Some 0.9.4 footage

Nice video guys, was great to finally get a little look at 9.4! It was even nicer to see you guys play a ranger/marauder heh

I was a little suprised to see the placement of the keystones, I would imagine getting certain ones as a ranger for example would be difficult for the time being. But you did mention that this will change as more are added so I'm really looking forward to seeing how the tree developes.

If I could ask one thing though, if you plan to make it more obvious when a gem has leveled up, could you add a feature to hide it or somthing? I could see myself accidentally clicking the level up button on a gem I wanted to keep at a lower level. Specially considering theres no confirmation dialogue box when you hit the level up button. Or maybe we could get a box that shows what stats the gem will have when it next levels with a 'accept/cancel ' options to make it a little more difficult to make a mistake.

Also is it just me or has Chris got some crazy ninja looting skills lol

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people think it's a bug ... but it's actually a side effect of the way we're doing shadows...

so it is a bug

it's just a bug you know about

>:(

Love watching these videos! Can't wait to try out 0.9.4, marauder seems to have improved quite a bit, definitely gonna try that out. Also, smooth quest notification art!

Nice job. It's good to see that most of the passive tree remained intact with only minor changes and the addition of the keystones. It was also interesting to hear you talking about exactly how you rebalanced the physical vs caster damage by lowering the caster damage capacity, but keeping their killing speeds similar to what they had before by lowering it relative to the monster life decrease. Perhaps this will mitigate some of the QQ still floating around with elemental reflect. Definitely looking forward to testing this patch out.

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caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaps wrote:

so it is a bug

it's just a bug you know about

>:(

Yeah, this kind of annoyed me when I noticed it on my first day testing, but it's nice that they actually took the time to explain why it's happening and that they might have some tricks to mitigate it eventually.

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Lonexs wrote:

Also is it just me or has Chris got some crazy ninja looting skills lol

Yeah, he was jacking those currency items like a madman. The mark of an experienced arpg player.

Yeah, but Chris then also shared 'em. I think the loot-ninja deal is just about the thrill of the win, for Chris, but, deep down, he's really too nice of a guy to be a jerk about it.

Anyone who has actually played with Chris, feel free to refute this, if applicable. =^[.]~=

Was Avatar of Fire the keystone in the top left? You didn't mouse over it but it seemed to be the only one missing out.

That keystone has me a little worried because it sounds perfect for a melee templar build but it seems you forgo physical damage all together. Elemental reflect mobs would be incredibly difficult to kill and elemental reflect mobs with health regen would be invincible, at least solo.

I know that when I was thinking of possible keystone placements I expected them to be embedded in the circle of passives.

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Fuuljo wrote:

I know that when I was thinking of possible keystone placements I expected them to be embedded in the circle of passives.

It has to be hard to get to them, because they're so powerful. Generally, it's going to take you 8-12 points to get to a keystone that's related to your class if you go straight for it from your starting point.

Something to take into consideration when determining where to place the skill level up icon. The best way to explain this is to compare it with theater.

In theater, you have 'power positions'.The foremoest powerful being downstage center(very middle of the stage closest to the audience). The second most powerful position is 'downstage right'(or the left side, from the audience's perspective, and closest to the audience). This is because in western culture we read left-right.

By placing the level up icon on the right side of the screen as can be seen in the video, it loses a lot of its potential power and can easily be overlooked. Because of how we read in Western culture, we are more likely to notice movement on the left side(stage right) than we would on the right side(stage left). Cultures that utilize different reading techniques also have respectively different staging techniques as well.

Now, a direct comparison to staging doesnt work for a viewing screen. Reason being, in theatre, upstage is the furthest from the audience and less likely to be noticed. If we were to take a top down view with upstage being the top of the screen, despite being further from the audience, it becomes more powerful than the bottom of the screen because of our left to right, top to bottom reading habits.

If we translate this to the monitor screen and take into account that our characters are centered at all times and in general our eyes are more likely to 'land' in the middle of what we look at, then the most effective area for notification icons would be center screen, then top-center, bottom-center, followed by center-left, top-left, and bottom-left. The last place you would want to place an icon would be the bottom-right of the screen as it would be the weakest of all positions, again going back to how we read.

Hopefully this makes sense to people. It may not work as intended once the game is released in different languages, but for English it should be work perfectly well.

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FaceLicker wrote:

If we translate this to the monitor screen and take into account that our characters are centered at all times and in general our eyes are more likely to 'land' in the middle of what we look at, then the most effective area for notification icons would be center screen, then top-center, bottom-center, followed by center-left, top-left, and bottom-left. The last place you would want to place an icon would be the bottom-right of the screen as it would be the weakest of all positions, again going back to how we read.

Well said. Perhaps Chris could make use of his fancy new quest info update banner to provide us with gem level up notifications as well?