Planes of Tlessa - 1.6.2 - Faction Loyalty Automation

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. I have a new and exciting update for you that will eventually pave the way for automated crafting, enchanting, alchemy, trinketry, and gem crafting.

This new feature is called Faction Loyalty Automation.

Faction Loyalty Automation works very simply: we automated the process of doing Faction Loyalty, which is a set of objectives for NPCs on various maps. A lot of quests are tied to you having specific levels in these to progress the story and even unlock new features and game mechanics.

One of the biggest complaints players had was how long it took to do them. Each NPC has about 6 tasks: 3 bounty and 3 crafting. Each NPC randomly generates how many of each of those you have to do per level. Each NPC has a total of 25 levels. You can imagine, even with the Faction Loyalty Event where it cuts the time in half, how long that can take to do manually.

Fret no more, because this feature is here to save the day.

You can read more about it here, however, in a nutshell, what it does is:

• While pledged to the faction and assisting an NPC who has at least one task for you to do, it will automate crafting and fighting, switching between the two every minute.
  • If you cannot craft an item, we will switch to crafting items of the type you failed to craft. For example, if you have to craft 35 level 400 swords but can only craft level 50 swords, we will switch to weapon crafting and auto-craft 50 items every minute until your crafting level is 400, then attempt the item again.
  • If you die to the beast in question, we will switch to auto-fighting creatures around your level, 50 at a time per minute, until you can actually fight the creature in question. Should you die after we spent all that time training, the automation will end, and you are recommended to check your gear.
  • Should you run out of gold while crafting items for the NPC, we will switch to bounty tasks until you have the gold, then try again.

We will also auto-switch you to other NPCs once you max one of them out, that is, get the current NPC you are helping to level 25. Should you run out of NPCs on your map and have access to other maps with other NPCs to help, we will auto-traverse you, pledge you to that faction, assist the first NPC, and continue on.

Faction Loyalty Automation lasts for 8 hours and runs every minute.

Fun, right?

This was a heavily requested feature from various players who have expressed frustrations with how faction loyalty currently works in-game.

Bug Fixes/Balancing/Nerfing and Improvements

A release like this would not be complete without its various bug fixes, so let's get into those now, shall we?

Exploration

Exploration has been changed from the concept of fighting a horde of enemies, surviving, fake-fighting the next set of hordes, and getting rewards. This was unbalanced, and now it has been changed to:

Fight 6-12 real monsters, with actual fights per minute. This is based on your Fight Time Out Modifier. You may notice this with manual fights, where the higher this value is, the more manual attacks you can do per minute. Right now, the timer for manual fights goes as low as 5 seconds. This means in a 1-minute period, you can technically fight 12 creatures. Exploration now mirrors this. At a minimum, you will fight 6 creatures per minute, and all rewards are batched. At a maximum, you can fight 12 creatures per minute, and all rewards are batched.

Other issues with exploration have also been fixed, such as:

• Fixed exploration kill mismatch where the server messages could say you fought X, but the Automation tab would say you fought Y amount.
• Fixed cleanup of exploration, such as when you die, if you cancel and start another one, if something behind the scenes failed, we now properly clean up after ourselves, and other pending explorations that may still wait to execute even if you canceled will clean themselves up and not affect currently running explorations.
• There was an exploit with directional movement when you were exploring, where you could leave special locations and enter special locations. This has been fixed so you cannot enter them while exploration is running. You can still enter regular, kingdom, and port locations.
  • If you are in a special location, that is: Gold Mines, Purgatory Dungeons, or other places where enemies are increased in strength, you cannot leave while exploring.
• There was an exploit where, with third-party tools, you could initiate other forms of actions you are not allowed to do while exploring, such as fight celestials, use PCT, or teleport, as examples. All of these and more have been fixed.

Exploration overall is now more in tune and in sync with how it should have been from the beginning. It's still used for training in terms of automation, but it's more aligned with how manual fights work.

This may slow player progression down, as we're not fighting 25-50 creatures anymore, but those can later be adjusted in follow-up patches and balancing changes. The goal of this was to bring exploration in line with manual fights and resolve bugs and exploits.

Life Stealing:

• Life stealing for vampires is now capped at 75%. Non-vampires are still capped at 50%.
  • After investigation, life stealing is only stealing from enemies' current health, not their max health.
• All monsters now have life stealing resistance, with Surface to Shadow Plane monsters capping at 30%, Hell -> Purgatory capping at 50%, Twisted Memories capping at 65%, Raid Enemies capping at 55%, and Raid Bosses capping at 65%.
• Delusional Memories and Ice Plane monsters will cap at 25%.

Drop Rate Changes:

• Purgatory Smith's House, Purgatory Dungeons, The Old Church, Gold Mines, and special locations where enemy stats are increased will now take monster drop rates into account when determining drop chances.
• Gold Mines, Purgatory Smith's House, Purgatory Dungeons, and The Old Church had their currency drops reduced by 25%.
• Weekly currency event has been reduced:
  • Gold Dust is reduced by 25%.
  • Shards are reduced by 25%.
  • Copper Coins are reduced by 23%.

Monster changes

Gold rates have changed for monsters:

• Surface, Labyrinth, Dungeons, Shadow Planes, Delusional Memories, and Ice Plane regular monsters will now scale to a max of 999.9 million gold.
• Hell and Purgatory will scale to a max of 1.9 billion gold for regular monsters.
• Twisted Memories will scale to 2.49 billion gold for regular monsters.
• Surface, Labyrinth, Dungeon, and Delusional Memories Celestials scale to ~25 million gold.
• Shadow Planes Celestials scale to ~50 million gold.
• Hell Celestials scale to ~75 million gold.
• Surface, Labyrinth, Ice Plane, and Delusional Memories Raid Monsters scale to ~35 million gold.
• Surface Raid Bosses award 100 million gold.
• Ice Plane Raid Bosses award 250 million gold.
• Delusional Memories Raid Bosses award 300 million gold.
• Labyrinth Raid Bosses award 175 million gold.
• Shadow Planes and Delusional Memories Weekly Fight Monsters scale to ~75 million gold.
• Hell Weekly Fight Monsters scale to ~125 million gold.
• Purgatory Weekly Fight Monsters scale to ~250 million gold.
• Twisted Memories Weekly Fight Monsters scale to ~300 million gold.
• Twisted Memories Delve monsters now scale to ~300 million gold.

Modifier changes, such as:

Healing, Spell Evasion, Affix Resistance, Life Stealing, and Entrancing Chance:

• Surface, Labyrinth, Dungeons, Shadow Planes, Ice Plane, and Delusional Memories are now capped at 65%.
• Hell and Purgatory are capped at 75%.
• Twisted Memories is capped at 85%.

Devouring Light/Darkness:

• Labyrinth, Dungeons, and Shadow Planes Devouring Light is now capped at 65%.
• Hell and Purgatory capped their Devouring Light/Darkness at 75%.

Please Note

At this time not changes have been made to enchantments, uniques, mythics or cosmic items. I want to see how this all plays out before doing additional balance changes those items.

Bugs and Misc Changes:

• When Faction Loyalty, Delve, or Exploration is running, players will now see an alert above the Attack Selection on desktop and the Action Selection on mobile that states the type of automation running and gives players the ability to cancel that automation.
  • With Faction Loyalty, you cannot do Delve, Exploration, manual fighting, or crafting.
  • With Delve, you cannot do Exploration, manual fighting, or Faction Loyalty.
  • With Exploration, you cannot do Delve, Faction Loyalty, or manual fighting.
• Timers have been updated to show H:mm:ss and count down properly, so refreshing will properly show the time left, not just 8 hours if half an hour has passed.
• Gold Dust Rushes now work slightly differently:
  • This properly requires the Grain of Sands quest item, gained from a 0.1% drop chance from the Astral Hell God on Surface.
  • This is now a 1% drop that adds 5% to the total dust you would gain from disenchanting a single item.
  • For batch disenchanting, there's a 1% chance to get 5% added to the total summed amount of gold dust you would get.
  • Gold Mines no longer has a chance to give out Gold Dust Rushes and instead only drops Gold Dust in its regular amounts.
• Gold Rushes are also a 1% + map drop bonus + special location drop bonus chance and only apply 5% towards the gold you gained.
  • When doing automation, be it Exploration, Faction Loyalty, or Delve, the summed total of gold you would gain can get the 5% bonus applied.
• Fixed Reincarnation text across the system to say 5%, not 20%.
• Fixed an issue with Bountiful Resources.
  • This now properly recalculates based on:
    • Base Kingdom Values
    • Completed Building Levels
    • Farm Population Math
    • And the Bountiful passive itself.
• Fixed passives that have the same name as the building to properly unlock the building when the passive is leveled.
• Capital City issues around mass building and unit upgrades/recruitments have also been fixed, which should stop the queues from hanging.
• Buildings and units, when manually upgrading or recruiting, not through the Capital City system, now properly show the name and description of the building or unit in question.
• Healing amount from spells will now properly show in the character inventory and in the character sheet.
• When gaining a single level or multiple levels, we now do stat * levels gained for regular stats and damage stat + levels gained * 2, which still aligns with the +1 for every level and +2 for every level gained toward damage stat.
• When using boons that could give 2 or more levels per level up, the logic was wrong. This means that instead of counting for the 25+ levels you would gain, we really only counted for 2 at a time up to 24, meaning you could be missing proper stats for base modifiers such as base stat and base damage stat.
  • Because of how character stats were falling behind, I created a way to try to give back as many of the missed stats as possible. We do not keep historical records of level ups, so things might still seem to be a slight tad off, but based on how stats are given out, we have tried to give as much of them back as possible.
• Fixed gem crafting so that we properly take into account enchantments and boons.
  • Reduced gem crafting DC (difficulty check) checks to:
    • Tier 1 - DC 25, meaning with nothing equipped, you have a 75% chance to craft.
    • Tier 2 - DC 45, meaning with nothing equipped, you have a 55% chance to craft.
    • Tier 3 - DC 65, meaning with nothing equipped, you have a 35% chance to craft.
    • Tier 4 - DC 75, meaning with nothing equipped, you have a 25% chance to craft.
• Fixed: Duplicate Manual Upgrade of buildings and units.
• Fixed: Building Max Level overflow.
• Fixed: Stale Capital City jobs and queuing issues based on max-level buildings.
• Fixed issues around Capital City queues and stale queues.
• Fixed issues around over-recruiting.
• Prevented kingdoms from manually canceling Capital City queues when the player should go through the Capital City system.
• A lot of fixes around how Capital Cities queue units and buildings.
• Gems should only be firing against monsters that have elemental atonements.
  • Gems will now properly fire on all attack types: Attack, Cast, Attack and Cast, Cast and Attack, and Defend.