Hi everyone,
It’s been a little while since our last Dungeons and PvE Roadmap post. Today, in addition to sharing with you our plans for upcoming PvE and Live Event content, we’re inviting some of the other groups within the team to pitch in and share any updates they feel comfortable giving for areas like Item Balance, Class Balance, Scenarios, and even RvR!
There’s a lot to dive into, so let’s get started:
The last year in Review:
-2025 was a busy year for our team. On the Dungeons front, the entire Lost Vale Dungeon was built and added to the game. Hunter’s Vale, Gunbad, and Bastion Stair all got re-worked and updated.
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-A large number of classes, from Healers to Tanks to Melee DPS, saw considerable changes last year as the balance team re-worked and updated them.
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-Our Voice Acting team, which started fledgling in late 2024, began to grow and expand, adding voices to Dungeons and soon the Open World. We also brought on a new video editor who has been doing a great job editing new Patch Notes video for our biggest releases!
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-Much of last year was also spent working on a new Scenario Matchmaker, which finally launched early this year in February. More on this and upcoming plans for scenarios below!
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-12 updated Live Events, 1 of them brand new, arrived last year to keep game content fresh and offer unique rewards
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-Behind-the-scenes, a number of improvements were made to improve both our tools and server performance
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-And finally, RvR saw a re-work of the Battlefield Objectives system, adding War Crest and renown bonuses tied to each, laid the foundation for many additions to come with the Random Events system, and most recently, implemented a totally new Lockout system to allow players more freedom to balance the lakes.
As we share what we’re working on for 2026, a few of the normal caveats: Everything you’re about to read is still work-in-progress, and as always, some things can and likely will change or shift timelines, so please take it all with a nice helping of salt. (Those in short supply of NaCl, worry not; it can be found all over the RvR lakes’ Region chat.)
New Tier 3 Dungeons
Welcome to Blood River Canyon!
Announced last year, we’re excited to confirm that the new T3 Dungeons are currently in development and are being prepared for launch this summer. We can also now share with you that these Dungeons will be unique per faction, with one tied to Karaz-a-Karak and one to Karak Eight Peaks.
RoR has always had a Dungeon gap between Sewers and Sacellum at level 15/16 and Gunbad up closer to level 36, and the introduction of this new Dungeon will give players something they can jump into starting at level 25, complete with a new armor set and other items to make grouping up and diving in worthwhile. A brand new daily quest will also be added to this Dungeon to allow players to gain a good chunk of a level every day should they complete it.
Some bosses in the T3 Dungeons will have brand new mechanics, which testers rated highly
The PvE team is starting to flex a little bit with some new mechanics that we’ve wanted to introduce for years, but never had the support to build before. Our testers have given good feedback to this so far, and we’re excited to share it with all of you when these Dungeons launch soon. These Dungeons will take us one step firmly towards more modern MMO PvE design, and we’re very much here for it.
Mechanics won’t be the only new things you see when you challenge these Dungeons. When we made Dragonback Pass (our new starter Dungeon), we took an unused scenario map and spent a ton of time populating it and touching it up to make it viable. This time, we’ve got our hands on something very special, which we’ve been excited to have for years - so let’s talk about that next:
A new way to Build the Warhammer World
The new Terrain Editor opens up huge potential for custom future maps
Our new T3 Dungeons are being built with our new Terrain Editor, allowing us to sculpt and paint the world in ways never before possible. This means that everything you’ll experience in these Dungeons will be built from the ground-up, and once we start to gain practice and experience with this tool, with enough time and support, we’ll be able to start building even more. New Dungeons may be where we’re starting, but we’re just as excited to see what other new things can be built with it in the future!
In the background, and though it’s not quite there yet, we’re also making significant strides towards getting lightmaps working. This means we might someday be able to add things like glows from torches and fires, shadows from large objects, and more to bring these new maps to life, and perhaps someday, to give a big facelift to other new maps, like the Dwarf and Greenskin capital cities. In the meantime though, one step at a time, and this new Terrain Editor is a huge step for us.
TOVL and the Land of the Dead
The Tomb of the Vulture Lord is filled with traps, treasure, and the game's most challenging Boss fights
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A request that we know many players have been excited for since our very first Dungeons Roadmap, we can now share that we’ve begun work on the Land of the Dead’s sandbox state, which will allow players to participate in Public Quests, find secrets, and take on the Four Tombs to earn special items. The weekly expedition will remain, but now you’ll be able to explore the sands of Zandri alone or with friends. We’ve already begun development on the Tombs. Our next Dungeon, Tomb of the Vulture Lord, will be starting development in the coming months, with testing expected to start later this year. Who knows what other hidden things lie waiting to be discovered in the sands?
RvR Campaign Changes
The new RvR Lockout system is now being tested, and the overall Campaign will be getting attention next
First: Let’s talk about Lockouts. After many years of player discussion, we’re now testing a new Lockout system that allows players to swap freely between the factions, and as of the latest patch, you can now bypass the Renown and War Crest lockout, provided you swap to a side that has AAO while you’re playing there. New Tutorial quests to explain this are also now in the game once you reach level 17. We’re watching the impacts of this new system closely in the hopes it can lead to more balanced lakes; only time will tell!
Random Events: The team is working on fixes to the Random Events system now, with the hopes that the new AAO-focused King of the Hill event can be fixed and operational in the near future. We'll share more news on this once it's ready.
Next up: The Campaign. We’ve heard feedback for years now wishing that the Campaign could have more meaning and purpose. On the live server, and even here in RoR for a time, it did. The game was less about just farming kills for Crests and all about pushing keeps and coordinating forts to attack the enemy city. With the arrival of unified currency, it’s no surprise that players have lost a lot of the motivation for a faction to tackle the big challenges or to organize to overcome them, and many tend to focus on farming the single currency needed for all end-game gear.
This year, we’re going to start slowly shifting back in the game’s original direction, with a bigger focus on Campaign progression centered around the return of City Sieges to the RvR campaign. Perhaps just as important, and for the first time ever in Return of Reckoning: today we can also announce that we’ve begun preliminary work on the return of Captured Cities!
Captured Cities
Factions who won a city siege could originally challenge enemy Warlords, and even Faction Leaders
Captured Cities were a key part of Mythic’s original vision for the game, and were accomplished if a faction pushed all the way to the enemy city, and then won the majority of the instances within. While captured, the attacking faction could challenge special 24-man Warlord and King Raids.
Our vision for Captured Cities will inherit many of Mythic’s goals, then will add a lot of our own to make these cities accessible for even more players and improve upon the system entirely. The 24-man PvE Raids are already on our list - think of these like instanced, more challenging versions of Chapter 22 - and the team is also considering other things to add to make the captured City States something all players can join in.
There are still many details to be ironed out about the specifics of how we introduce these (historically, we saw many cities pushed during off-hours and far fewer during prime time), so please don’t panic yet about worrying whether or not you’ll get to experience these more or less than others. These details are things we’ll be discussing internally over the coming months, and we’ll share more details on the reintroduction of both City Sieges in the RvR Campaign and the brand new versions of Captured Cities as we get closer to their release.
Scenarios
Less-popular Scenarios, like Talabec Dam, will be getting entirely updated mechanics
Scenarios have seen a significant improvement in their matchmaking recently, resulting in fewer one-sided stomps and closer, better-balanced games. The trade-off has been that fewer matches are popping. The Scenarios team, now supported by some new faces, made further adjustments in the last patch that should allow the matchmaker to begin scenarios even if one team is missing heals, or missing tanks, provided that both teams are lacking the same.
Playing the Objective: In our most recent patch, we lowered the amount of Renown gained for farming the enemy team, but increased the Renown gained for playing the objective and winning the scenario. In many cases, this may result in a net gain to Renown earned via scenarios, and a reduction in XP.
New Focus Group: A brand new Scenarios Focus group was formed up over the last few months, and they’ve been working closely with the new SC team on ideas and improvements for Scenarios across the board.
New Scenario Weekly: Many players pointed out the inconsistency with a 3-day Scenario Weekend event compared to RvR and Dungeons, which each get full 7-day Weekly events to complete. In the future, we’re going to bring Scenarios in line with their own new Weekly Event so players can participate, no matter which days of the week you get to play. (We’re still working out if Weekend Warfronts will change and the details surrounding them, so stay tuned for more info on this soon.)
New Scenario Mechanics: Lastly, another key area that the team is working on are improvements to some of the least popular Scenarios. Talabec Dam, which was impressively rated near the very bottom in player enjoyment, is in testing now with a brand new proximity-based mechanic that will see the Giant moving to automatically place the bomb as long as a team is near him. The more players of one team near him, the faster he gets prodded to the other team’s bomb site. This brand new mechanic will go into testing in the coming months.
Class Balance
Since the start of this year, the Balance Team has been busy concepting, reviewing, and proposing new ideas for all six Range DPS classes within the game. Each proposal is now complete, and with our focus groups for their feedback.
We’re excited to confirm that work on these class updates will begin in June, and you can expect to see and hear more on these changes this arriving summer. This will include updates for Engineer, Magus, Shadow Warrior, Squig Herder, Bright Wizard, and Sorcerer.
Some of these changes will empower existing play styles and others will offer brand new takes, so we’re looking forward to seeing what players think very soon.
Itemization Updates
New PvP Weapon Upgrades, including the Supremacy and Infamy lines, are being added
In the last two patches, we started a long overdue re-balancing of items, which began with weapons and lower level armor and jewelry. We realize nobody enjoys logging in and seeing that their weapon lost some stats, but the benefit is that we’re finally fixing and correcting many years of stat inflation or incorrect stats entirely, as many previous devs all interpreted the rules differently. Some of our stat rules have changed recently, and you can read these on the RoR wiki here.
In the most recent patch, we updated many of the mid-game and end-game Jewelry Sets, like Genesis, Lost Vale Rings, Annulus Rings, and more.
We also recently added two new tiers of Genesis Accessories for players to upgrade to. The gains on these upgrades are fairly small, but serve as stepping stones to give players more options in a pure PvP path that they can upgrade into. Our stance of having some items exclusive to PvE and some to PvP remains, but this will add some love to the PvP side of things, which hasn’t seen as many new items in the last few years as PvE has.
In the July patch, we’ll be tackling the final piece of the puzzle, which is Armor Sets and end-game armor set bonuses.
Part of the benefit of fixing many of these items and bringing them in line is that it’s now easy for us to expand options for players without worrying about stat-creep, and you’re going to see some of that arriving in July:
New War Crest Weapons: We’ll be introducing a new tier of Weapon above Anathema and Reverence, which are called Supremacy for Order and Infamy for Destruction. These will be purchased for War Crests, and require the tome unlock for having the Reverence or Anathema tier.
Triumphant and Victorious Ring costs: As you may have seen, we’re going to be lowering the cost of Triumphant and Victorious Rings down to 2,000 War Crests instead of their current 9999. We’ll also have a vendor set up so that players who purchased these at the 9999 price can get a refund on crests.
New End-game Talismans: We agree that having something to work towards at end-game is nice, so as we remove the end-game grind from these rings, we’ll also be introducing new +25 Talismans for players to work towards. These Talismans will require significant resources to create, including an existing +24 of the same type, and will help us shift from a huge stat jump after 9999 crests into a much more modest +10 total stat gain for players who put in the effort, with many likely getting a +1 here and there as they progress to 80-85. We'll share more news on how players can earn these Talismans soon.
Updated Renown Trainer
Later this year, we’ll also be updating the Renown Trainer to fall in line with the new stat values that we follow for all items. In its current design, some of the gains for Renown are hugely worthwhile and very cheap, while others are a bit too expensive and very rarely taken.
We’ve begun work now to revisit the Renown Trainer to bring all of these costs in line and make them uniform, so that all players are getting the same values for the points they spend, be it in offense or defense. We’re hoping to also update the vanilla UI for this while we’re at it, as we feel that the Advanced Renown Trainer add-on does a much better job of showing players the upgrade paths, but we’re still very early on this, so please stay tuned for more news in future patches.
Live Event Roadmap
Finally today, we’d also like to share with you a roadmap for the upcoming Live Events you can expect to see this Summer:
On June 12th, mark your calendars for the special 3-week Live Event Twilight’s Tide, complete with specialized crafting as players forge, stockpile, and trade special Annulus Rings!
In mid-July, prepare to build or settle grudges as Live Event Saga makes a special return, and in mid-August, hold your halflings close and fire up those ovens because Pie Week is on its way, complete with special 1-hour Pie buffs (similar to Liniments), the return of apple bobbing, and what some* call the game’s greatest temporary mount: the Pig.
*”Some” players specifically means Rubius, and does not include Ekalime, who writes, and we quote: “The pig mount is stupid and not even that lore friendly.” Ruby would like to apologize for Eka’s lack of taste and appreciation of this wonderful mount.
Thank you!
Whew, that was a lot to cover! That’s all we’ve got for this Roadmap on what you can expect to see and hear as we move through 2026. We hope you enjoyed this look behind the curtain, and we appreciate your support and your feedback as the various teams continue their work to bring Return of Reckoning to life; not just to restore it, but to bring it back even better than it was before. It wouldn’t be possible without the support of many players like you that keep us motivated, so thank you for being here, and for keeping the game alive with us.
Until next time, thanks for reading!
