Dungeons & Dragons Online: Peril of the Planar Eyes Update Now Live

A new update is now available for Dungeons & Dragons Online. On the content side of things, it introduces the Peril of the Planar Eyes adventure pack. And apart from that, it adjusts the melee and ranged combat systems in an attempt to fix some of the game’s more annoying performance issues.

Here’s the official update trailer:

And an excerpt from the patch notes:

Of Special Note:

Peril of the Planar Eyes

Help scholars from Morgrave University as they search Xen’drik for the Planar Eyes, mysterious artifacts tied to the power of Eberron’s planes. But be careful – the Eyes are also sought by a new and mysterious cult known as the Hidden Hand!

This new adventure pack is FREE to VIPs and available in the DDO Store! Peril of the Planar Eyes includes four adventures, available at level 12 on Heroic and 32 on Legendary difficulty:

• An Element of Chaos – Questgiver: Thaddeus Donbury
• Eye Know Whodunnit – Questgiver: Alban Kimble
• Seizing the Dawn – Questgiver: Fain d’Phiarlan
• Beautiful Nightmares – Questgiver: Electa Poole

All of the quests can be accessed from Lordsmarch Plaza in Stormreach.

Changes focused on game performance

Update 49 includes significant adjustments to melee and missile combat to address long term concerns about game performance. One of the most frequent causes of lag happens when an Effects Queue forms, which means that players have applied a ton of on-hit effects to a monster and the game has reached a buffer and must clear its queue in order to continue processing new information. We are specifically targeting Server-based lag with this change. Behind the scenes, the server crunches damage, effects, and debuffs in a big queue. We can measure how efficient the server is at processing this queue by measuring the server frames. To begin researching and addressing the root cause we put together simulations of a standard large group and their on-hit profiles. What we found was that the amount of damage dealt didn’t matter, it was about the frequency that effects were being applied. It didn’t matter if a simulation was against one target or many – if the effects queue was in trouble the rest of the instance had its performance significantly impacted. That means lag for not just you and your group but for other people on the server.

What’s Changing:

• Doublestrike and Doubleshot will no longer apply a full subsequent “attack” as part of your attack chain. Instead, when a player Doublestrikes or Doubleshots the game will instead multiply the base amount of damage dealt (first number and sneak attack) by the amount of Doublestrikes or Doubleshots generated. This means that a player who deals an average of 100 damage on their first hit will now deal 200, or 300 damage, or however many Doublestrikes or Doubleshots multiplied by their base damage, when their Doublestrikes or Doubleshots go off.
• When a Doublestrike or Doubleshot happens, you’ll see an icon of two swords next to your damage in the floaty text, similar to how Point Blank Shot provides its feedback.
• Abilities that apply additional ranged projectiles (Shuriken Expertise and Advanced Ninja Training) no longer apply multiple hits or projectiles. Instead, just as if they had been purely Doubleshot scalars, they will simply be additional chances to Doubleshot.
• Effects that trigger on-hit will also have their damage multiplied comparatively. This means that if you deal 10 Law damage on each hit, on a Doublestrike, it will deal 20.
• Repeating Crossbows and the Dual Crossbow style still fire 3 or 2 full projectiles (so you’ll still see 3 numbers or 2 numbers, respectively) and are still affected by their Doubleshot penalties of 66% and 50%, respectively.
• A player’s 100% effective Doublestrike cap still applies in this system.
• Offhand strikes will still be a separate “hit” and will roll their own damage from their own weapon and can still Doublestrike. However, we have removed the stat Offhand Doublestrike from the game. Your offhand now Doublestrikes at 50% of the Doublestrike of your mainhand. This means that if you have a 50% chance to produce an offhand strike, and 100% Doublestrike, your offhand will hit 50% of the time for 50% Doublestrike (so a 50% chance to deal double damage). Abilities and enhancements that used to provide Offhand Doublestrike no longer do so. Your offhand can only doublestrike a maximum of 50% of the time.
• Shields still cannot Doublestrike.
• Strikethrough attacks still proc their own Doublestrike roll individually per target struck.
• The main reasoning behind these changes (letting repeaters and offhand strikes still proc rather than fully condensing) is that we want to keep our damage numbers appropriate to the amount of animations that a player actually produces.
• Adrenaline’s damage multiplier has been reduced from 300/300/300/400% to 150/150/150/200%
• Fury Eternal’s 33% chance to regain an Adrenaline charge on vorpal has been increased to 100%
• Hunt’s End damage multiplier has been reduced from 400% to 300%
• Hunt’s End cooldown has been reduced from 24sec to 18sec
• Aasimar Scourge has lost its 2% Offhand Doublestrike per copy (as that stat no longer exists) and has gained an additional 1% Doublestrike per copy in its place (It now grants a total of 2% per copy, because it gave +1% before)
• Fury Eternal and Fury Made Placid’s tooltips no longer claim that the two abilities are antirequisites of each other; they aren’t.
• Tempest Capstone (Dervish) has lost its 25% Offhand Doublestrike (as that stat no longer exists) and has gained +10% Doublestrike.
• Reformatted text on Tempest’s other Core abilities to be closer to current standards. (No functional changes).

A major effect of this change is that you will see much spikier damage across the board. The Doublestrike or Doubleshot calculation takes the original roll into account when determining damage, which means that you’ll see much higher highs and much lower lows. Attacks that crit will multiply that increased damage, so you’ll see much higher numbers on those attacks. Attacks that miss will deal no damage, as before, but rather than a Doubleshot or Doublestrike giving a chance for a second strike to deal damage, they will still deal no damage, as the original strike has missed.