Whenever there is a new patch for Pathfinder Online, it's like being a kid in a candy store, or getting the new rulebook with that class you've been dying to play! New options that expand the game are really fun to play around with and they have the benefit of changing things up enough to make it interesting. The tenth patch for Pathfinder Online (lovingly referred to as EE10) brings a bunch of new stuff into the game!
I Used a Mule... and I Like It!
In a game which simulates a real-world economy, moving resources and finished goods from one side of the map to the other without help is a daunting and time-consuming task. Even a character optimized for hauling heavy loads can carry only a small amount of something heavy like iron ore or coal, not to mention the bulk resources that settlements need to grow and become more advanced.
Enter the mule, the ornery equine whose ability to haul heavy loads is legendary. In EE10, players will be able to hire mules to help them carry heavy loads across the map. Either buy a set of saddlebags from the auction house, or craft a set with your leatherworker character, then proceed to the muleteer adjacent to the bank to get your own friendly mule for six hours! The mule will follow you around like a puppy dog... as long as you don't go too fast and leave him in the dust. If you do, he will sit down on his hind legs and pout until you come back into range, at which time he will leap up and run to you with a happy grin on his face.
When left for more than a minute though, the mule will no longer be attached to you. Once a mule becomes unattached, anybody (including you) can come up to him and acquire him, at which point he will happily follow his new owner around. So you'll want to get back to him quickly. If the mule isn't acquired by anyone within 15 minutes, it will die from loneliness and leave a husk that can be looted in the next half hour. After that time, whatever's left in the husk goes away for good.
Laurethoron hires a mule at the bank before heading out.
While playing around with my new mule friend, I found that he worked great for gathering resources. As you go around gathering, he will dutifully follow you and allow you to dump the stuff you find onto him for the first four hours that you have him. (For the last two hours, you may only remove goods from your mule.) This means that you can effectively stay out gathering for hours without having to spend a bunch of time running back to town every time you become too encumbered.
The downside to the mule, though, is that a bandit who sees a mule is going to (probably correctly) assume that there's profit to be had by taking your mule. Doing so will give them a reputation hit unless you are being feuded by them (attacking a mule is the same as attacking you for reputation loss), but the gains could outweigh that penalty. On the other hand, the mule is almost always slower than a running human, especially when loaded down with stuff. So if the bandit takes the mule for himself, he'll have to make a slow getaway, giving you a chance to bring some friends in to hunt him down. A bandit who wants to run off will have to take only what he can carry, leaving the mule for you to reacquire, minus a few choice pieces of your stash.
The mule is definitely a game changer in a virtual world where goods are regionalized and bank vaults aren't global. I can't wait to see how it shakes out!
I Fought Nhur Athemon... and I Won!
The other big feature coming this weekend is the first server-wide event, the Wrath of Nhur Athemon. As I mentioned in last week's blog, this event is centered around the removal of the towers that have dotted the landscape in our War of the Towers mini-game. But now their time is done; Nhur Athemon has other uses for them.
Testing the escalation, four of us decked out in Tier 2 gear with a bunch of expendables such as potions and greater tokens, and set out to free a hex from Nhur Athemon's influence. I don't want to give too many spoilers, but beating this escalation is all about finishing off the various quests, not killing the monsters that defend the hex (though sometimes those two things will align). The minions of Nhur Athemon had some tasty loot on them—some of the best I had seen in the game to date! Tier 2 and even Tier 3 recipes, spells, and maneuvers dropped into our greedy hands. There were even a handful of the new recipes for creating settlement buildings—things folks are going to really want come early August when you'll be able to start building your own settlements from scratch!
Laurethoron battles Nhur Athemon one on one.
This escalation event also unveiled the first of the new Azlanti crystals, Pathfinder Online's twist on Pathfinder RPG's ioun stones. Everybody who participates in beating down the escalation gets a crystal for their efforts. Crystals have their own slot on your character and we plan to introduce different crystals in future monthly events. Eventually, you'll be able to take lesser Azlanti crystals and craft them into much more powerful versions.
Of course, befitting all the great loot, Nhur Athemon turned out to be the deadliest escalation that we had faced to date. Between the four of us–a heavily armored melee fighter, a ranged fighter, a cleric, and a wizard—we died 22 times over the course of the escalation. We got better at fighting Nhur Athemon as we went along, so I expect that we will have slightly less deaths the next time we face off against him, though his minions are nevertheless deadly. With the right mix of potions and spells, you can give yourself an advantage, but it will take trial and error (and a few deaths in the process) to figure this out. And in the end, Nhur Athemon and his hoodlums are still going to give you a fierce battle. What fun!
For newer players, we have made The Shadow of Nhur Athemon, an easier version of this event that will appear in certain hexes. With some +2 Tier 1 feats and some spells and potions, you will have a tough fight on your hands. This escalation doesn't drop the high-end loot that the main one does, but it will give new players some nice things to play around with in the game, including the Azlanti crystal drop.
Player Spotlight: Jokken
I met Jokken as part of the leadership of Stoneroot Glade and the Coal Road Alliance. At the start of the game, he and his allies were hampered by being isolated in the northwest corner of the map, away from all the action. Rather than letting that become a negative, he and his compatriots in the northwest have managed to create a thriving haven for characters interested in dealing with some of the NPC challenges in PVE far away from the PVP drama happening in the southeast part of the map. Now they are one of the fastest-growing areas of Pathfinder Online. Let's hear from Jokken himself about how this all came about:
I love Pathfinder Online. It touches core aspects of my interests and life as few other things do: Fantasy tabletop RPGs, Online Multi-User Dungeons, and a vibrant, evolving community. Like many of my peers, I came upon fantasy roleplaying with the classic D&D "red box" in the mid-1980s. Thanks to Mr. Mentzer, I still desperately want to punch that Bargle fellow in the nose. That grudge and the stirring art of Larry Elmore gave birth to a passionate obsession that has lasted 30 years. What started in my friend's basement as ten-year-old children rolling dice for hours upon end, slaying caves full of trolls and bears for magic and plunder, evolved into the rich 12-hour-a-week tabletop gaming experience I enjoy today.
My love for Paizo began with Dragon Magazine. Along with Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" comic and Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, Dragon and Dungeon were the cornerstone of my adolescent escape experience. Grabbing those magazines from my local bookstore each month and poring over them cover-to-cover brought joy that is completely untranslatable to adult life. Given my endearment of such works, my weekly group and I were on board with the launch of Pathfinder RPG Alpha, running the entirety of the Second Darkness Adventure Path under that system. Since then, our multiple weekly gaming sessions have been filled with adventure paths, Pathfinder Society scenarios, and mythic homebrew. With a diversified pot of interests, I'm a 3-star Pathfinder Society GM and, along with my dear friend venture-captain Eric Clingenpeel, I organize an annual convention hosted in a winery/brewery. (If you're in the Mid-Michigan area at the end of August, join us at Tavern Con 2015!)
When not rolling dice, working, or volunteering on community projects, I'm playing MMOs. That experience began in the days of yore when I'd log my Packard Bell 486/66 machine onto a much younger internet and get lost in text-based MUDs such as GemStone III and Tarmon Gai'don. One can not thank TinyMUD enough for turning a floundering middle-school typist into a keyboardist extraordinaire. Games like Asheron's Call and EverQuest came calling in the '90s along with an eventual transition to a seven-year experience in World of Warcraft.
By the end of 2013, my interest there had lost its steam. The glory of the theme park MMO was waning. That's when the Pathfinder Online Tech Demo Kickstarter hit my radar. After reading all I could on the burgeoning product, I wanted it and I wanted it now. When the second Kickstarter came along I got a chance to vote with my wallet and help to make this dream come to be. I didn't have the bankroll to become an alpha backer, but last August I was very pleased to buy access to Early Enrollment and begin my life in the River Kingdoms.
Those early days were simply the best. I still miss clobbering goblins with the flat side of my axe and tussling with the "Werewolf of Rathglen." The experience of interacting with a game world that evolves and changes 24/7 is impossibly enticing. Many of the friendships garnered in those early days of development are the seeds of the community to come.
With January and the launch of Early Enrollment, we hit the ground running. We had pledged to life in the west and became enamored with the ideal of living on the frontier. With no handouts or guidance from an alpha aristocracy, we are a people on the range with nothing but bootstraps and grit. The bonds of our Alpha experience held our little cadre together. We are Stoneroot Glade, Talonguard, and Tavernhold, and we are here to stay. We slowly built what we have from the salted earth up, and did it without a training manual. It is tedious and painful at times, but endlessly rewarding. In lockstep, we embraced "hard is fun."
There were so many awesome days the first couple of months. In week one, we kitted out in starter gear and hastily crafted +1's and set ourselves upon a wild and dangerous wilderness. We'd do crazy things, like spend a 5-hour evening tussling with Moloch Cultists, nervously ferrying coin and the occasional piece of Tier 2 loot back to the bank as a break from being roasted alive. Gutgluts (a tribe of goblin ghouls) were a numerous mainstay. We endeavored without end to push them back around Guardheim and away from our lands. I was stunned not just by those undead fiends but also at the resolve of my companions. I think the pinnacle of our grit in the Tier 1 days was clearing out a Ripping Chains goblin tribe at the full 26,000 strength with four unrelenting souls, a pile of gear, and a free weekend. Making a safe place for new recruits is important to us. It came from the blood, sweat, and tears of the dedicated.
Jokken and his Stoneroot Glade compatriots rest at one of their shrines.We decided early that we'd be a free people. Freedom and brotherhood became the cry of the western settler. We looked at the collectivist play going on in the east and put it at our backs. We would be a collection of engaged clans, a tribe of diversifying interests with constructive gameplay at its heart. We have a lot of sand in the western sandbox, and our desire to pile it up is ravenous. We advance through hard work and fair trade. Meritocracy has become the way of the west. We're a land where everyone is born a slobbering infant and worth is built on one's ambition and resolve.
Looking at the community growing across the map, we saw the Empire of Xellias focusing on an engaging and exciting PvP-centric experience, the Free Highlanders fighting for justice and glory in the north, and the Everbloom Alliance churning the cogs to manufacture an industrial complex and great civilization in the southeast. "Where do we fit?," we pondered. Largely, we inherited the role of player-versus-environment by necessity. We were a small band of settlers compared to the rest of the server, with five escalation sources and three monster home hexes in our region. We would either forge ourselves into the most skilled and efficient force tackling those threats, or we would die trying. To that end, we did both spectacularly. We do not like being overrun by infected hexes, therefore, by force of will we do not get overrun. Molochs, Ustalavs, Mordant Spire, and Elemental invasions meet our mettle and are no more. One can walk from Talonguard to Tavernhold and have little to fear.
Our latest (and perhaps proudest) endeavor is the creation of the Coal Road: a bridge between east and west; a lifeline of communication over the distance between our kingdoms. The Coal Road is a physical thing, much like the Silk Road of Marco Polo fame. It stretches from Forgeholm and Blackfeather Keep at the edge of the Eastern lands, into the Southern Echo Peaks, through depot stops in Callambea and Alderwag, into the Western Echo Woods, before coming into the heart of our society in the Bulwark Hills, connecting Tavernhold to Stoneroot Glade and Talonguard, then turning South to a cozy tavern on the Highwater Plains. It is a conveyance from east to west and back again; a path for those of brave heart and bold endeavors to journey and seek their self-made futures and fortunes. It is also a fantastic online resource, a place for citizens across the River Kingdoms to communicate and trade with the peoples of the west; an open channel of diplomacy where new relationships can be fostered and new trade opportunities found. In either incarnation, all who are respectful of their neighbor are welcome to join the Coal Road. Its stones come from the ore of our land, the mortar, the triumph and tears of our ambitions. We hope you like it.
The future holds limitless possibility that none can predict. Even our seers of Desna and Pharasma are silent on the subject, but I, as many, look forward to meeting it head on.
Lisa Stevens
CEO
