Bosses join the grid
Three more weeks of alpha. Bosses moved onto the formation grid, enemies use the skills they teach, and the map went 3D.
The last dispatch rebuilt idle combat as formation versus formation, body by body. Everything else in the game was still fighting the old way, and that is where these three weeks went.
Bosses
Global bosses, hunts, dungeon floors and the big set-piece fights all used to pool each side into a single stat block and trade one blow per beat. They run on the same grid idle fights do.
- Boss abilities: A cleave catches one square and everything around it, a debuff lands across an entire formation, and summons arrive carrying auras.
- A downed ally can be brought back up: Aim a heal or an item at their square and that unit stands; they rejoin the fight with their first body still standing.
- The enemy side fills up to 25 squares: Corpses clear theirs as they fall.
Enemy skills
Enemies now use the skills that they drop experience for. Both sides (player and enemy) walk through the same stat pipeline, so fights become more strategic.
Equipped skills
The cap is six now, down from twelve. This is for balance reasons; namely balancing content around six equippable skills is much easier than twelve skills.
Loadouts
- Bind a saved loadout to an activity: Starting that activity loads it first. Start a harvest and a harvesting formation is already in. Open a fight and a player’s fighters are ready to go.
- Switch actions whenever: Starting something new concludes what was running rather than refusing.
- Timed events publish a countdown: Invasions and global bosses communicate how long is left.
Trainers
An audit turned up 14 of the game’s 45 skills that were unobtainable from any source. New trainers have been added around the game world that can train units in various skills along with selling building plans.
Merchants moved onto boards: a list, a basket and a running total, so a shop is one visit and not one item.
Locales
A zone is no longer a single place. Locales give it rooms that players can move between, each with its own description and a trail showing how they got there.
The map
Two of the six travel directions go up and down, but these were not easily viewable via the 2D map view. Zones whose only ways out were vertical looked like dead ends.
There is now a 3D toggle in the map header that draws everything a player has discovered as a rotatable 3D view.
Item changes
- More consumables.
- Boss fight items.
- Trinkets: a new, rare gear type that stacks infinitely.
- Pets.
The rest
- A backend restart no longer signs players out in rare circumstances.
- Zone positions in chat are now clickable links.
- System messages left chat for a log of their own. Chat sorts by time and chimes on a mention.
- Search, sorting and paging on every inventory and guild list.
- A notepad.
- A more detailed bestiary that’s searchable by name or by drop, filterable by enemy family, and every entry lists where it was seen before.
What’s next
More content (quests, units, zones) in preparation for the beta.
Guest accounts are open at online.grindshell.com.
About the wipe
Alpha progress will be wiped when the beta arrives. What your time buys right now is influence over the shape of the game.