Easter and its events are coming to an end. We had a full month of Events and a community campaign and it’s now time to move forward with the next update. You already tested some of the changes coming up to Realm of the Mad God, like the O3 changes and Moonlight Villages adjustments. Additionally, our newest STs for the Priest and Ninja now drop from specific dungeons. To celebrate this we are hosting events in them. The April Fool Skins will be removed with this update.
The Oryx 3 fight has shown a lot of issues as time progressed, generally as time goes on we expect for bosses to get more optimized. Oryx 3 however has in some cases been optimized to the point where the boss is incapable of attacking for the majority of the fight. The primary culprit of this is the counter/stagger system, as it currently exists dealing enough damage quick enough will instantly cancel any attack oryx is doing and force him into a reset. Coupled with many instances where O3 is vulnerable to damage while not doing anything and you can blow away most of the fight with oryx barely shooting a single bullet. The following changes should keep the majority of the fight intact while still rewarding good gameplay and patching up a lot of the above issues.
The O3 counter/stagger system has been fully retooled, now instead of getting the counter or stagger at the end of an attack, O3 will fully complete all of the attacks in a combo chain. When you hit a certain threshold of damage in each phase, o3 will go invulnerable for the remainder of the attack and add to a tally of times the threshold was reached in the combo, at the end of the combo O3 will enter a stagger state with a duration depending on how many of these thresholds was reached over the course of the combo. When hitting a threshold an attack will end a little bit faster than if that threshold was not hit and the attack fully played out.
The thresholds have been normalized to 3.5% for all o3 attacks, this is not a final value, but was chosen to hopefully allow well played solos to still hit these thresholds on occasion. Additionally if you happen to have a stagger occur near the bosses next phase transition, the stagger will allow you to push up to 5% of Oryx’s hp into the next phase. If you hit a phase transition with a stagger count of 2 or higher a stagger will automatically occur as if the combo chain ended there.
Oryx now only does combos of length 2 or 3 before he becomes exalted, and will only do combo chains of length 4 or 5 while exalted. This should allow you to get staggers more often in the earlier parts of the fight but need to last through longer attack chains in the later parts.
O3 has had some of his phase transition points changed in order to shift a little more of the fight into later phases and speed up the portions that players generally find less engaging.
The threshold changes are as follows:
Portals 80% -> 85%
Dance 60% -> 70%
Exalted 50% -> 55%
Celestial Unchanged – 40%
Heavens 20% -> 15%
Death 5% -> 1%
Counters have been entirely removed from the fight.
Invulnerability has been added to the windows at the start of attacks and between combos as o3 is resetting to the center. This should cut down on the “free” damage windows present in the fight as they had previously been contributing to the fight being steamrolled in higher dps groups.
The hp scaling for player counts 2-5 has been increased from 25% to 35%, this only increases the health gained at those player counts, scaling beyond the 5th player is unchanged.
Celestial caps damage dealt at 20% of O3’s HP during that phase, this will not longer let you kill him entirely during that phase but, coupled with the stagger at the end, will let you push all the way into heavens and even cut into its hp pool a bit. When combined with subsequent the stagger this totals to 25% damage from a single celestial.
Each Oryx 3 attack now has a third attack it can chain into, this was done to counteract the loss of chain variety caused by the removal of Counters, reincorporating the lost “Guarded Chains” by splitting them into the attacks that lost them and the attacks that previously had staggers.
Oryx now has a 50% chance to grant an additional Life Exaltation when defeated.
Over our testing periods, we have received a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. While it may disappoint some of you to see these changes make it Live, we, unfortunately, were not able to get the full data that we wanted for the system on testing. What we did get was very promising, resulting in a nearly imperceptible time difference from a production run, and solving the issues we set out to solve. As such these changes will be going live, but should the system prove to be overall negative after players have gotten used to it, revisiting it or rolling it back will be on the table. That said, we do believe if you give the changes a shot, once you get used to them you will find them rather positive.
To celebrate the introduction of the ST Sets into dungeons, we will be hosting a Chest Event in the following dungeons from the 25th of April until the 2nd of May:
High Tech Terror drops:
The Nest drops:
Lair of Shaitan drops:
Kogbold Steamworks drops:
Those two skins were missing for the Mystery Skin series and are now in the game. You can get them via the following quest at the tinkerer:
Quest Name | Quest Requirements | Rewards | Quest Type |
Mystery Classes | Mystery Mystery Skin | Mystery Summoner Skin Mystery Kensei Skin |
Item of Choice Repeatable |
The quest is up between the 25th of April and the 2nd of May at 12 PM UTC.
As you know, we canceled the Moonlight Party Event but decided to give everyone all the rewards. You will be able to claim your free pack in the shop. The pack is available until the 2nd of May.