The Plane of War

The Plane of War is a zone due to be launched some time during the anniversary celebration in 2014. It will be accessed through the previously inactive stone in the cave in the Plane of Tranquility. Depending on your progression through The Plane of War there may be a second zone line inside the Plane of Tactics. The zone will be tuned for level 100 players.

Details

 * Plane of War (maybe or Maybe not) - SOE forum thread with Dev posts describing The Plane of War.


 * The zone will remain permanent when it goes live.
 * It will be locked on progression servers until Call of the Forsaken goes live on them.
 * There will be anniversary specific content that takes place in instances of The Plane of War and those will only be available during the anniversary holiday season.
 * There will be anniversary specific content that is instanced, the base zone will be static.
 * There will be achievements for both the anniversary content and the base zone content.
 * There is no plan to require you to have Call of the Forsaken to zone into The Plane of War.
 * The zone will be tuned for level 100 players, so it is likely there will be a minimum level of 95 to zone in.
 * The ZEM (Zone Experience Modifier) of The Plane of War will be a value appropriate for a Planes of Power era zone (much less than modern zones).

NPCs

 * The basic NPCs in the zone will be beatable by a group, possibly less.
 * The rare NPCs in the zone will be targeted for two full groups and will drop loot commensurate with their difficulty (better than one groupable gear).
 * The rares will also have a percentage chance to drop an additional utility item / augmentation / clicky piece that are among the best in game for both group and raid level players.
 * The difficulty of the NPCs will be based on the quality of their additional percentage chance item.
 * The rares are intended to use mechanics and force players to apply strategy to defeat them.

Loot

 * Most of the loot will be No Drop. However, there will be random drops off of any mob that will be tradeable.
 * The rares (named) will always drop an item or items that are superior to Call of the Forsaken group level items.
 * The named mobs have a percentage chance to drop an additional item that is an augmentation, a right click utility item, or a piece of gear of raid level quality (at this time only four items fall into that final category).

Name of zone
The zone's full name is "The Plane of War". This hasn't stopped people, including SOE Devs, from calling it the "Plane of War".

Quests
One of the principles that the team working on the quests in the Plane of War are trying to stick to are quests that are in the spirit of ones that would have actually taken place during Planes of Power. We're avoiding using the task system for the quests that take place in the zone so that they will better resemble 'classic quests'.

Progression
There will be in-zone progression. Completing the in-zone progression will allow you access to the areas where the rare NPCs spawn. The progression is designed to take a considerable amount of time.

Named mobs
At this time SOE is planning on having 11 rare NPCs in the zone. This is subject to change.

Graphics
The zone's style, use of objects, and texture rendering methods are all in line with zones of the Planes of Power era. One of the most obvious differences between zones prior to Omens of War and modern zones is the use of normal maps which add detail to the zone based on light sources. There are no normal maps set up for Plane of War and the majority of the textures used throughout the zone are unchanged from the ones originally created for Planes of Power. You'll notice a lot of the textures are shared between this zone and Plane of Tactics.

The only textures that needed to be updated were the ones used for the ground because the shader technology used for zones from Luclin through Gates of Discord is not in use anymore. A good example of this shader can be seen in Dawnshroud Peaks. If you look at the ground from a distance it is a relatively low quality texture that increases in detail the closer you get to it. The original Plane of War made use of this shader tech and blended a grey rock and white sand texture. The version of the zone that will be released now will use a rock texture similar to the one used in Pillars of Alra and a ground texture pulled from Brell's Rest.

Bonus Dev Trivia: Both Pillars of Alra and Brell's Rest were created by artist Allen Bond who was the one who helped teach me enough about 3DS Max to complete the geometry fixes on the Plane of War. Fixing the bugs in the zone geomtry is among the first times I've ever done anything in a 3d graphics program, so the whole experience was a fun chance to do something new.