Dark Lord update: Command & Energy, stronger pets, a new chat and more

Today is the Dark Lord's day. Command and Energy are now one stat, the skills got stronger, and the Dark Horse, Dark Raven and Guild Master bonuses finally show what they give you. Alongside it come leveling spots on the Aida map, level-free 380 items, a rebuilt chat, the Silver Valkyrie flicker fix and new Cash Shop items.

Dark Lord: Command & Energy, one stat

Here is how the Dark Lord formulas changed, next to the original Webzen ones and what we had until this morning. Higher "skill damage" is better; the divisors work the other way round, a smaller number means each point counts more.

The example is a Dark Lord with about 32,000 Command and 12,000 Energy before the merge, and 43,987 in the single stat after it. The Critical Damage buff is capped at 1,500 in our version, so at that size it hits the cap both before and now.

• One stat. Your Energy points fold into Command the next time you log in. The panel shows a single Command & Energy row, and the + button adds to Command. Nothing is lost: Command now does everything Energy did, including mana, item and skill requirements, wings and pets. Energy fruits count as Command fruits.
• Stronger skills. Fire Burst and the other attack skills now scale with Command alone, and each point is worth more than before. In our tests a Dark Lord went from about half of a Dark Knight's damage to the same level.
• Steadier hits. A hit no longer rolls below 75% of its maximum, so damage swings far less.
• Critical damage buff. It now follows Command only.
• Honest numbers. The character panel shows what the server actually uses: damage range, defense, rates, speeds and your skill damage percentage. What you read is what you get.
• Earthshake no longer pushes monsters away, its cooldown dropped from 10 seconds to 5, and it now reaches two tiles further.

Dark Lord buffs, at a glance

Your pets and your guild now have their own buff icons next to your other buffs. Point at one and the tooltip tells you exactly what you get.

• Dark Horse: a skill damage bonus, a bigger one while the Dark Raven is worn too, plus the share of damage it absorbs for you and the defense it adds. At the maximum pet level (50) the skill damage bonus is +10%, or +15% with the Raven.
• Dark Raven: a skill damage bonus and extra critical damage rate (+5%).
• Guild Master: guild masters who are Dark Lords gain damage from the guild members who are online. The tooltip shows how many and what it adds.
• Pet bonuses grow with the pet's level and only count while the pet still has durability. The Dark Raven's wear is tuned so it keeps up with the new damage.

380-level items need no level

380-level items no longer ask for a character level to wear. On a server with resets a level requirement does not mean anything, so only the Strength and Agility requirements are left. The pink "380 level item" label on the tooltip stays, so you can still tell them apart.

New leveling spots in Aida

Aida now has 20 leveling spots. A spot is a marked box on the map with a fixed group of monsters that respawn quickly, so you always know where a pack will be and can plan a session instead of hunting for one. Each spot has a number, such as M #2, so your party can say exactly where to meet. There are three sizes:

• Small, 5x5: 5 monsters, respawning every 7 seconds.
• Medium, 9x9: 10 monsters, respawning every 9 seconds.
• Large, 13x13: 18 monsters, respawning every 10 seconds.

The spots follow the monsters as you go deeper into the map, up to the level 125 monsters at the far end:

• North and north-west: 4 small and a few medium spots with Death Trees and Forest Orcs, the gentlest start in Aida (level 72 to 74).
• Middle of the map: medium spots with Blue Golems and Death Riders (level 78 to 84).
• South and south-west: medium spots with the Bloody Orcs, Bloody Golems and Bloody Death Riders, plus the two large spots, the biggest packs in Aida.

A new chat

The chat bar has new, sharper art made for high resolutions, and everything on it is now drawn by the same engine as the rest of our new windows. It stays crisp at any resolution.

• Messages move. Each new line fades in while the older ones glide up with a small spring, in the chat and in the system log at the top left.
• The typing fields are new. Your text, the caret and the selection are drawn in the new style, with a thicker font for your message. You can use Ctrl+A to select everything, and Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y to undo and redo what you typed, as many steps as you like.
• Whisper by name, not by accident. Right-clicking a message used to start a whisper no matter where you clicked. Now only the sender's name is the target, and only the name lights up when you point at it.

• F3 keeps your nickname. Turning whispering off no longer hides the nickname. It stays there, dimmed, so you can see who you were writing to.
• The size button always works. You no longer need the chat background switched on to change the size. New characters now start with the tallest chat.
• Slimmer scroll bar. The chat uses the same slim scroll bar as the warp window, and the resize bar on top keeps only its middle handle.
• Readable tooltips. The tooltips on the chat buttons now appear above the chat lines instead of behind them.
• Under the Master Skill Tree. The chat no longer draws on top of the tree when you open it with A.

• Calmer error and success lines. Errors such as "No users" now sit in a soft red box with dark red text, and success messages in a soft green one, instead of bright red on black.

Silver Valkyrie flicker, fixed

The silver glow on the Silver Valkyries used to flicker, and sometimes the effect on other monsters did too. The cause was a drawing-order problem inside the faster rendering we introduced for launch, where a shiny overlay could be drawn from slightly different positions than the body underneath it. We fixed the cause for every monster, not just this one, and it came with a small speed-up. The glow on the Resurrection staff and the Lizard King's staff also fades smoothly now instead of popping.

New in the Cash Shop

• Seal of Valor: +10% damage and +10% defense. 100 KCoin per day, 500 for 7 days, 1,500 for 30 days.
• Seal of the Traveler: free warps from the M menu, plus +20% Zen. 40 KCoin per day, 200 for 7 days, 600 for 30 days.
• Maple Ward Charm: +5% defense, worn in a ring slot. 30 KCoin per day, 150 for 7 days, 450 for 30 days.
• Golden Maple Ward Charm: +10% defense and +10% max mana, worn in a ring slot. 100 KCoin per day, 500 for 7 days, 1,500 for 30 days.
• Wing Talismans: pick which wing the Chaos Machine makes in the wings mix. One use each. 2nd wings 250 KCoin, Cape of Emperor 400 KCoin, 3rd wings 600 KCoin.

Blood Castle: the bridge opens for everyone

Players told us two things about Blood Castle: the monster counter in the bottom right ran past the number it asks for (the picture shows 100 of 40), and the bridge gate sometimes did not drop, so nobody could cross to finish the quest.

• The bridge opens in your game too. When the last required monster fell, the server opened the bridge, but it told your game about the wrong stretch of the map, so your game kept the real bridge blocked. It now gets the right one.
• The open gate is repeated. The server now repeats "the bridge is open" and "the door is open" every 5 seconds, so a player who was loading or lagging at the key moment is not left standing in front of a closed gate.
• The counter stops where it should. The kill count never shows more than the requirement (40 monsters per player), and the door, the statues and the Angel King no longer count as monsters.

NPC names and speech no longer overlap

When two NPCs stood close together, their name and speech boxes were drawn on top of each other and neither could be read, as with Caleb the Taskmaster and the Shadow Phantom Soldier above. Each box now moves up to sit above the one below it, the way player chat bubbles always did.

Fixes

• Silver Valkyrie glow no longer flickers, and the same drawing problem is gone for every other monster (details above). The Resurrection staff and the Lizard King's staff glow no longer pop on and off.
• Event monsters no longer leave ghosts behind when Devil Square, Blood Castle or Chaos Castle end.
• Kalima gate labels no longer flicker, and they now read " - Gate to Kalima N".
• Monster health bars sit under your buff icons instead of over them.
• Server notices are drawn above tooltips instead of behind them.
• The Crywolf HUD sits under the skill list instead of over it.
• Chat size (F4) works with the chat background hidden and is remembered for each account.
• Particle effects no longer drop out in very crowded fights, because we raised the number of effects the game can show at once.
• Soul Barrier shows the correct percent on its buff tooltip.
• Server selection: the player load bar is bright green again.
• In-game news: reloading the news could corrupt the quest table. That is fixed.
• Seal names: the two seals now carry their final names, Seal of the Traveler and Seal of Valor.
• Launcher news pictures: the newest news item showed no picture on its card while the older one did. The launcher now shows the picture of every news item.

See you in Lorencia.