Today we deployed Patch 6.95 on both the client and server with some exciting new changes for the game.

Dynamic Scaling

Beginning with this patch, we have the ability to designate some content in the game as dynamically scaled. What this means is that regardless of your actual level, the enemies that you fight will scale the damage that you deal and the damage that you receive such that it feels like fighting an “Even Match” same-level monster.

A few notes on this feature:

• You will still see the same damage amounts appear as when fighting any other monster in the game. So for example a Level 20 fighting a dynamically scaled monster might see 1200 damage from their attacks hitting, while a Level 5 might see 100. The amount of damage the monster is receiving based on how quickly their health bar is declining will be the same between them, though.
  
• If you attack a dynamically scaled monster, you will receive a buff that lasts for 1 minute which causes any healing that you receive to be scaled as well. This means that a Level 5 Musketeer can heal a Level 20 ally just as well as a Level 20 can. It also means that a Level 20 healer can’t just instantly top off a Level 5 ally with one Renew orb making them invincible.
  
• As a caveat to all of this, however, the way that the system works still allows for some scaling of damage above “normal” for highly-geared characters. So for example, a Level 20 in Raid-tier gear will do more damage than a Level 20 in basic gear. So you still do get an advantage for being better-geared for your level compared to other players of the same level. It’s just that you will no longer one-shot Level 5 monsters because you are Level 20.
  
• The rewards in terms of drops that you receive from killing dynamically scaled monsters are based on your level. So if you fight a monster as a Level 19, you will receive Level 19 gear. Note that this caps out at Level 19 gear and does not extend to Level 20+ gear, you still have to go do Tradu Mines and Shard Dungeons to receive that.
  
  We are turning on this feature in this patch for the Cave Dungeon (Maeo’s Sanctum), Rainforest Dungeon, and Desert Dungeon. So you can now do any of those dungeons with a mixed-level group and still find a compelling experience.

Dungeon Queuing

This leads to our next major feature of the day, dungeon queuing. If you go into the Social tab and choose Activities, you will find a new feature which allows you to queue for dungeons. When doing so, you will be asked to choose a role (either Tank, Healer, or DPS – or a mix of these). Once you have selected your role, you will be entered into the queue and matched with an appropriate group.

• When your match is found, you will be instantly teleported into the dungeon and placed into a party with your new group. (Note that any existing party you were in will be overwritten by this). After completing the dungeon, or at any time if you wish to end the dungeon run, you can exit through the dungeon entrance portal and you will be returned to the spot you were in the world when the queue “popped.”
  
  
• In addition to queuing for dungeons, our queuing system now allows groups to join. When you are in a party, only the Party Leader can initiate a queue. Once they have done so, it will ask all party members to select a role. Then it will place you all into the queue together, and match your party up with other players to fill out your group appropriately. Note that depending on your group’s composition and roles, you may have to wait longer than when queuing as a single person.
  
  
• The queue will (for now) only place you in the Cave, Desert, or Jungle dungeons, and since those are now dynamically scaled, that means any player in OrbusVR can join a queue and be placed with a group regardless of level. We’re hoping this really opens up the ability for newer and veteran players alike to join together and do a fun activity. Alongside this, the week’s Defend the Realm monster slaying requirement will be focused around these three dungeon’s bosses – so basically the best and quickest way to meet your Defend the Realm requirement this week will be to use the new queuing system!
  
  
• We still have a lot of work that we want to do to further improve this feature, such as for example allowing you to choose to accept or decline the queue after it “pops”, to allow you to choose specific dungeons to queue for, and to offer daily rewards for veteran players for using the queue. But even in its current state, it should add a welcome new activity for players of all levels, and we’re excited to bring it to you!

Defend the Realm Rewards

We’ve updated the leaderboard 29 with a list of all the possible Defend the Realm rewards. In particular:

• The Defender’s Crown will be a transmog hat style signifying your efforts.
  
• The Defender of Patreayl will be a title available to choose in the new titles system we are bringing to Reborn.
  
• The Dev Final Boss reward, if unlocked, will see us put in the time to develop a special type of World Boss that one of the Dev Team members can directly get online and control, so you can fight us as an actual boss in the world before Reborn launches.

Other Changes

• The Raid Shop vendors now allow you to purchase the pet for that raid for 75 tokens.
  

Defend The Realm

Read in-depth about the event here.

Defend the Realm is a long-term event where everyone can work together to donate supplies and kill monsters in order to contribute Highsteppe's defense. The goals change every week and your personal and global contributions will unlock rewards and twists to the event.

• Your journal has a new page that will show you the current amount of points you have earned total, and for the current week. There is a cap of 2,000 points that can be earned per week per character.
  
• There is a special new vendor who you “sell” the resources that are being gathered for the week, and receive points instead of dram.
  
• You will receive credit for killing the correct type of monster that is required for the week without needing to do anything extra (e.g. there’s no quest you have to go accept or anything like that).
  
• The weekly point totals will reset every week on Tuesday at 12:01 AM (the same time that the Raid lockouts reset). Note that the first reset won’t happen until a week from tomorrow, though, so you actually have “a week and a day” for this first period of time.
  
• The event is meant to last 15 weeks total, and you have to earn a minimum of 18,000 points on your character in order to receive the rewards that the entire server unlocks. So for example, if the entire server earns enough points to unlock the Windup Pet, you will only get it if you have at least 18,000 points by the time the event ends. Note that all rewards that are items will not be given out until the end of the event, even if you earn your 18,000 points sooner than that (just like how a Kickstarter campaign works, basically).

Pet Sightseeing

Expanding on the Dragon Pet happiness system, this is a fun little activity where you can take your Dragon pet with you on a sightseeing tour of the realm. An unknown entity has placed special dragon treats spread throughout the world, so take your Dragon pet and go on an adventure to find them together!

Each treat can be consumed by your pet once per week and instantly grants full happiness. There's also a special achievement you can earn for feeding all the treats to your dragon at least once.

Shard Dungeon Bonus Rewards

You are now eligible to receive bonus rewards when running shard dungeons daily. The bonus rewards are grouped into three tiers.

Tier 1: Shards Level 1-3, 1 reward
Tier 2: Shards Level 4-6, 2 rewards
Tier 3: Shards level 7-10, 3 rewards

You can receive the rewards from each tier once per day. So for example, if you run a Level 2, Level 5, and Level 7 shard dungeon, you have received all of the bonus rewards you can get for a single day. These rewards reset on the same schedule as the guaranteed rolls for the Shard Dungeons.

You will receive the rewards when you complete the entire shard dungeon, the same time that you receive your reward chest with gear or dram. The bonus rewards are selected from a random pool of potions, including aged potions.

In addition to this, the dram you receive for completing a shard dungeon when you don’t receive a piece of gear has been increased, and now scales based on the level of the shard dungeon you completed. So for example if you complete a Level 1 Shard Dungeon you will continue to receive around 100-200 dram, but completing a Level 10 Shard Dungeon will now pay up to 2,000 dram.

New Potion Recipes

We’ve also rolled out several new 5x and 10x potion recipes which can aid you when crafting Intellect, Empowered Strikes, Strength, Luck, and Vitality potions. You’ll find these new recipes sitting in an old book in your player house (check the basement!)

Note that these recipes require some new ingredients, and are somewhat complicated to make. It’s sort of a trade-off if you want to make more potions at once with rarer ingredients and more complicated steps, or stick to the base one-at-a-time method. The choice is yours!

Our goal with these changes is to hopefully increase the availability of potions that are used often for higher-level content, to help give more casual players the ability to participate without needing quite as much grinding as before, as well as to encourage folks to run Shard Dungeons even if they already have a complete gear set.

Miscellaneous

When utilizing the Pet Bonus Treat, your pet will now always select a bonus different than the one they currently have (if applicable).

Launching on Monday August 6th, our next sprint features some great new quality of life improvements to the game as well as the introduction of our in-game cosmetic shop.

Mounts

A long-standing complaint of OrbusVR players has been the lack of a fast-movement option to make getting around the game world a little faster and easier. One of the reasons that we haven't rolled this out sooner is we wanted to have time to experiment with mounts in VR and find out what worked and what didn't. We tried a variety of approaches, from riding horses with reigns to flying around in a small airship-like device. In the end, we settled on an approach that allows the player to hop on board a flying disc (and other disc-shaped objects) to get around the world while gliding up off the ground.


You'll find a new equipment slot on your Inventory screen where your mount can be equipped. Upon doing so, bringing your hands together and pressing the Grip button, then drawing them apart, will summon your mount into existence. It's a really cool feeling that adds a special flair to mounting up and gliding off on your next adventure!

Mounts can be used anywhere that you can go in the game. If you are using Sliding Locomotion, they will increase your slide speed, as you would expect. If you prefer Teleporting to get around, they will increase the speed at which your teleportation charges to allow you to get places faster. Engaging in combat (either by getting damaged or causing damage) will cause the mount to disappear. You also cannot summon your mount while you are in combat.

The Disc Mount (shown above) will be made available as part of the Main Story Quest, and a new vendor will be added to the game world which gives out the mount to existing players who have already completed the quest.

Cosmetic Shop

The in-game Cosmetic Shop is now available via the Player Menu, and can be accessed at any time. In the shop you'll find a variety of fun items to add some flair to your gaming sessions, including new windup pets as well as some quirky hats. The hats can be used as a transmog option as well, so you can apply that look to your existing headgear without sacrificing your stats. Note that all items in the Cosmetic Shop give no in-game mechanic advantages. So for example, all mounts in the shop are the same speed as mounts found from in-game activities. All pets in the shop are purely cosmetic and not used for breeding. All hats in the shop have no stats and can only gain stats when used as a transmog skin for existing gear.

After purchasing an item, it will appear immediately in your inventory. We'll also add an Account Item (similar to how the Backer Rewards worked), so if you go to the Backer Rewards vendor on any other character on your account, you will receive the item as well.

Your purchases on the Cosmetic Shop help fund further game development and improvements, and we appreciate your patronage!

Expert Mode Raids

The other big addition coming to the game with this update will be the Expert Mode Raids, launching August 10th. We'll have more details on those next week as we prepare to unleash the most challenging content we've ever built. You can expect punishing fights as well as some new twists to keep you on your toes!

In addition to this, one of the pieces of feedback we've heard from the community is that it can be too difficult right now for more casual players to keep up with raiding due to the required number of materials and potions that make raiding possible. We'll be rolling out some additional opportunities to earn ingredients for potions via daily Shard Dungeon runs next week as well, to hopefully further expand the pool of players that can take part in end-game Normal and Hard mode Raids. More details on that to come!

Networking Improvements

Finally, we've been experimenting with some major improvements to the networking system of the game via our Beta branch and with some brave testers. We're pleased to report that this new networking is now ready for a wide-spread rollout. In this you should see much smoother movement of fast-moving objects (such as Fireball spells), as well as much higher stability on the "Default" networking type for all players.

Launching Monday, July 16th, our new Sprint brings with it a number of quality of life improvements to the game. Read on for all the details!

Transmog System for Gear

The new Transmog system allows you to change the look of your gear pieces to any piece you've previously unlocked. Mix and match to your heart's content to create a unique look for your avatar in the world of Orbus!

To begin using the system, open the new Wardrobe item in your Player House. Inside, you'll see a preview of what your gear currently looks like, as well as a list of options on the left side. Choose an option and on the right side you'll find a list of all possible styles in the game that you can apply to that gear piece. Ones that you haven't yet unlocked will be greyed out, but still visible, so you can quickly see at a glance if you've unlocked all the possibilities yet.

Unlocking a style is simple, just break down the piece of gear into a shard using the existing dismantle option in the Inventory menu. Or, use the piece of gear in the infusion process. Once it's been unlocked, you can choose to use that style as many times as you'd like in the future. Each time you change the style of a piece of gear, just pay a fee in dram based on the tier of the gear piece you are styling. Higher-tier pieces require a higher fee.

Of course, when applying the new style to your gear, all of the stats and dyes that are already on the piece will stay the same. The new style will be previewed for your in the Wardrobe, and if you're satisfied with your look, just hit Apply to save your changes and pay the fee. Note that you can also do multiple pieces at once if you want to change a significant part of your look and see how everything will fit together.

Not only does this new system offer the players some great new options for customizing their look, it also opens up a lot of new and exciting options for the art team to be able to create some new, unique styles for the game, without being constrained by needing them to look similar to previous styles.

Fellowship Improvements

It's long been on our roadmap to further improve the features available in the Fellowship system in the game, and we're pleased to deliver some of those improvements with this patch. In particular, your Fellowship menu has been overhauled, and will now sort your Fellowship members list alphabetically, as well as showing those who are online at the top of the list. You can also choose any member from the Fellowship and see the last time they were in-game, to help with fellowship management over time.

In addition to that, we've introduced the Fellowship Chest inside of the Fellowship Hall in Guild City. This new chest is a shared resource for your Fellowship where items can be stored to be shared with your fellow members. Note that only tradeable items can be stored in the chest.

In addition to that, we are currently working on a Fellowship Permissions system so that you can assign members into different roles (e.g. Officer, Leader, Member, Initiate), with different permissions for each role, such as who can access the Fellowship Chest. We're working on a really cool way of managing these permissions in-game, and as such we need to delay this piece a week or two while we finish polishing it up.

The Ranger’s trap has had some quality of life improvements. In particular, now it should deploy much more reliably, including exploding immediately if it contacts an enemy directly (as opposed to just bouncing off of them and then hitting the ground).

The Warrior has had a new mechanic introduced in the form of the Sword Charge. This mechanic can be activated after doing a combo move by holding your sword at approximately a 90-degree angle to your body for about a second. You will then hear a sound which indicates that the sword is charged, and then the next time you strike an enemy, you will perform the same combo as the last one you did. So essentially you can, for example, do a Wound combo, then charge and strike once to do the same combo again. The amount of time that it takes to charge the sword increases with each subsequent charge without doing a full combo. We’ve attempted to tune it such that you should be able to do 1 or 2 charges for each combo that you do. You can of course do it more than that as well, but in doing so you will be doing less damage than the combo. Still, that might be okay if you are just “lazily” grinding. The intent of the mechanic is to give you the ability to play the Warrior class without needing to do nearly as much repetitive motion over and over again as before.

The Warrior’s hit detection has also been improved, and now will prioritize targets which you are looking at if there is a group of enemies in front of you.

The “direction” detection has also been improved so it should be more accurate and the VFX accompanying it should be more distinct.

Fixed a bug with the Musketeer which was causing orbs to reset out of the hand/gun after they were loaded but before they were fired.

Fixed a bug which was sometimes causing enemies to target dead party members as their primary target in some boss fights.

Fixed a bug which was preventing the Fisher’s gloves from being dyed properly.

The Shard Dungeon mutations have been rotated.

A bug that allowed tombstones to always restore durability when recovered has been fixed.

Today’s patch is the culmination of our efforts to create the first VR MMO. Raids are one of the most fun and engaging pieces of content that define the MMO genre, and we’re incredibly excited to bring that experience to room-scale virtual reality.

The Waystation Crypt Raid is a 10-person raid featuring 5 bosses, increasing in difficulty from “pretty easy” to “hard” from a mechanics perspective. These bosses will challenge your group coordination in new and interesting ways that we’ve never done before, and we hope you have a blast working together to overcome them.

To enter the Raid, head to the Necropolar. If you have never been to the Necropolar before, there is a secret entrance in the Zoological Gardens Redtail Enclosure. Once in the Necropolar, follow the frozen river, staying left at the fork, and the entrance will be a portal on your right.

Raid Parties

The maximum number of players you can add to a Party has now increased to 10. If your party size increases above 5, you will receive a notice that you have joined a Raid Party. Raid Parties cannot receive loot or XP outside of raid dungeons. In addition to that, all the original dungeons in the game have been modified such that you cannot have more than 5 people in them at any given point.

Raid Lockouts

Today we’re introducing a new system for saving your progress in the Raid. Whenever you kill a boss, that boss as well as its associated trash pulls will not respawn the next time you enter the raid. The lockout is based on the leader of your party, so if you want to save your progress you’ll have to use the same Party Leader for each attempt.

Regarding loot, you will be eligible to receive 1 “chance” at a drop from each boss in the raid per week. Non-gear drops including dyes and the Windup toy can be received even if you have already used up your gear drop, however note that the Windup toy only drops on Boss 4 and 5.

The lockouts for both progress saving and loot will reset at 12:01 AM Server Time (US Central Time) on Tuesday mornings.

Raid Tokens

In addition to your base chance to get loot from Raid bosses, you will receive one Crypt Token from each boss per week. These tokens can be exchanged at the Raid Shop vendor in Highsteppe to get gear. You can choose to purchase gear for any class, regardless of your current class or the class you were playing when the token was earned. Please pay close attention to what gear you are buying, as there are no refunds.

When you buy a piece of gear from the vendor, it will roll just like you had gotten a drop from the Raid boss directly.

Tagger Tool

To aid in your strategies, a new tool has been added to the game which allows the Party Leader to mark symbols above monsters when in a Dungeon or Raid. You can acquire this handy new tool for 1 Dram (practically free) from the Dragon Shop vendor in the Zoological Gardens.

Windup Necro Boss

New to this patch we are introducing a new Pet called the Windup Necro Boss. This is a cute, fun pet that is a miniature version of the 4th boss from the Raid. Note that this is a very rare drop and it is soulbound.

A Note on Difficulty

While these fights do end up being fairly mechanically challenging, if your group has been doing T6+ shard dungeons for a while you will outgear them, which may make them a little easier than for freshly-geared 20’s. As such my expectation is that as groups learn the mechanics throughout the day, we’ll see the first clear at some point. (Of course who knows I could be wrong, haha). We will be releasing hard-mode Raids in a few weeks with some added mechanics as well as a more difficult tuning to challenge groups that are geared to the teeth but want to see how much they can overcome.

So if you’re new to the game or just hit 20, please find a group and check out this content, as it should be very doable (if difficult) for you, and a lot of fun!

And if you’re already in T10+ Shard Gear, enjoy the new sights, sounds, and mechanics and get some fun new drops, and then get your strategies down for the Hard Mode Raid which is coming soon.

Miscellaneous Other Changes

Fixed a series of stuck in combat bugs.

Fixed a bug which was leading to crashes when loading into new zones or dungeons (hopefully).

Fixed an issue causing large amounts of lag when it was snowing in the Necropolar on Rift headsets.

The “party in combat resurrection lock” mechanic now applies to the entire dungeon instance, regardless of how far away your party members are.

Fixed a bug which may have been affecting the Soulkeeper AoE attack.
Attempting to loot an item will now reset your logout timer.

Tentacles from Tentacle Elites will no longer count toward Shard mob completion.

The public character API has been updated to include records of your fastest kill on each boss in the raid, as well as the last 10 bosses you have killed (similar to how it works for Shard Dungeons). We’re also now showing your total number of boss kills for each of the World Bosses.

Fixed an issue which could sometimes incorrectly kick you from a dungeon because you weren’t in the correct party.

The Bonus XP Week has officially begun! All XP in-game (from killing monsters, quests, and everything else) has been boosted by 50%. If you’ve been playing for a while and just haven’t hit 20 yet, or want to level up another class, this is a great time to do it.

The Bonus XP Week will last through next Wednesday, June 6th at around 12 PM US Central Time.

General Patch Notes

The Highsteppe zone’s static assets (such as buildings) have been re-worked to better match our new art style.

Several new quests have been added to the game which take place in the new Necropolar zone. To begin them, you must have completed the quest “Faction Hero,” then speak with Markos.

While in the Necropolar zone, you will receive a stacking debuff called Deep Chill, which does slowly increasing amounts of damage. Sitting by the fires spread throughout the zone will clear the debuff.

The Player Chest in your Player House can now be upgraded to unlock two additional tabs for 10,000 and 100,000 dram respectively. To upgrade it, just select tab 6 and 7 and press the Upgrade button.

The Pack Mule and Finely Aged Concentrated Healing Potions are now both fully working as intended. The Pack Mule potion will increase the base amount of weight you can carry in your inventory for 1 hour (up from 20 minutes).

We’ve re-worked some of the internal client-side networking in the game to move sending packets off the main thread. This should result in performance improvements and hopefully fix some disconnect and desync bugs as well.

Invisibility Potions will now break on the wearer if any damage is done or received. This was always how it was intended to work. We may in the future add some counter-play to this potion (such as a potion that allows you to detect invisibility), and if we do that we may change this back, but for now we fixed it to work according to the original intent.

PvP Mechanics

The Warrior’s Shield Slam now causes a 90% slow on enemy player targets for 2 seconds. In addition, all buffs on the target that have a remaining duration of less than 10 seconds are cleared.

The Runemage and Musketeer Decurse abilities will now clear 1 friendly buff from enemy player targets. Note that many long-term buffs such as those from potions (e.g. +Strength, Pack Mule, etc.) cannot be decursed.

The Ranger and Musketeer’s Poison abilities now apply an additional effect onto enemy player targets which reduce their incoming healing by 15%, which can stack up to 5 times. The additional effect lasts as long as the base Poison effect.

Bandits can no longer initiate trades with other players.

The new logout system will prevent bandits from logging out for the duration of their remaining bandit timer, or 5 minutes, whichever is shorter.

The Trickster’s Chest will now spawn in the Wilds on a set schedule. Note that the schedule is based around in-game time.

A note on Player Slow effects

Slow effects on Players in combat reduce the speed at which your Stamina bar regenerates. That means if you have a full Stamina bar and are slowed by 90%, you can still teleport away or sprint using up your existing Stamina. However, if you Slow someone who has just teleported or used up their stamina bar while sprinting, they will be much more vulnerable. This gives a natural defense against slow effects to players who make smart decisions about when to use up their Stamina bar and when to save it to escape.

Pet Mechanics

We’ve introduced the Happiness rating to Dragon Pets, which you can increase by petting your Dragon once every 5 minutes, or by feeding it a Pet Treat. Happiness will slowly degrade over time whenever you Dragon is equipped.

At this time, we are delaying the implementation of the Dragon Happiness Bonuses while we consider and re-work those based on the community’s initial feedback. We should have them out the door later this week.

Dragons have gained a much higher speed, so they should be able to follow their owners more closely.

Haptic feedback for petting Dragons will now no longer trigger when the Player is in combat.

Beginning today at 12 PM Noon Pacific Time, we'll be holding a free weekend so that all Steam users with VR headsets can try out OrbusVR! We'll also be putting the game on sale for 25% off starting tomorrow and running through the weekend.

If you've been curious about the game or want to give it a shot, come join us and have a great time. We've got hundreds of hours of content for you to enjoy, including dragon pet breeding, fishing, four combat classes, regular and hard-mode 5 player dungeons, World Bosses, 20 hours of story quests, and more! There's never been a better time to jump in and play.

If it's your first time playing, please be sure to run through the in-game Tutorial to start your journey, as it's packed with a lot of information you'll really want to know to get the most out of your play time. In addition, we've got a handy Wiki including a Getting Started guide to help fill you in on all the details of the mechanics and the world:

https://wiki.orbusvr.com/Getting_Started

See you in-game!