A Time For Everything

I know many of you were expecting the last part of the Mother's Day release today, but unfortunatly that's going to have to wait till tomorrow. Tomix is working on the cutscenes for the quest, but they are pretty big and he needs another day to get them all ready. We don't know exactly when it'll be out tomorrow, but we'll let you know!

For today though we've got something a lot of you wanted. (And bugged Tomix about every week for the past few months) Avatar of Time is finally going into testing for DA holders! The item you got from the calendar won't change into the class until the testing phase is over. (It's going to last 2 weeks like the others) If you are a non-DA holder you won't be able to actually test the armor, but if you have the item from the calendar you WILL be able to use it once it changes. This armor uses a couple of new effects that haven't been done before, including a new DoT type effect that was pretty hard to get working correctly. There will be an official testing thread for this class in the Dragonfable General Discussion section of the forums. Make sure that you let us know of any bugs you run into as several things may break because of how different a few skill effects are compared to normal effects.

While you're testing it, make sure to keep several things in mind.

First, It's not going to be as powerful as Doom Knight. I know several people said that it should be because it's an "Avatar", but it won't be. (Yes, even after the skill revamp DoomKnight is getting, it will still be the strongest armor in the game. Again, that won't change) Avatar of Time is a name, nothing more. While the armor is flashy and cool looking like an Avatar should be, it's not going to be doing 400%, or more, damage on every skill.

Second, make sure to use all the skills and experiment with them. Just because something isn't obvious the first moment you push the button, doesn't mean the skill isn't doing anything. Skills that can't miss, they have TONS of Bonus to Hit, have no real notification unless we give it one and I didn't think you wanted that bar to constantly be popping up over your character. If you have a question about a skill that you think has an effect but you don't know what it is, ask me in the testing thread. I'll be happy to give you an answer as to what the skill does.

Third, if you don't like a skill make sure you give us a reason and what effect you think would be better to replace it. "I hate X! Get rid of it!" is less helpful in terms of feedback than, "This class doesn't really seem to be able to handle *enemy/effect/something else*. I really feel like *skill* should be changed and *effect* added because it will make sure it can counter it better." Something to keep in mind though is that several of the choices I made in terms of stating the class took into consideration that it may be missing something. Ask first and I'll be sure to explain why it's missing something or work to try and figure out some sort of compromised effect that solves the need to keep the class somewhat balanced and make sure you get an effect that makes the class better.

Fourth, there is skill activation lag on a couple of the skills. I can't fix that. Flash is based on a timeline where it starts at 1 and goes until you stop adding in art. You can have hundreds or thousands of frames in flash and that slows down things like skills. When you push a skill button the game has to jump from where it is ALLLLLLL the way to whatever skill animation connects to the button you just pushed. AoT's timeline is really, really, long because of how much Tomix put into the class. That means that you may see a tiny bit of lag when you push a skill and the game has to not only calculate the damage and effect, but also has to move to play the connected animation. It may be more apparent on slower computers or connections, and I'm sorry but there is no actual way to fix that with how many animations this class has. I wish there was but the animations themselves are amazing, Tomix really outdid himself with them, so I hope they make up for the tiny bit of processing lag.

With this release, the Guardian revamp moves out of testing and becomes the live version of the class. Due to work this week I wasn't able to get the matching items for Guardian ready, nor the saving feature for Guardian's to be able to save the class from the Guardian Tower. I'll be working on all of that tomorrow while the rest of the team works on getting the main release out for you guys.