The Latest Throne & Liberty 'Tico Talks' Gets Into Gameplay Changes, Including World Boss Matchmaking

With another month gone and a new update on the way, there are more changes coming to Throne and Liberty, and the team is starting to get into the nitty-gritty. The latest "Tico Talks" by the Globalization Design Manager goes over some of the more granular gameplay changes coming, including world boss matchmaking and item streamlining.

Much of the upcoming Wilds of Talandre expansion was already discussed in a previous video update from the Eye on Solisium series, previewing the single-player content as well as a new Artifact system. Tico Talks tends to focus more on major game changes, especially any resulting from community feedback. 

To give players more options on how they take on Field Bosses and Archbosses, there’ll be new “Portals” that allow players to join in groups how they see fit. A Peace portal lets players just take down the boss itself in a matchmade PvE group in either the Field Boss or Archboss. The Faction portal for the same content splits players into two teams for a PvPvE experience. 

As for guilds, there’ll be Guild portals for Field Bosses for 36-48 players to join, and Archbosses will keep the open-world approach as usual, not requiring portals for Guilds to duke it out over the big guy. 

There are some serious item changes coming meant to streamline the experience. Players with a top-ranked Tier 2 item can unlock a slot to “anchor” items of the same time and let those items match in level, reducing grinding time. Abyss Coins and Dimensional Soul Shards are going to be consolidated, meanwhile, and there’ll be new tokens for Tier 1 and Tier 2 items. There’ll also be simplification of the rune system, with a much more streamlined UI. 

Combat movement and abilities have been improved for ease of use and, more notably, to pull back on auto-blocking as a cheating technique. Target visuals and UI are also improving in a later patch. 

Finally, the long-requested raid frame feature is arriving March 13, which’ll hopefully make your giant PvP sessions a lot smoother. 

Full details on all of these changes are in the Tico Talks video, and the big update bringing many of these changes comes on March 6 alongside the big content update. 

T&L is also currently undergoing a massive server consolidation process—if you want to make sure you end up with your friends when the new update goes live, you might want to log in tonight and transfer before the February 27th mega-merge.