Black Desert Online Introduces Nova Awakening & Succession Skills, Combat Assistance Improvements, And New Year Events
Black Desert Online ends the year with the introduction of Awakening and Succession skills for the recently-released Nova class and Combat Assistance changes along with several New Year-themed events.
Nova’s Awakening Weapon, Sting, can switch from a rapier-like sword with piercing attacks to a formidable scythe capable of ring-shaped strikes, making it hard for enemies to predict her movement. She can also acquire a resource called Star’s Breath whenever she hits her enemies. Gathering enough Star’s Breath will allow her to enhance her skills allowing her to unleash quicker and more powerful attacks.
Nova’s Succession Skills on the other hand allow her to summon Axian, the King of the Dead, to fight for her. “Axian is a gigantic and ghastly undead creature with wings and horns. He was summoned by sacrificing Nova’s vitality and the Thornwood Guards to bring death to the land of the living,” explains Pearl Abyss. “Axian simultaneously attacks from the skies and taints the Morning Star in black to make it recover Nova’s HP and SP at the same time.”
The latest patch also introduces controversial changes to the Combat Assistance feature including the addition of motion delays for skills during PvP combat to make it more difficult to connect combos and improvements to prevent auto-aiming for instant grappling skills in PvP. According to the developers, the changes are aimed at making PvP combat easier for new players.
“The combat mechanics in Black Desert Online is one of our most defining contents. We realize that many people appreciate this unique, intuitive, action-packed combat system,” says the devs. “However, we’ve also received increasing feedback from adventurers who are more used to fixed-POV style games, or those who have no experience in the MMORPG genre at all, that the controlling of the combat system is difficult to learn. We believe the recently added Combat Assistance system can help in great deal many novice adventurers.”
The developers also assure veterans that the Combat Assistance feature isn’t meant to be an AI-bot that will replace the “hard-earned combat skills” that players have put in a lot of effort to learn. “This new feature will not allow new adventurers to outperform veteran adventurers in PvP,” they add. “At the very most, it would help them strike a single blow before they died in the hands of an experienced adventure.”
Lastly, the New Year Wishes event is now live bringing with it multiple events featuring doubled boss drop rates and various seasonal rewards.
