Ok, quickly mentioning the developments I can remember from the past several months...

The Soul Revision. That sets us up well for a lot of the stuff we want to add. I think that's working out nicely.

We added a new spot for renewing Holy Weapons. You can expect to see more of those. We'd like to have one in each province plus more than one on the islands.

Changes to taking Soul Hits in self-defense. Those are generally to our advantage. Along with those, there was the limit to tending for soul (I know, boo!) although a single tend does give you more.

Two enhancements to Glyph of Ease. One gives a boost to dragging the dead uphill. The other allows you to give yourself or someone else some fatigue back.

And we began our campaign to give a stronger definition to the guild and what it stands for. The first installment of the was the Paladin Council meeting. Council members will be showing up again from time to time, but we'll also be presenting some of this material in other ways. Hopefully books, scrolls, other events, and anything else interesting we can think of.

Ok, now I'll mention in general terms what we've got planned for the next few releases. As you may have heard, most major releases in the game are now going to occur during special release periods. Hot Harvest Nights was the first of these. The next round will be this summer. We've got three main things that we're looking to do for the summer and a couple extras I'd like to get out if time permits.

Two of these are glyphs. Both are combat-related. One for offense and one for defense. As of now, they've been proposed and approved in general terms. The details are still to be confirmed. The offensive glyph is meant to help you with melee attacks. I've included a feature in the proposal that gives an extra boost if you use it with your Holy Weapon.

I'll be looking for opportunities to give extra benefit for the Holy Weapons whenever it seems suitable.

The defensive glyph is planned to give you a boost to armor skill. Once again, I do expect we'll be able to do these, but the final details are still to be approved, so there could be some changes.

The third summer item is a "mundane" ability. That is to say, it's not a glyph or a spell. This one's also armor-related, although in a different way than the glyph is. I expect this one should be a lot of fun.

If time permits, I'll also see if we can get the Tipping the Scales spell going for the summer. That's the one that allows you to exchange balance with the object of the spell, either to help out a friend in trouble or to zap the opponent.

And finally, I also want to expand our "Paladin Sense" to include combat-related "hostile intent. I'll also look into the possibility of getting Clarity to enhance the sense.

If those last two don't make it for summer, they should be on the list for the next round.

There are also a few little things that we're shooting to get out before summer. These aren't what I'd describe as "major" releases, so we can do them before summer.

There's another enahncement to an existing glyph on tap.

We should be able to get at least one more Holy Weapon renewal spot done fairly soon. We've got the location for it scouted out.

And lastly, we're going to change "Soul Drift." Probably soon. I'll go into a little more detail about that one. I was talking to a Paladin at Vegascon, and he was telling me how hard it was to get soul up to the point where it doesn't drift. It turned out that a number of people have had trouble with that. Because of that and also to do something we thought was more appropriate anyway, we're going to do the following:

The "good" news (and I think this is a lot more good than the "bad" is bad) is that soul will drift down to neutral MUCH more slowly than it currently does. Basically, it's just going to drift a little bit once per Elanthian day.

The other change is that rather than drifting downward only if your soul is below pristine and upward if your soul is bad but not "awful," it's now going to drift downward even from pristine and not drift upward at all.

This will require even someone with perfect soul to do a "good deed" once in a while, but again, the drift is going to be quite slow, so effectively if you just do a tend or a tithe or whatever once every few RL days, you probably won't even notice the drift. The removal of upward drift for bad souls removes a bit of a "free ride" to neutral, which I think makes sense, but this is also pretty minor and probably won't be noticed much either.

Oh, and by the way, you don't drift when you're not in game, so you don't have to worry about logging out pristine and logging in grey if you don't play for a couple weeks.