroll.
• Some new gear mods have been added so that giant bats have gear for main-hand and off-hand slots. Some mods were shuffled around:
  
  • Mod "Combo: Sonic Burst+Any Giant Bat Attack+Any Ranged Attack+Any Ranged Attack: final step deals +20% damage" is now found on the main-hand slot instead of the hands slot.
  • Mod "Wing Vortex has a 90% chance to deal +26% damage" is now found on the off-hand slot instead of the legs slot.
  • Mod "Wing Vortex Damage +44%" is now found on the main-hand slot instead of the feet slot.
  • Mod "For 30 seconds after using Drink Blood, you gain +26 mitigation vs. Psychic and Trauma damage" is now found on the off-hand slot instead of the feet slot.
  • Mod "Rip deals +27 damage" is now found on the main hand slot instead of the feet slot.
• If you had gear with mods that are moved to other slots, that gear has become Legacy and will need to be replaced within a month. You can turn Legacy gear in to the Legacy Golem in Serbule to get a randomized replacement.

Other Changes

• Some monsters now drop Halloween loot! The affected monsters include all undead (skeletons, mummies, ghosts, ghouls, floating skulls of all varieties, zombies, lamias, and any other undead I forgot -- if its Anatomy is Undead or Incorporeal, it's included), plus giant bats, nightmare creatures, animals from the dimension of darkness (e.g. Misery Yaks), and various creepy humanoid wizard-types (including necromancers, cabalists, dark priests, and the like). Also note: to prevent abuse by high-level players, the very lowest-level undead, such as the ones on the newbie island, drop only a very limited assortment of Halloween items.
• Some gear that has Endurance requirements when non-magical will now lose their Endurance requirements for enchanted versions (assuming the enchantment's requirement is at least as high as the Endurance requirement). In effect, this usually means the non-magical versions have Endurance reqs and the magical versions don't. Affected gear include Snail Armor, Melee Staves, Combat Staves, and certain loot-drop knives. This affects only new items, not pre-existing ones.
• New command "/who nearby" lists players in your area OR in areas that have portals from your current area. For instance, when you're in a dungeon, the command finds all players in the dungeon and in the aboveground area where the dungeon resides. Outdoors it can be more complicated; in Eltibule, "/who nearby" finds players in Eltibule, Serbule, the goblin caves, outdoors in Kur Mountains, or in the Dark Chapel. (This "command" is built into the new UI, and this is just a secondary method of accessing it.)
• Poetry podium should broadcast to a larger radius now, but this is not well-tested yet.
• Fixed a bug that could cause you to miss some of your in-game messages during login, if you had more than one message pending.
• Fixed a bug that broke some abilities that require specific gear (or gear sets) to be equipped.
• /isearch command now correctly searches contents of the shared-item storage box.
• New JSON files (for third party tools): itemuses.json, storagevaults.json, areas.json, npcs.json. This info is used by the new GUI. Also note that items.json has changed a bit to support multi-action items, and directedgoals.json has a very different format.

Oct 31 Hotfix

• Halloween quest to kill the Bonfire Puck required you to kill Ursula instead.
• Made the timing easier for summoning Empusa.
• Fixed wording of Halloween quest from "Gulp from a Cauldron of Vile Thoughts" to "Guzzle from a Cauldron of Vile Thoughts".
• The Halloween event to make Pumpkin Spice Tea showed an empty box when you received the quest. (But the description in the quest panel is/was correct.)
• Fixed an exploitable bug that allowed you to get infinite empty bottles.