Crusaders!
A few months ago, during the release of A Dance of Masks DLC, we showed you that the Devil is always in the details. You all seemed to really enjoy it, so it’s about time we take the next step and invite you to witness the flight of the dragons!
Yes, it is what you think it is! The long-anticipated finale of the years-long effort to flesh out the Mythic paths — the update to the Gold Dragon path — is here.
Coming in the impending major patch 2.5, the update tweaks and improves many aspects of this Mythic path.
Let’s give you a sneak peek!
New Visuals
We’ll start with the shiny new visuals. While the original Gold Dragon always had a distinctive visual identity, we always felt that we could kick this up a notch.
With this update, the Dragon has received a few new spell effects and animations — this is how some of them look:
We also felt it was a good time to revisit the Corrupted Gold Dragon. Previously the followers of Dahak had no unique look, simply using the same visuals as the standard version. With this update, evil dragons boast an updated corrupted version of the portrait, updated scale color and texture, and their own alternative visuals for some of the spells.
While technically not a part of this update, we felt that it would also be appropriate to remind you that in the last major patch, alongside the other Mythics, the Gold Dragon received a unique weather effect in Drezen and a gorgeous new animation for the Sword of Valor. Whether you’ve already seen it or missed this beauty, we invite you to enjoy chilling in Drezen under the rays of shining light and shadows of dragons flying overhead.
Mechanical Updates
Let’s move on to the mechanics, and we’ve got lots to show here:
New Mythic Spellbook
The Gold Dragon has received a brand-new mythic spellbook with a total of 10 new spells, with followers of Dahak having their own, corrupted version of some.
Take a peek at a few of them:
Dragon Might
As a swift action, you increase your damage dealt by 50% for 1 round.
Summon Dragon
You summon 1d3+1 medium silver dragons (or 1d3+1 medium black dragons if you have vowed to serve Dahak). Summoned dragons attack your opponents to the best of their ability.
Thousand Bites
While in the form of a Gold Dragon, as a swift action, you gain 3 additional attacks for 1 minute. These additional attacks stack with the bonus attacks from haste and other similar effects.
Dragon Wrath
You blast your enemies with rays of focused dragon energy. You may fire one ray for every six caster levels you have (up to a maximum of 3 rays at 18th level) at every enemy within a 25-foot radius. Each ray requires a ranged touch attack to hit and deals 1d6 points of damage per caster level. Half of the damage is fire damage, but the other half results directly from holy or unholy power (if you have vowed to serve Dahak) and is therefore not subject to being reduced by fire resistance.
New Mythic Features
We have also added 10 brand new Mythic features related to various improvements to your dragon breath. Here are some of them:
Annihilating Breath
Your breath annihilates the life force of living foes. Living enemies struck by your breath take additional negative energy damage equal to your breath damage (a Fortitude save against the DC of your breath halves this damage).
Mind-Clearing Breath
Your breath dispels all mind-affecting effects applied by enemies from allies in the area. Additionally, you dispel all mind-affecting effects from enemies struck by your breath (including effects applied by your allies while affected by domination or charm effects).
Empowered Breath
Your breath damage increases by a number of damage dice equal to your mythic rank.
Rejuvenating Breath
Your breath heals allies in the area. The amount of damage healed is equal to your breath damage.
New Domain and Blessing
To support early-game affiliation with the Gold Dragon Mythic for dragon aficionados, we’ve also decided to add the dragon-themed Scalykind Domain and Blessing:
Improvement and Rebalance
After introducing new spells and features, we naturally felt it was necessary to also review and update the existing ones, such as:
- Moving some of them to be accessed earlier
- Having them Empowered and Maximized at Mythic level 10
- Allowing you to alternate between damage types
- Straight up increasing some of the damage and bonus numbers
- Reducing or even removing the cooldown on higher levels (in particular, the cooldown of Gold Dragon Breath)
Our goal with all these changes was to bring the Gold Dragon mechanically on par with other Mythics and make it considerably more fun and distinctive to play. Enjoy your new toys!
Narrative Updates
Last but not least, let’s get to the storytelling.
Instead of focusing all our resources on a single large quest like we did with the Devil in the previous update, this time we’ve taken a lighter but more sweeping touch, placing an emphasis on reactivity throughout the story.
We started from a concern voiced by many of our players — that unlike other late-game Mythics (Legend, Swarm, Devil), the transition to the Gold Dragon felt somewhat rushed and ‘‘out of the blue” for the Commanders who lacked an existing connection to a draconic heritage.
To address this, we prepared two new full-scale (pun intended!) dragon-themed religions: Apsu and Dahak, available at character creation.
Each of these new religions will serve as a smooth buildup toward the Gold Dragon path for players who want their story to naturally tie into this Mythic but don’t want to be locked into picking one of the dragon-themed archetypes. Both of these religions have a lot of reactivity across the game, some of it exclusively to the Gold Dragon.
Additionally, we’ve added two new story beats available only for the Gold Dragon, where their wisdom of millennia has a chance to make two certain well-known characters take an unexpected turn to the path of good and redemption. This will, of course, be reflected in the epilogue slides.
Can you guess who these characters are? Leave your thoughts in the comments!
Oh, and while we’re at it, we’ve changed the corrupted Gold Dragon’s alignment to Chaotic Evil. Evil is evil!
What’s next?
While this update marks a very important milestone for us and for the game itself, we are not entirely done just yet. The game will continue to receive additional bug fixing updates, we will continue to accept your bug reports, and there might still be some QoL improvements in the future. However, we don’t have any more plans for new mechanics or story content after this update, so if you waited for the game to be complete — this is the time!
Stay tuned, and may your wings carry you forward!
Always yours,
Owlcats