First, sorry for the delay in getting a PTS refresh out to you all. The server gremlins came out in full force, conspiring to keep us apart… While their eventual defeat was inevitable –for love indeed conquers all –it doesn’t lessen our longing in the meanwhile.

Second, thanks a ton to everyone who’s been hopping on the PTS. We’ve had a loooot of activity. Thanks especially to those of you who have hopped on to take a moment to run through Story / Veteran modes, as it’s arguably even more important that we get those adjustments correct!

Alright. Onto the refresh notes:

General:

• The Ossus Daily Area is now ready for PTS testing, and for the first time players will be able to access the area! *pokerface*Just open the galaxy map, and you’ll find Ossus (it’s just southwest of Voss).
• Fixed an issue where players could not purchase items from some of the PTS vendors
• The 252 Gear Vendor, ED-5E, is now present in the Odessen Landing area!
• Fixed the issue where Nightmare Crystals could only be used in GotM, instead of the intended behavior of being usable everywhere except GotM. (Checkboxes are hard!!)
• The Tyth skip button has been enabled in Master Mode, allowing thusly inclined players to bypass the encounter to test Aivela & Esne.

Tyth:

Overall, Tyth seems to be playing really, really well, but it’s become clear the encounter is a tad overtuned in what it’s demanding of the DPS, given the chaos of everything else that’s going on. We’re going to attack this with a series of smaller adjustments in multiple areas (as opposed to a single large adjustment to one facet of the encounter) to get us to where we want to be without ruining the current feel.

Therefore, we’re (1) Pulling back ever so slightly on the HP of Tyth and the drones, to give just a little bit more moment-to-moment breathing room. Additionally, we’re (2) Kicking out the enrage timer by an additional 30s, and (3) Decreasing the drones per wave in Phase 2 from 5 back to 4, since that seems to be just about the survivable break point to begin with.

We’ll see how this winds up playing, and then adjust again from there.

In terms of Veteran mode, the changes to Tyth have certainly made the encounter a lot more viable, but I think we might have gotten to the correct answer in the wrong way, in that everything winds up being so thin that the structure of the encounter is coming a bit loose.

While there are no changes to Veteran mode in this refresh, as a heads up: For the next refresh we’re thinking of reducing Vet mode’s Phase 2 wave size from 5 to 4 (to match Master Mode), while walking back the cooldown increase on Phase 2 wave summoning (reducing it from 36s to 32s). We might also put some HP back on the drones, since it’s easier to DPS fewer targets. We’ll see.

Master:

• Tyth HP reduced ~6%
• Drone HP reduced ~5%
• Standard Drone wave size in Phase 2 reduced to 4 drones (down from 5)
• Enrage timer increased by 30s (6:45 -> 7:15)
• Cast time of Inversion increased to 5.0s (up from 4.0s)
• Fixed an issue where the encounter would occasionally spawn a “blank” wave of drones (i.e. the spawn warning text appeared but no drones did).
• Fixed an issue where Energy Wave’s radius of effect was larger than the ground indicator (by about .75m), occasionally causing rather unfortunate outcomes.
• Reduced the maximum width of Tyth’s high rage Energy Wave by .5m (8.0m -> 7.5m) (in addition to the above correction).

Aivela & Esne:

We actually did get a bit of exposure to the A&E encounter, in one case due to a fatfingered dev command, and in others through judicious application of Nightmare Crystals. This wound up being a happy accident, because it exposed a couple of things that had gone wrong in the encounter, saving us all a PTS cycle! #HappyAccidents \o/ 

All Modes:

• Players standing on any of the four pillars in the Master Repository Core will now take damage while the encounter is engaged. There are no VFX for this yet, but there will be soon.

Master:

• Fixed an issue where the Nexus wasn’t going invulnerable when it should have been.
• Fixed an issue where Codex obelisks weren’t going invulnerable when they should have been.
• Increased the damage of the Codex obelisks’ secondary attack by a bunch. (You’ll know it when you see it, if you haven’t yet)
• The Nexus’s “Disco Lightshow Mode” will now fire properly (Again, you’ll know it when you see it, if you haven’t yet).
• Super Energy Burst now does what it’s supposed to, as opposed to… whatever you would call the nonsense it was doing before.
• The base damage of System Shock has increased, as it was insufficiently spicy.
• The purification sequence will now run during Phase 3.

Veteran:

• Probably fixed an issue that could cause the first Purification sequence to be polarized incorrectly (3-and-1, instead of 2-and-2).