Calling All Players: Crystalshaper School Goes to Blight

Gifted of Istaria!

This week marks the culmination of months of work with the long-anticipated release of the Crystalshaper school to the Blight Shard for testing. We are contacting all of our players to extend a special invitation to help come and test this new content and also to get a first-hand preview with it!

How about a few details on what you need to know:

1) Dragons must be Adult or Ancient, at least a level 80 Adventurer, and at least a level 20 Lairshaper to qualify. Travel to Sslanis and speak to Aratanosh to join the Crystalshaper school.

2) From Aratanosh you can purchase formulas for making any of three types of Crystals (Armor, Resistance and Damage) as well as a formula to refine crystal slivers into shards. Please check these formulas carefully and report any inconsistencies.

3) Don’t worry if you don’t have a character that qualifies for the school itself; you too can help with testing! Everyone will be able to purchase special “ability boxes” from Aratanosh that, once used, grant the character a new ability called an Inspiration. These ability boxes are based on the character’s highest adventuring school. Once the box is purchased and used, look in your character’s Abilities window for your new Ability. Should you purchase the wrong one, it can be sold back to Aratanosh for full value, but once used the item is destroyed and the ability is given. Use care when purchasing and using an ability box so that you have the appropriate one.

4) These abilities in turn can be used to give a special buff to your character that enables the unique part of this school. With the inspiration buff active, depending on the specific ability obtained, each character will have a chance (25%) to have special loot items drop from a wide variety of monsters in the world.

They do this by “inspiring” emotions within the target monsters - Rage, Peace, Apathy, etc. Seven in all! Not all monsters react to all emotions, each ability tells you what types of monsters to look for if you are looking for a particular emotion. Please note: if a monster is immune to the particular damage type of the emotion you are trying to inspire, your attack will fail completely. With Inspire Apathy active, for example, you can not attack animals at all.

5) Be careful, however, inspiring emotions into monsters can have a potentially deadly side-effect on each monster depending upon the emotion. For example, inspiring rage into a monster can potentially cause it to become enraged, increasing the damage it does to you for a time. Other emotions can cause both good and bad results on monsters so experiment and have fun!

As you can tell from this explanation the Crystalshaper system is very large and quite complex. And therefore, we need everyone to log in to Blight and help with testing this school. There are a few known issues that will be addressed in a later update. They include:

1) Not all content that is planned for Crystalshaper’s release is available right now. When you greet the NPC Aratanosh, she talks about an area called the Fiery Rift. No one can gain access to this region yet. In addition, there are no quests related to Crystalshaper at this time, they will be added at a later date. Finally, Aratanosh is currently located in Sslanis, but with the final release of this update she will be located within the Fiery Rift itself..

2) Aratanosh “hovers” a bit in the air. This is a known issue and as she’s only in a temporary location, not one we’re going to be fixing. Her dialog when greeted is also temporary.

You can discuss this update here.