Tier 11 Update
I wanted to give you all an update on our progress with T11. The plan was originally to release Dragonscale Hills as our next tier, and for my first EZ project to be T12, Kael Drakkel. However, as Draca has informed you, he's been dealt some busy real life cards, while I on the other hand have way too much vacation. We quickly found out that Kael was making good progress and we decided to go with that zone for our T11. Dragonscale Hills is also a larger project than Kael Drakkel, so all in all it also requires a lot more work to complete.
That's not to say KD is a small project. I've been working on it just about every day for about 5 weeks now and it's really taking shape. It will have the usual stuff that one would expect from a complete tier on EZ along with some surprises.
At this point much of the tier is complete. We still need to do some minor polishing on various things as well as properly balance and test the zone. I will do this myself once it's ready. We will not be opening the test server for Kael Drakkel. However, the initial release of the tier to the live server will effectively serve as a second-phase test. Players should anticipate changes if we find them necessary in relation to our original intentions for the zone.
One of the last pieces of the puzzle is to add spells to the tier, both as free standing spells for classes and as click effects on various items and armor. We've saved those on purpose for last, as the spells needs some adjusting globally to mend some inconsistencies and make sure it's more sustainable and predictable for players and for us developers. Not just for this tier, but for future tiers as well.
There are so many different items with a lot of modifiers on them. Some were made for a different time on EZ and some were added more recently, yet still have effects that cause players to be confused as to what is best. While many spells have been tuned to stack and work already, there is still some work cut out for us here. With no item/spell in mind, as an example, we don't necessarily want a level 73 item to be the "go to" item to boost the DPS for a level 79 player, rendering newer and intentionally better items, worse. By having a clear vision on which items do what, and avoid using all sorts of modifiers to spell, melee and healing crit across the board, we will have more control of the flow of the classes powers. These adjustments will also be a work in progress post T11 release, so don't expect everything to be fixed before launch.
This means some effects will change, maybe some will be removed or replaced by a more logical effect for the item. I do not have a list of items currently, but I will update you once we start working on it. We're definitely not doing any nerfs that will put your characters long term state in a worse place than it is now. Kael should also bring on many things that will improve your DPS as well as future tiers will do as well. No changes are set in stone either. We may do adjustments that pending live testing proves to be wrong. We always listen to constructive feedback and hope you all will be part of the process, providing us with feedback if needed.
Once this issue has been worked on, and it's hard to predict just how long it will take, we will be close to opening T11.
Take this with a grain of salt, but we're hoping to get Kael released by end of January, but expect it to take longer, maybe sometime in February. Things have a tendency to appear at last minute, creating issues that might take time to solve. We are pretty close though, relatively speaking
