Development Activities in Dungeons and Dragons Online This Week

This week, we can expect a number of improvements and bug fixes in Turbine‘s Dungeons And Dragons Online. As far as the game in general is concerned,  loot messages from other players will now be tagged as such, allowing them to be filtered out. A bug that caused players to get stuck while dismounting ladders has been addressed as well.

Specific improvements include the following:

Monsters

• The dragon‘s spellcasting AI and line of sight recognition had been improved.

Items

• Vorpal weapons will behead monsters as outlined in the original Players Handbook. This means you must roll a natural 20 and confirm a crit in order to vorpal your target.

Spells

• The Fragment of the Silver Flame’s Protection from Evil spell no longer protects the wearer from Neutral and Good casters who attempt to affect the wearer with Charm or Enchantment or Compulsion spells.

Future developments include increased bandwidth (about 2%) and improvements in some of the slow-moving areas when a player’s client gets flooded with information about objects in his/her local area. Hopefully, players will see a speed increase of 20-50%. There will also be a “showhelmet” command which can be used to hide a player’s helmet graphic. Some work is being done to improve the combat/damage feedback mechanism, eliminating “false” hits (where the target would flinch but no attack roll would take place)  and give more accurate feedback as to the strength of the hit.

On the subject of Monsters:

• Widow type spiders will again shoot functional webs.
• Elemental Empathy will work properly on Earth Elementals that have used their Earthgrab ability.
• Arcane Skeletons will no longer “eat collectibles” they should be creating.

Finally,  those of you who wear Kundrak Delving Boots will be able to ward the movement effects of Storm Giant weather control. they will no longer ward the Beholder’s petrify eye beam or the Mummy’s Despair ability, but the programmers are working on exempting the boots from the movement restrictions of Sleetstorm and IceStorm.

This week, we can expect a number of improvements and bug fixes in Turbine‘s Dungeons And Dragons Online. As far as the game in general is concerned,  loot messages from other players will now be tagged as such, allowing them to be filtered out. A bug that caused players to get stuck while dismounting ladders has been addressed as well.

Specific improvements include the following:

Monsters

• The dragon‘s spellcasting AI and line of sight recognition had been improved.

Items

• Vorpal weapons will behead monsters as outlined in the original Players Handbook. This means you must roll a natural 20 and confirm a crit in order to vorpal your target.

Spells

• The Fragment of the Silver Flame’s Protection from Evil spell no longer protects the wearer from Neutral and Good casters who attempt to affect the wearer with Charm or Enchantment or Compulsion spells.

Future developments include increased bandwidth (about 2%) and improvements in some of the slow-moving areas when a player’s client gets flooded with information about objects in his/her local area. Hopefully, players will see a speed increase of 20-50%. There will also be a “showhelmet” command which can be used to hide a player’s helmet graphic. Some work is being done to improve the combat/damage feedback mechanism, eliminating “false” hits (where the target would flinch but no attack roll would take place)  and give more accurate feedback as to the strength of the hit.

On the subject of Monsters:

• Widow type spiders will again shoot functional webs.
• Elemental Empathy will work properly on Earth Elementals that have used their Earthgrab ability.
• Arcane Skeletons will no longer “eat collectibles” they should be creating.

Finally,  those of you who wear Kundrak Delving Boots will be able to ward the movement effects of Storm Giant weather control. they will no longer ward the Beholder’s petrify eye beam or the Mummy’s Despair ability, but the programmers are working on exempting the boots from the movement restrictions of Sleetstorm and IceStorm.