Phenra looked over the cliff, his gaze falling on the second Temple of Ternium. The pale stone walls, flanked by colonnades, stood as pristine as ever, seemingly immune to the corruption within. Though only a short distance away, the temple felt far, unreachable. It had been his to protect, and in that, he had failed.
How could he have been so wrong, so blind to the fingerprints of the Aspect of Corruption? So mistrusting of his own kin? How had he failed to distinguish good from evil—until so much had already been lost?
His eyes lingered on the other six temples sprawling beside his own, on the Basilica towering above them, and, higher still, the dark plume of the volcano curling into the sky. After taking it all in one last time, he focused his thoughts on the one goal that still mattered: reclaiming that which had been lost.
The town of Kethryl and its surrounding region are now accessible to players. Among other things, the town features new kinds of merchants:
South of Kethryl is the entrance to a dungeon called Ternium. Ternium uses a new Written Realms system called Instances, which allows players to create unique copies of a dungeon they are progressing through, in isolation from the main world. Instances persist until all players have left it for 5 minutes. Some of the rules of an instance can be different from its parent world. For example, unlike Edeus, the penalty for dying in Ternium is the PERMANENT destruction of the player's equipped items.
Ternium has 8 different bosses with unique mechanics and rewards. It will be released progressively, starting with 1 temple and opening one more temple each week until all the content has been released. Each boss rewards on kill with:
The final boss will award:
Note on loot: it takes a few seconds for all of the loot to get loaded on the bosses's corpses. Don't move on right away.
The instance has been balanced using a warrior and a cleric wearing the silver set, meaning every boss has been defeated using that setup. There is no doubt that some sets from crafted gear would outperform the silver sets but since you lose all of your gear on death, you can count on that when trying to get back on your feet.
You don't have to only bring 2 players, you can bring a group as large as you want, but some of the better rewards like relics are split among participants so the fewer members, the larger their reward. To enter Ternium as a group, make sure all players are in the entrance room and grouped, and once the leader uses the enter command all other members will automatically be transported inside the leader's instance. A leader can exit the instance and re-enter it with another grouped member to add more players to the instance (use the leave command to return to the parent world).
The chat channel when in an instance is local to it. So you won't be able to see chats from the Edeus parent world when in Ternium, and they won't be able to see your chats. Gossip does work across instances and between them and the parent world, as do clan chat and tells.
Six new sets of non-upgradable equipment are introduced with this release. Three are bought with silver in Kethryl, and three drop from the bosses inside the instance. To give some context of how these sets compared to the rest of Edeus equipment:
Ternium took a very long time to build and utilizes a slew of new features that have been added to achieve the desired endgame loop and boss mechanics. Mob tracking, combat reactions, health threshold reactions, room damage, randomized commands, mobs using custom skills, combat scripts, accessories, augments, item actions, on-use abilities, taunt, disengage, custom currencies… the list is long. Hopefully this results in fun boss fights and a more engaging endgame, but it will also inevitably involve bugs that will need to be worked through.
I would highly recommend not bringing the characters you care about the most with your most cherished sets of gear for the first few weeks. Not only is there permanent eq loss on death, but the system that it uses, Instances, is very new and from a technical standpoint touches all kind of data saving and loading code. That should scare you, because it scares me, and any problem around there can lead to data loss issues and much frustration indeed. When you join an instance, your player character gets moved to a different world, and moved back on exit. Making sure that the data, new or destroyed, in the parent world and the instance worlds syncs up and updates correctly is very difficult.
I don't take any issue as seriously as player data loss. There's unfortunately been a dozen instances of it this year, though in most cases part or all of the items were restored. I've built a lot of tools over time to be able to recover from such incidents but I can't guarantee those will always work either. So just keep that in mind when entering Ternium, especially for the first few weeks. Don't go in there with anything you'd never want to lose, equipped or not.
Please report bugs in the #bugs channel with as much info as you can, it goes a long way to help getting problems addressed quickly.
Hope you enjoy!