Today’s Friday Feature will be a “Droid Invasion” desktop wallpaper and a preview of the Major Features for Publish 8. The theme for publish 8 is “Droids Rebuilt” and we also have the Combat Balance going live in Publish 8 as well.

Droid Invasion Wallpaper

Droid Enhancements

· Display for power meter

· Droid Customization Kit

- kit useable by anyone

- customization lasts longer

· Customized appearances for Droid Deeds so that Droid Engineers can display the models they sell.

It is still an early look, but here is our goal for Droid Modules:

Entertainer module: Entertainers would get a certification so that only they could use this droid (no combat functionality is added so its different that the combat certs). This module would allow an entertainer to queue one of 10 different new effects (smoke, lighting, etc.) The advantage is that the droid won’t consume entertainers HAM (just batteries). Each module will represent a different effect. So with 10 different effects, there will be 10 Entertainer modules which means the higher level droids with more module slots will be more useful for queuing different effects.

Merchant Barker module: This would give droids the ability to bark advertisements, give waypoints to shops, have additional information available so players could list prices, services, etc through a radial menu command.

Covert Detector Module: The covert detector module would allow a droid to detect and disable a covert detector in an area.

Exploding Module: This combat ability would consume a droid in a fixed damage blast.

Combat Balance: A major Combat Balance pass will be happening in Publish 8. The goal of the combat balance is to make combat challenging and equitable across the combat professions. The Combat Balance consists of several aspects.

The first aspect is the Weapon Balance. The Weapon Balance pass is intended to bring relative power of weapons between professions more in line with each other. This is not to say that they will all be the same. Different weapon types will still have various strengths and weakness providing different abilities in which they are ideally suited. Certain weapons classes will stay more or less powerful than the average but this is to reflect a balance paradigm of the profession that uses those weapons. Additionally weapon certifications will be rearranged to provide a better power progression and to better match up with when Weaponsmiths are granted the schematics to craft them. A major goal of the weapon balance pass is to provide players with a consistent and balanced power progression as they advance up their profession as well as providing interesting and varied weapon choices at all skill levels.

The second aspect of the Combat balance will be the HAM redesign. A very critical part of the overall combat rebalance is the change to the functionality of the HAM system. This change will allow a greater ease in balancing overall HAM costs for weapons and special moves. It will also allow Mind to be removed as a special damage type and place equal emphasis on Health, Action and Mind pools for both abilities and damage.

The third aspect is the Profession Balance. Once the underlying core systems for combat (weapons, damage & HAM) are balanced it will be possible to look at all combat professions and balance them in a way that emphasizes each of the professions roles in combat and to give purpose to each individual player as well as reasons for choosing various profession combinations in groups. This includes a skill mod balance, skill tree progression tweaks, combination stacking, special abilities (existing and some new) and overall difficulty.

Lastly is the follow up to many of the preliminary changes that have been made so far. This includes balancing armor, buffs and DoTs, bringing them in line with the combat balance overall.

Image Designer Profession Enhancements: To enhance the Image Designer profession, we’ve put together a list of new features so that we can add some exciting new avatar customization features to the game as well as make them an important part of the game world. Some of the things Image designers can look forward to are:

ID User Interface: Image designers and their clients can work through the changes in real-time, agree on a price and execute the changes through a secure-trade transaction window.
Hair accessories: Coming in the form of particle enhancements to existing hairstyles
New hair colors: Bright neons and fluorescents, glitter that flickers or changes colors.
New skin tones: More variety in current colors, body paint type colors. (Bright Red, Lemon Yellow, etc.).
Increased Colors for all Palettes: For example, Lip colors such as pinks, peaches, more flesh tones and more vibrant shades like Canary Yellow, White, etc.

So here you have it; a preview at the publish 8 major features!

We hope you like the wallpaper, the preview and have a great weekend