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Greetings everyone and happy 2024 to all Taboreans!
I hope you’ve all enjoyed your transition into 2024 and arrived healthy in the Year of the Dragon. Maybe with some new personal resolutions, or goals for your character in Runes of Magic?
Since my last PM Letter in December, we’ve received quite a lot of feedback from all of you and there’ve been some changes to our plans as well, so I wanted to go over those and explain them to you. Let’s jump right in 
Changes to Peak EXP & Requirements
Oh boy, this is going to be a big one, so buckle up!
Background
We already made some more gameplay fixes for the 2023 release of Necropolis of Mirrors and are happy where we’re at with this dungeon all in all.
However, due to the way Peak Levels and your hit rate against enemies scale, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place for our previously communicated plans for a Peak 15 dungeon:
- We could leave it all as it is, and simply expect everyone to reach higher Peak Levels (while speeding up EXP gain and adding new Peak Levels to boot).
- We could try and change the way the scaling works deep(er) in the code to negate the issues we’ve identified with it.
- We could adjust the required Peak Level for our Timeless Instances (both past and future) to avoid this issue for a bit longer.
We’ve had multiple discussions about this topic within the team – and decided to go with the third option. This would also allow more players to participate in current and upcoming dungeons, all the while scaling well with our other Peak EXP changes. We’re aware it’s not a perfect solution and is mostly “pushing the issue into the future” – but it’s the best compromise for now.
Timeless I & II
Soooo… before the above “background” decision, our plan looked as follows:
- Pantheon Peak 5 (requires Peak 1 for a good hit rate).
- NoM Peak 10 (requires Peak 14ish for a good hit rate).
- MA Peak 15 (requires above Peak 20 for a good hit rate).
With our newly revised strategy, this looks a lot better overall:
- Pantheon Peak 5 – no changes
- NoM Peak 7 – Peak 5ish character should be a good start.
- MA Peak 9 – Peak11ish character should be the target.
We’re aware that this will make the existing NoM a lot easier to deal with – and while “nerfing” it wasn’t our intention, it’s a side-effect we’ll have to live with this time around. Maybe it’ll help some newer Peak Players to also join in on the fun!
Peak EXP & Peak Leveling
Next up, we also intend to improve the situation around reaching higher Peak Levels that are recommended for the new dungeons. This means that whenever we’re planning to release new content for higher Peak Levels, we’ll try and release changes in advance to help you prepare and get ready for it.
One example of this will be the upcoming Mystic Altar – it’s balanced around Peak 9 and requires Peak 11ish to be run well. With the anniversary patch, we’ll make drastic changes to the required EXP per level up to and including Peak 11.
Between the Anniversary Festival release and the future release of the Mystic Altar, players will now have quicker progression through Peak levels 1 to 11. However, Peak 12 and above will remain as they are for now and only get adjusted later when we get closer to future content.
TL;DR:
We hope that we can buy ourselves some more time with these changes, while also allowing more players to access the new dungeons we’re releasing.
Both the NoM adjustment (Peak 10>7) as well as the lowered Peak EXP requirement (up to 70% less EXP needed) are scheduled to go live together with the Anniversary Festival.
15th Anniversary
Anniversary Festival
The 15th anniversary is fast approaching – March 19th is marked in my calendar!
Get ready for a new minigame to play with cool new rewards to unlock (cannon mount anyone?). We’ll also organize a variety of community events for you to participate in and win some merch and other things.
Be sure to celebrate this with us!
Mystic Altar
As mentioned initially, there’ll be a variety of changes to what we revealed in December. Next to the change of Peak Level, we’re also going through some design updates when it comes to the amount of bosses and how the dungeon plays through (it’s likely going to be 7 bosses – not 6 as communicated). One thing we didn’t highlight last time is what type of gear will drop here – it’s going to be a new accessory set!
All in all, due to the aforementioned Peak EXP issues that we’ve had to deal with, and the increased amount of gameplay we’re adding, it’s very likely that we won’t manage our target of mid-March for this release anymore. It might be late March or even somewhen in April, given that Easter falls very early this year.
While this is very unfortunate, it should allow more players to get ready, so we’re trying not to be too upset about this schedule update ourselves. We’d have loved to target the 15th anniversary – but as many of you also pointed out, taking our time not to rush the dungeon is most important.
Other Topics
For the following topics we’ve got nothing concrete we can communicate yet – we’re just letting you know that we’re aware of the feedback and will try to look into it later this year!
Public World Bosses
After the Mystic Altar release (and some subsequent fixes), the next topic on our radar is the issues around Public World Bosses. We’re aware that there are a lot of issues to address when it comes to how these work and can be interacted with, and it can be quite frustrating to crash out, not get any loot and similar issues.
More Peak Changes
We’d also like to investigate the Peak EXP (daily/x-hourly) quests moving forward, and have a few ideas floating about giving more choice there, or to avoid certain situations.
Class Balancing
Since my relatively brief comment about this in the last post, we’ve gotten many comments and suggestions from you guys – thanks for that! We’ll have to sift through them in the coming months and evaluate what is realistically feasible for us, and how much we want or can “interfere” with this. But we understand it’s an important topic to the community, so we’ll try to keep it on our radar moving forward.
Stats for Your Gear
This too is on our radar, and we have some first changes in the making to be released together with MA. We intend to offer purely sacrificial gear to be acquired at a less steep price. We’ll continue to look into this moving forward though, as that likely won’t be enough.
Closing Words
Yet again you’ve followed my words through about 3 pages of a certain piece of office software –even if I did have to share some news about a delay… I hope I was able to give you more insights into what’s going on, and also things to look forward to!
There are still a lot of improvements and adjustments to make, and it won’t get boring anytime soon. Thank you for your continued interest in and love of Runes of Magic also in 2024, as we dive into our 15th year of service!
Patrick & The RoM Team
