The Place Where Darkness Gathers

[dnd]

Spooky~
New thread, new update and well, a big boss and download await

The Dark Falz battle: he’s planet sized, each ship fights a section of the body, then in stage 2 you fight his main body. It appears as an emergency quest.

This is all that's known of the fight so far. its not known if all the ships would work together for stage one and two, or when stage two hits you stay on your own little ships group and not have a huge 120 person fight (Although, that'd be awesome.. and harsh on both the servers and your computer).

Weapon Potential Abilities:

A new feature for December aswell, Certain weapons have hidden special abilities. (At this time, its not known if it applys to all weapons, or just a selection) basically, you grind a weapon to +10 and if it has a special ability, a new option will unlock in the item lab. This then (if you choose) will reset the grind level back to +0, but unlocks level one of the special ability. The only one that's been announced increases just attack (Read: Heavy attack from psogc/bb) damage by 3%. At the moment, it appears you don't have an upper limit to the level of the ability - but I imagine it will cap at lv5 (as other ability's are)

Grinding an 8star weapon to +10 is a traumatic experience alone, one I've not even gotten yet in ~600 hours playtime, so this is an.. interesting addition if its only for afew specific weapons. Imho not worth the time spent grinding to +10 again

As always, will bring more news when its released. I expect the first part of the update to land in 9 days, on the 5th of December with a tasty 4gb download o.o'

Edit: Some more infos!

St.rappys/Christmas lobby picture/Christmas limited time emergency code 'Merry Christmas on Ice!' (Battle to the end of tundra to protect the cake sisters!)


And of course, you cant have an update without a few new costumes

[Lee-yoshi]

Christmas looks like it just got better!

Plus the cake sisters... hmm I seem to recall seeing them before somewhere...! :O

[dnd]

In pso2, they appeared in the Halloween limited time emergency quest called 'Trick or treat?' which the Christmas version will probably follow the same style.

Area 1 and 2 (Desert for Trick or treat/Tundra for the new one)) being nightmare with the spawns, then area 3 being a small area where the e-code triggers after a few spawns (Or a boss, if your super lucky ) - the only catch is, the code: Protection is always red, which means is far harder then the normal (blue) codes that appear but much better exp.

They also appeared rarely in ps0 on the ds, iirc in the swamp level - where you got a quest to go to the snowfield and find the lost sister... They probably appeared elsewhere aswell, but that's all I know x_x

For the weapon potential ability - you need 99 pds aswell as the +10 grind to unlock one level of the ability. The good news is, data-mined patch files indicate a huge amount of new item ability's. They range from class specific ability's to new awesome ones like 'Hp steal', this leads me to think you can choose an ability on the first use, then the others just level it up - we'll know on the 5th, anyway as i have a +10 zanba ready to test this out on

EDIT: Current lobby music until the 5/12/12 update lands - I love it and wish for it to stay forever :'( http://youtu.be/1L9ExQg8QOI

[dnd]

Recap for tomorrows update! maybe a wall of text but its covering everything

Dark falz:

he's the size of a planet, for a start. Appears as a emergency quest randomly, now how this works is the following:

His health pool is decided by the current number of people on the ship (not sure if its dynamic, or decided as the quest goes live).

Phase one lasts for 30 mins (20 min limit per quest attempt, however), in which you need to kill as many arms as possible, to weaken falz. Anyone can take part, from lv1 in normal mode (suicide ^_^) to lv50 for very hard mode. Everytime you kill a hand of falz, it goes towards the entire ships progress, not just your party of 12's. Its also unknown at this time if killing a hand in normal (Or doing hard mode @ lv50 for example, to kill more hands quicker) yields less reward then one in very hard.

If the entire ship has killed enough hands to progress to phase 2, an additional emergency quest will unlock. The goal of this one is simple, to vanquish dark falz (but hey, lets face it, you never really do completely kill it off). I've not been able to gather much information on phase 2. He appears to love using lasers and hits like a truck (500-600+ damage consistently in very hard). Also players familiar with Phantasy Star music will get a kick out of the remix for this boss theme.

Other news:

yeah yeah, i gave falz its own section, but falz deserves it >=D

Parallel Universe:
From the 5th of december, whilst questing in areas you will have a (very small) chance of encountering a new 'Special transfer device' which will teleport you to the Parallel universe, in which you will encounter rare enemies that exist in that zone far more often then normal. They also look pretty awesome

Latent Ability System
When a weapon hits +10 grind, a new option appears in the item lab, which allows you to unlock its Latent ability (If it has one, anyway) at the cost of the +10 grind, photon spheres and a small meseta cost. To level up the latent ability, you just need to repeat this process. When you equip a weapon with a Latent ability unlocked, you get a yellow effect instead of the blue one.

Other other stuff:
Pyroxene Shop! Another new shop has been added, this time you trade Pyroxene for 10star weapons. For example if you collect 20 Red Iritista Stones , you can use them to trade for 10 star weapons at this shop like Ruins Gloam.


I'll edit later with more stuff, but this patch in total is 5.2gbs.. ;-;

[dnd]

So, I didn't finish that last post, my bad, was super tired when writing that and kinda forgot the next day

Yesterday unleashed Dark falz onto pso2, finishing part 2 of this update. Whilst I could just describe the fight, Heres a video of me being overly restrained fighting him for the first time: http://youtu.be/GiDOiuawyhM

I will say, however, the entire fight (From the build up, phase one, phase two and its 'death) has been done awesomely - cant wait to do it again ;-;.

Now, onwards:

Not much has been said about the new-years update landing on the 26th (Entitled: 'A fate worse then death' - charming, eh?) however two new 'codes' have been added to the game with this update.

Code:Escape - Darkers will capture you (and your party) randomly during normal questing, in which you have to escape the darkers den. If you die here, however, you return to the arks lobby and the quest you where doing AND the code are failed, nice, huh?. As another twist, when you escape from the darkers den, your character is cloned, to be used for...

Code:Clone - When this (Apparently - very rare) code appears, you get to fight clones of people who have escaped from the darkers den. The clones have all the skills/pas/weapons/titles/autowords/appearance of the original, in addition you are more then likely going to fight your own clone if you've done the escape quest, anyway. The reward for completing this code? Photon sphere(s) - and they have hinted at a title reward if you kill your own clone aswell as additional rewards.

A new boss has been datamined - 'Chrome dragon' is all that's known about it so far and like all good bosses, it has a soul affix to weapons

[Lee-yoshi]

Just watched a bit of your Dark Falz fight and it looks amazing! He's certainly changed a bit though since I last saw him lol