Today’s PTR Patch Notes are located here.
The PTR launched last week and many of you jumped in and found a lot of bugs we could get to work on. Unfortunately, we were unable to have the Steam client available for the first week, but that has now been rectified, and we are happy to have our Steam players join us on the PTR this week. Later today, Steam players will be able to access the PTR directly from their Steam Library. It will be listed as a separate title called “Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen (Public Test Realm).”
The PTR server comes down today at 7am PDT and will be back up a few hours later. There is no exact downtime estimation this week.
In the meantime, we wanted to say thank you to our players who have been able to jump in so far and start providing bug reports and feedback on the level 1-10 experience. It is invaluable, and it has already enabled us to find several immediate problems we need to fix. As we keep moving forward to the production release of the Combat and Progression Update, we’ll be using player feedback to help dial in everything and make sure that new systems and mechanics are working before it comes to the regular play servers. We also have plans to leverage the Avendyr realm (the PTR server) for testing some of the server improvements we have planned for later this year, so even once the Combat and Progression update is out, there will be more things to test in fairly short order.
To set everyone’s expectations, our immediate focus this past week was on fixing bugs. We successfully identified and fixed several issues that were breaking some low-level class abilities, and we are updating the server with those fixes today. As part of that update, we are performing a character wipe so that we can generate a new baseline with those fixes in place and use that information to help drive tuning for our lower-level content. In the upcoming weeks, we will be enabling access to the remaining classes as they become ready, and we will also begin lifting the level cap as we work through tuning everything. We may do a few more character wipes on the testing realm before it is all done to help make sure that everything is getting dialed in properly, but this is part of the testing process to make sure that we get it right when it comes out to the regular play servers.
Of course, we’re not only working on bug fixes and tuning.
Also in Today’s Update
We have a few new things queued up for you all that will be coming to the Public Test Realm when we update it next. Here are the highlights. You can access the complete patch notes here.
- Spell Pushback Mechanics – we talked about this a few weeks ago, but we have these mechanics ready for testing and will likely be enabling them on the PTR in the next update we do there.
- Changes to Ability Types – We are also updating how abilities are organized and assigned to your bars. Previously, your spells/abilities were separated into 3 types: Ability, Utility, and Technique, each with its own dedicated bar and slot limit: 8 Abilities, 6 Utilities, and 4 Techniques. With this update, we are removing those categories by consolidating the 3 separate bars into one unified, 14-slot hotbar (more detail on the hotbar changes below). Players will be able to place any of their abilities into any slot on the new bar, without type-based slot limits. While this does soften some of the rigidity of the Limited Action Set design, it is not intended to remove that structure entirely. Players will eventually have far more than 14 abilities to choose from at any given time, and they will still need to make meaningful loadout decisions before entering combat, since abilities cannot be changed while in combat. In a future blog, we will also discuss how Techniques are being adjusted as part of this broader work.
- Updated Hotbars – as promised, we are going to merge our separate hotbars into a single, 14-slot hotbar with fewer restrictions on what you can put there. We are also removing the restriction that you need to keep buffs on your hotbar after you cast them, so you can buff up your party and then swap some of those hotkeys out for things to use in combat if needed.
• A quick technical note here: Buffs will still sometimes drop on zoning for the time being, or if the character who cast the buff logs out or get disconnected. That’s not the behavior that we want long-term, but there are some technical issues related to server memory utilization that we need to sort out before we can fully stop this from happening.
• As part of the hotbar changes you will also gain the option to hide your auto-attack hotkey if you so desire. And no, this one doesn’t count against the slot limit on your hotbar.
• As another upgrade, you’ll have the flexibility to configure your hotbar in different layouts to suit your preferences.
Here are some screenshots to show you what we mean:
Single-row layout
Two rows of 7 hotkeys
Stacked vertically
Our goal here is to give you the flexibility to configure your UI in the way that works best for you. While we’ll still have a default UI layout, ultimately we know that everyone’s preference (and monitors) are different, and we want to try and accommodate that. As we update additional parts of the UI we plan to try and leverage this same philosophy as much as possible.
Thank you for joining us in Week 2 of the PTR. See you in game!
Discuss this article on the Official Pantheon Subreddit
Join the Official Pantheon Discord