Maintenance 2016-01-13

From the Maintenance Notes:

Loki: We have merged in months of Hercules changes which may alter, break or fix things as intended or not. Please report anything that is off, thank you. Introducing the next escapade of Nobby the Novice: The Golden Hole Adventure! This instance will see you help hapless Nobby the Novice in his continuing search for riches and fame! The instance will take place in the official Nightmare Scaraba Hole, but everything else is entirely custom. Four new mobs and one new MvP - Gold Queen Scaraba Much like the Kraken's Lair, rewards at the end are based on completing certain, hidden objectives. The instance has a 2 hour cooldown. To enter, the party leader must have Kraken's Lair on cooldown. Nobby can be found in dic_dun01, near the entrance to the actual Scaraba Hole dungeon. 8 new armours, 6 new weapons, 3 new cards and 3 new useables make up the tally of new items added with this instance. The effects of the new items may be posted if asked nicely enough! Burning and Cold (known officially as Freezing) changes: There's been a lot of controversy over Burning lately (Cold not so much as only one item causes it), so I'd like to announce some changes made. Firstly, we will be calling Freezing, Cold, because there's too much confusion otherwise. Previously, End Sectora - the only item to cause Cold - used a rather tacky implementation of this; however, now it uses the proper implementation. At the minute, this status effect is not common at all, but as it becomes more common, as with burning, curing and resisting methods will be added. On the subject of burning - and this will get slightly technical - previously it was caused by a custom script called bAddSC, which I expanded to allow the ability to bypass sc_def which is the calculation for stat-based defence against status effects. It also allowed SCs (status changes) to be unavoidable. Now we are using renewal-based src, we can scrap using bAddSC to cause burning and instead use the "official" script of bAddEff. Therefore, henceforth, burning will no longer bypass stat-based defence reductions (the stats for burning are luk and agi) and will be avoidable if you can immunise yourself against it. With burning becoming more common now, and the swap to the Eff_Burning implementation, we can and will now start releasing more items that resist burning. I initially considered boosting all burning items to offset the new defence against it; however, you may be pleased to know only Skoll card has had its burning chance increased. Some people have been unhappy with the unofficial implementation of burning. I have to say, when I came to port burning into pre-SE Loki, there were limited sources on what burning actually did; in fact, one source did say burning stopped all movement. Despite being wrong, I actually like this side of burning and feels it fits in well with Loki's meta (one that is too weighed down with movement speed boosters). I considered removing blocking movement and instead have it only block all movement-related skills, but with the aforementioned changes, it was decided to keep the effect as it is. We hope that clears up some complaints some people have, and as always, please do discuss these changes as anything can be changed if needs be. Sealed MvPs have been fixed to stop them from spawning multiple copies of the same MvP when it shouldn't. Bio Labs 4 has been fixed and is fully functional (as some of you may have already found out). A noleap mapflag has been added to Bio Labs 4. A map error that caused the mobs of Bio Labs 4 to be spawned on the outside rim of the map has been fixed. Halls of the Abyss has received a fix in order to stop potential abuse and announcement spam. A fix relating to a specific script (bonus bAddSC) will mean some newer items will now function correctly A bug related to bUnhidden (Chen card) has been fixed. @away has been fixed and should no longer crash the client under certain circumstances. Kraken's Lair will no longer tell you that the instance is being cleaned and then reset your timer so you cannot re-enter. Nobby the Novice in Kraken's Lair will - hopefully - no longer steal your money when purchasing the mob items. Antiques will now function correctly and give you the correct bonuses all the time. There may be a bug in the "Reset Antique" function, so please refrain from using that for the time being. If you have encountered this bug, please report to Helpdesk so we may check your variables. Sightblaster will no longer do damage to traps. Fire Pillar is no longer considered a trap and hence will be blocked by LP. Tarot Card of Hope has been re-added. The cap of 75% on after-cast delay has been re-instated. Stalkers, whilst linked, will receive only half the previous bonus from using potions (it is now equivalent to a ranked pot). Stalkers will also now take 10% extra damage when being knocked out of chase walk. Backsliding will now work as it did in pre-SE (i.e. backsliding will work correctly when doing so against objects at 45 degree angles). Shockwave Trap will now apply level 5 Critical Wounds as intended. Changing gear will no longer remove Paladin-based buffs whilst under the effect of Devotion. If the Devotioner removes their shield, then everyone will lose the buffs, as is intended.