Elias Tarnaras, one of the Darkfall Unholy Wars designers offers some insight and reasoning behind some of the additions and changes to the game for the upcoming patch early next week:
Upcoming Patch Preview- by Elias Tarnaras
On the next patch, apart from the two new big warships, the Frigate and the Ship of the Line we’re introducing the new Sea Fortresses.
For the Sea Fortresses we felt that a big server event every 3 days was too much and it would defeat the purpose. We changed the occurrence of the Sea Fortresses to have one every 6 days and the other every 11 days.
The second one will have appropriately bigger loot and hence will be a more significant event. Additionally with the different day offset there will be days that both Fortresses will become vulnerable to have an exceptional day at sea for the players.
The loot tables of the Sea Fortresses will be consisted of a big chunk of gold and additionally will have a chance to drop Runestones, Portal Shards, Black Powder, Ship Cannons, Ship Modules, Advanced Ship Modules, Lodestones, Sunstones (ultra rare material for the top ships), Building Modules, Advanced Crafting Materials and also every ship figurine available in the game, adjusted of course to the rarity of each ship.
Advanced Ship Modules will be a unique drop from Ship Fortresses. Keelhaul (the 11 day Fortress) will drop double loot quantities for all items except the ship figurines which will have a doubled drop probability.
We also made changes to ithe Slayer Barrage skill, as we felt that Slayer lacked some unique mechanic, a kind of spice in the gameplay to feel more satisfying. Additionally, Slayer was having some minor problems by the multiple knockbacks that other roles / schools have available. After some thought on the matter, we decided to add the unique and new mechanic of knockback invulnerability on the first few seconds of the ultimate Barrage skill so that the Slayer could land more that two melee hits more consistently, especially against Air Elementalists and Baresark / Battle Brand Warriors. And, yes, we are
aware of the impact that will have on ganking, but the role name is Slayer and that's what it performs best after all.
Finally, we adjusted the melee swing stun when parried by adding a flat 100 milliseconds to compensate for an average lag and another 100 milliseconds scaled on the weapon speed. That means that knives will have the minimum 80 milliseconds and polearms will have the maximum 110 milliseconds with all the other weapons being in between the two values. This change is to make the single handed weapons even more viable by allowing the parry + hit combo on a successful parry by a shield and further increase the importance of the Disabling Blow skill. The mechanic is still under evaluation and we continually read your feedback on the matter as we do not want to break the melee combat flow. Of course, coupled to the above is the Stamina drain when parried which we reduced as we felt that it was a very passive skill to have that much of an effect. We decided to increase it back a tiny bit so that a shield parry by mainly a Primalist wouldn't be that ineffective.