Welcome to Week 11 of the Public Test Realm. Before we get into what to expect this week, we want to give you a heads up of our current status in implementing the 11 classes that we had planned for July 17.
The introduction of mastery ended up introducing extreme complexity to build, debug and tune the abilities and their corresponding mastery options. This, in turn, has caused a delay in getting all 11 classes implemented for this week.
To mitigate and improve the issues and to ensure we can get these classes out over the next few weeks we have:
- Added additional designer resources on abilities and mastery.
- Added more internal testing.
- Added significant investment from programming to improve the designer tools to simplify mastery creation.
As a result, the remaining classes will not be available by July 17, but will be released in the following few weeks.
As expected with the Public Test Realm, the classes won’t be perfect, but they should be an improved experience over the previous iterations. These changes should also help us better maintain, debug and tune abilities and mastery going forward.
We are grateful for your help in testing classes and providing feedback and bug reports.
Combat and Progression – Week 11 Patch Highlights
Full Patch Notes here.
This week’s update to the Public Test Realm brings a major update for the Wizard class, along with many bug fixes and tuning adjustments for other classes. We are also raising the level cap on the server to 40 for further testing of higher-level abilities and content.
Wizard Update – Elementalist and Spellblade Playstyles
Wizard now has two distinct playstyles available to it – a traditional “Elementalist” playstyle, and a melee-oriented “Spellblade” playstyle. Wizards will start off at level 1 with options from both playstyles available to them and will be able to choose which playstyle to pursue further via Mastery. Whether flinging spells at their opponents or channeling elemental energies through their blades, wizards are all about bringing elemental destruction to bear and inflicting massive damage to their enemies.
As part of this, we have introduced many new abilities for the Wizard class and retooled many existing abilities to support Mastery. Many abilities now apply special status effects that can be leveraged to trigger additional effects that can help shape the flow of combat.
It is important to note that this is an initial implementation, and several aspects are still work-in-progress. Notably, many of the wizard abilities available this week have placeholder visual effects. These visual effects will be updated over time as we get the new effects created. Likewise, several of the Wizard Mastery unlocks are not yet functioning or only partially functioning. These Mastery unlocks will be enabled in future updates to the PTR as work on the class continues. To help our testers, we have included a list of the mastery unlocks that are not yet fully working in this week’s patch notes and our known issues list.
What’s Next
Next week we are planning to roll out Mastery options for additional classes, as well as continue our efforts to fix bugs and address feedback reported by our testers on the PTR.
As always, we want to send a big thank you out to all our player testers who are logging onto the Public Test Realm. Your bug reports and feedback are helping us refine the changes we are making so that when we are ready to push the Combat and Progression update out to all our servers, our game can deliver a compelling and fun combat experience at all levels.