Shades of Twilight

We’ve finally completed every quest we can find in Elite Mode, except the final one – kill Sydonai. We’ve run through Broker’s (between Monument Station and Liverpool), and we’ve done every single one from Spud at St. Paul’s.

We even ran back to all the lower-level stations to see if we’ve missed anybody’s quest out.

We haven’t.

So, with only Sydonai’s death a quest away, once again we’ve reached the endgame. This time, it’s in Elite mode. We thought we couldn’t make it this far, but we did. The picture below is a familiar sight in many of our quests 🙂

No it’s not me, it’s my gaming buddy. He’s a melee character, a “tank” in MMO-speak. This happened in one case where we were mobbed my monsters from all sides and we backpedaled really quick. He backed into an obstacle – those bricks you see on the floor around his tombstone 🙂 So, before he could go left or right, the monsters all got him.

Me? I ran like crazy. I only came back to his tombstone when the monsters left the area and resumed their aimless ambling throughout the zone.

It was barely a week ago that me and my buddy started on Elite mode, after hitting the huge obstacle of fighting mobs about 10 levels above us. After about a week of fighting through the story again, we’re now at Liverpool Station, almost at the end-game. We just have to fight through the sidequests and then on to the main story, before being told we need to head towards St. Paul’s station for the final showdown with Sydonai.

2 weeks, pretty fast eh? We both level 29 now, and if I remember correctly, we both completed the normal version at level 31 or 32.

After that, the dreaded Elite Nightmare … sigh.

People have said if we hated getting creamed by the mobs in Normal Nightmare, wait till we see the Elite version. Well, I’m hoping this doesn’t happen now that the SEA server has been patched…

Today is the day that the South-East Asian server is applying Patch 0.7. Downtime is slated to be from 8am to 1pm. Here’s the list of fixes:

Memory Usage

* Memory manager rewritten for better performance and stability.
* Fixed a UI-related memory leak.
* Fixed a clothing and armor texture-related memory issue.

User Interface

* New Looking For Group interface that allows players to more easily find each other for creating specific groups.
* Reorganized the De-modificator, Augmentrex, and Nanoforge interfaces to appear in the left-hand panel area.
* Added an auto-transparency feature to the chat window.
* Players can skip all logo splash-screens with a single click.

Nightmare Difficulty

* The difficulty of Nightmare has been rebalanced. More overall experience is earned in Nightmare levels, scaling of group experience and difficulty has been improved, and the overall level progression has been adjusted.

Skills

* Fixed skills being added to and/or removed from Shift activation when swapping weapons.
* Investing a skill point into an Aura skill will no longer automatically cause it to activate.

Templar

* Taunt skills are no longer reduced in effectiveness when in a group.

Blademaster

* Path of Righteousness now applies damage from offhand melee weapons.

Guardian

* Prayer of Retribution can now be used while poisoned.
* Prayer of Healing can no longer be used while poisoned.

Cabalists

* The Summon Ember and Summon Fire Elemental skills no longer conflict when granted through items.

Evokers

* Fixed a bug that caused Drain Power to charge an upfront power cost.
* Tempest’s targeting range has been increased and properly loses targets that move out of range.
* Fixed a bug which prevented Boneshards from having any effect on every other cast.
* Fixed a bug which prevented Evokers from using any other skills for two seconds after casting Boneshards.

Summoners

* Hand of Nostrom correctly adds more beams as the skill level increases.
* Fixed a bug which sometimes caused the Warper minion icon to not display.
* Master of the Flame skill effects now display properly in the skill description tooltip.

Hunters

Engineers

* Engineer Drone behavior improved.
* Fixed a bug that allowed Repair Drone to be used at no cost.
* Drones will now level properly along with their owner. Existing Drones that are below your character’s level will automatically be raised to the correct level.
* Drones now receive correct health bonuses with skill level after they are re-summoned.

Marksmen

* Overshield now gives the correct amount of shields.
* Fixed a bug that prevented Homing Shot from activating properly.

Quests

* Fixed a bug with the Cannon Street Rails quest.
* Fixed a bug in the Helping Hands and Triage quests where Maxim and Arphaun occupy the same place.
* Fixed a bug with the Regular Customer quest where Slaughterbeast occasionally wouldn’t spawn as expected.
* Characters stuck in the Holborn station after completing the game in normal mode should be able to progress.

Items

* Improved the drop rate of analyzers and various recipes.
* New blueprints have been added for Focus Items and Boots.
* Focus Items and Boots can now be made by crafters.
* Fixed a bug where already activated Auras would turn on and off when swapping weapons that grant Aura skills.

Guilds and Groups

* Fixed a bug where players were not seeing Guild invites.
* Introduced new Auto-Party logic to provide better matches.

World Movement

* Fixed additional instances where players were sometimes randomly teleported when other people used portals.
* Players can now use the /stuck command when in Ghost form.
* Fixed rare instances where certain areas were impassible.

Miscellaneous

* Fixed a bug where Founders saw all character names in blue text.
* Fixed rare issues with being unable to properly apply the Multiplayer patch.
* Fixed a bug with mods on weapons not being properly equipped when loading a character.
* Fixed rare cases where the PRD became unusable.
* Fixed a bug where numerous pets would show up in Stations.

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Special Subscriber Features
The survivors of London are keeping their spirits up by celebrating the season and sharing some Holiday goodies with our subscription members:

The Transmogrifier
This mystic box transforms the junk you put in it into something new and wonderful. When you discover a new Transmogrifier formula, it is automatically stored in a special recipe list.

12 Unique Items
New Unique weapons spread across all three factions.

Are you ready to jump back into the servers at 1pm? 🙂