Future Plans - Thieves

Now that level 35 is installed and running in the game, I figure it's probably a good idea to let everyone know about the game's direction and where we're headed. Things aren't going to be static; there's a lot of really neat stuff planned out for this year.

The next major update is scheduled for some time around mid to end of July. The focus of this update will be the Thief class, which is currently the least played class in terms of high levels, and the class with the fewest skills.

At a minimum, the thief update will include an entire tree for shadow skills. I'm not a fan of traditional ninja skills though, so don't expect Naruto style effects. The basis for the shadow skills will be a type of channeling/synergy with the shadow plane, which has already made itself known with the Guildmaster Assassin in Jo'Kerin.

Also on the high priority list are a couple of miscellaneous skills ('untanking' in group combat, room analysis out of combat), and updates to lock picking to make it more incremental and less hit or miss.

For medium priority stuff that might get implemented, we have disguise skills, bribe improvements, and haggling (possibly for bulk purchases.) My guess is that at least some of this will get into the final build.

For low priority, we've been mulling over the idea of distraction skills, but the effects are pretty ill defined right now. We also really need to take a look at the way poison damage is done, to try to make poisons function in a reasonable way. It's pretty unlikely that either of these will be done for the update.

That concludes things for the proposed thief update. Again, we hope to have it out prior to August. I think it will address a lot of the shortcomings of the thief class, without necessarily making thief into another fighter class with differently named skills.

Coming up next - clerics get some love too.