17.9 Preview

[Famine]

We are happy to present a preview of the content we plan to release with the 17.9 update.

Steps of Madness – the nightmare continues

Neleb the Deranged sits in his cave, oblivious of the world outside and lost in the dark pits of his insanity. On the outside, a handful of people have long been convinced that Neleb is not a deranged mind with delusions of grandeur, but rather a misunderstood visionary. One of these people is more than happy to talk to people and will even supply quick and easy transport to the cave itself…if you dare venture inside, that is!

Steps of Madness, which was the first dungeon added to Anarchy Online back in 2001, is not going to be quite as you remember it! Recently, nostalgia got hold of us and we decided to give it a small facelift. Targeted for levels 30-60, Steps of Madness now has modified monsters (yes, before you ask, we have taken them off their insane diets and their hit points should be a bit more manageable now!), new and improved loot and some revised items and drop rates. We hope that both new and old players alike will find their way to this curious place where sanity balances on an edge.


The Escaped Prisoners

Quite recently, the prisons in Newland, Omni-Trade and West Athen accepted prisoners from the priests of Home. There were several things out of the ordinary about these inmates and now, to everyone’s horror, they have managed to escape!

This is a major crisis for the penitentiaries on Rubi-Ka, and they could use all the help they can get in catching these prisoners again. High level players should seek out the prison wardens if they are willing to help track down some of these dangerous foes and maybe earn themselves a bounty or two along the way. Some of the tools they used to escape might have uses in the outside world as well!


Dust Brigade – Locating the threat

It is no secret that the Dust Brigade is interested in Xan technology, but this knowledge has spawned more questions than answers. Why are they searching for it? Where is their base? Who directs them? What are they planning?

The ICC intends to find out at least one of these answers, and may accept help from those who have shown their reliability before.


Other content and updates

Of course there will also be the usual selection of tweaks, changes and improvements in this update including some of the following:

• Changes to the way Shade perk chains work. The perks will be changed to now check against the user rather than the target if they have recently activated the previous step in the chain. This means that shades will be able to carry chains forward from one target to another.
• Resolved several issues on the battlestations. Players should no longer get warped back by the decontamination buff, should no longer get the deserter flag when ending the round in the decontamination room, and neutral players should now be able to be buffed correctly by their chosen side.
• Loot channels will now report when a player deletes an item from a corpse as well as when they loot an item.
• New /rp command for roleplayers. This command will add visible characters to your name tag so that other players can see that you are currently ‘in character’
• Reduced the spawn times on many of the older Rubi-Ka unique mobs
• Reduced the spawn times of the boss mobs in the new player starting area.

Keep your eyes peeled for the full preliminary update notes when the update goes to the test dimension.