Oh yeah, on a side note the next warfare map will be coming out 5 hours early this time as I have places to be. It will go live at midnight (GMT) / 7pm (EST) server time. So make sure you're ready. These blogs are getting shorter and shorter...

Time flies quickly it seems, next warfare map will be released tomorrow. We'll be going to the symmetrical desert map as we go back in to the normal rotation. Starting positions will not be released ahead of time and the middle objective will be the hospital.

New abilities are being created on Dev as we speak, a few of them are quite complicated so may take a while but they should be up pretty soon.

First draft of the new abilities is now done, so time to get feedback as I get them coded and tested on Dev. These are just initial ideas on how they will work, feel free to say if you think any of them are over-powered, under-powered or need tweaking. Focus costs and prerequisites have yet to be determined.

Learning

Forsight
Allows you to queue 1 ability to be trained when your current ability finishes training.

Xen Master
Receive a 20% discount from Xen's Dojo when resetting stats.

Warfare

Astral Bomb
Consumes all your focus and injures you, ejecting you from the wasteland. Damage is split equally between all enemies on the square and is equal to your current HP. So a 100 hp Avatar triggering this ability on a square with 5 enemies would do 20 damage to each of them. Damage is negated by active radiance.

Stealth

Expert Cloak
Allows a player to use healing items while cloaked, regardless of enemy presence.

Support

Death Wash
Toggle this ability on or off to have any injury in the wasteland reported to you, along with the coordinates it occurred.

Shielding
Allows an avatar to shield a building, preventing the building from taking damage for 10 minutes. Shielded buildings will not heal while enemies are present and may not be re-shielded for a short while after being shielded.

Protection
Allows an avatar to protect a non-avatar for 60 seconds in the wasteland. Any damage that player takes from any source will be redirected to the protecting avatar. Damage from attacks will be calculated against the Avatars defensive stats.

Summoning

Summon Beacon
Raises a temporary beacon on your current square that lasts 5 minutes. The beacon will remain even after you have moved away. Can only be used on friendly or neutral squares.

Summon Elemental
Summon an elemental that will be friendly to your gang and remain on its summoned square for 5 minutes. This elemental will be level 80 and act in the same way as sentries.

Slight change to the mechanics behind Gang HQ theft. If attacking an un-deployed HQ, you will now have a 50:50 chance of stealing GP or Metal if both are available. However, if only 1 is available then you will always steal that. So if you un-deploy your HQ with 0 metal and lots of GP, any enemy attacks will result in GP theft of 1-2 points every minute.

This is a fix to the old bug that would generate messages saying "Nothing left to steal", when there actually was. You monster.

I'm in space!