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DEVELOPER'S BLOG
Introducing Rank 8 – Wizard
Greetings, Tree of Savior dev team here. Today we’re introducing you to the new Rank 8 classes, and we’re starting with the Wizard class tree. As always, remember that the contents you see here are still under development and could look different in their final version. Necromancer (Circle 3) This is the highest circle of the Necromancer class. The effect of the original Necromancer Decay debuff was limited to weakening the enemy to arrow attacks, but in Circle 3 it becomes a lot more powerful, momentarily neutralizing the effects of all the items equipped by the opponent. ▲ You can enhance the Necromancer’s Decay debuff, making it corrode the enemy’s equipment. ▲ The new debuff is expected to open up more diverse strategies for Necromancers, like enhancing the power of summons, or using Shoggoth/Dirty Pole to widen the area affected by Decay. ▲ A new skill for summoning “Skull Archers” with high combat power will also be introduced. Alchemist (Circle 3) Circle 3 Alchemists will be able to choose the appearance of items created through the Briquetting skill when both items combined are of the same type. ▲ Alchemists can now combine items of their preferred appearance and stats to create new items. The effect of the Briquetting skill was rather tame in terms of enhancing the performance of new items, but in Circle 3 we widened this scale of enhancement. Also, we’ve introduced a whole new roster of recipes to be used with the Tincturing skill, allowing Alchemists to take the role of item makers. As for item awakening dungeons, we’re introducing a feature that will require 3 times the amount of materials, instead delivering the results 3 times faster. ▲ The Magnum Opus skill gets an additional number of slots, allowing you to craft an “Homunculus”, the ultimate creation. The “Homunculus” will carry some of the skills of the Alchemist that created it and can be set to use them automatically. The “Homunculus” creature has a life span of 10 days after it is created. Warlock (Circle 2) In Circle 2, Warlocks, who use the power of evil spirits, will be given a new skill that will allow them to either combine summoned evil spirits to create a more powerful attack, or manipulate a summoned evil spirit directly. ▲ The higher-grade spirits in red appear based on probability and are stronger than the regular evil spirits. ▲ The new skills allows you to manipulate evil spirits and lead them to your enemy. When nearby spirits have been absorbed, these evil spirits can be launched through regular attacks. Featherfoot (Circle 2) Featherfoot Circle 2 unlocks the skill Levitation. ▲ A flying Featherfoot will evade most melee physical attacks and fly over magic circles on the ground. There will be a self-destruct type skill that can only be used while flying. The skill will drain 60% of your max HP. Casting it with HP below the 60% mark will incapacitate your character. However, the skill temporarily renders nearby enemies in a special state where, when you attack them, it will heal you in return. Sage (Circle 1) Sage is a class that will be first introduced in Rank 8. The general concept is that a sage gained the knowledge of the inner workings of the reality and, as a result, can manipulate space itself. The class will possess skills that distort space and dimensions. ▲ Open up a "portal" for you and your party members to move to a memorized location. ▲ The skill Micro Dimension attacks opponents with small distorted fragments of space and it can have a replicating duplicate attribute. The number of duplicates grows with the skill level. ▲ Ultimate Dimension maximizes the portion of space to attack enemies. One attribute of this skill can also increase its perimeter and power. Enchanter (Circle 1) The Enchanter is also a newly-introduced Rank 8 Wizard-type class. Enchanters do possess some combat skills but they mainly play the support role by enchanting items with magic. ▲ Enchanters can craft magic skills into a magic scroll and give it to other players. ▲ This means, if you are friends with an Enchanter, you can use Joint Penalty. The store’s customers can choose their desired options listed on the shop and the enchanted item will have a corresponding prefix in front of its name. The effect lasts for 24 hours and the number of available enchantments grows with the skill level. Enchanter C1 can only enchant Armor items such as tops, bottoms and shields.
Weekly Question and Answer – July 8th, 2016
1. In the silver-sharing feature you have planned, will there be any penalties for transferring silver between characters? As introduced on answer no. 3 of last week’s Q&A post, we’re looking to develop a feature that will allow silver to be shared among characters of the same team. While we don’t intend to implement any sort of tax or penalty for sharing silver with characters of your own team, we do plan to make this feature available only to Token users. This, in a way, is expected to increase the value and usability of Token items as well. 2. Do you have any plans to sell Instanced Dungeon Reset Vouchers in the future? We realize there’s been some demand for Instanced Dungeon Reset Vouchers among players interesting in speeding up their leveling process. As of now, we have no plans to make Reset Vouchers available for purchase, since this would imply considerably expanding the admittance to dungeons which aren’t designed for unrestricted access. That said, we will consider developing a type of advanced EXP Tome for those looking to level up their characters a little faster. 3. Will there ever be an option for blocking in-game requests automatically? We want to review the possibility of developing separate functions for declining all guild join requests, party join requests, friendly dual requests and blocking whispers from selected users automatically. We can’t say for sure that a feature like this will be implemented, but we agree it would be a convenient function to have included in the game settings, so this is something we’ll be actively looking into. 4. Any news about the Bunny Boy costume? We actually had no initial plans to develop a Bunny Boy costume, but we decided to create one after the continuous interest we saw from our Steam users. Seeing as the idea originated from the Steam community, we definitely want to add this costume to the TP Shop there as soon as we can; just wait a little longer. 5. Can we expect any future option to change the skin color of our characters? The current design of TOS characters uses complex graphics which make it difficult to apply color changes to the skin alone. We understand this is a commonly requested feature, however, so we’ll be thinking of ways to make it happen in the most effective way. 6. Are you also considering making it possible to do quests or hunt during auto matching? This is something that has been discussed internally, too, but first our goal is to focus on making dungeon auto matching times shorter. We did apply a patch to our Korean servers recently which actively reduces the waiting time in dungeon auto matching, so we will be analyzing the results we get and likely revisit the possibility of allowing quests and/or hunting while auto matching.
Weekly Question and Answer – July 1st, 2016
1. The update gap between kTOS and iTOS is quite wide now. When can we finally expect the next update? The way we develop TOS is generally an internal process, but we know players have been waiting for updates on iTOS for a long time now, so we thought we would shed some light on how we’ve been working and what we’re planning. The repositories that manage the servers, clients, graphic data, etc. for kTOS and iTOS are currently separate. That means that, originally, all the contents and the system were made for kTOS, and then transferred to iTOS. The only exceptions were updates made to target issues specific to iTOS. These updates were applied directly to iTOS, since running them through kTOS first would have delayed our response time to fix the issues. Lately, however, we’ve noticed a high demand for kTOS contents among iTOS players, and so we’ve decided to change our policy and work on merging the repositories for the two versions. So far, iTOS updates like new costumes and such were done through a partial application of contents, rather than a full-sized merging process. However, we feel that this repository merge is necessary to minimize patch gaps between both versions of TOS. As for when you can expect new updates, we’re now focusing on the merge process and the plan is to finish merging and testing during the latter half of July, after which we’ll implement the merge patch. We expect to bring all the major updates we have prepared to iTOS after this process is finished. 2. Whatever happened to the PVP system? When can we expect that? The PVP system is included in the list of major updates we want to implement after the kTOS-iTOS repository merging process is finished. This will include the Team Battle League feature, as well as GvG within servers of the same region. These contents have already been applied to kTOS and are currently being tweaked in terms of balance and bug fixing. We consider PVP contents as a very important part of the game, so we wanted to make sure the environment is as balanced as possible. This unfortunately caused some delays in bringing the PVP system over, for which we ask for your understanding. 3. Do you have any plans for a future silver-sharing feature? We’ve received constant requests and suggestions from the players about a silver-sharing feature, so we’re currently looking for ways on how we could implement this in the TOS environment. We can say that, at the moment, we’re working to develop a feature that would allow silver to be shared between characters of the same team. As of now, we don’t intend to make silver sharable between different accounts; our initial plan is to allow transferring silver through the Team Storage.
The Monster Card Equip System
Greetings, Saviors! This week on the blog we want to introduce you to a new feature we’re working on for a future update: the Monster Card Equip System. Please note that this feature is still under development and the final version may look different from what we’re showing you here, but this is what you can generally expect. What is the Monster Card Equip System? We plan on making Monster Cards obtainable through the Cubes acquired after defeating field boss monsters and instanced dungeon/mission bosses. Our goal is to create a function where these cards can be equipped by a character, just like equipment items. The Monster Cards will then have their own effects that are applied to the character when they equip the cards. Equipping Monster Cards New Monster Card slots will be added to the characters’ inventories. Each rank of your character will grant them one slot, so for instance, a Rank 5 character will have 5 Monster Card slots in their Inventory. To equip a card from your inventory, you can either right-click it or drag and drop it on the card slot. You can equip different cards and receive their diverse types of benefits at once, or you can equip multiples of the same card and focus on a single effect that you want to multiply. Can Monster Cards be Unequipped? Monster Cards can be freely equipped and unequipped. Unequipping a Monster Card, however, will cause its EXP to decrease. See the images below.
Weekly Question and Answer – June 17, 2016
1. Do you have any plans to make Monster Gems or Cards tradable? We do plan on making Monster Cards, Monster Gems and regular Gems sharable through the Team Storage in a future patch. Along with this change, we plan to make Boss Monster Cards become unobtainable through quests and will be deleted. 2. The current UI makes it difficult to understand whether an item is going to change to untradeable depending on the Token we’re using. Are you working to fix this? When a character participates in a personal trade with an untradeable Token, the items traded with it will also become untradeable after that trade. Despite this having been mentioned in previous comments and announcements, a lot of users are still confused as to why their traded items became untradeable even when trading with a Token activated. For this reason, we are currently developing a new UI that will hopefully make it clearer to trading users how their activated Token will influence the items’ tradable/untradeable status. 3. When will we get new premium costumes on Steam? We will be launching a new set of premium costumes and head accessories for the TP Shop this coming maintenance, and we also plan on releasing premium cosmetic items more often with future scheduled maintenances. 4. Are you working on any Swordsman balancing issues? We expect to implement some changes on the Korean servers as soon as next week. These changes will include improving the attack scope of a few skills and increasing STR stat bonuses. 5. It’s not uncommon to see items being sold on the Market for RMT purposes. Do you have any plans to combat this? We’re currently developing an in-game Market report function which we expect to implement sometime next week. As you can probably guess, this function will allow users to report items suspected of RMT, helping us identify similar cases and reduce the prevalence of RMT in the Market. 6. Do you have an ETA on when the servers will be reopened to new users? As mentioned in our previous weekly Q&A post on the blog, the purpose of closing the servers to new users was to allow for a more controlled environment in which we could stabilize the game to a certain extent and fix some pressing issues that required our attention. On the other hand, we’ve been receiving numerous requests from players who are eager to join ToS, and some of the issues we were most worried about have thankfully been fixed meanwhile. As such, we plan on reopening the servers after the Market report function mentioned earlier is implemented in the game, which is expected to happen sometime next week.
Weekly Question and Answer - June 10, 2016
Greetings, Saviors! We've compiled another list of questions gathered from our forums to answer this week; read them below. 1. Regarding the Client and Server Lags First, regarding the client, we have prepared a couple of additional updates as a follow-up to the previous update. They are ready to be included in the future patch. We can expect enhanced performance in a crowded situation. As for the server lag problem, we’ve tracked down the factors suspected to be related to server resource leaks and we applied corrective measures during our latest patch. We can only confirm the server issues a few days after the fact, so we are constantly checking the system. 2. When will you reopen the servers? The rationale behind closing the servers was to create a controlled environment so that the issues such as bots, lags and payment issues can be solved. The ultimate goal was to provide our users with optimal gameplay and experience. After implementing certain fixes for bot and exploit issues, we are planning to reopen the servers for newcomers. Look out for further announcements about this. 3. When can we expect to hear about Rank 8 classes? We are currently developing Rank 8 classes. The information about those classes are soon to be revealed. We hope to show you what we have prepared and polished very soon. 4. Will Monster Gems and Cards ever become tradable? The original intention behind them was to encourage users to explore various fields and invest a certain amount of time to obtain the desired items. That is why we set them as untradeable. We have no plans to make them tradable yet. 5. Could you let us know which add-ons are allowed and which aren’t? We have no plans on restricting add-ons that conveniently display information which can be obtained from external communities or between users. However, we are sternly against add-ons that allow abnormal gameplay such as being able to use NPC stores on a field or an auto-play program. Those are prohibited and its user is liable to be banned. 6. Lv 160 and Lv 175 dungeons are very stingy with EXP compared to other dungeons; are there any plans to revitalize them? It is true that there are unpopular dungeons or mercenary missions. We believe that even if we simply adjust EXP and Silver yields from dungeons, it will only rearrange the popularity list and will not solve the problem fundamentally. That is why in kTOS, we have included unique rewards that are dungeon-specific in certain dungeons. And we plan to expand such practice to other dungeons as well. In addition, this week’s patch will change all the dungeons’ BGMs to their own themes. 7. Will there be a housing system and/or guild castle customization? At the moment, the degree of customization is limited to changing the Lodge theme. However, we are considering the system which players can furnish the lodge with certain items or exhibit the trophies earned. Likewise, the guild hangouts will have a place where the players can place their trophies.
Weekly Question and Answer
Greetings, Saviors! Today on the blog we’re talking about our Saviors' Q&A. The following statement is indicating that many of our saviors posted these questions frequently. 1. The game still feels slow, even after the optimization patch. How much more and when do you plan to further optimize the game, and when can we expect a lag-free Tree of Savior? A. We thoroughly applied all of our previously announced optimization measures, but because every user’s playing environment is different and there are so many diverse factors at play in-game, we still cannot guarantee that the expected improvements will show in every single situation. There are still some areas in the game we can speed up, so we plan on continuing to improve the lag issue through frequent patches. 2. Do you have any plans to develop a class or rank reset potion? A. Creating a character in TOS involves making choices about stats, skills, attributes, classes, and many other things. It is possible to revert a character’s entire state to what it was like the day before, for example, but rolling back their class or skills while maintaining the level and stats intact is not an easy task. We will, however, consider making it possible to give up class advancement quests to allow picking a different class. 3. We’re being affected by the bug that joins 10-15 people together in instanced dungeons. If you’re going to allow large numbers of characters to be matched together, why don’t you introduce stronger boss mobs or random hidden bosses? A. This bug is an issue that’s been affecting only our Steam servers, and something we’re working to fix as soon as possible. We did try playing dungeons with over 10 people in a test version of the game, but it was just too confusing and complicated. That is why we want to keep the parties to 5 players or under. 4. There’s a connection problem happening every time the Gravity Pole skill is used. Are you fixing this bug? How far along are you on this issue? A. This bug has been around for a long time, but we haven’t been able to accurately reproduce it so far, so until now we’re still not entirely sure of how it can be fixed. This is especially true considering that it has never occurred in the development server, only on the live server. We’ve recently found and revised some aspects we think might be related to this bug, and we expect to apply them as soon as we’re done with testing. 5. Sometimes a character’s head will just disappear, which is a shame considering the otherwise beautiful graphics of the game. Are you fixing this bug? A. The dev team is well aware of this issue. We’ve set up a testing PC to figure out whether this happens only with specific video cards. We’ll try to fix this issue as soon as possible. Thank you for reading and have fun playing Tree of Savior.
Recent Client Optimization Measures
Greetings, Saviors! Today on the blog we’re talking about our game client. Many of you have long been noticing that, when user numbers go up or during busy battle scenarios, the client’s response time tends to drop rather low. And in fact, while the game’s graphic engine is able to portray images with its distinctive unique 2d-like feel, it was suffering from a lot of performance-related problems. So, in this post, we want to notify the information about how much we improved in the new patch. The biggest issue with the current engine was the high number of draw call. Every time this number reached a certain level, the CPU would become overworked while the performance of GPU was underutilized. One of the main reasons behind this high number of draw calls was the abundance of particle effects. Whenever an enemy dies, or a character on screen attacks, and even when doing nothing, a large number of particle effects is required to render all the small objects moving in the background. - Particle Effect Batching In order to reduce the number of draw calls, we need to group together particles of the same type to create draw call batches. The problem is that most particles used are semi-transparent, so without depth sorting, they won’t be rendered the way we intend. The current engine prioritizes rendering accuracy, so particle effects of all types were mixed together, making batching impossible and increasing the number of draw calls. We considered, in this case, that improving the client’s performance was a more urgent matter and decided to slightly compromise the visual accuracy of the game in favor of allowing more batching. We’re also applying other measures to improve performance and reduce draw calls, such as exploiting multiple render targets, shadow processing optimization and character instancing. - Multiple Render Target - Shadow Processing Optimization and Character Instancing - We tested versions with and without the optimization measures applied and compared the results. - Chart Showing FPS (Frame Per Second) and MS (Millisecond per frame) Figures by time The top of the graph shows FPS variation (the higher, the better), while the bottom represents MS figures (where lower is better). With all the optimization measures applied, we witnessed an increase of approximately 2.5 times in minimum FPS. We were able to see that the gaming environment was improved greatly by the fact that by raising the minimum FPS allowed the game to maintain at least 60 FPS on the testing specifications. Note that these results were obtained in a testing environment and can differ depending on each user's PC specifications. However, the inconvenience caused by these problems is expected to reduce significantly in most situations. Besides of these issues, there are still some problems need to be optimized such as CPU multicore utilization and Graphics data-side optimizations. These measures are part of all efforts to continue providing a better environment to TOS players. Thank you.
Steam TOS Service Improvement Plan
Greetings, Saviors! First of all, we would like to thank you for the love and support you’ve been showing for Tree of Savior. We hope this post addresses some of the most pressing issues you’ve been asking about and sheds some light on how we are working to improve them. Client Lag Issue The graphic engine optimization is currently in process. We had some major progress and the patch is being prepared. How much it smoothed the overall experience and improved the performance is going to be announced through our Dev Blog. Server Lag Issue As stated in our previous announcement, temporary restrictions limiting access for new players to Tree of Savior are now in place. We will alleviate the “slow server process speed” symptoms through temporary maintenance before we permanently solve this server lag issue. As previously announced, there have been other DDoS attacks on the [SA] Silute server. Every attack results in the particular machine getting banned, which means far lower machines compared to the user count, and we have been denied adding more machines to the server. The SA server shall be moved to a NA location due to the fact that normal service operation is practically impossible with the current local service provider. The regional pricing will remain the same even after the machine’s location transfer. The server will stay in NA until we find a good solution to the SA problem. Persistent Bot Problem The Bot Classifier for [SEA] Telsiai, [SA] Silute and [SEA] Varena servers is under maintenance and has not been fully operational. This is a problem related to DB backup, which cannot be solved easily and requires extended maintenance to fix, which is why we are putting it on hold for now. In the case of [SA] Silute, the problem should be solved and the situation normalized after today’s relocation. We also expect to solve the problem for [SEA] Telsiai and Varena and get back to normal operation on those servers as soon as possible. Why haven’t you applied to iTOS the same patch as kTOS? The regions for iTOS are more and diverse and applying a patch for each region takes some time. Our previous patches also had problems of that sort. Such problems resulted in the updates and the game access being unavailable. Also, after we update the Korean version and receive feedback from the users there, we sometimes end up making changes to it again, so getting a final version of the update that we can apply to iTOS can take some time. That is the reason why we were unable to apply patches frequently. Feedback and Communication from the Staff Are Insufficient From now on, we will have a regular Q&A time with the Dev Team based on the opinions from you, the users. Also, a CM will gather up questions raised on the forum and forward them to the Dev Team and provide our users with answers. Token Prices Our players have long been voicing out their opinions about the price of Tokens, and after some internal discussion we’ve decided to lower Token prices. We plan to compensate those who are currently using or have recently purchased Tokens as a result. Details will be announced in a separate news post. link : https://treeofsavior.com/news/?n=434 Thank you for reading and have fun playing Tree of Savior.