Supporter newsletter 68

Issue
This is a copy of Eternal and Diamond Supporter Newsletter #68, published by Grinding Gear Games.

Hello Supporters,

This week Rory writes a few words about the creation of the Death and Taxes map, and I share some stats that didn’t quite make it into the Two Week Ambush/Invasion Charity Event infographic.

- Carl

The Death and Taxes unique map

We recently released another supporter unique map, which from the start was intended to be a MMORPG raid-style boss fight. The supporter, myself, Joel and Rhys discussed various concepts, until we came up with this as our plan:

http://i.imgur.com/0EyFDWN.jpg

If you’ve played the map, you’ll see that it has gone through some changes. We decided to have each form be reduced to 0 life before the transformation, to let us drop items for each form, otherwise players would be rewarded for only bringing their full team into the area for the final phase.

We experimented with the boss visuals. The bosses started out as elemental themed skeletons, but we changed them to a cloaked figure with a scythe to better match the theme, and because the model looked better when scaled up to boss size.

Here is is a screenshot taken during development of the map.

http://i.imgur.com/8TgY4c1.jpg

- Rory

Insider Info

Here are some stats that didn’t quite make it into the Infographic, but were interesting:

Top 5 skills among characters level 80+:

Lightning Warp

Arctic Armour

Flammability

Elemental Weakness

Leap Slam

Characters wearing Crown of Thorns: 131, Veil of Night: 1, Voidbringer: 1

Top 10 player killing areas (ordered by deaths per instance ratio):


 * 1) Mao Kun
 * 2) Poorjoy's Asylum
 * 3) Normal Quarantined Quarters
 * 4) Normal Concealed Cavity
 * 5) Cruel Forbidden Chamber
 * 6) Normal The Coast
 * 7) Normal Sunken Shingle
 * 8) The Apex of Sacrifice
 * 9) Normal Secluded Copse
 * 10) Normal Arcane Chambers

- Carl