HV 0.85 is now live!


Equipment Management

- The Inventory page was renamed Equip Inventory, and now only lists equipment. It has new functionality where you can place equipment in storage, which will prevent it from being listed anywhere else, including on the equipment screen.

Gear cannot be placed in storage if it is equipped. If an equipment piece is equipped in any equipment set on any of your personas, it will be listed here as grayed out.

- There have been various changes and improved consistency for when equipment is displayed and selectable in various screens:

Gear is now hidden in the equipment shop and in the mooglemail and salvage screens when equipped in any equipment set on any persona. (Previously, they were only hidden if in the currently selected equipment set.)

Gear is now protected and unselectable in the equipment shop and in the mooglemail, salvage and reforge screens when locked. They are however listed and can be unlocked from the same screen.

Bound equips will still obviously not show up on the mooglemail screen, and you still cannot select equipment from your active set in the item world and reforge screen.

In all other cases, gear should be visible and selectable even when equipped and/or locked.

- A new equipment multi-selector was created for the equipment storage page, which means you can store or retrieve multiple items at a time, both by clicking to select multiple items and shift-clicking to select ranges.

- Equipment locking is now reliable, in the sense that the lock icon won't update unless the state change was saved on the server.

- UI interaction when selecting, locking and unlocking equipment should feel much better in general.

- The equipment shop now also uses the new multi-selector to enable selling and buying multiple equips at a time. Note that here, you have to control-click or shift-click to enable selecting multiple items.

- The equipment shop "Sell All" button will now select all unlocked equipment you have rather than sell it outright.

- Equipment in the equipment shop that you cannot currently equip will now be displayed in red. Non-fusable equipment at more than 100 levels over your current level will display in bright red, while fusable equipment 100 levels over or less will display in a duller red.


The Lottery

- The weapon lottery will now sometimes have shields. This will happen about half as often as the other options.

- The soul fragment prize in the lottery was replaced with the new Caffeinated Candy item, which restore 5 stamina each. These are untradeable and will disappear if sold to the item shop. Using stamina restoratives out of battle will always use Caffeinated Candy before Energy Drinks.

- The blood token prize in the lottery was replaced with more chaos tokens, by popular demand.

- You can now opt out of the lottery grand prize by clicking the new "Do Not Want" button below the equipment details. This will let you enter a lottery just for the 2nd through 5th place prizes. Opting out of the grand prize will additionally increase your win chance/effective number of tickets for the rest of the prizes by 20%. (This is applied after any increase for using a Golden Lottery Ticket, and therefore stacks multiplicatively.)


Monster Lab

- The "Feed" button on the monster stats page and the "Feed All" button on the monster slots page now operate in the exact same way, and neither will waste food. The feed quantity is always rounded down, and monsters will not be fed if they cannot eat at least one food. The single-food option was removed.

- Added a "Drug All Monsters" button to automatically use happy pills on all monsters with yellow or worse morale. This will not waste pills, but it will use more than one if it can do so without wasting any. This specifically avoids using pills on monsters that are currently on green morale, in case you want to boost them with upgrades.

- Monster food/morale capacity was increased from 12000 to 24000. This was done primarily to make no waste for extra strength happy pills possible. Drain rates or restoration amounts are not affected. The yellow thresholds is still at 6000, and the red threshold was dropped from 3000 to 2400.

- Crystal upgrades now restore morale based on the number of points the monster's power level was increased by. Primary stat upgrades restore 1000 morale per level, while elemental stat upgrades restore 2000 morale per level. (This is a straight increase over the old formula with the old capacity, assuming that monsters were kept at yellow+ morale.)

- The drain rate bonus for powerlevel was rescaled to start from PL 250 and increase linearly up to the cap at PL 2250. It now caps at x6 (i.e., the morale bar takes six times longer to drain) up from the old x4. Chaos upgrades no longer affect monster morale drain rate.

- To enable going over 100%, the monster double gift chance was changed to a fixed "gift factor" that directly modifies the number of gifts a monster gives. Every point of scavenging will increase this factor by 2.5%, while every point in any other chaos upgrade will increase it by 0.5%, for a maximum of +160%. This should somewhat shift the balance towards fully developed monsters rather than scavenge armies.

- It no longer costs anything to rename a monster. The system will soon start penalizing generic/repetitive/facerolled monster names, so if you use those, change them to something better.

- Monsters now have default skills they will set if none have been created.


Mooglemail

- You can now attach up to ten items per message.

When composing a message, you are able to add or remove items individually. When receiving a message, you have to remove all items at once. If a message has a CoD fee set, it applies for all attached items.

Note that if you have an old message still being drafted, attaching more items to this message will not work.

- Removing the attachments no longer resets CoD when drafting a message. Obviously, it will still not send with a CoD if no messages are attached at this time.


Combat/Balance

- Battle actions/screen updates are now (finally) done with XHR rather than POSTing the entire page. This should cut down on load flashing and various browser memory leak issues. While scripts have been available to emulate this behavior, the official method selectively transfers updated panes and new log entries, and therefore also reduces the amount of data transferred. (This is a first pass, and will be further improved in the future.)

- Vitals are now fully restored when you leave combat. The vitals are also no longer displayed out of battle, and the consumable usage except for stamina restoratives has been removed as it was no longer necessary.

- New player vital bars were added to replace the old sidebar bars. Note that spark protection is now indicated with a dark green bar health bar instead of a gray/silver one.

- Overcharge is now represented in pips on the health bar, where one pip is equivalent to 25% in the old system. The way charges are gained or spent has not been changed at this point, except that all skills have been updated to use an exact number of pips, that is, 25% increments. Defend now restores 25% health for 1 pip rather than 10% for 10% overcharge.

- A new level experience progress bar was added to the bottom of the screen. (To show level progress outside of battle, you can hover or click the Level readout.)

- Melee skill chaining requirements were removed. One-Handed, Two-Handed and Dual-Wield skills therefore no longer have to be be used in a certain order, but there are still natural interactions based on the effects procced.

- Drain is now twice as effective for HP, but the cooldown was increased.

- The MP/SP drain augment has been changed, mainly due to an internal change for how monster MP/SP is represented. It is no longer limited to a fraction of the monster's current MP/SP - instead, it will prevent monster MP/SP regeneration and zap up to 10% of the monster's max MP/SP per turn to restore up to 5% of the player's base MP/SP, as long as the monster has any MP/SP left.

- The drain effect on Banshee and Illithid weapons was also changed, and is now based on a new percentage base drain potential of the weapon (derived from the old value) and the base vitals of the player, multiplied by the current percentage of MP/SP on the monster. For example, proccing a Banshee weapon with 2% base spirit drain would restore an amount equal to 2% of the player's base spirit if the monster is at 100% spirit, or half that if the monster is at 50% spirit.

- Vampire weapons are still based on a fixed number of points drained, but the level scaling for this was increased slightly.

- Starting an Item World or a Grindfest now costs 1 point of stamina, equivalent to 50 rounds. Starting an Item World will consume the stamina for all rounds up front. This is done primarily to prevent abusing the instant full regen when leaving combat.

- The day of week now has a moderate effect on elemental damage, where attacks and magic of a given element will do increased damage on specific days. (This is implemented as a reduction in effective elemental resistance for both players and monsters on the day in question.)

- Players now start at 500 health (up from 50). Monster exp scaling at lower levels has also been tweaked slightly; the very earliest levels could literally have a level-up for every round in a Grindfest, which may have been just a little bit much.

- Monster health scaling was changed. Above level 100 it will shift more from difficulty to monster level, scaling up from 1x at level 100 to 4x at level 500. Max difficulty modifier was reduced from 8x to a 2x. Base health from endurance was reduced from 6 per point to 5 per point.

- The global loot penalty for playing many rounds on lower difficulties was removed. Instead, only when doing Grindfest and Item World, a fixed rare drop modifier is applied to artifact and token drop chances, decreasing the drop rate for these two types of items at lower difficulties.

- The artifact/token drop rate for random encounters was increased by 2.5x. Arena drop chances are the same as before. Low difficulty no longer penalizes drop chances in these battle modes.


Misc

- RIP sidebar.
-- Stamina, level and difficulty readout as well as equipment repair and other various warnings were moved to the top bar.
-- If stamina is below 99 or there is an active warning, you can hover/click the stamina readout to view it and restore stamina; if a warning is active, a link to the page you can fix it on will be provided.
-- Hovering/clicking the level/difficulty readout will display the total current and next-level experience as well as the required experience until the next level.

- Significant DOM/CSS reworks and improvements affecting basically everything except the Forge, as well as a lot of internal refactoring that makes it easier to add new stuff in the future.

- Message popups can now be closed by clicking anywhere on the message rather than trying to hit the X.

- Added a new system based on dynamically generated cachable javascript files that prevent having to constantly redownload certain kinds of semi-persistent data. This is currently used for player equipment and consumables.

- Battle Items was renamed Item Inventory, and the UI interaction was improved somewhat. Non-consumable items are now also shown here, mostly to avoid needing a separate screen for it.

- Arenas now show their cooldown timer. (The time will be the same for all arenas, since they reset at 00:00 UTC.)

Note: The Better Pots abilities will be buggy until your character's ability list is rebuilt, remove and then reslot any ability to do this.


2017-06-26 Update

- HV was split off into its own database cluster. This should theoretically speed things up somewhat, but as this is the first time we use this particular database version in production, let me know if you encounter any issues.

- An alternative utilitarian (and easier skinnable) left-to-right vital bar with numeric overcharge readout was added. This can be chosen under Settings.

- The normal vital bar now shows a numerical readout for the current health if it can fit within the bar (>6% health - missing numbers should be read as "heal plz").

- The vital bar charge pips were moved above the health bar, and visually tweaked somewhat. A final faded-out pip will now be displayed if you have between 10 and 24 points towards the next pip. The pips will also change color if you are at max charges.

- Corrected a bug in the forge where gear what was at less than 1 condition point of wear was calculated in the "Repair All" cost but still unlisted.

- Better wording for monster activation conditions.


HV 0.85 does not support older browsers. Some things we now use was not added until Chrome 21 / Firefox 22 / IE 11, and thus is known to render incorrectly or not at all in older versions. Do not report problems with older browsers as bugs.