Soul & Siena introduces the Soul Ability System, greatly expanding the skills that characters can acquire. Ability Experience Points will be earned alongside regular experience points, and can be spent on Essence Runes that give players the passive skills of their choosing. Players will begin acquiring Ability Experience Points when their characters reach level 120 and can earn them in fields, dungeons or Mission Wars. There are 26 unique Essence Runes available, representing such diverse combat skills as Knockback Resistance, Magic or Defense Increase, Experience Point Bonus, and Sword or Magic Skill Amplification.
Players itching to try out their newly gained skills need look no further than Altar of Siena, the brand-new dungeon located in MutantForest. Soon their characters will be adorned with the Shiny SIGMetal armor sets and epaulets that drop in the new dungeon.
The Altar of Siena B1F Dungeon Instance
Requirement: Level 135, Battle Style level 11 or above
Entry Item: Siena’s Crest B1F (this weird pumpkin looking item drops in the Lakeside and higher maps)
Testing a new dungeon is always fun, at least for the very first couple of runs through it. My first thoughts, just by looking at the notes, are that this one has a starter location bang in the middle of the Entrita infestation. I really hope they have added a safe zone around the starting spot, otherwise getting your whole party there without any Death Penalties would be… interesting. It’s not a problem on ITS, but on the live server I suspect it might be a bit more challenging. The winning nation bonus will include a premium warp point to the entrance as well, which will save you a long, horrible walk to get there.
You see, we get no notes on exactly what is waiting in the dungeon. The first time we enter it’s completely blind, with no idea of what is coming. Of course, the testing team is quite experienced and we work together really well, but there is still that sense of anticipation and exploration as it starts.
I will keep on updating as we test the new content, and I will be posting screenshot as well. Of course there will be ‘SPOILER’ warnings, but if I know this community most people will ignore these.
The Soul Ability system
I am studying the patch notes at the moment, and it seems as if the Soul Ability will offer some interesting builds for characters above level 120. Soul Ability Experience (called Ability Experience, or AXP) can be earned by just killing mobs, or fighting in TG. The AXP you receive in TG will be calculated according to your personal score in there – I will include the notes on this in a later update to this blog.
AXP will then be converted to Ability Points, and Ability Points can then be used to equip items that are called Essence Runes. Interestingly enough, while the notes on AXP and AP are quite extensive, the actual information of where to find Essence Runes is not included. No doubt we will find out – here are the notes on Essence Runes:
Essence Rune is?
• Items used to learn passive skills or upgrade skills using AP and upgrade items such as cores.
• There are total of 26 Runes available. You can only equip or learn maximum of 13 Essence Runes or skills.
• Essence Runes are tradable items and already equipped or learned Runes can be removed.(Once the Rune is removed, it has to be learned again from LV. 1)
No, I am not sure what this means either, but I will find out – and I will post here as I find out more. So information such as droprate, or exactly how they are used on cores are still missing
Tue Oct 27, 2009 4:32 pm