Blight Delta 316.3 Istaria Community Manager September 14, 2023
	Delay Changes As part of the ongoing combat overhaul, delay associated with ability or spell use has been overhauled. The old style of % modifiers to delay has been replaced with three attributes that can be boosted that contribute individually to generate a calculated reduction in delay. Those new attributes are: Martial Alacrity, Magical Alacrity and Gathering Alacrity. Read More...

Blight Client 404.537.0 Istaria Community Manager August 25, 2023
	Features: The Guild MOTD / URL will now appear in the chat window on game startup. It’s now possible to turn off the  "You hear distant sounds bearing the familiar cadence of speech" message when nearby Gifted talk but are too far away to hear. The add/remove techs arrow buttons are now disabled for Blighted formulas as these products can never have techniques applied to them. Fixes: Fixed an issue where invisible, broken clickable links can be present in quest dialogue. Fixed an issue where the “Remote pet size” slider would not properly update the size of other player’s pets when changed. Fixed issue causing the Target window to not be interactable. Fixed item information displaying <Missing> for some “Creates” information fields. Fixed Gnomekindle Clause and Gnomekindle Helper Shirt displays on female characters. Read More...

Blight Delta 316.2 Istaria Community Manager August 18, 2023
	Dispels The way the dispel system works has been altered to be more friendly and predictable. Previously there was a complex system involving an assigned quality of the dispel and a weight on the buff/debuff.  This system has been replaced by a table comparing a quality (which matches the lowest tier the dispel is received at) and a calculated tier on the buff/debuff. These tiers are compared to determine the relative difference (target - source) and a chance of success is determined using the table below: Read More...

Blight Delta 316.1 Istaria Community Manager July 20, 2023
	Just in case you need a refresher on the previous Combat Revamp Delta Release, please see the previous news article.  Combat Overhaul Resistances and Wards have been simplified. Rather than matching up against each individual damage type (e.g. Flame Resistance, Ice Resistance, Slash Ward, Crush Ward, and so forth) the types have been reduced to four. The goal of this change is to make it easier to boost your evasion chance against attacks from or improve your damage mitigation against a category of damage. Slash, Crush and Pierce now matchup against Physical Resistance and Ward. Flame, Energy, Ice, Nature, Blight and Primal to Arcane Resistance and Ward. Mind, Spirit and Life to Mystical Resistance and Ward. Ethereal to Ethereal Resistance and Ward. Read More...

Summertime Double XP Istaria Community Manager July 17, 2023
	The summer up in the northern hemisphere is in full swing, while our southern friends are scrounging up blankets for the chill. As is tradition, we're turning on double experience for a two week period from July 18 to August 1, starting and ending with maintenance. Grab your pickaxes, sharpen your claws, and practice your magic to make the most of the extra experience!

Live Client 404.327.11 Istaria Community Manager May 30, 2023
	Fix: Updated launcher error message for an unexpected exception during login. Read More...

Blight Client 404.439.2 Istaria Community Manager May 30, 2023
	Fix: Fixed launcher not staying on last shard used. Read More...

Blight Combat Changes Istaria Community Manager April 10, 2023
	The combat revamp is now in pre-alpha on Blight! This revisit of Istaria's combat systems intends to improve combat, assist in balancing, and offer new features. We will be listening carefully to player feedback during this extended testing period. We expect there to be significant changes, based on your feedback. Stay up to date with us on Discord, forums, and support. You can send in feedback through:     Support system: https://support.istaria.com     Email: [email protected]     Discord: https://discord.gg/istaria     Forums: https://community.istaria.com/forum/ Please note that the support site and email guarantee your feedback is seen by every developer. Discord posts may be missed by some on the team, but you do get more back and forth communication with Discord.

Blight Delta 316 Istaria Community Manager April 3, 2023
	Combat Overhaul This update contains the combat overhaul in its entirety. There are a significant amount of changes and you can read about them in more detail in this document: https://tinyurl.com/3faeyec8 NOTE: This is part 1 of the overhaul and further patches will be coming soon as testing is conducted. Please do consider taking the time to hop on Blight and try out the changes. We have a new way to send in feedback. A cutting edge technology called "email" has been setup. Rather than writing things down old school, you can type into your computer and the letters will fly across the internets and arrive for all of us to see: [email protected] This guarantees that your feedback is seen by every developer (unlike Discord posts that may be missed by some). As always, the support system is also available at https://support.istaria.com Summary of changes: To-Hit and Avoidance (Dodge, Parry and Block) have been entirely reworked and are now more predictable. Separate evasion checks have been removed and are part of the dodge check.  All players (and monsters) now check for dodge. Direct reduction of damage by armor has been replaced by a % reduction (called mitigation). Glancing Hits and Critical Hits/Heals have been added to the combat experience. Armor has varying levels of effectiveness against physical, mystical, arcane and special damage types now. Ethereal Damage/Armor has undergone an overhaul. Ethereal Armor and Damage Ethereal Damage is no longer a Damage-Path, but instead is now a damage type (similar to Spirit or Flame or Slash). This means that it will be checked against standard armor (though armor is less effective by 50% against it). As a result of this change, ethereal armor has been replaced with ethereal resistance and a new stat called ethereal ward has been added. This stat can be buffed/debuffed and applied to equipment like any other ward stat. Read More...

Into the Future: Using AI to Enhance Istaria Istaria Community Manager April 1, 2023
	Hello Istarians! We have exciting news to share with you today and we can't wait to dive in. I am sure all of you have heard of the recent advancements in AI, but in case you have not, let us give you the rundown. Recent innovations in technology have resulted in very powerful AI - or artificial intelligence - programs, able to take prompts in plain English and return nearly anything you could ask for - scripts for plays, stories, conversations, and even images. AI has grown from the simple decision-making programs powering things such as our own monsters' wander paths to self-educating electronic brains capable of learning and evolving. As you all know, we at Virtrium are a very small but dedicated team. Any help we can get to improve our game, we are excited to jump on. One of our biggest bottlenecks in producing new content and updates is the amount of manpower required to produce interesting storylines and art assets. We have seen the advancement of AI and are ecstatic to use it as a tool to improve our workflow. To this end, we have decided to scale back the human involvement in our development process and submit to our new AI overlords. We hope as being among the first adopters of this unique technology that we may be spared in the upcoming collapse of society. The development process has been redefined to the following: Read More...