Nexus Improvements: Pets, Alchemy, Faction Mobility and More

[Kandarin]

Many things have happened behind the scenes in development in the past few months, both for the present Nexus and its future, and we have a round of updates to many different aspects of the current game to announce. There isn't really one specific theme or focus to this patch, but whatever your strategy of playing the game there should be something here for you.

The changes are:

Mechanics
● You may now Forget an Alchemy recipe once you have learned any amount of the recipe, rather than being required to complete the recipe first.
● MP gain for members of the Obsidian Cartel guild has been boosted to 2 MP on a kill (4 if killing an angel) for Rank 3, 3 and 5 (if angel) for Rank 2, and 4 and 6 (if angel) for Rank 1.
● The Monks of the Unbound Mind guild has been improved such that the duration of beneficial status effects is also boosted if the caster of those effects is a member of the Monks of the Unbound Mind guild. This compounds with the bonus duration if the recipient is in Monks. Therefore, for example if a first-rank Monks Advocate with Blessing of Eternity Blesses a first-rank Monks character, the duration will be 30 * 1.15 * 1.15 (rounded up). Status effects that benefit from this include:
- The Advocate's Anoint
- The Advocate's Holy Transfer
- The Nexus Champion's Altered Luck
- The Holy Champion's Divine Resolve
- The Advocate's Healing Aura
- The Advocate's Blessing of Inspiration
- The Conduit's Arcane Well
- The Conduit's Wormhole
● For 5 AP, players may now search the inside of a Mall for specific clothing items. This is done via a menu with a wide range of colors and materials and another menu of clothing types. There are over 1,700 possible combinations.
● If you fail in Alchemy research because you already know the recipe, you are now not charged AP/MP for doing so.
● Using Wings, Leathern Wings, Ghostwalk or Flying from a Flying potion now starts the users of these skills on their free movement half step instead of the AP-costing movement half step.
● The Defiler's Life Vampire and Soul Vampire have been modified thusly: These attacks can now grant Blood or Soul Ice on attacks that deal 5 to 9 damage, but these low-damage attacks have a failure rate on ice generation that starts at 50% for 5 damage and drops 10% per additional damage point dealt. The purpose of this change is to make these allegedly Tier 2 skills accessible to Tier 2 Defilers, who generally don't have ways to deal 10+ damage in a single shot without assistance from Tier 3 enchanters.
● The Corruptor's Draining Field no longer negates the Corruptor's Tainted Wings attack.
● The Fallen's Bond of the Mechanical now extends its damage and accuracy bonuses to Melee attacks as well as Firearms.
● Feral Hellhounds now possess the immunity to fire and critical hit chance inherent to all other hellhound types.
● The Burning Incense effect now grants substantial buffs: it increases melee and hand-to-hand damage by 2 and accuracy by 10%.
● The damage bonus for using Affinity potions has been increased from 2 to 3.
● In addition to +2 damage, Strength potions now grant +10% accuracy to melee and hand to hand attacks.
● The Conjure Sinews spell now lasts for 30 ticks and (in addition to its current effects) grants +20 inventory capacity.

Factions
● Faction leaders get a notification in their message log whenever a leader (including themselves) buys a faction upgrade.
● Faction leaders get a notification when someone joins their faction via character creation.
● Faction leaders get a notification when someone leaves their faction via releasing their character.
● Revoking mechanics have been updated to include a change meant for the last patch: While you can now revoke if your ward is at full and reset immediately (thus making moving easier) you cannot revoke within 24 hours of a successful flag capture by your own faction. Inasmuch as this word is usable in the Nexus, revoking is a "peacetime" action.
● Viewing of the exact locations of strongholds of factions not your own has been returned to its previous bounds (Faction level 7 or above). Viewing of stronghold locations by neighborhood has been kept low (level 2 or above), however.
● New Faction upgrades. These upgrades can be purchased and stored until they are consumed, similar to Spelltraps and Lead Paint:
- Homing Beacon: Faction Leaders may spend a Homing Beacon in their stronghold to give every member of the faction a one-AP teleport to the hold (similar to the Archon's Word of Recall but without MP cost) allowing you to transport your entire faction to a new location. Once the Beacon is spent, every faction member gets 24 hours in which they may use this teleport, which may only be done once per person per Beacon. Homing Beacons cost (Faction level x 6, maximum 50) Renown each.
- Emergency Bunker: If your faction has Emergency Bunkers purchased, one will be spent every time your flag is captured or revoked to generate a partial Fortification soak bonus on the site of your fallen stronghold. Emergency Bunkers cost 10 Renown each.

Quality of Life and Interface
● Petmasters are now informed when a pet has despawned for reasons besides violent deaths i.e. running out of AP or MP.
● All Petmasters now have the option to activate Passive Pet Regeneration in the Skills pane. When this status is active, during AP ticks you will automatically spend MP to rejuvenate pets that are critically low on AP, MP or HP, if you have the MP with which to do so. While this will not sustain a large pet wall, it means that you can maintain a certain base level of pets without having to micromanage your time and be sure of logging in every day. Passive Regeneration is adjusted only by your choice to push the toggle button and cannot be disabled by things other players can do to you; for instance if you are killed with the effect active, it will still be active when you respawn.
● Attempting to cast Shadow Wrap in unhidable circumstances or if you are already hidden now gives an error message instead of spending AP/MP as if you'd successfully cast the spell.
● In addition to users of Enchant Item, Corruptors with Manabiter can now view the enchants on an item.
● Forgetting an Alchemy recipe now leaves a record in your message log that you have done so.
● The Wear and Remove buttons for items now have a line break for the slot used, to fit better in the interface.

Major Bugs
● Corrected an issue with greyed-out buttons that blocked players from spending AP into negative numbers. Buttons for normal actions should now only grey out for AP reasons when you have zero or less AP. Buttons for actions that legitimately cannot be done without large reserves of AP (setting and revoking strongholds) will still be greyed out if you don't have enough AP.
● Kills of player characters made by area-of-effect attacks now correctly grant kill Renown. This (and last patch's fix of renown for kills made by pets) does not extend to kills of pets; killing pets only nets renown if the kill was made via direct player-character attacks.
● Corrected a bug that forced wandering monsters in the outer planes into specific neighborhoods when a circumstance that was supposed to lead to them spreading further than those neighborhoods applied.
● Resolved an issue where enchantment decay messages on death weren't telling people when Poison enchants were lost.
● Corrected an issue that made Shadow of the Dust users unable to track their killer when killed by a pet that raised their corpse such as a Ghoul or Zombie.
● Pets stolen with the Corruptor's Touch of Corrupted Loyalty now clear their targeting and do not keep attacking whatever they were attacking before the Corruptor enslaved them.
● Resolved an issue in which renamed weapons could decay on attack to conditions far worse than Destroyed, which ironically allowed them to behave as if Average indefinitely if not fixed.
● Corrected many conditions where Fraternity of Wondercraft reduced MP costs that it shouldn't.
● Fixed a bug that allowed the Adamant Kinship damage bonus to work outside of Laurentia and Laurentia derivatives if the target is a ward, fortification, glyph or door.
● Darksoul Cabal and Arcane Affinity now correctly reduce MP costs on MP-costing target shooting attacks.
● Items that have somehow gotten to a condition worse than destroyed will now display as destroyed.
● Fixed an issue where under some circumstances, Elysian Ivory Guardians were able to target Good characters.
● Deep Spellcraft's Eldritch Blast now works on wards.
● Poison clothes/armor enchantments now apply when struck by a Touch Attack such as Agony Curse.
● Fixed a bug with the new healing interface that kept Dark Oppressor curses from being absolved.
● Resolved an issue in which Wizard spell bonuses were being assigned to Spellwand multiple times.

Minor Bugs
● Neck-slot custom clothes were assigning to an otherwise unattainable slot due to a typo.
● When a notification goes out that someone unlocked a door, it now has a link to who did so.
● Fixed a bug where individual rounds of ammo can't be dropped.
● Fixed a condition where under some circumstances it was possible to bring Flying into your stronghold with Word of Recall.
● Fixed a bug that gave the wrong error message when using a bullhorn with insufficient AP.
● Casting Shadow Wrap while invisible no longer dispels invisibility.
● Closing the Description pane no longer incorrectly closes the Eye of Death pane.
● Corrected an issue where it was sometimes possible to heal oneself to greater than maximum HP if healing through Sorcerers Might.
● Added an extra check to clear non-Horrid-Tentacle pets on respawn, to correct a number of fringe cases where pets might erroneously survive their master's death.
● Corrected an issue in which Ghostwalk users sometimes retained their status (and were charged MP) while dead.
● Aethersprites are able to attack invisible characters and therefore should now correctly be able to heal invisible characters.
● Additional code to ensure that stolen Sires of Retribution pets can be rejuvenated correctly. The rejuvenation cost for these pets should be 15 MP.
● Clarified the message a bit when inflicting Phantasmal Terror.
● Fixed a bug that allowed multiple activations of Shield of Faith.
● The Void Walking status now clears correctly when leaving Void.
● Fixed an issue where dead Revenants were sometimes told that they took sun damage whilst dead.
● Expanded protections to keep petmasters from shifting their morality when hitting Sect of Maevel zombies.
● Wytchfire (which is utterly useless against pets) has been removed from the combat dropdown for fighting pets.
● Acrid Vapors now displays a spell description.
● Fixed a whole bunch of lingering typos.

[Badziew]

[Kandarin]

It's a status effect under the hood (which you can't see, which isn't dispelled on death or by Corruptors....) and resets clear status effects, so a reset should clear it.

[Badziew]

[Nayru]

a hotfix has been deployed for the following two issues:

https://www.nexusclash.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=9211 (create alchemical item dropdown broken)
https://www.nexusclash.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=9213 (autorejuv not factoring darksoul % reduction)

[Kandarin]

[Badziew]