Norrath's Garde

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What: Proc/Item effects

Changes:
- Procs have been limited to a few slots and specialty items.
- New procs have been turned into yellow/red adornments that can be placed in any items that have the properly colored slot.
- All Sentinel’s Fate ward-type procs will not work in Velious zones.
- Seven class focus effects have been changed to passive effects on armor.
- Remaining class focus effects are on new adornments, along with a variety of stats to choose from.

Details:
After reviewing past itemization and looking at our current gameplay, we felt that the number of procs given out made these special effects feel rather ordinary. We do not want players relying
on these effects that are meant to be more of a bonus than a requirement. In Velious, the increase to effectiveness from natural item growth should far outweigh the loss of procs/effects.
Starting with the Velketor’s instances, you will see weapons, shields, and symbols with yellow adornment slots.
This is how you can customize the proc you want to have. Similar to past expansions, these adornments are available on the Ry’Gorr faction merchants.
The requirement for procs was most prevalent with healers in the form of ward procs. After looking at these procs and how frequently they were being used, we realized how much we’ve been balancing combat and encounters around the power of wards. That meant if you did not have ward proc you were in dire straits. While we are introducing a new set of healing-related procs with Velious, they will be toned down quite a bit and only available in one of the three slots
mentioned above.
Class focus effects have been changed a little. Seven of the ten class/archetype focuses that were on red adornments in SF are now built into the armor as passive effects. This allows you more freedom in what you want to put in your red adornment slots. The remaining three focuses have been retained on red adornments, but they offer varying combinations with other stats like crit bonus, potency, or mitigation. Group players will now have access to armor pieces with innate class focuses on them starting with Velketor’s shard armor. They will be able to get up to three slots with class focus effects. The remaining effects will be on raid armor pieces.

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What: Item Score

Changes:
- All items will now display their item score.
- This only applies to Velious and future expansion itemization.

Details:
Item score represents the power of an item relative to other items. This value is meant as a quick way for someone to gauge if an item is an upgrade and where it comes from. In general if an item has a higher item score than an item it would replace, the overall stat bonus should be higher.
This item score is not intended as a tool to segregate players by the quality of their equipment. While it does provide a quick summary of the overall quality of your equipment, it doesn’t give more information than a player already has by inspecting you .

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What: Threshold stats

Changes:
- Critical mitigation is now a required stat for all tiers of content starting with Velious.
- Critical chance is now contested against a NPC’s crit avoidance.
- Resistance bonuses have been limited to jewelry slots.

Details:
Previously critical mitigation was only used in raids; unfortunately Velious mobs did not get that memo and so they all know how to critically hit. Because of this, critical mitigation is valuable everywhere and Velious itemization reflects this. Each tier of the expansion expects you to have a certain value of critical mitigation give or take a few percentage points. So if you find that you are being hit too hard you may want to go for some drops in other dungeons to help make things easier.
Critical chance has been turned into the offensive version of critical mitigation. All NPCs have a stat called critical avoidance. This stat is a direct reduction of your chance to critically hit them. This means if an NPC has 30% critical avoidance you would need 130% critical chance to hit him all the time. The critical mitigation and critical avoidance values are displayed as a buff on any NPC you encounter using this mechanic.
Resistances have been limited to ears, rings, cloak, and wrists slots. Velious focuses on a primary resist of elemental, which should be naturally gained by acquiring various levels of jewelry in the expansion. While the other resists are still useful, you will want to chase elemental primarily.

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What: Health and Power mods merged into attributes

Changes:
- Stamina now gives a static amount of hit points per point.
- Stamina no longer has a cap or a diminishing return curve.
- Your primary attribute gives a static amount of Power per point.
- Your primary attribute power benefits are not capped.

Details
In a continued effort to reduce the unnecessary complexity of items, we have rolled hit point and power bonuses into the attribute stats that are on every item. Before Velious, you would get a raw hit point bonus plus a calculated hit point bonus from stamina. Now stamina will give you a flat amount of hit points per point, so calculating how much health you will get from an item is simply: (Stamina*HP per stamina value).
This takes the guesswork out of how much you’re getting and reduces the amount of stats that your need to consider on an item, making comparing items a little bit easier. Power has been converted in the same way making your primary attribute even more valuable.
Currently the value per point for both is ten. Because of the way the curve worked previously, players at the lower level will see little to no change. Any change you see should be positive; at least that is our goal. As we go through beta we will be looking through feedback and adjusting g this value if needed. Casters and priests will more than likely see the largest hit point bump. Scouts and fighters will more than likely see the largest power bump. Tank gear in Velious will give bonus stamina and tanks inherent base hit point bonus has been standardized across all tanks and is the largest of all the archetypes. This should result in more hit points for tanks
even though the benefits from stamina are the same for everyone.
Hit point and power items will still exist in the form of adornments and buffs.

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What: Side Bonuses

Changes:
- Agility no longer gives an avoidance bonus or critical mitigation bonus.
- Wisdom no longer gives a resistance bonus.

Details:
With the launch of Sentinel’s Fate, we introduced the initial stage of attribute refinement. By defining a primary attribute we made it easier for the average player to understand what kind of items they should be chasing when they equip their character. With Velious we are moving more towards this by folding power into your primary attribute, and also by removing the small side benefits from these stats.
When defining primary attributes, the unintended side effect was that some classes got an extra benefit because they naturally had a lot of a stat where other classes did not. A tank having high strength does not benefit from anything outside of the power increase it gives, while a scout not only became more powerful but gained an avoidance and critical mitigation advantage because they were easily capping that benefit. The same goes for wisdom – Priests gained added
resistances, but all items used the same resist values so there was no compensation for the fact that other classes could not cap that benefit.
In the grand scheme of things, the total benefit, for those classes where that was not their primary stat, was small but it gave players a reason to chase the primary attribute of other characters when they should not. Along with this change we will be reviewing various buffs that give bonuses to these stats and changing them where they should be in order to compensate for anything we feel is a significant loss.

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What: Melee Range Increase, Multi Attack change

Changes:
- Melee range has been increased to match the max range of combat arts.
- Items that increased melee range have had this removed from their spell effects.
- Multi-attack will now grant an additional attack for every 100% over cap.

Details
This is a relatively straight forward change – in the past, combat arts and melee auto-attacks had different ranges. This didn’t make much sense, so we made auto- attack and combat arts have the same range.
The cap on multi-attack has been removed. Now if you have more than 100% multi-attack, you gain a chance to make additional attacks. For instance, If you are at 150% multi-attack you have 100% chance to hit twice with every auto attack, and a 50% chance to hit a third time

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What: Ability Mod

Changes:
- Ability mod is no longer being itemized

Details:
After reviewing the usefulness of ability mod we determined that this is relatively useless when compared to simply giving more critical bonus and potency. Ability mod has a cap, is not straight forward, and does not affect all classes equally. Ability mod is not going away though; this stat will still be given as an option in AAs and potentially with a proc.

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Summary
Overall our goal is to try to remove unnecessary complexity. We think of this as any extra complexity that doesn’t improve gameplay or provide interesting choices and decisions. If a game system would be just as fun with fewer moving parts, then we’d like to streamline it as much as possible without diminishing the value of that feature.
We want to make sure that players are getting enough of the right information so they can make intelligent decisions when it comes to enhancing their characters through items. Since Velious is an expansion with no level increase the largest percentage of power growth will be through itemization. When all is said and done everyone who enters Velious should leave it much more powerful and with an easy understanding of what items are upgrades and what are not.
Many things play into this goal including simplifying presentation, making sure that the growth path is very straight forward, and ensuring that a player feels and is more powerful in the end. Velious presents you with challenge at all levels and it is our hope that these challenges are enjoyable and very rewarding.