In PlayFellowship’s most recent livestream on November 10th, Chief Rebel’s Community Director, Hamish Bode, was also joined by Chief Rebel’s CEO and Game Director, Axel Lindberg. Hamish and Axel discussed upcoming balance changes together. Other topics during the stream included the Eternal Queue system, social and community features, and leaver penalty. Hamish also teased the upcoming video interview with Axel to be released on the PlayFellowship YouTube channel.
If you ever want to catch these dev streams, Hamish said he plans on streaming on Tuesdays and Fridays around 8:00 am NZST (GMT+13).
Upcoming Hero Balance Changes
While Axel was on stream today, he discussed with Hamish some of the balancing updates coming this week. The maintenance patch scheduled for this Thursday, November 20th at 7:00am CET will contain:
- Adjustments to Voidbringer’s Touch weapon ability,
- Buffs to Rime’s single target abilities,
- Elarion buffs,
- Adjustment to the Shadowlord Curse.
The DPS weapon ability, Voidbringer’s Touch, is being adjusted this week. Axel stated that the feedback they got about the weapon was that it was fun when they first discovered it and how to optimize its use. However, the more recent feedback is that it has now begun to feel like a crutch. It was stated that they plan to not neuter the weapon, but to bring it more in-line with other weapon options. The changes cut the amount of damage accumulated and the maximum amount of damage dealt in half. 100% critical strike chance will be added to the weapon’s baseline as well, with its Grievous Critical Strike effect. Axel teased at a new build to work around the new Voidbringer relating to the fact that it will be guaranteed to crit.
Rime is getting a buff to her Cold Snap, Glacial Blast, Freezing Torrent abilities to offset the changes made to Voidbringer’s Touch.
Elarion is said to need just a little more love. The plan is to reduce Skystrider’s Grace cooldown from 3 minutes to 2 minutes. No other changes for Elarion were mentioned on stream, but there may be more to come in the patch notes for this week.
Adjustments to Dungeon Curses
There have been a couple of dungeon curses that they are looking at making adjustments to. Axel stated that Chief Rebel’s intention for the curses is that they don’t end up being negative for your dungeon timer.
Axel opened the discussion about the Shadowlord changes with: “We haven’t tested this yet; it might go too crazy.”
Chief Rebel noticed that the Shadowlord’s affix takes a long time to kill in the higher difficulty levels and that the buff gained by defeating it doesn’t make up for the time lost. To fix this issue, they are looking to adding a 100% Spirit point value to the Shadowlord boss. This means that players will be able to use their Spirit Ability during the Shadowlord encounter and have it back up again once Shadowlord dies. It was stated that they might end up adjusting this change if it seems to swing too far in the other direction.
They are also “very aware of Malevolent Shade” being a negative for dungeon timers as well, with plans to look at this curse later for adjustments.
The Mid-December Patch & Eternal Queue System
The mid-December patch, scheduled for December 11th was potentially going to be when the first reset for Fellowship would happen. While this is no longer the case as it was contingent on the addition of a new hero (or two) and other content, there is a hefty patch planned for mid-December.
The long awaited Eternal queue system is projected to be part of this mid-December patch, but it could potentially come sooner. However, Eternal Queues won’t be coming this week for the November 20th patch. Hamish said to expect the first iteration of Eternal Queue to come in ~3 weeks. The details of how this queue will function haven’t been released yet.
Social and Community Features
On stream today, Axel Lindberg confirmed whispers are coming during this week’s patch on Thursday November 20th. He explained that the reason why it took longer to fix than it probably should have was due to having an issue with how the chat system was set up. They had to rebuild the connections between different servers/instances in order to get it working.
They are also looking at improving and implementing more social and community tools, including the addition of in-game guilds.
Incentives and the Leave Penalty
Leaver penalty is something that is currently being looked at. Hamish stated that “leaver queues themselves can be griefed.” If a leaver penalty is applied if you leave mid-dungeon, the person may go afk and/or grief instead to avoid the penalty. Rather than penalizing players for bad behavior, they may be looking at trying to incentivize positive behavior.
The Upcoming Interview
Hamish conducted and recorded an interview with Axel last week. The video is planned to be released this week on the PlayFellowship youtube channel. The video goes over where the game is at now and what’s coming up in the future.
New heroes being worked on, the likelihood of when one of them will be coming soon (very soon). Three heroes are discussed in the video, with two of them further along than the third. These heroes are coming early next year. “We talk about the top level fantasy of both of those heroes and they are very cool.”
Other Topics
A few other topics were covered during the stream that were only touched on briefly.
- There is a holiday event in the works to be released in December. There is no set date for when this event will release.
- The first reset for Fellowship is to come in Q1 next year with no set date yet.
- When asked about if there will be changes to empowered sockets, gems, in-game gearing, Hamish Bode stated: “Almost certainly. It’s Early Access, right? There’s changes to everything.”
- Cosmetic systems are currently very rudimentary, we are at the start of what it is.
- An in-game store is coming and weapon skins are coming.
- Updates to the editable HUD are coming.
- Per-character keybinds are planned.
- A more robust buff tracker is to come over time.
- Scalable cursors are planned, but they are lower priority at the moment.
