The Tabula Rasa official site has been updated with another edition of Feedback Friday, a weekly look at a variety of topics in Tabula Rasa.

The new 1.4 build arrived onto the Public Test Server yesterday with the character database from the Orion server. We hope that you will be able to read through the PTS Patch Notes and test out the new content. Remember! If you have any comments or suggestions about the 1.4 changes, please make sure to send them using our Feedback Form.

Below we address some of the “hot topics” found in the patch notes.

Purple Drops
In a recent publish, we significantly improved the power of Green, Blue, and Purple items. In prior versions, item rarity color was simply an indication of the number and strength of the enhancement modules on the items. Rarer item colors also enjoy higher success rates with crafting. High rarity did not make a very significant difference in the overall power of an item. In order for mission rewards to be valuable, many of them were assigned relatively strong enhancement modules, which bumped up their rarity.

Now, however, each level of rarity adds 20% to the damage of weapons or 20% to the absorption rating of armor, so Purple items are now intrinsically more powerful than Blues, and Blue items are intrinsically more powerful than Greens. Mission rewards were not re-worked at the same time, and as a result many “easy” missions were giving out Blue and Purple items. Also, due to “legacy” item conversion errors, many of those higher rarity mission rewards were not correctly converted to have the higher stats.

The 1.4 publish contains many updates to address these issues:

• Typical shared map missions now only give out Green items (with the appropriate +20% bonus to stats) as rewards
• Typical instance missions now give out Blue items (with the appropriate +40% bonus to stats) as rewards
• Purple items are best obtained from instance map mini-bosses
• All “legacy” items have been up converted so their rarity and stats match:
  
  • The majority of these had stats that were too low for their rarity, so their stats have been increased
  • A few erroneous items had stats that were higher than their rarity, so their rarity has been increased to match

We have gone to great effort to ensure that existing items received before these changes are not nerfed, and instead large numbers of items will receive stat or rarity boosts. There is one unfortunate side-effect to this with respect to armor: in cases where the rarity of armor pieces was increased, that armor will now have a different visual appearance than before.

Read more here.