Season 2 and More

Preliminary Notes! May not have all info, be badly formatted, or be up to date!

Season 2 will be preceeded by AT LEAST one week of public testing!

Season 2 - Buff Madness

Buff Madness

Focusing on the shrine reworks, there are new instant shrines that give a random buff everytime the shrine's goal is reached separate from the rest of the shrine system.

This is a community effort! You can contribute to either the strength of the shrine, or contribute to generating new buffs in the shrine. Every 24 hours the buff madness shrines will downgrade, so you will need to be constantly maintaining (or upgrading) the shrines to benefit from the nearly limitless pool of buffs available.

Augmenting Overhaul (includes changes below)

Augmentation Counter System (Season 2 Only, Currently)

Instead of being a success/fail system, augmentations have been fractionalized and made into a success/crit success system.

Almost all augmentation costs in this new system have been reduced to roughly 1% of the materials required to initially craft the item.

Augmenting an item increases its Augmentation Counter, and once that counter exceeds the threshold to upgrade the item consumes up to several base variants of the item, increases its augmentation level, and resets the counter.

There is a low chance that instead of increasing the counter once a player may critically succeed, incrementing the counter twice. This system ensures that there is no ability to "fail" in the augmenting progression but there is still a chance to do better than the base.

In this new system all items are tradeable!

Research System

The Research System, also called 'Scrapping' internally, gives the player a new timed Enchanting action. It costs the same to Research as to Augment and results in the same amount of experience, but instead of upgrading items it breaks them down.

Players will research existing items with successful attempts resulting in the relevant affix dust and unsuccessful attempts resulting in the relevant item scraps. The amount of dust and scrap generated scales with the augmentation level of the item used, so high augmentation items may result in dozens, if not hundreds, of their rarity of dust before turning into several pieces of scrap.

This new system allows players to generate new materials through recycling old and unused equipment as well as accumulate a ton of experience in the process.

Oh, by the way, Ability Books/Scrolls/Tomes/Whatevers are researchable for a decent chunk of higher level dusts. Don't burn them!

No More Soulbound

Season 2 has no Soulbound status, Item Levels, or Item Experience. Every item is tradeable, go nuts on the market!

These gameplay changes (besides the buff madness seasonal mechanics) will inevitably come to main game, either mid-season or post-season 2

Global Game Changes

Yes, these are main game updates, not just the season changes!

Partial Augmenting Overhaul

Augmentation Bonus Rescaling

All combat related stats (except offensive criticals) have been rescaled to always be at least 5% of the item's base strength. This means at +10 an item is 50% stronger, and at +20 an item is twice as strong as its base variant.

Shrine Rework

Shrines have been completely overhauled!

Shrines now have several altars of buffs that can be individually contributed to as well as introducing personal contribution goals.

Each altar focuses on a specific skill or category of skills as well as its own contribution goals. Each time a goal is reached, one of the enchantments is unlocked or upgraded in strength. Generally there are three enchantments per altar. Shrine duration is now has its own contribution pool and goals; it must be donated to separately from the other altars to increase the length of ALL other altars. In order to benefit from these altars a player must meet a personal contribution goal. As of writing this post a player must contribute 1 million gold to unlock the first buff from each altar, 10 million gold to unlock the second buff, and 100 million gold to unlock all buffs. Contributing to any altar will raise a player's personal contribution.

Essentially, the shrine is now a set of 9 buffs that scale theoretically infinitely, limited only by how much gold the community wants to spend on them.

Ironmen can also contribute to shrines through donating materials rather than gold with altars asking for a specific set of items; as of now materials will count for 10x their vendor value.

Quests and Achievements

Quests, Achievements, and Tutorials are making their entrance into Idlescape.

They can be advanced by accomplishing specific tasks and often reward the player with experience, items, quest points, achievements points, or access to new mechanics.

Quests are multi-step tasks to guide the player through content, such as having the player work through a specific tier of content, and often unlock subsequent quests and sets of achievements. Quests have been split into a storyline, combat quests, gathering quests, and processing quests.

• Storyline quests follow the progression flow of the game and allow many different avenues to complete it; most steps can be completed through combat, gathering, or processing, and are designed to allow any playstyle to easily approach the story.
• Combat quests focus on the combat within a specific tier and see the player engaging several difficulties in that tier's combat zone, culminating in the relevant elite scroll or dungeons.
• Gathering quests focus on all the gathering zones within a tier to familiarize the player with the materials that are found there.
• Processing quests are a specialized set of quests that allow the player to obtain specialized rewards; for example, there is now a questline to unlock each tier of the enchanting tomes as well as a questline to passively unlock the effect of the previous crafting enchantment (crafting resource reduction).

Achievements are single-step tasks that focus on accomplishing one specific task a massive number of times.

Talents

Talents, also known as Mastery Talents depending on how long you have been around here, are a new progression system that generally starts after you max a skill.

There are roughly 100 talents as of writing this post; they are spread across all skills and vary greatly in their effects.

Some of the cheaper talents are minor effective level boosts, whereas the more expensive talents that require a much higher level to unlock come with new mechanics to help you specialize into your gameplay niche.

Affixes

Affixes are FINALLY coming out globally and have undergone several reworks:

• Affix rerolling has been redone so that you have the option to choose either the new or old rolls.
• Dust and Scrap generation has been integrated into the previously mentioned research system; on a successful research attempt dust will be generated. On an unsuccessful attempt the item will be consumed and scrap will be generated. The number of dust or scrap produced scales with the augmentation level of the item researched.
• Affixes are now internally stored as a range of 0 to 1 so that we are able to rebalance and change affix strengths after they are already applied to items. This means that if you get a perfect roll on an item that affix value will be stored as 1; if we buff the affix later it will be automatically updated to the new higher strength, or lowered if the affix is nerfed.
• Affix UI now displays the odds for rolling specific affixes as well as rarity categories so you should now know exactly what you should expect from RNG rolling

Other Balance Notes

Smithing has gotten a rebalance; it has had more of its power moved into its tools/effective levels and its experience curve has been made flatter (nerfed) in the early/mid game. Refining has similarly been adjusted for these new rates and scaling.